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‘He’ll soon get to know you,’ Daniel told her as he reached out to scratch between the animal’s ears.
‘I can’t wait,’ Christa muttered sardonically, firmly keeping Daniel’s body between her and the goat as they walked towards the house. What on earth had she got herself into? she wondered bitterly as she waited for Daniel to unlock the door. A month cooped up virtually alone with a man who she already knew was a danger to her, and for what? Just so that she could prove a point?
She must be feeling more tired than she had realised, she decided as Daniel pushed open the door and motioned her inside. Her principles and her beliefs had always been very important to her. Her great-aunt had been the old-fashioned type, with very strict and strong values which she had passed on to Christa.
The door opened directly into a large, low-ceilinged kitchen. And as Christa glanced round the room, observing the bright red Aga and the solid cherrywood kitchen units, she reflected cynically that no expense had been spared in creating what, at first glance, might appear to be a plain and practically furnished room.
Christa, who was interested in all aspects of design and fashion, knew better.
But then, no doubt the fees he earned from his spurious ‘professional’ activities enabled him to enjoy such extravagance.
He had good taste, she had to admit that, Christa acknowledged grimly. The kitchen was actually what she would have chosen for herself had she been able to afford such a luxury. The cupboards might look plain and workmanlike but there was no mistaking the cherrywood’s expensive subtle gleam, nor the high quality of the furniture’s design.
It would be interesting to see how the rest of the house was furnished.
‘Hungry?’ she heard Daniel asking her.
‘Why?’ she asked him. ‘Do meals come extra?’
She made no attempt to hide her hostility, but his reaction to it brought a hot, shamed flush to her face as he told her quietly, ‘No, of course they don’t. As I’ve already said, there’ll be no charge for your stay here. This venture isn’t something I’ve taken on purely to make money, although I’d be lying if I said that my motives were completely altruistic. I do have to earn my living, but profit has never been my sole motivation—for anything.
‘You’re determined to think the worst of me, aren’t you?’ he accused her almost gently. ‘I wonder why.’
Angrily Christa turned her head away from him.
‘Stop trying to psychoanalyse me,’ she told him irritably. ‘And yes, I am hungry…’
‘Good, so am I, although I’m afraid it will have to be something simple: soup and a salad. I’ll take you up to your room first, though. It’s this way.’
‘This way’ turned out to be through a door which led into a spacious rectangular hallway.
‘The house was originally built by the youngest son of a Victorian industrialist who wanted to return to his family’s roots, hence its size. The fact that very little land goes with it makes it something of a white elephant to the local farming community, so I was able to buy it reasonably cheaply.’
Why was he being so informative? Christa wondered. As a means of trying to disarm her? Well, it wouldn’t work.
His unsubtle ploys might not impress her, but the house certainly did, she admitted, as she followed him upstairs. The Victorian younger son had obviously had money and a good architect. The house was solidly built, its style simple and plain.
Christa paused on the stairs to admire the proportions of the dado rail and skirting-board, her eye caught by a newer-looking piece of wood where the rail had obviously been repaired. Unable to resist, she reached out and stroked her fingertips along the wood; the join was so smooth that you couldn’t even feel it, and only the slight difference in colour gave the repair away.
‘I see you’ve spotted my repair work. Not many people do.’
Christa turned her head to look in astonishment at Daniel. ‘You did this?’ she demanded, unable to conceal her surprise.
‘Yes, joinery is my hobby…I made the units in the kitchen. My grandfather was a joiner, a true craftsman, justifiably proud of his skill and his work.
‘Your room’s this way.’
Silently Christa followed him. That easy, friendly manner of his—was it natural or was it merely assumed? Deceit had to be an integral part of his nature, surely, simply by virtue of the way he earned his living? The art of concealment, or of projecting a false image, so polished and perfected that it was easy for him to make others believe the illusions he created.
Look at the way he had deceived her that first afternoon, the way she had been so certain that the warmth, the admiration in the look he was giving her had been real, until his companion had betrayed him.
What would have happened if he hadn’t done so, if she had never discovered his real identity, if for instance that afternoon he had been alone, if he had chosen to follow up on the promise of that exchanged look…?
How much damage could he have actually done to her emotions before she had realised the truth?
Her own vulnerability had come as a shock to her. She had thought herself so fireproof to men of his particular type.
There was only one reason that he had brought her here, virtually kidnapping her in order to do so. No man liked being challenged by a woman, especially when that woman won the challenge, and both professionally and financially he could not afford to be defeated.
It was going to be war between them, and he had some pretty devastating weapons in his arsenal, she acknowledged as he stopped outside one of the several doors off the broad corridor.
‘I’ve put you in here,’ he told her. ‘You’ve got your own private bathroom.’ He pushed open the bedroom door, allowing her to precede him inside it. The room was furnished plainly and simply, with an antique brass bed and a few pieces of highly polished, age-scarred oak furniture, including a desk.
‘I’ll leave you to settle in and then over supper we can discuss the structure of your course. One of the things we teach here is the importance of harmonious teamwork and its benefits. We find that many executives lose sight of the importance of working alongside others; our culture breeds a need to dominate, a desire for supposed superiority. We aim to redress the effects of that; to teach the benefits of co-existence, of valuing and supporting one another, of integrating with one’s colleagues and team-mates.’
‘I don’t have any team-mates,’ Christa told him drily. She was on safer ground here, and with every word he spoke she could feel her resistance to what he was saying growing. ‘You should try going out into the real world,’ she added cynically. ‘I promise you, it doesn’t work. One of the first things that would happen if I and my fellow importers started empathising supportively with one another is that our buyers would accuse us of setting up a cartel and of price-fixing.’
‘You don’t fool me, Christa,’ Daniel told her softly, by way of response. ‘You may think you sound hard and cynical, but that’s just a disguise, a form of protection.’
He had gone, closing the door quietly behind him before Christa could summon up a suitable retort.
Her need protection? Ridiculous. Protection from what—from who?
* * *
Christa hesitated in the hallway, the temptingly rich smell of soup coaxing her to go into the kitchen, the knowledge that Daniel was waiting inside it for her stopping her. But when the door opened and he appeared in front of her the decision was taken out of her hands.
‘Soup’s ready,’ he told her cheerfully, ‘although I can’t claim much credit. All I had to do was to reheat it in the microwave.’
Who had cooked it? Christa wondered curiously ten minutes later, seated at the kitchen table dipping her spoon into the thick rich broth. A comfortably middleaged local farmer’s wife, or someone else—younger-prettier? Daniel was a very attractive man, both sexually and in other ways, or at least he would have been, she amended hastily, if she didn’t have the intelligence to see through that very deceptive maleness
and recognise what really lay behind it.
However, not all women were fortunate enough to have the benefit of her past experience and knowledge to protect them.
It would be all too easy, she suspected, fatally easy in fact, for a more vulnerable woman to be taken in by his apparent warmth and caring, his sense of humour and his pseudo-readiness to be open about himself, especially once they had looked into his eyes and seen the look she had thought she had seen when they first met!
Fiercely, she clamped down on the memory of how she had felt then, her body tensing.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Daniel asked her solicitously. ‘Soup too hot?’
Thank God he couldn’t really read her mind, Christa reflected wryly as she avoided his eyes, shaking her head as she responded guardedly, ‘No, it’s fine. Very good, in fact. Who made it?’
‘I’m not really sure. Some of the local farmers’ wives are involved in their own small business, cooking and supplying home-made food,’ he explained. ‘They cater for functions, speciality events, weddings and the like, and run a stall on market day, and they also provide me with a rota of cooks and staff for the centre when it’s in operation.
‘This soup was part of a batch of food that was in the centre’s freezer. I brought it up here to save it being wasted. Normally I cook for myself or eat at the centre.
‘I’ve drawn up a basic programme outline for your course,’ he continued. ‘We normally follow a more specialised routine, but in your case…’
