Love Me

Episode 11

‘You’ve paid for the work on the Rectory yourself?’ Kelly queried in

disbelief.

David’s mouth thinned.

‘Perhaps you’d like to see the receipts,’ he challenged her.

‘Yes, I would,’ Kelly responded doggedly, refusing to let him cow her even

though she could feel her face starting to burn self-consciously and her stomach

beginning to churn as she contemplated just how foolish she was going to look if

David did produce such receipts.

‘Mrs Lee tells me that you’re going out for dinner this evening.’

Kelly stared at him, thrown by his abrupt change of subject.

‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ she agreed.

‘There isn’t a decent restaurant for miles,’ he told her, ‘and certainly not one

that offers fresh wild salmon; it’s always been one of your favourites.

‘Perhaps my tastes have changed,’ Kelly said a little loftily, adding robustly,

‘Unlike yours.

As he started to frown she explained sweetly, ‘I saw your...friend. She called

at the Rectory just as I was leaving. I’m sure she’d be more than delighted to

share your salmon with you, David,’ she told him coolly. ‘Now, about those

receipts...

Inwardly Kelly shivered a bit as she saw the anger flare in his eyes but

outwardly she stood her ground. It was, after all, her job to make sure that the

Trust wasn’t cheated—by anyone.

‘Of course,’ David told her formally, inclining his head as though in defeat, but

then, just as Kelly started to draw a relieved breath, he gave her a dangerously

vulpine smile and told her softly, ‘But I’m afraid it will have to be this evening

as I have a business meeting tomorrow morning and then I shall probably be

away for several days...’

‘With your...friend...?’

Later Kelly could only despair over whatever it was that had led her to make such a dangerously betraying and provocative remark, but inexplicably the

words were out before she could stop them, causing David, who had been on the

point of turning away from her, to turn back and slowly scrutinise her from head

to foot before asking her softly, ‘If you mean Micky, is that really any of your

business...or the Trust’s...?’

He had caught her out and Kelly knew it. It most certainly was not part of her

duty as the Trust’s representative to ask any questions about his personal life,

and she was mortified that she had done so.

‘If you want to see the receipts for the work on the Rectory then it will have to

be this evening, Kelly,’ David was repeating briskly. ‘Shall we say about eight-

thirty?’

Before she could say anything else he had gone, striding across the dusty floor

and leaving her to watch his departing back.

It was a good ten minutes after she had heard the noise of his Rolls Royce

engine die away before Kelly felt able to continue with her work. Her

intelligence told her that their antagonism was coming between her and the

normally wisely efficient way in which she dealt with even the most awkward of

the Trust’s clients, but her emotions refused to allow her to back down, to climb

down. If she was wary of him, suspicious of him, then she had every right to be.

And every right to as good as accuse him of trying to defraud the Trust?

She started to nibble anxiously at her bottom lip. If she was wrong about him

trying to get the Trust to cover the cost of work he had had done on his own

home, and if he chose to complain to Nichole—Irritably Kelly reminded herself

why she was here.

Although the house wasn’t any larger than others she had dealt with, it certainly

seemed to possess far more small interconnecting rooms here on its upper

storeys. She rubbed the dust from the window of one of them and peered out at

the countryside spread all around her. From here she could see the river where

David must have caught his fish. It wound lazily in a long half-loop through the

parkland which surrounded the house. Although the terrain here in city

was very different from that which surrounded Jack’s home, it was disturbingly

easy, looking down towards the river, to remember the many happy hours she

had spent with Jack and David as a young girl, watching them as they worked

together, helping them fish and later learning from them their countryside skills.

One of the ways in which, hopefully, ultimately, City Hall could generate

One of the ways in which, hopefully, ultimately, City Hall could generate

its own income would be, as David had suggested in the initial approach he had

made to the Trust, for the house to be let out to large corporations and groups

along with its fishing and shooting rights. The Trust adopted a policy that no

game existing on its lands could be killed simply for sport—a very strict culling

programme was put in place where necessary and the art of tracking animals was

taught as a skill for its own sake rather than with a view to killing. That had been

a condition which she herself had insisted on persuading the trustees to adopt,

and it made her stop and frown slightly to herself now as she was forced to

remember how it had been David who had first shown her that it was not necessary

to kill to enjoy such traditional country sports.

David...

Kelly was still thinking about him some time later when an exhausting drive

through the virtually uninhabited countryside which surrounded the house had

only produced three small villages, not one of which boasted a restaurant.

In the small pub in the third village the landlord shook his head when she

asked about food and apologised.

‘We don’t have the trade for it round here, although I could perhaps see if

there’s any sandwiches left over from lunchtime.’

Smiling wanly, Kelly shook her head. She was hungry, very hungry in fact,

and had been looking forward to sitting down to a proper hot meal.

‘There’s a good place over way,’ the pub manager was continuing

helpfully, ‘but that’s a good twenty six miles from here.’

Twenty-six miles. Kelly’s stomach was already starting to rumble. Against

her will she had a mental vision of David’s salmon, pink and poached, served with

delicious home-grown baby new potatoes and fresh vegetables and, of course, a

proper hollandaise sauce. Her mouth watered.

It was gone seven o’clock now, though, and if she were to drive to city

and back and eat as well that would mean she would be late for her meeting with

David and there was no way she was going to allow him the opportunity to accuse

her of being unprofessional.

Refusing the landlord’s offer of the afternoon’s leftover sandwiches, she made

her way back to her car. She would just have to go without a meal tonight, she

told herself firmly; after all, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. She was hardly

going to starve... But oh, that salmon and... David was quite right. It was her

favourite.

It was almost eight when Kelly pulled up outside the Rectory’s front door.

Her earlier hunger had turned into a gnawing irritation that was making her

head ache and her temper on edge. Low blood sugar, she told herself sternly. All

you need is a sweet drink.

All she needed maybe, but not all she wanted. What she wanted...

What on earth was the matter with her? she derided herself as she opened the

front door. Other women her age daydreamed and fantasised about having men,

not meals.

Eight o’clock. She just had time to get showered and changed before her

meeting with David. She wanted to run through her figures again, but if, as he said,

he had paid for the work himself and he had the receipts to prove it... Perhaps

she had been too quick to accuse him...

Kelly...’

She froze at the bottom of the stairs as she heard David’s voice. When she

turned her head he was standing in an open doorway several feet away from her.

‘Mrs Lee is going to serve dinner at nine-thirty so you’ve got half an hour

to get ready...’

A dozen questions and just as many denials and arguments sprang

immediately to Kelly’s lips, but somehow she managed not to utter them and

she was at the top of the stairs before she managed to ask herself why she had

not simply told David that she had eaten already.

Why? The audible rumble of her stomach as she opened her bedroom door

gave its own answer. Even so, it galled her to know that David had guessed she

would have to return to the house without having found somewhere to eat. But

just let him try to make something of it, Kelly decided fiercely as, having had

her shower, she changed into a long silky pink dress, brushing her hair

and quickly re-doing her make-up before checking the time.

Almost nine-thirty. Taking a deep breath, Kelly checked her appearance in

the mirror and then, holding her head high, headed for the bedroom door.

Her pink dress, pink and unadorned, might not, to anyone but the

cognoscente, reveal the fact that it had cost her the best part of a month’s wages

and carried the label of one of Europe top designers—the uninitiated might

be deceived by the simple design and the way the heavy fabric discreetly hinted

at rather than clung more obviously to Kelly’s slender figure. But even the most

self-confessed sartorial ignoramus would have reacted to the way David looked

when Kelly saw him waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.

Used as she was to seeing him wearing casual work clothes, and perhaps

because that was the image she held engraved in her mind’s eye—jeans fitting

snugly against the hard muscle of his thighs, checked work shirt rolled up at the

sleeves and just open enough at the neck to reveal the silky dark expanse of body

hair which so temptingly and tormentingly made one’s fingers long to unfasten a

few more buttons and explore just how thick, just how silky that soft dark hair

actually was—Kelly had forgotten how very male David could look in formal

clothes.

And although he hadn’t gone so far as to change into a dinner suit he was

wearing a pair of well-cut dark trousers and a crisp white shirt.

The fact that he was just shrugging on his jacket as she came down the stairs

afforded Kelly an unwanted glimpse of the lethal maleness of the muscles in his

torso and made her hesitate betrayingly just for a second before continuing her

journey downwards.

He had changed his clothes simply to have dinner with her.

Why? Because he knew very well the effect his appearance would have on

any susceptible woman and because he intended to use that fact to distract her,

confuse her when she needed all her attention, all her concentration to ascertain

the truth about that invoice? Or was she letting her imagination run away with

her? Was the woman he had dressed so elegantly for not her but—?

Was he perhaps seeing the other woman after their meeting had finished?

‘We’ve just got time for a drink before dinner if you’d like one,’ David told her

calmly, but his glance, Kelly was sure, had rested for just a betraying fraction of

a second on the soft thrust of her breasts before it had lifted to her face. Her heart

started to thump giddily.