Reclaiming His Wife. Susan Fox P.
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remembered that even that was an impossibility without any electricity. Nevertheless, she wished she had kept her mouth shut, hoping she hadn’t sounded as though she had been complaining unnecessarily when he was doing his best to make them both comfortable.
Resigned to her discomfort, she got up and started clearing the dishes left over from lunchtime, filled the kettle for more water to wash them and with a small shudder went back to the warm sitting room where the logs Jared had heaped on the fire were already glowing red, giving off extra heat.
Roll on the thaw, Taylor thought wryly, placing the kettle across the two little walls of bricks that Jared had found in the shed and ingeniously erected in the grate for that very purpose before lighting the fire that morning. He had made the whole experience of being snowed in easier than it would have been had she simply been here on her own, she reflected with reluctant honesty. OK, she would probably have coped, though a little less efficiently since she lacked his degree of physical strength for chopping logs and suchlike, but she had to admit that Jared had somehow managed to make it fun. Even so, it was still harder work than she was used to, and it certainly made her appreciate how difficult life must have been for the ordinary people a century or so earlier, but that didn’t stop her longing to get back to normality. Just to be able to feel clean again, she thought, if for no other reason, because a thaw would mean going home—returning to her safe, self-sufficient existence, and as much as she knew that the sooner that happened and she could get away from Jared, the better it would be for her, some crazy, aching part of her—the part that loved him—didn’t want this time with him ever to end.
She had just finished lighting a candle on the mantelpiece, replacing the one that had finally burned itself out, when a thud against the door jamb had her turning quickly.
Wearing the anorak he had casually thrown on to go outside, Jared was manoeuvring a large oval tin bath through the doorway.
‘I don’t believe this!’ Taylor laughed incredulously.
Seeing him trying to kick the rug aside with his booted foot, Taylor rushed to help him, dragging the table to one side and folding the rug clear of the space between the chair and the sofa so that he could set the hollow oval tub down in front of the fire.
‘There you are.’ He ran his hand around the tub’s interior, brushing out some foreign objects. ‘Every modern convenience.’
Still amazed, Taylor stared down at it. ‘How are we going to heat enough water to fill that?’
‘As your forebears did, darling. With one kettleful after another. Bath night, I believe, was every Friday or Saturday night.’
‘In front of the fire.’ Right now it sounded like pure luxury. In front of him.
Disconcerted, she uttered, ‘Did your grandparents use this? Did you?’ Try though she did, she couldn’t imagine him living quite so rustically.
He laughed, and said, confirming it, ‘Good heavens no! I didn’t. There was always the bathroom—certainly in my time. I’m not sure this was ever used. It did, however, come in useful for mixing potting compost and keeping goldfish outside in during the summer months.’
‘You’re joking!’ Horrified green eyes lifted from the ancient metal to meet those that were deep-set, dark and definitely laughing at her. ‘Thanks,’ she chided dryly, secretly amused.
Having to wait for each kettleful of water, it took some time to fill the bath to a practical level—until Jared found a large cauldron in the old pantry and started heating the water in that instead.
With the bath almost ready and steaming invitingly, Taylor went to fetch some of the toiletries she had brought with her; soap from the bathroom and, still in its paper bag, the bottle of fragrant bath foam she had purchased when she and Craig and another member of the crew had gone on a shopping expedition in Edinburgh a few days before.
She was glad Jared was upstairs, moving around in the master bedroom when she came back down because, intimate though they had been during their marriage and then shockingly—her cheeks burned as she thought about it— the previous night, she felt absurdly self-conscious in the present circumstances about undressing in front of him.
She quickly discarded her clothes and, sweeping her hair up and securing it with a large clasp she had brought down with her, she stepped nimbly into the water.
With her shoulders supported by one end of the bath and her long legs draped over the other, she was luxuriating with her eyes closed—breasts barely covered—in the scented bubbles when he strode back in.
She wasn’t sure if he had sat down or if he had gone back out of the room because she couldn’t hear him moving around and she felt too relaxed to open her eyes and look. There was no sound but the crackling of logs on the fire, the soft pup-pup of bubbles dispersing in the foam and a strange kind of fizzing she was straining her ears to identify.
Something cool and smooth skimmed her leg, and she gasped, drawing it up sharply, her eyes flying open to the realisation of Jared standing there above her, that it was the cool base of a crystal glass flute he had been trailing along her leg.
‘Champagne?’ she beamed, surprised.
‘I never travel without it.’
He had changed, she noticed, into a soft black shirt and black corduroys, an image, which, with his black hair and those glittering black eyes rocked her with its sexual impact.
‘You’re decadent,’ she accused in a voice that faltered, reaching up and taking the glass from him.
‘If you mean in the sense of being self-indulgent, then I can only admit to being entirely guilty of that,’ he accepted. ‘But if you mean in the sense that I’m morally corrupt, then no man could apologise for dispensing with his highest principles around you, Taylor.’
What did he mean by that exactly?
Guardedly, with loose strands curling damply against her face, she watched him retrieve his own glass from the mantelpiece then, with one easy stretch of his body, pick up the book he had been reading earlier and cross to the settee.
Was he, she wondered, in some way alluding to last night? Was he, like her, and in spite of everything he had said, somehow regretting what had happened?
Refusing to think about that, she savoured the champagne, considering, as she twisted the slim stem of the glass how ridiculous it seemed sipping the most expensive wine from what looked like incredibly valuable crystal while lying in a battered tin tub!
‘Why the Madonna smile?’
That deep voice sliced through her reverie, bringing her head round.
He was sitting with his book lying open on the palm of his hand, one long leg lying across the other, those thoughtful eyes watching her as a Roman emperor would have watched his naked and favourite slave girl, as though she amused and entertained him.
‘What were you thinking of?’
Head tilting, Taylor surveyed the leaping fire through the carved perfection of the crystal, noting the way the one filled and impregnated every last fine sculpted contour of the other.
‘Incongruities,’ she murmured, taking another sip.
‘Such as?’
‘This.’ She held up her glass. ‘And this.’ A toss of her chin indicated the bathtub. ‘You and I.’
‘You and—’ She couldn’t look at him sitting there with the book, still open, but transferred to his lap now. His left arm was stretched across the back of the settee. ‘What are you saying? That we’re that much of a mismatch? Out of harmony with one another? Incompatible?’ When she didn’t answer, but just went on sipping her champagne, he said, ‘There is one way, my love, where you and I certainly aren’t incompatible, and if you’re determined to make that sort of rash remark then I’ll just have to—’
She was both relieved—and surprised—when the phone