Best of Fiona Harper

Adam gave me a look that was half-sad, half-affectionate. ‘Coreen, I’m always telling you about my work.’

‘But you’ve never boiled it down to a hard figure like that before. If you’d done that I would have paid a bit more attention!’

He pursed his lips slightly. ‘You’ve never asked… Anyway, if you actually listened, instead of nodding and pretending you were, you’d have worked it out for yourself.’

My insides slumped like a fallen soufflé. With great effort I looked my Best Bud in the eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have listened. I should have known you’d take something ordinary like a garden shed and do something wonderful with it. And I should have paid attention—I’m supposed to be your friend.’

Robert chose that moment to return with my glass of water, and I took it from him, all the while looking at Adam, who was regarding me with a very un-Adam like expression.

Finally he bent down a little and kissed me softly on the forehead. ‘It’s time you ripped those polka-dot blinkers off. You’d be surprised what you’d see.’

And then he walked back into the drawing room, leaving me clutching the cold glass against my stomach.

I was right about there being a lake at the Chatterton-Joneses’ estate. It lay beyond the formal gardens in artfully landscaped parkland. To the unobservant eye the small body of water might have seemed like a natural feature, but the diminutive island in the centre was almost painfully picturesque, and the weeping willows on the undulating banks were grouped together a little too harmoniously.

The blissful summer’s afternoon only intensified the sense of perfection. The breeze was just right: cool enough to take the edge off the bright sun, but only just strong enough to whisper through the reeds and willows. Dragonflies flitted happily around us, tiny iridescent flashes above the water’s surface.

I didn’t care if all that beauty was man-made and planned. Primped and preened a little. Mother Nature is a woman too, and us girls know we need to emphasise our best assets. I didn’t care if it was too perfect, either. Perfect was what I was here for, after all, and after the disastrous morning I’d had perfect was what I was determined to have.

After breakfast Izzi had frogmarched us through the woods on what was supposed to have been a restful country walk. There had been no mist—the clean sunshine had cut through the summer morning too well. There had been no bluebells—too late in the year, I discovered. No convenient rabbit hole. No being scooped into Nicholas’s arms as if I weighed nothing more than a feather.

Instead Limpet Louisa had monopolised him the whole time.

I had to give her credit, though. She was good.

If I could have been objective, I might have applauded her strategy—one scheming woman saluting another. But I wasn’t in the mood for being objective about that. Not in the slightest.

Izzi, meanwhile, had complained about all the ‘out of character’ chatter and behaviour the entire morning, and had moaned at us periodically for not having uncovered any significant clues yet. After lunch she’d announced her solution: a spot of boating, pairing us up with people we hadn’t talked to much yet, so we could interrogate each other further. And that was how I came to be sitting in the stern of one of a row of beautifully varnished little rowing boats tied to a short wooden jetty.

As the boat bobbed up and down I could barely contain my excitement. Perfection was within my grasp. Izzi had finally done something right! She’d paired me up with Nicholas, and in a few moments he would step into our little craft and row us off into Happily Ever After.

The setting couldn’t have been more romantic if it had tried. There was warm sun, a cloudless forget-me-not sky, and all this achingly perfect scenery. There was even a pair of devoted swans orbiting each other at the edge of the dark green water. Surely this was a sign? Surely the scales would fall from Nicholas’s eyes after this?

He walked along the jetty towards me, his long legs easily covering the distance in a matter of seconds, and then it was happening, just as I’d dreamed it would. Nicholas stepped into the boat and cast off, sat down, grasped the oars and rowed away from the jetty, leaving the others behind.

Nicholas and I were finally alone together.

I fixed my gaze on his strong arms and waited for that delicious tingle to skip from the base of my spine to the nape of my neck. Any moment now…

Okay, in a few seconds, maybe. Once we were away from the bank and he could build up speed, really pull on the oars…

I frowned and concentrated harder on his hands and wrists, since the rest of his arms were covered by his shirt and an off-white linen jacket, and I thought I felt a flicker of something. Unfortunately, after another few minutes, that flicker began to itch. The something turned out to be a mosquito bite.

Flickers and tingles don’t mean anything, I told myself. They weren’t what I was there for. I was there to make Nicholas realise how irresistible I was, remember? The only one who should be tingling was Nicholas, and I needed to focus on that objective without getting distracted.

I decided my next step was to engage Nicholas in conversation, to show him I had brains as well as beauty. In fact, since the ‘beauty’ bit of me was still well hidden underneath Constance’s tweed suit and specs, this was probably the perfect time.

We’d been told by the murder-mystery weekend organisers that we could reveal a piece of confidential information about our characters now, and I decided to set the ball rolling. I gave Nicholas a particularly enticing look and lowered my voice. ‘I can tell you one of Constance’s deep, dark secrets, if you like?’

For the first time since we’d left the jetty Nicholas took his focus off the oars and looked at me. ‘Okay.’

I scanned the small lake, keeping an eye on the other couples in their boats. I suppose it might have looked as if I was being careful who overheard us, but actually I wanted to make sure the other couples were at a safe distance and that I still had Nicholas all to myself.

I looked into his deep blue eyes and my voice became even more husky. ‘Well, this doesn’t seem like anything much, but here goes… I have—or I should say, Constance has—a travel book about India hidden in her luggage. Apparently, she wants to go there to help the poor and needy, but her brother, Harry, has refused to help her raise cash for her passage or give a reference to the missionary society on her behalf, so she’s planning it all in secret.’

Nicholas frowned. ‘I presume she needs significant funds?’

I nodded. ‘The missionary society will sort her out when she gets there, but she needs money for the boat—which I’m guessing must have been an arm and a leg in those days.’

He paused briefly, before taking another stroke with the oars. ‘Could be a motive, I suppose…’ He glanced over at Adam and Izzi’s boat, which was gaining on us a little. Adam had taken his jacket off and rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, and their little boat was zipping through the water. I could tell just by looking at Adam’s back, just by the smooth grace of his oar-stroke, that he wasn’t even rowing at full capacity.

Suddenly I felt all hot and unnecessary. I dabbed at my forehead with Constance’s lace-edged hanky.

‘Is the sun getting to you? You’re quite fair-skinned, despite being a brunette,’ Nicholas said, looking deliciously concerned. ‘I can row into the shade near the bank, if you’d prefer?’

I smiled demurely back at him. ‘That would be marvellous,’ I replied. Not only would I avoid looking all pink and sweaty, but it would take us away from the other boats—especially Marcus and Louisa, who had also started to head our direction.

Nicholas and I chatted about the murder-mystery weekend as he guided the boat into the shadows cast by the willows. I liked listening to him. He had a very analytical way of thinking. Not like me at all. My brain seems to flit from one subject to the next with worrying frequency—although I suppose the compensation is that I have the odd flash of right-brained brilliance now and then.

Nicholas frowned. ‘So, why won’t Harry hear of you going to India? And what has all of that got to do with Lord Southerby’s murder?’ he asked as he lifted the oars out of the water and let us drift further into the shade.

‘I don’t know.’

I tried to drape, but it just wasn’t working. No matter what position I got myself in, it just wasn’t comfortable. I glanced across at Izzi and Adam’s boat. They were closer now. It wouldn’t be long before they swept past us, making a circuit of the lake.

‘I tried to get it out of Adam—I mean, Harry—last night, but he was annoyingly evasive.’

Nicholas nodded. ‘Yes, I couldn’t get any of the information I wanted out of him either. Very cagey. If he’s hiding something, it’s big.’

My eyes grew large and round. ‘You think it might be him?’ I whispered.

Nicholas turned to look at Adam. ‘Maybe. Who would suspect a vicar? But why? What possible motive could he have?’

I balanced my elbows on my knees and looked at Nicholas. I liked him even better when he stopped looking bored and was actually engaged in something. That carved-in-stone expression he always wore had cracked a little and it made him look more alive.

I tried really hard to think about Constance and Harry, and why my fake brother might have killed his rich uncle, but I kept being dragged back to the here and now by a rather annoying detail.

The conditions were perfect. Nicholas and I were alone together, and he was even leaning forward, looking right into my eyes. I’d dreamed about a moment like this ever since Adam and I had gone rowing in Greenwich Park, but now I was living the actual fantasy something was missing.

Still no tingle.

I trailed a hand in the water and gave Nicholas a sideways look. ‘I don’t suppose you could you roll your sleeves up, could you?’

He stopped mulling over suspects and motives and looked at me in clear astonishment. ‘I beg your pardon?’

I closed my eyes and shook my head a little. Even I didn’t know how I was going to explain my way out of that outburst. I did my best.

‘You must be getting awfully hot in that suit,’ I said, sitting up straight again and doing my best to look concerned.

A microscopic frown pulled his brows together and stayed there while he carefully removed his jacket, folded it, and placed it on the wooden seat behind him. Adam wouldn’t have done that. Adam would have shrugged out of his jacket in a jiffy and thrown it into a crumpled ball, leaving it wherever it fell. For some reason the neatly folded pale linen bothered me.

I became aware of other voices around us and looked round to see all three of the other rowing boats in our vicinity. Typical. Just as Nicholas started to roll up his sleeves, as well. How was I supposed to get my tingle going now, with all these onlookers?

‘Ahoy, there!’ Marcus yelled as his boat lurched in our direction.

I couldn’t see his face, as his back was to us, but Louisa was looking very beady-eyed indeed down at her end of the boat. It didn’t take much guessing to work out whose idea it had been to take a gentle row under the willows.

‘Watch out, Marcus!’

Adam, who was maybe twenty feet away in his boat, had stopped rowing and yelled out. It was too late, though. People like Marcus ought to have rear-view mirrors on their dinghies. He didn’t bother looking over his shoulder to see who was in his way; he just kept on rowing until he hit something.

And that something happened to be us. Our boat rocked and I had to grab onto the sides to stop myself from going head first into the murky green water. ‘Oi!’ I shouted, and then instantly regretted my obviously low-class outburst. I clapped my hand over my mouth.

Marcus was conveniently deaf to any criticism, though. ‘Listen here, Nick,’ he said, grabbing the edge of our boat with his puffy fingers. ‘My iffy shoulder is playing me up, and Louisa here is refusing to take the oars.’

I wasn’t surprised. Marcus’s rugby days were obviously over. What might have once been lean, hard bulk was now looking a bit flabby and squidgy. He must have weighed a ton.

‘We’ll have to give up on this rowing nonsense,’ he added, looking none too crestfallen.

Izzi and Adam’s boat had drifted closer now, and she must have heard his dissent. ‘Rubbish, Marcus. Surely you can keep going?’

Marcus shook his head, then rubbed his right shoulder and moved his elbow backwards and forwards, as if that was supposed to prove a point of some kind. ‘We’ll have to swap around.’

‘But that means one of the girls will have to row, and that’s not really on, is it?’ Nicholas said.

We all sat and looked at each other, our three boats haphazardly parked about twenty feet from the shore.

‘I don’t know how,’ Louisa said, and did a good job of hiding a smile.

Nicholas looked across at his sister. ‘You do, Izz.’

Izzi let out a hard laugh. ‘In this get up?’ she said, indicating the stiff black dress. ‘It’d rip in a second.’

She was right, as well. As Lady Southerby’s clothes were supposed to be old-fashioned even for the thirties, that particular piece had to be about ninety years old, made of crêpe de chine, and wouldn’t take much stress on its seams.

‘That’s okay,’ Adam piped up. ‘Coreen’s excellent at rowing. I’ve seen her myself. Strong as an ox.’

I very nearly stood up in the boat to call Adam out on that one! Apart from the fact he’d just compared me to a rather unattractive, hefty-looking farm animal in public, he knew I wanted to spend time with Nicholas. What on earth was he playing at?

I glared at him, but he just gave me that annoyingly serene smile he’d adopted in return.

Just then he was pretty lucky he was a couple of boat lengths away, because I would have wrung his neck if it hadn’t meant immersing myself in a freezing cold lake.

Then I became aware that no one was talking, and five pairs of eyes were on me. Nicholas was regarding me carefully.

‘You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,’ he said, just as carefully.

I knew he was waiting for me to make a decision; I just didn’t know which way he wanted me to choose. I looked round at the other faces—Louisa’s triumphant smile, Izzi’s pleading eyes, Adam’s warm, brown gaze.

I shrugged and looked over at Marcus and Louisa’s boat. ‘All right, then. I’ll swap.’ If I swapped with Marcus I might not be with Nicholas, but I could make sure Louisa and I rowed to the other side of the lake and kept right out of his way.

Marcus and Nicholas worked to bring the boats side-by-side, but before I could argue Louisa nimbly stepped across from one boat to the other. ‘You’re such a star,’ she said thinly. ‘I don’t think any of us wanted to go back indoors just yet. It’s such a beautiful day.’ And then she bestowed a glowing smile on Nicholas, who, as luck would have it, didn’t smile back—he was looking at me instead.

‘Sure about this, Coreen?’

‘Yes,’ I said, spurred on by something I saw in his expression. I don’t know how, but I knew that he was impressed with me.

He gave me a brief nod, his expression warming further. ‘Hold the boat steady, then, Marcus.’

I stood up, for once stupidly glad about Constance’s sensible lace-ups, and prepared to plant one foot and then the other in Marcus’s boat. Slow and steady was the plan. When the first part was done, and I was straddling both boats as elegantly as I could, I took a few moments to steady myself, aware of the growing silence as they all watched me. Even Adam and Izzi, who had drifted closer, weren’t moving.

However, just as I lifted the second foot, and was balancing one-legged in the other boat, Marcus decided to ease his shoulder with another set of arm rotations. He missed me, but hit one of the oars, the end of which made jarring contact with Nicholas’s boat. It also acted as a lever, pushing the sterns of both boats away from each other in a swinging arc.

The jolt from the oar and the sideways motion of the boat meant only one thing—I went from having one foot planted securely in each boat to not having any feet planted anywhere at all.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Can’t Take My Eyes Off You

Coreen’s Confessions

No. 7—As much as I hate to admit it, there is a time for fantasy and there is a time for looking facts (especially the numbers on the bathroom scales) in the face.

THE water that had seemed so perfect and tranquil? Well, it was cold and smelly and far from perfect. As the murky green water closed over my head I panicked. I’m not proud about that, but it was surprisingly cold, given the glorious summer we’d been having, and then something slimy touched my leg.

I hadn’t had time to think about closing my mouth before I’d fallen in, and lake water filled my mouth and nose. It was the same three-shades-dirtier-than-olive colour as the suit I was wearing and, believe me, the water tasted as good as the suit looked.

I flailed around, desperately trying to find the surface, but my hands hit something hard and ridged. It took me a couple of seconds to realise I was under one of the boats. I opened my eyes to see two fuzzy, hulking shapes above me and no obvious gap between them.

That was when I really started to freak out.

I kicked with my legs, propelling myself forwards and upwards, desperate to get to the surface. My head hit the hull of one of the boats and I let out a silent underwater yelp.

Then something grabbed my torso, pulling me sideways. I kicked and fought, the breath burning in my lungs. At least I did until my palm hit something soft, something that definitely wasn’t boat or muddy lake-bed.

I realised I wasn’t alone.

In some weird, slow-motion part of my brain I thought, How romantic! He’s jumped in to save me. But the slicing pain in my chest wiped those musings away, replacing them with more primal urges.

I clung to him, dragging myself against him as he pushed upwards, wrapping my arms and legs around him just before our heads broke the surface. After the billowing underwater silence the shouts and squeals of the rest of the boating party seemed sharp and deafening. I buried my face in the crook of his neck to muffle them.

Slowly, rational thought returned. I coughed and hiccupped, thinking that if I’d known this was all I had to do to get up close and personal with this finely-toned physique, I’d have hurled myself in the lake the moment I got here on Friday afternoon.

I could feel the graze of rough wet cotton against my cheek, could feel shoulder and back muscles hardening underneath my arms as I held on tight. I felt totally vulnerable, yet totally safe. I knew he had me, and that whatever happened he would never let me go.

Was it wrong that it was now I got my tingle?

Despite the freezing water, a strange, buzzing sensation raced up my legs, surged through my body and lifted the roots of my hair. All I cared about was clinging on to him, the feel of him, the breadth of him, the dream of him…

‘Is she okay?’

The voice drifted above me, merging with other phrases of concern in different tones and pitches.

I was okay. Shaken. Wet. A little humiliated, maybe. But okay. However, I didn’t seem able to open my mouth and tell him that.

And then it hit me.

The voice. The one flowing in the air above our heads. That safe-and-dry-in-one-of-the-boats kind of voice. It was Nicholas’s.

Recognition hit me like a punch in the head. I knew this warm, hard shoulder I was resting my head on. I’d relied on it for most of my life, in fact. But the knowledge that it wasn’t Nicholas I was hanging on to didn’t change anything. I just clung to him all the harder.

‘Coreen?’ Adam whispered in my ear. ‘Are you okay?’

It was only then I noticed the pounding of his ribcage as it was pressed against mine, the hitches of breath between his words. I could almost believe he’d been as terrified as I had been. I raised my head to look at him, hair plastered over my eyes so I could only half see him through the sodden strands.

There was something fierce, something basic and protective, in those usually cheery brown eyes. I shivered a little. The water temperature, which I’d hardly noticed since he’d grabbed me underwater, suddenly seemed to drop. I still couldn’t prise my jaw open. Our gazes hooked together and I nodded.

A flood of warmth replaced the fierceness in Adam’s eyes. I loosened my grip on him a little, let my legs float downwards, but drew them up again quickly when they hit something soft and sludgy. It was then I realised I’d lost at least one of my shoes.

I also realised Adam wasn’t kicking and splashing to keep us afloat, which meant that the sludgy stuff I’d felt with the tip of my toe… Yep. It was the lake-bed. My vocal cords ended their strike and I groaned aloud.

I’d thought I was drowning in just over five feet of water?

How humiliating! I couldn’t even begin to look at the others, who were still peering over the edge of their rowing boats at us.

I sent Adam a begging look, no eyelash sweeps or tempting lip-bites included this time. I just telegraphed my desperation to him. Eye to eye. Friend to friend. Woman to man.

He didn’t even blink. ‘Let’s get out of this over-sized paddling pool, shall we?’ And then he hooked one arm under my knees and started wading towards dry ground.

Thankfully we were close to a section of bank that wasn’t engulfed in reeds, even though it had flattened into a rather small and very muddy beach. Adam just walked right out of the water—although how he managed to do it with me, my curves, and my water-logged tweed suit I’ll never know.

Once we were back on dry land I tried to slip out of his grasp and put my feet on the beach, but Adam stopped me with a firm squeeze and a stern look. ‘You’ve got no shoes,’ he said grimly. I hoped desperately that the strain I could both hear in his voice and see on his face didn’t have anything to do with the effort of keeping me aloft.

‘You can’t carry me back to the house,’ I squeaked. ‘It’ll kill you!’

Adam planted his feet firmly on the grass and twisted round to shout to the others, swinging me with him and yelling that he was taking me back to Inglewood Manor.

What a pair we must have looked, dripping wet, smeared with mud, and covered with tiny flecks of bright green duck-weed. I hid my face in his damp, white and, now that I noticed it, slightly see-through shirt—which prompted a Mr Darcy flashback so intense that my legs began to shake. It was just as well Adam had decided against plonking me on the ground after all.

And then I was bumping gently against his chest as he strode across the grass towards the formal gardens that encircled the house.

‘I can walk…really,’ I said weakly.

‘Shut up, Coreen.’ He puffed the words out above my head.

I’d thought offering was the right thing to do, but was secretly glad Adam had refused. If I hadn’t been feeling horrendously sorry for him, having to heft me all that way, I might have let the drama of the moment get to me. I don’t get to play the damsel in distress very often—not for real, anyway—and I was tempted to enjoy it as long as it lasted.

I snuck a look over Adam’s shoulder, wondering if the soggy, slightly smelly and muddy reality of what had just happened might look a little bit romantic to our audience, who were now some distance away. I also wondered if Nicholas might be even the tiniest bit jealous.