Dangerous Interloper

‘Thirty-four, and no, he doesn’t have a wife. He’s never been married and seems to be quite content with his single state. A bit like you,’ he pointed out slyly, grinning at her when she glowered threateningly at him.

After he’d gone, she tried to concentrate on her work, but for some reason her thoughts kept sliding back to the man she had bumped into earlier and at last, in exasperation, she put down her pen and leaned her chin on her hand, frowning into space.

It was ridiculous to keep thinking about him like this. A stranger … a total stranger, who, for all the thoughtful interest she could have sworn she had seen glinting in his eyes, had made no attempt to make any capital out of the situation fate had thrown them into and suggest extending their acquaintance.

Not that she would have wanted him to come on to her in the manner of the likes of the Ralph Charlesworths of this world, she told herself hastily, but a subtle compliment and the suggestion that he would not have been averse to seeing her again …

For heaven’s sake, she derided herself, trying to dismiss him from her mind. She was a woman, not a teenager, and it wasn’t even as though she didn’t have a hundred better things to occupy her thoughts.

Tomorrow night, for instance, there was a meeting of the newly formed Committee for the Preservation of Local Buildings. She had been asked if she would like to be its president, but she had hastily declined, explaining that her other responsibilities meant that, although she would be an enthusiastic supporter of their work, she could not take charge of it and do it justice.

The others on the committee were all locals; Tim Ford, a local historian and schoolteacher, now retired; the vicar’s wife; Linda Smithson, the doctor’s wife; and a couple of others. Miranda was also due to attend another meeting the following night, to decide how best they could organise something within the town which would prove of sufficient interest to its youth to keep them from loitering boredly in the town square.

Yes, she had more than enough to occupy her time and her thoughts without allowing them to drift helplessly and dangerously in the direction of a man she didn’t really know and whom she was hardly likely to see again.

The trouble was, though … the trouble was that nature had seen fit to bestow her with a rather over-active imagination. Something which on occasions she found to be rather a trial, especially when she was trying to concentrate on promoting a cool and businesslike professional image.

Right now it was rebelliously insisting on coaxing her away from her work, and into an extremely unlikely but very alluring daydream in which, instead of releasing her so promptly and so courteously as he had done, the stranger had held on to her that little bit longer, had gazed deeply and meaningfully into her eyes until her whole body tingled with the sensual message of that look.

Almost without knowing she was doing it, she had closed her eyes and relaxed in her chair.

Of course, she would have tried to pull away, to convey with the cool remoteness of her withdrawal that she was not in the least impressed or flattered by his interest. And of course she would be able to look directly and unmovingly at the sensual curve of that very male mouth without feeling the slightest tremor inside her, even while she was aware that he was still holding on to her and that his gaze was fastened on her mouth in a way that in her daydream made her give a tiny sigh.

Of course he wouldn’t kiss her in broad daylight in the middle of the street. Of course he wouldn’t, couldn’t, but he could release her slowly and regretfully, so that his fingers held on to her arms as though he couldn’t bring himself to break his physical contact with her, and of course before he let her go he had made sure that he knew both her name and where he could get in touch with her.

‘Miranda. Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.’

Miranda jolted upright in her chair, opening her eyes as Liz came in.

‘I … I—er—wasn’t asleep,’ she told her guiltily. ‘I … I’ve … got a bit of headache.’

‘Oh, dear, and you’re going out to that golf club do tonight, aren’t you?’ Liz sympathised. ‘I hope it goes before then.’

Tell one lie and you had to tell a round dozen to back it up, Miranda reflected to herself half an hour later as she drove homewards. And what on earth had possessed her anyway? Allowing her mind to drift in that idiotic silly fashion. Good heavens, she had thought she was well past the stage of such idiocy. Daydreams of that kind belonged to one’s very early teens alongside fruitless dreams over thankfully out-of-reach pop stars.

She put her foot down a little harder on her accelerator. Well, tonight should bring her down to earth with a bump. She only hoped that Ben Frobisher didn’t prove to be too boring. No doubt he would talk about computers all night long, which meant she would hardly be able to understand a thing he was saying.

Her cottage was small and rather isolated, its timber frame sunk into the ground as though crumpling under the burden of its heavy stone roof.

When she had originally bought the cottage it had been little more than a shell. It had taken a good deal of work and research to transform it into the home it was now.

The setting sun harmonised with the soft colour of its peachy-pink-washed exterior walls. She had made the lime wash herself, and dyed it, using a traditional recipe and ingredients. That result had only been achieved after several attempts, but it had been well worth the effort she had put in.

Inside she had taken just as much care over the renovation of her small rooms and the purchase of the furniture which clothed them.

The back door opened straight into a square stone-flagged kitchen. The cat curled up on top of the Aga greeted her with a soft purr of pleasure.

‘You don’t fool me. I know it’s only cupboard-love, William,’ she told him as she scratched behind his ears.

There was no point in making a meal, not when she would be eating out later. A quick snack, a cup of coffee and then she would have to go upstairs and get ready to go out.

She made a wry face to herself. There were a dozen things she’d rather be doing tonight than playing the dutiful daughter and partner, but she had promised her father.

CHAPTER TWO

WELL her dress was hardly designer style, Miranda reflected, studying her image critically in her mirror, but then the golf club was not exactly the haunt of the beautiful people. Most of the members were around her father’s age, pleasant enough but inclined to be a little dull. She wondered cynically if their new client realised what he was letting himself in for, and then told herself that she was perhaps being a little unfair.

Biased … that was what he had called her. She stopped looking at herself, her eyes becoming soft and dreamy. Now, if she had been going out with him tonight, she wouldn’t have been satisfied with her simple plain black dress and her mother’s pearls, she reflected, not seeing as others did, that the slender elegance of her body somehow made the simple understatement of her plain dress all the more appealing and eye-catching in a way that would never have occurred to her. If anyone had told her that the silky swing of her hair, the soft sheen of her skin and the plain simplicity of her clothes all added up to a sensuality all the more effective because it was so obviously unstudied, she wouldn’t have believed them, but it was true none the less.

Tartly reminding herself that, since the object of her ridiculous daydreams had not appeared the least bit interested in her, it was pointless wasting her time fretting about the clothes she didn’t have to wear if he asked her out, she clipped on her pearl earrings and picked up her bag.

All through her schooldays her teachers had bemoaned her tendency to daydream. She had thought in the last few years that she had finally outgrown it. Now it seemed she had been over-optimistic.

It took her just over half an hour to drive to her father’s house on the other side of town. Helen’s car was already parked in the drive, and when Miranda went up to the front door it was Helen who opened it to her.

At her father’s insistence she still had a key for her old home, but she only used it when he was away on holiday, just to check that the house and its contents were safe.

Helen kissed her and greeted her warmly. She wasn’t as tall as Miranda, a still-pretty fair-haired woman of fifty, whom Miranda doubted anyone could ever have disliked. She had a natural warmth, a genuine compassion for humanity that Miranda could only describe as a very special kind of motherliness, and that made her wish sometimes that her father had met her earlier and that she could have had the benefit of her compassion and love during her own difficult teenage years, although she was honest enough to admit that, had her father met her then, she would probably not have responded well to her and would have been inclined to be jealous and possessive of her father.

‘Dad not ready yet?’ Miranda queried as she closed the door behind her.

‘You know your father,’ Helen said humourously. ‘He says he can’t find his cufflinks.’

Miranda laughed. ‘It’s just as well you’re organising everything for the wedding. How’s it going by the way? Have you found the outfit yet?’

Helen had complained to her only the week before that she had still not found an outfit she liked enough to wear for the supposedly quiet church wedding organised for the end of the month.

‘No, I haven’t. I’ve decided that I’m going to have to have a day in Bath or maybe even in London.’ Helen pulled a face. ‘I’m dreading it. I loathe city shopping.’

They chatted easily together for a few minutes while they waited for Miranda’s father to come downstairs.

Just as he did so, they heard a car coming up the drive.

‘This will be Ben Frobisher!’ her father exclaimed, hurrying towards the door and opening it.

As she heard the sound of male footsteps crunching over the gravel, Miranda slipped discreetly into the shadows at the rear of the hall so that she would have a good view of her partner for the evening, without his being similarly able to observe her.

She watched as he mounted the steps and came forward into the light, and then her heart turned over with shock, and she stared with open disbelief, closing her eyes and then opening them again; but no, she wasn’t daydreaming; it was the stranger, the man she had bumped into earlier on. He was standing there, calmly returning her father’s handshake, turning to smile warmly at Helen, his dark hair shining cleanly and healthily beneath the light, his tall broad-shouldered body moving easily within the elegant confines of his dinner suit, his eyes as familiarly and perceptively grey as she had remembered as they swept the shadows.

‘Miranda, come and meet Ben,’ her father called out to her, forcing her to move forward, to extend her hand and to force her lips into what she hoped was a sophisticated and cool smile.

‘Actually Mr Frobisher and I have already met.’ His handshake was firm, if brief.

‘Ben, please,’ he corrected her.

‘You two know each other?’ Miranda heard her father saying curiously. ‘But, Miranda, you never—’

‘We met by chance earlier on today. At the time your daughter was escaping from the depressing sight of my desecration of what she informed me had once been a fine old Georgian building.’ His eyebrows lifted humorously as he smiled at Miranda. ‘She was a little—er—angry, and I didn’t think it wise to introduce myself.’

‘Oh, Miranda is one of the leading lights of our newly formed Committee for the Preservation of Local Buildings,’ Miranda heard her father saying while to her own fury she could feel her face flushing.

‘It isn’t quite as bad as you seem to think, you know,’ Ben Frobisher told her, still smiling at her, adding, ‘In fact, why don’t you give me an opportunity to prove it to you? Let me show you the plans I’ve had drawn up.’

‘By Ralph Charlesworth?’ Miranda demanded scornfully, letting her temper and her embarrassment get the better of her.

The whole evening was going to be a complete disaster. She could tell that already … Of all the humiliating things to have happened … had he known who she was when …? But no, he couldn’t have.

‘No, not by Charlesworth, as it happens.’

That made her focus on him and then immediately wish she had not done so, as she was subjected to the fully dizzying effect of meeting that level grey gaze head on.

It was like running full tilt into an immovable object, she reflected, the effect just as instant and even more of a shock to the system. Her heart was beating too fast; she was fighting not to breathe too quickly and shallowly. She felt slightly dizzy and thoroughly bemused. It was totally unfair that he should affect her like this.

‘I’m sure Miranda would be delighted to see them,’ she could hear her father saying heartily at her side. ‘Wouldn’t you, Mirry?’

Wouldn’t she what? she wondered muzzily, somehow or other managing to force herself to respond with a brief inclination of her head and a rather wobbly smile.

‘I’m delighted that you were able to join us tonight, Ben!’ Miranda heard her father exclaiming. ‘They’re a good crowd at the club.’

Behind her father’s back, Miranda grimaced slightly to herself and then flushed wildly as something made her look up and she saw that Ben Frobisher was watching her.

‘And you, Miranda,’ he enquired politely, ‘do you play golf?’

Her father answered for her, chuckling.

‘Not Mirry. She doesn’t have the patience. She plays tennis, though …’

‘Tennis. It’s becoming very fashionable at the moment.’

For some reason the musing comment delivered in Ben Frobisher’s very male voice made her stiffen and look defensively at him. She had the feeling that his comment had been slightly barbed … slightly derogatory.

‘I’ve been playing ever since I left school,’ she told him challengingly, adding pointedly just in case he hadn’t got the message, ‘long before it became fashionable.’

As they walked out to the car, Miranda tried to quell her mixed feelings of irritation and embarrassment and then reflected how very different reality was from her daydreams. In them she had perceived Ben Frobisher as a highly desirable stranger, who also desired her; in reality … In reality he quite plainly did nothing of the kind, and there was an abrasion between them, a covert hostility that was making her feel both uncomfortable and defensive.

It was all because she had made that stupid unguarded comment about the house, of course. And the only reason she had said that had been that she didn’t want to admit to him that he had been right and that she had been escaping from something and someone, namely Ralph Charlesworth and his pursuit of her. Well, it was too late now to wish she had not acted so impulsively. Much too late. But how could she have guessed who he was? She had imagined that the then unknown Ben Frobisher would be a much smaller man, hunch-shouldered and probably bespectacled, as befitted someone who spent long hours staring at a computer screen working out complex programs.

This man looked as though he had spent more time outdoors than in, although she ought to have been warned by the unmistakable intelligence and shrewdness in those grey eyes.

‘I thought we’d all travel together in my car,’ her father suggested, and before she could argue and insist on taking her own car Miranda discovered that Ben Frobisher was politely holding open one of the rear doors of her father’s BMW for her and that she had no option but to get in. When he went round the other side of the car and got in beside her, she could literally feel her muscles tensing.

Not against him, she recognised miserably, but against herself, against her own involuntary reaction to him.

Hell, she swore crossly to herself. This was the last thing she needed … an inconvenient and definitely unwanted sexual reaction to a man whom she had now made up her mind she did not like.

All right, so maybe it wasn’t his fault that she had made such a fool of herself, but somehow, illogically, her emotions refused to accept this. There had been no reason for him to mention what she had said about the house in front of her father and Helen, had there? It was bad enough that he knew how tactless she had been, and as for looking at his precious plans … She tensed again as she realised belatedly that she had already accepted his offer. That would teach her to let her mind wander and not to concentrate on what was going on around her! With good reason had her teachers rebuked her for daydreaming.

Teachers? She wasn’t a schoolgirl now, she was a woman … an independent career woman. An independent career woman who willfully daydreamed about unknown men? She chewed unhappily on her bottom lip, angry with herself as well as with the man sitting silently beside her.

The evening was going to be a total and utter disaster, she knew it.

As her father drove them towards the golf club, she told herself that it served her right and that this was what came of allowing herself to weave idiotic daydreams around a man she didn’t really know.

Had she known who he was when they met … She frowned to herself as she stared out into the darkness of the surrounding landscape.

Would his physical impact on her have been lessened if she had known who he was? She wasn’t a young girl any more, after all; a person’s personality, their beliefs, their sense of humour, their views of life and love—it was important that all these should mesh with and complement her own, and anyone who could employ someone like Ralph Charlesworth to undertake the renovation of a graceful old house like the one Ben Frobisher had bought could not possibly have the same outlook on life as herself. Which was probably just as well. After all, he had not shown any reciprocal awareness of her interest in her—quite the reverse—so the sensible, indeed, the essential thing for her to do was to forget the disruptive physical effect that the first unexpected meeting had had on her and to concentrate instead on the reality of the man he was actually proving to be.

A very sensible and mature decision to come to; so why, at the same time as she was congratulating herself on this sensible mature outlook, was she also angrily wishing that she had dressed with a little more élan, a little more sophistication; that she had perhaps made the effort to take herself off to Bath and buy herself a new dress?

A new dress for the golf club dance—and when she had promised herself that this year she intended to save up and treat herself to a holiday in Hong Kong and the Far East? What on earth was happening to her?

Nothing, she told herself firmly, answering her own question; nothing whatsoever was happening to her, and nothing was going to happen to her.

Even so, when the lights of the club-house came into view she found herself wishing that the evening was already over and that she was safely tucked up in her cosy cottage bedroom.

Something about Ben Frobisher made her feel acutely unsure of herself; acutely aware of him as a man, and of her own reactions to that maleness.

She moved uncomfortably in her seat. She didn’t like this unwanted awareness of him, this sudden and totally unexpected schism in what she had believed her sexuality to be: controlled, tamed and of no real force in her life, and not what she had experienced on first seeing him.

She had gone through all the usual sexually experimental stages in her teens, but had never been promiscuous, either by inclination or peer pressure. After all, when you lived in a small town in which your father was something of a prominent figure, you felt almost honour-bound not to indulge in a variety of involvements and affairs.

In this part of the world respectability was still considered to be important and a virtue. Couples might live together, but in most cases they eventually married.

Since in the years when her peers were settling down and marrying she had had no wish to follow suit, she had chosen to remain celibate rather than indulge in a series of relationships. Rather happily celibate, if she was honest, and when she contemplated the thought of any kind of intimacy with men like Ralph Charlesworth it was revulsion that made her body shudder, not desire.

No, she had never considered herself a highly sexually motivated person, and she didn’t now, which made her illogical reaction to Ben Frobisher all the more unnerving.

Had she actually, really, this afternoon, fantasised about how it would be to have him kissing her?

She did shudder now, horrified to remember just how easily and intensely she had been able to imagine what it would feel like to be taken in his arms and—

‘I’ll drive up to the door so that you can get out, and then I’ll park the car,’ her father was saying, thankfully forcing her to concentrate on the present and the blessedly mundane activity of getting out of the car.

The golf club and its course had been donated to the town in the twenties by a wealthy and benevolent local resident, who had hired an architect to design the club-house after the style of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s designs for small country houses, so that it was vaguely Tudoresque in style. As the three of them went inside to wait for her father while he parked the car, Miranda acknowledged the greetings of several of her father’s cronies, registering as she did so the speculative, curious looks she was getting from their wives. No need to ask herself why; the answer was standing right beside her, all six-feet-odd of manhood of him.

Why, she seethed inwardly, were there still in this day and age women who still believed that no member of their own sex could be complete without a man in her life? It was all nonsense, just the same as suggesting that no woman could be complete without having had a child. Her thoughts floundered to an uncomfortable halt as she recalled her own vulnerability in that particular direction. But then, it was not as though she considered herself incomplete without a child, it was just … just—

‘Aunt Helen … not long now until the wedding, is it?’

Miranda tensed as she heard the soft hesitant voice of Susan Charlesworth, and she knew even before she had heard Ben acknowledging briefly, ‘Charlesworth,’ that Ralph was with her. She had almost been able to feel his presence from the atavistic reaction of her body, from the way the tiny hairs on her skin had risen in physical protest at his nearness.

It galled her unbearably sensing that Ralph was fully aware of her aversion to him and that for some reason this only caused him to increase his pursuit of her.

She didn’t know how on earth poor Susan could tolerate him. In her shoes … but, then, thankfully she would never have allowed herself to be trapped in that kind of situation, married to a man who was flagrantly and frequently unfaithful, who treated her so contemptuously and inconsiderately, who humiliated her in public and, Miranda suspected, in private as well.

She was glad that her father joined them before she could be drawn into the small flood of exchanges passing between the other three as Ralph introduced his wife to Ben, and Helen explained her relationship to Susan.

Miranda excused herself on the pretext of wanting to go to the Ladies, gritting her teeth in rage and revulsion as Ralph leered at her and told her fulsomely, ‘Going to check up on the old makeup, are we, then, Miranda? Shouldn’t worry too much, if I were you. A good-looking woman like you doesn’t need any warpaint, although I must admit there’s something about a woman’s mouth when it’s painted with lipstick that makes a man wonder what it would be like to kiss it off.’

As she turned her back on him, red flags of rage flying in her cheeks, Miranda heard Susan saying uncomfortably, ‘Ralph! Really.’