Love Me

Episode 5

Her hair, long and thick, hung down to her shoulders in an immaculately

groomed swathe of molten honey-gold. Just looking at it, at her, made him ache

to run his fingers through it, to watch its silken weight sliding through his

hands...

His stomach muscles tensed. The brilliantly white T-shirt she was wearing

hugged the soft shape of her breasts before disappearing into her jeans. The T-

shirts he remembered her wearing had been big and baggy and invariably

slightly grubby as she happily trotted after him whilst he worked.

Even to his male uneducated eyes, this T-shirt was plainly not the kind one

wore to work outdoors in.

And as for her jeans...!

David closed his eyes. What was it about the sight of a pair of plain blue jeans

lovingly hugging the soft, shapely contours of a woman’s behind that had such lovingly hugging the soft, shapely contours of a woman’s behind that had such

an evocative, such a provocative effect on a man’s male instincts?

Unabashedly he acknowledged that had Kelly been a complete stranger to

him, and had he been walking down the street behind her, he would have

instinctively increased his pace to walk past her so that he could see if she

looked as good from the front as she did from the rear.

But she wasn’t a stranger, she was Kelly.

‘I’ve told Nick that if you don’t keep away from Kelly he must make you,’

Kelly’s mother had once warned him haughtily, shortly after her husband’s

death.

She had caught David at a bad moment and he had reacted instinctively and

immediately regretted it as he’d thrown back at her bluntly, ‘It’s Kelly you

should be warning to keep away from me. She’s the one doing the chasing.

Teenage girls are like that,’ he had added unkindly, watching as Kelly’s mother

pursed her lips in shock.

It had been then that he had seen Kelly slipping past the open doorway of

Nick’s estate office. Had she overheard them? He’d hoped not. Difficult though

her unwanted crush on him sometimes had been, the last thing he’d wanted to do

was to hurt her. But now, as he watched her, David acknowledged that these days

if anyone was going to be hurt it was far more likely to be him! Why had she

taken as her lover and her intended partner for life a man more than old enough

to be her father? David couldn’t begin to understand. Unless it was because she

had lost her father at such a young and vulnerable age.

Kelly had pulled open the house’s unlocked door and disappeared inside.

David followed her. THEY had covered the ground floor of the house, walked the length of the elegant

gallery, with its windows overlooking the parkland and the distant vista of the

hills, and were just inspecting the enormous ballroom which opened

off it when Kelly acknowledged inwardly that David might have been right to

advise her to wait until after she had rested to inspect the house.

City Hall’s rooms might not possess quite the vastness of the palazzo’s

marble-floored rooms, nor the fading grandeur of the Prague palace, but Kelly

had already lost count of the number of salons and ante-chambers they had

walked through on the lower floor. The gallery felt as though it stretched for

miles, and as she studied the dusty wooden floor of the ballroom her heart sank

at the thought of inspecting its lofty plasterwork ceiling and its elegantly inlaid

panelling. And they still had the upper floors to go over! But she couldn’t afford

to show any weakness in front of David and have him crowing over her. No way.

And so, ignoring the warning beginnings of a throbbing headache, she took a

deep breath and began to inspect the panelling.

‘The first thing we’re going to need to do is to get a report on the extent of the

dry rot,’ she told David in a firmly businesslike voice.

He stopped her. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

Kelly paused and turned to look angrily at him.

David, there’s something you have to understand,’ she told him pointedly. ‘I

am in charge here now. I wasn’t asking for your approval,’ she told him gently.

‘The house has dry rot. We need a specialist’s report on the extent of the

damage.’

‘I already have one.’

Kelly started to frown.

‘When...?’ she began.

But before she could continue David told her coolly, ‘It was obvious that the

Trust would need to commission a full structural survey of the place to assess it,

so in order to save time I commissioned one. You should have had a copy. I had

one faxed to the Trust’s USA office last week when I received it.’

Kelly could feel her heart starting to beat just a little bit too fast as the angry

colour burned her face.

‘You commissioned a survey?’ she questioned with dangerous calmness.

‘May I ask who gave you that authority? ‘May I ask who gave you that authority?’

Nichole,’ came back the prompt and stingingly dismissive reply.

Kelly opened her mouth and then closed it again. It was quite typical of

Nichole that he should have done such a thing and she knew it. He would only

have been thinking of saving time in getting his latest pet project under way; he

would not have seen, as she so clearly did, that what David was actually doing was

not trying to be helpful but deliberately trying to upstage her and challenge her

authority.

‘I take it you haven’t read the report,’David was continuing, talking to her as

though she were some kind of errant pupil who had failed to turn in a piece of

homework, Kelly decided as she silently ground her firm white teeth.

‘I haven’t received any report to read,’ she corrected him acidly.

David shrugged.

‘Well, I’ve got a copy here. Do you want to continue with your inspection or

would you prefer to wait until you’ve had a chance to read through it?’

Had the question been put by anyone else, Kelly knew that she would have

gratefully seized on the excuse to defer her self-imposed task until after she had

had a rest and the opportunity to do something about the increasingly painful

pressure of her headache, but because it was David who asked her, David whom she

was fiercely determined not to allow to have any advantage over her, she shook

her head and told him aggressively, ‘When I want to change any of my plans,

David, I’ll let you know. But until I do I think you can safely take it that I don’t...’

She saw his eyebrows lift a little but he made no comment.

It had been a hot week and the air in the ballroom was stifling, the dust thick

and choking as it lay heavily all around them.

Kelly sneezed and winced as the pounding in her head increased. The bright

early evening sunlight streaming in through the windows was making her feel

oddly dizzy and faintly nauseous... She tried to look away from it and gave a

small gasp of pain as the act of moving her head made the blood pound

agonisingly against her temples.

Only rarely did she suffer these enervating headaches. They were brought on

by stress and tension. Turning away so that David wouldn’t see her, she tried to

massage the pain away discreetly.

‘Careful...’ David warned her tersely.

‘What?’ Kelly spun round, colour flaring up under her skin as David motioned

towards a piece of fallen plasterwork she had almost walked over.

She was feeling increasingly sick and dizzy in the sharp bright light.

Despairingly she closed her eyes and then wished she hadn’t as the room started

to spin dangerously around to spin dangerously around her.

Jelly...’

Quickly she opened her eyes.

‘You’re not well; what is it?’ she heard David demanding tersely.

‘Nothing,’ she denied angrily. ‘A headache, that’s all.’

‘A headache...?’ His eyebrows shot up as David studied her now far too pale

face and saw the tell-tale beading of sweat on her forehead.

‘That’s it,’ he told her forcefully. ‘We can finish this tomorrow. You need to

rest.’

‘I need to do my job,’ Kelly protested shakily, but David quite obviously

wasn’t going to listen to her.

‘Can you make it back to the car?’ he was asking her. ‘Or shall I carry you?’

Carry her... Kelly gave him a furiously outraged look.

David, there’s nothing wrong with me,’ she lied, and then gave a small gasp as

the quick movement of her head as she shook it in denial of his suggestion

caused nauseating arrows of pain to savage her aching head.

The next thing she knew, David was taking her very firmly by the arm and

propelling her towards the door, ignoring her protests to leave her alone.

At the top of the stairs, to her infuriated chagrin, he turned round and swung

her up into his arms, telling her through gritted teeth, ‘If you’re going to faint on

me, Kelly, then here’s the best place to do it.’

She wanted to tell him that fainting was the last thing she intended to do, but

her face was pressed against the warm flesh of his throat and if she tried to speak

her lips would be touching his skin and then...

Swallowing hard, Kelly tried to concentrate on banishing the agonising pain

in her head but it was something that she couldn’t just will away. As she knew

from past experience, the only way of getting rid of it was for her to go to bed

and sleep it off.

They were downstairs now and David was crossing the hallway, thrusting open

the door and carrying her out into the fresh air.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded as he walked past her Discovery

towards his own car.

‘I’m taking you home...to the Rectory,’ he told her promptly.

‘I can drive,’ Kelly protested, but to her annoyance David simply gave a brief

derogatory laugh.

He told her dismissively, ‘No way...’ And then she was being bundled into the

passenger seat of a Land Rover nearly as ancient as the one she remembered him

driving around her stepbrother’s estate, and as she struggled to sit up David was driving around her brother’s estate, and as she struggled to sit up David was

jumping into the driver’s seat next to her and turning the key in the ignition.

David...my luggage...’ She was protesting, but he obviously had no intention of

listening to her. With the Land Rover’s engine noise making it virtually

impossible for her to speak over it, Kelly gave up her attempt to stop him and

subsided weakly into her seat, hunching her shoulders as she deliberately turned

her head away and refused to look at him.

As he glanced at her hunched shoulders and averted profile, David’s frown

deepened. In that pose she looked so defenceless and vulnerable, so different

from the professional, high-powered businesswoman she had just shown herself

to be and much more like the girl he remembered.

The Land Rover kicked up a trail of dust as he turned off the drive and onto

the track that led to the Rectory.

Girl or woman, what did it matter so far as he was concerned? He cursed

under his breath, his attention suddenly caught by the sight of several deer

grazing placidly beside the track. They were supposed to be confined to the park

area surrounding the house and not cropping the grazing he needed for his sheep.

There must be a break in the fence somewhere—the new fence which he had just

severely depleted his carefully hoarded bank balance to buy—which meant...