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She couldn't do this. She couldn't sit and talk with the feel and delicious smell of him making her legs weak and her pulse race. She had put some cake out on the small bird table in a corner of the tiny garden the night before; now she used the fact some crumbs had fallen on to the floor as an excuse to move from the bench. After picking up the fragments of cake, she scattered them on the bird table and then seated herself on the tub of flowers she had sat on when they had been in the garden together once before. It was only then she said, 'Harvey was a gift from my sister when I moved into my flat over a year and a half ago. He was just a little puppy then.'
Travis glanced at the powerful jaws which were making short work of the bone. 'Not so little now. Do you take him with you when you work?'
Beth nodded. 'Any time I can't, Catherine has him. My little nephew, James, loves him and Harvey's as gentle as a lamb with him. I'd never had a dog before and it would never have occurred to me to get one but I don't know what I'd do without him now. Harvey's more than a dog, he's...' She stopped, wondering if he would think she was silly.
'A friend?' Travis said softly.
Beth nodded again. 'My best friend,' she said a little defi¬antly. 'He helped me through the worst time of my life and I'll forever be grateful to him.' Immediately she regretted saying it. It wasn't the way to keep things light and casual. But it was too late now.
'Unconditional love.' He finished his coffee in one gulp. 'Animals have it in abundance but it's a rare quality in Homo sapiens.'' He leant forward slightly and every nerve in her body responded. 'It must have been tough,' he said quietly, 'and I'm sorry you had to endure something so terrible through no fault of your own. Life sucks sometimes.'
She looked back at him, an echo of the old anguish streak¬ing through her briefly. 'When I look back it was losing my parents the way I did that hurts most.' Her voice was so low he had to lean further forward to hear her. 'They were won¬derful people, the best parents in the world. Funny, but my dad never did get on with Keith. My mum thought he was lovely; Keith had a way with women—' her voice held a note of bit¬terness for a moment'—but my dad was always very wary of him. He wanted us to wait for a while before we got married but...' She shrugged. 'Love's blind.'
'Beth, anyone can be fooled by someone who is deter¬mined and cunning enough. It was no reflection on your judge¬ment or anything else. Bad things happen to good people.'
She stared at him and her eyes were huge and shadowed; she was bewildered at how much she" had opened up to him when she had been determined not to. 'Some people are more gullible than others.' The little catch in her voice told him this was something very important. 'I didn't think I was like that but I must be. How else could I have married someone, lived with him, loved him, and not have a clue what he was really like? I wouldn't have believed it was possible if it hadn't happened to me.'
'It's possible.' He reached out and touched her mouth tenderly with his finger, his voice deep and smoky. 'But, as I said, it's nothing to do with being gullible in your case. Keith was something that crawled out from under a stone, without morals and principles, and that gave him power of a kind. You were unfortunate enough to have your life touched by him but you had the strength and courage to do something about it. He won't prosper, Beth. Not in the long run. His kids won't respect him—they might not even love him or want anything to do with him when they're older—and eventually any woman he gets involved with will see him for what he is. He'll die a lonely bitter old man one day.'
'You don't know that.' She shook her head, her voice shaking. 'And how do you know I'm not gullible? Why is my case different from lots of others where women are taken for a ride time and time again?'
'I know you.' His voice was firm and warm.
'But you don't. We only met a few weeks ago. You know hardly anything about me. I might be a serial victim.'
Travis gave her a crooked smile. 'I know you,' he repeated softly. 'And it's nothing to do with time. It happens like that sometimes. You're no more a victim than I am.'
She was very pale, her haunted eyes warning him that he
had taken her to the limit of her endurance for the moment. He stood up, his voice matter-of-fact as though they had just been discussing the weather, when he said, 'I'm for breakfast, how about you? Coming to choose for yourself?'
'You...you go and help yourself. I'll come in a minute when I've finished my coffee.'
When he disappeared into the house Beth went limp and she knew she was trembling. She hoped Travis hadn't noticed. How had he made her say all that? And what had he meant by that last comment—that he knew her? She pressed her hand to her heart as it pounded against her chest. She didn't want any man to know her, to get too close. This idea of them seeing each other was a bad one—she had to tell him she had changed her mind. She hadn't come here to get involved with anyone, least of all a member of the male sex, and especially one as—her mind sought for a word to describe Travis and failed, she compromised on—unusual as Travis.
