Love Me

Episode 8

It was only when she was on

the verge of sleep that she remembered that she had neglected to ask David to do

something about the window she had been unable to open. David grimaced as he studied the very obviously cut-through pieces of fencing

wire. No accident, that. Someone had quite definitely used wire cutters on them,

which meant...

The lambs which had been born early in the spring had all gone now, his

breeding stock the only flock that remained. It was an unpalatable thought

though, that the deer roaming the home park made a tempting target for rustlers,

all the more so because those animals were tame and not used to being hunted.

The last time he had seen Jack, the two of them had discussed the pros and

cons of tagging their deer. Like him,Jack had a small herd on his estate, but

since their marriage Elly, his wife, had added a new strain to them in the

shape of the same miniature deer that the Duchess had bred so

successfully.

As David glanced towards the ha-ha which separated the parkland from the

main gardens to the Hall he could hear the peacocks screeching their warning

that someone was approaching the house.

Frowning, he got up, dusting the twigs and grass from his jeans as he headed

back to the RollsRoyce.

It was almost ten o’clock, hardly the time for anyone to be visiting the Hall for

any legitimate reason. Still frowning, he started the Rolls Royce’s engine.

Kelly had woken up abruptly, wondering where on earth she was and why she

couldn’t breathe properly. The dying sun had heated the already stuffy air in her

bedroom to the point where she could actually taste its staleness in her mouth.

The sharp intensity of her earlier headache had, thankfully, eased, but she knew

there was no guarantee of its not returning if she continued to breathe such

unhealthy air.

What she needed was some fresh air. After sluicing her face with cold water

she pulled on her jeans and T-shirt, grimacing slightly as she did so. Usa

had effected some changes in her, she reflected wryly. Once she would have

been quite happy in grubby clothes, but now...

Nichole often teased her for the preppy look of loafers, jeans and white T-shirts

which had become her trademark, but, as she had loftily told him, they made good sense for her job in that they always looked workmanlike and enabled her

to climb scaffolding and straddle platforms whilst at the same time looking smart

and businesslike enough to command the respect of the sometimes very

chauvinistic men she had to deal with. Women too, especially in Europe, the home

of style with a capital S, had been discreetly impressed with her working

‘uniform’, she had noticed. Now it was second nature to her always to wear

immaculate white T-shirts and equally immaculate jeans, and the act of putting

on clothes she had already been wearing all day was not one she enjoyed.

She had a spare set of car keys in her purse—another trick she had learned

from her work. Spare keys to anything and everything were a necessity, as she

had quickly discovered the first time she had allowed one of the workmen to

accidentally lock her out of a building and then go home with the keys—it would

be a simple enough matter for her to walk back to Hall and pick up her

Discovery. The last thing she wanted was to be dependent on David for a lift to the

place in the morning, and besides—a small triumphant smile curved her full

mouth—it would be good to be able to point out haughtily to him that whilst he

had been out enjoying himself with his girlfriend she had been working.

She had a well-developed sense of direction and the walk to the Hall, which

someone else might have found a daunting prospect, was nothing to her.

Humming happily to herself, Kelly set out.

It was a warm summer’s evening, with just enough remaining light for her to

avoid the occasional cloud of midges hovering on the still air.

Being on foot gave her the opportunity to assess the land far better than she

had been able to do from inside David’s Rolls Royce. She had spent enough time

on Jack’s estate to appreciate that it was going to take a considerable amount of

good husbandry on David’s part to bring this land into the same productive state as

her brother’s. she envied him the challenge, but not so much as she

envied his wife the pleasure she would have in lovingly restoring the Rectory; in

making it the home that Kelly knew it could be. Oh, yes, she envied her that.

Only that? Kelly paused, shaking her thick hair back from her head. Of

course only that. She couldn’t possibly envy her David, could she—David and the

children he would give her? No, of course she couldn’t.

It was almost dark when Kelly eventually reached the Hall, its bulk throwing

long shadows across the gravel, cloaking both her and the Discovery as she

walked towards it.

The sound of other feet on the gravel momentarily made her freeze until she

recognised the familiar shapes of half a dozen inquisitive peacocks and peahens.

The c***s were sending their shrill cries of warning up into the still night air. The c***s were sending their shrill cries of warning up into the still night air.

Kelly laughed as she heard them, relieved, and shook her head at them as she

told them cheerfully, ‘Yes, I may be an intruder now, but you’re going to have to

get used to me. You and I shall be seeing an awful lot of one another, you

know.’

She stayed with them for several minutes, watching them and talking to them.

Soon, no doubt, when it became fully dark, they would be roosting somewhere

out of the way of any predatory hunting foxes.

Turning her back on them, Kelly stared thoughtfully at the house, trying to

visualise how it would look once the stone had been cleaned. That alone would

cost a small fortune and would, no doubt, take almost as long as it would take for

the interior to be renovated. She must ask David to give her any formal records

from when the hall had originally been built and the work done on it since then.

She wasn’t sure, but she suspected that the stairway she had seen had been, if not

the work of Grinling., then certainly the work of one of his more

innovative apprentices.

The tiny sprays of coral, the seas hells and unbelievably realistic fish carved

into the wood related, no doubt, to the fact that the money for the original house

had come from the very profitable overseas trading its owner had been involved

in. As a prominent member of court, and one of his favourites,

he undoubtedly had had access to many money-making activities.

Idly Kelly wondered what it would have been like to live in such a time and

in such a house. It was one of her indulgences that whenever she became

involved with a new property she couldn’t help daydreaming about its past, its

history, picturing herself as part of it...imagining how and what she would have

chosen had she been its chatelaine and then translating that into...

David parked his Rolls Royce out of sight and sound of the house. The peafowl,

on their way to their roosting place, saw him and started to flap their wings until

he threw down the grain he had brought with him to silence them. No point in

giving the intruders the same warning he himself had so helpfully received.

Abandoning her study of the Hall, Kelly stepped back into the shadows and

made her way back towards her parked car. As he rounded the corner of the

building, for a moment David thought that its frontage was deserted, and then he

saw someone moving in the semi-darkness.

Immediately he acted, crouching down low and using the shadows to conceal

his presence as he ran light-footed and quietly towards Kelly’s car and whoever

it was who was trying to break into it. There wasn’t any time to waste—the

Discovery’s driver’s door was already open. Launching himself towards the

figure about to climb into it, David brought the thief down in a rugby tackle,

pinning him down on the ground beneath him as he grunted, ‘Got you.’

Kelly didn’t see her assailant spring out at her but she certainly felt him as

the speed of his attack carried her to the ground, his weight keeping her there as

his hands moved quickly and lightly over her body.

Frantically she tried to struggle, kicking out at him, clawing his back as he

pinned her legs, imprisoning her beneath his own, and then reached out to

imprison her hands. As she twisted and turned beneath him, trying to throw off

his weight,Kelly felt too furiously angry to be afraid, but then, suddenly, as he

secured both her hands in one of his and ran his free one experimentally over her

body, she froze, all her feminine instincts and fears awakened.

‘Keep still,’David warned his quarry abruptly. It had come as a shock to

discover that she was female. He had assumed that the attempted theft of the car

was being carried out by a young boy.

As she heard and recognised David’s voice, Kelly’s fear immediately changed

to a mixture of relief and fury.

‘Let go of me,’ she demanded immediately.

Kelly...?’ David stared at her in disbelief. ‘What the hell...?’

He had relaxed his grip on her hands but his weight was still holding her

pinned to the ground and Kelly wriggled protestingly beneath him,

complaining.

‘Kelly,’ David repeated, still obviously shocked by her presence. ‘I thought... I

heard the peafowl and thought someone was... I thought you were trying to steal

the car... I couldn’t tell who you were in the dark,’ David told her curtly as he read

the disbelief in her eyes, her expression revealed to him as the moon grew in

strength now that the dusk had given way to proper darkness.

‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he demanded sharply.

‘I needed some fresh air; the windows in my room won’t open and I...I

decided I might as well walk over here and collect my car... And what about

you? I thought you were supposed to be going on a date, not creeping around

frightening people to death,’ Kelly accused him angrily.

She was becoming acutely and very uncomfortably conscious of the way he

was lying on top of her, her legs still entangled with his from when she had tried

to escape from him, but now...

Kelly drew a sharp self-admonitory breath at the direction her thoughts were

taking. It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to breathe and not just

because of David’s weight on top of her. She was all too aware of how, when she

did breathe, her breasts were pressing against his chest and even more did breathe, her breasts were pressing against his chest and even more

dangerously conscious of the way her pelvis was accommodating itself to the

shape of him. She could smell the warm summer night air on his skin and with it

the much, much more intimate musky male scent that was him. Somehow or

other during their struggle her T-shirt had become separated from her jeans and

she was hideously aware that it was too late to regret now the fact that in re-

dressing herself she had not bothered to put back on the sensible white bra she

had discarded when she had gone to bed. Instinctively her free hand went to her

body to check just how far up her T-shirt had ridden.

‘What is it?’ David asked her, his attention caught by the movement of her hand.