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She walked across to the window and looked out, and he was right. It was snowing furiously and the snow was catching on absolutely everything and sticking there. In the morning, the place would look like a picture postcard, but not one in which she particularly wanted to feature.
‘Point proved?’ he asked in a voice that told her that he was only too aware that his presence in the cottage was filling her with misgivings. He deposited the empty plate on the ground and she eyed it with her hands on her hips.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s just fine. I can tell you from now, though, that I might follow your orders at work, but don’t think that I’m going to be fetching and carrying for you while we’re here.’
She picked up the plate because her little speech hadn’t provoked him into activity, picked up the two mugs and stormed off to the kitchen.
When she returned, hovering to look down at him, he was virtually asleep.
‘I’ll be heading off to bed now,’ she said awkwardly. ‘The spare room is first left on the landing. I haven’t been in, but I presume it’s made up.’
His eyes flickered open, unnervingly black and glittering in the semi-shadows. They fastened on her, sapping her and making her feel confused.
This, she thought despairingly, was what she would have to watch out for. The enemy in the camp was herself, her treacherous body which could be roused to shameful response without even being touched. She schooled her features accordingly and began to move away.
‘You’ll freeze up there,’ he said conversationally, and she turned back to face him. ‘You yourself said that what awakened you was the cold. Well, I won’t be up to tend this fire and when it goes out, you’ll go numb. At least down here will remain warm for much longer.’
‘I’ll risk it,’ Abigail informed him lightly, and he frowned.
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ She searched around for a suitable reply to that and didn’t find any. ‘Because,’ she pointed out lamely, ‘there’s only one sofa down here.’
‘I’ll sleep on the floor. I’m sure something could be rigged up.’
‘No bother.’ Sleep here in the same room as him? Rig something up so that she could spend what remained of the night in a state of nervous tension, listening to his every movement? No chance.
‘Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘I won’t.’ She turned and walked away and it was only when she was at the top of the stairs that she was aware of him behind her, taking them two at a time, his long legs covering the distance until he was standing next to her.
She edged against the wall and said sharply, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Sheets? Blankets? You don’t expect me to fall asleep like this, do you?’
The question invited her to look at him and she didn’t.
‘In that case, the spare bedroom is right behind you.’ Her voice sounded taut in the silence and her back was pressed against the wall in the attitude of a cornered rat.
‘OK.’ He lowered his eyes, his long lashes falling against his cheek. ‘Bit jumpy, aren’t you?’ he asked with soft amusement. ‘What do you think I’m going to do?’
‘Nothing!’ Her voice sounded far too high and she cleared her throat. ‘I’m not jumpy. It’s just that, well, naturally, with the lights going and all that, I’ve been a bit rattled.’
‘I thought you said that you were fine?’ he asked immediately, staring at her, and she blushed, hating him for needling her into justifying her behaviour.
He could be very inquisitional when he wanted. He did it when he wanted something from someone and when the most handy tactic was to circle them like a predator until they had nowhere to run. He also did it for amusement, and this, she thought angrily, was why he was doing it now, making her stumble over her words. In the normal course of events, at work, it was diplomatic to ignore his occasional provocation, but out here, on neutral ground, she wasn’t going to keep quiet and smile a lot. She wouldn’t show him what sort of effect he had on her, but she damn well wouldn’t hesitate to show him that provoking her was not a good idea.
‘I would be,’ she said coolly, with more composure in her voice, ‘if you would fetch what you came for and go to sleep.’
‘Of course,’ Ross murmured obligingly, looking down but not before she saw the wicked gleam in his eyes, ‘just so long as you’re all right and you don’t twist and turn and think that I’m going to barge my way into your bedroom and rape you.’
‘Difficult,’ she mused icily, ‘when I have every intention of locking my bedroom door.’
She turned away and he called out from behind her, ‘So you are jumpy with me in the house!’ He laughed under his breath and she knew that if there had been anything to hand she would have flung it at his smug head.
The blankets, when she made it back to her bed, were ice-cold and she huddled into a ball underneath them, teeth chattering, wishing that she had had the sense to slip on a pair of socks before jumping in.
It was earlier than she had expected. Not yet midnight, although it felt later. She lay in the darkness, eyes wide open, staring at the shadows on the walls and furniture and thinking how her peaceful little interlude had been shattered.
She couldn’t face the prospect of an indefinite stay in a very small cottage with only Ross Anderson for company. Even when they had been in America, work matters had absorbed most of their leisure time, and, she thought with some desperation, just look at what had happened when they had been together without the work to keep them occupied. Ross found her amusing. She was different from the type of women he normally dated. That was why he had made that light pass at her in Boston, a light pass which had nearly ended up wrecking her life. The fact that he already had a girlfriend had not been any deterrent.
She groaned aloud and punched the pillow in helpless frustration. He should never have come here. She should never have told him where she was going. She should have pretended to listen to his warnings about snow and told him that she was going to stay in London. Should, should, should. By the time she drifted off into a restless sleep, her head was rebounding with shoulds.
She awoke less than three hours later. The room was very cold. For a while, she lay completely still and told herself that it was mostly in her mind. She knew that the heating was not working, and so she felt far colder than she would have otherwise. She had once been told a story about a group of people locked inside a hot, cramped room somewhere on a ship. They had been collapsing from the heat when someone said that a window somewhere had been prised open. No one questioned them, they accepted it and spent the rest of the journey in relative comfort only to find that no window had been opened at all. She told herself that what she was experiencing was the same thing.
She spent another half-hour trying to persuade her body to listen to her mind, and then abandoned the struggle. The fact was that she was freezing and it wasn’t going to get any warmer. Ross, damn him, had been right. The effect of the log fire was dying and there was no central heating set on timer to come on in an hour’s time.
She clutched the blankets around her and tiptoed down the stairs.
Why should he sleep in comfort when she was rigid with cold?
The logs were still burning, but only just. Abigail eyed the warm rug in front of the fire greedily, then shifted her gaze to where Ross was sound asleep on the sofa.
She had no intention of waking him up. There was no way that he was going to have the last laugh. She would grab some sleep, perhaps a couple of hours, and then head back up to the bedroom before daybreak. He would never know. He was out like a light and likely to stay that way for several hours after the mammoth journey he had had.
She hitched the blankets around her tightly, to make sure that she didn’t inadvertently knock against anything, and settled in front of the fire with a little sigh of relief.
For a while she listened to Ross’s even breathing, her body tense in case he woke up, but sleep was weighing on her eyelids, and she could feel herself relax and begin to drift off. It was a wonderful feeling.
She was having a dream. A very vivid dream. In it, she was somewhere very hot, she could feel the sun burning down on her body, and Ross was next to her, his hands wandering over her body, his mouth against the warm curve of her neck. She could feel the pleasurable ripples of sensation touching every corner of her body, and she sighed and smiled. She twisted her position, and her eyes flew open because she was no longer alone inside the blankets. Ross was next to her.
Abigail sat up, instantly awake, and looked down at the dark, handsome face which the faint light of the moon threw into shadows and angles.
‘Lie back down, woman,’ he said drowsily, and she grabbed the blanket around her.
‘What,’ she hissed, ‘do you think you’re doing?’
‘What does it look like to you?’
It was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t make out the dry half-smile, which sent her into a spasm of speechless fury. How dared he? His thigh was by her toes and she edged them away, curling her feet underneath her.
‘Get out,’ she told him in a low, angry voice. ‘Back to the sofa!’
