‘Did you resent them for that?’ Georgie asked, but he gave her one of his eloquent shrugs, a signal for her to steer clear of quizzing him. Those shrugs had become fewer and farther between. She didn’t know whether he had noticed that but she had. She was making inroads into his private thoughts and she delighted in that. He was a revelation to her and there was nothing about him that she didn’t want to explore.
Of course, when Christmas was done and dusted, reality would set in. He would return to London and once he was back in the swing of life there, with its high-voltage, frenetic pace, he would soon forget his lazy times in Devon, but until then Georgie was happy to bask in the pleasure of doing things with him. His knowledge of even minor things was vast and, like a squirrel, she stored away the memory of evenings spent at Didi’s cottage, in front of the open fire in the sitting room, listening to him tell them about his travels and teasing him that he couldn’t really call them travels when they involved him being inside an office working, even if the office was on the other side of the world.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#
And of course she bought him a present. It had taken ages to choose because she had to toe the fine line between personal and impersonal.
Pierre might enjoy being with her but theirs was a tacit understanding that nothing was for ever, least of all their relationship. He didn’t do clingy. The merest hint that she was taking what they had more seriously than he was would guarantee his immediate flight. She had come to the conclusion that he was a man who kept a supply of running shoes very close to hand should he need them to escape a woman who might be getting too close for comfort.
So her present was a book. He had mentioned, in one of those moments of unconscious intimacy, that his favourite book when he had first gone to boarding school and was still settling in was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She had had an image of lonely little boy hunkered down under the covers with a torch, reading about someone else’s adventures to take his mind off the isolation of being somewhere strange for the first time. Naturally she had avoided sharing that insight with him. It would definitely have warranted one of those shrugs. But she had managed to find an early copy of the book on eBay, complete with hand painted illustrations. Surely that couldn’t be mistaken for being too personal?
On Christmas Eve, after a week and a glorious half of suspended reality, the three of them went to early service at the church and then back to Didi’s for supper. It had taken very little to persuade Georgie to stay the night so that they could all wake up bright and early on Christmas morning for present unwrapping, and she had duly been transported by Pierre with clothes, gifts and various bits and pieces of food.
‘I feel as though I’m moving house,’ she joked, stepping out of the Bentley and looking at him with laughter in her eyes.
‘Oh, I can’t see you leaving your chickens that readily,’ Pierre answered, and she felt a shadow flicker across the brightness of her mood but she banished it with another laugh.
‘Don’t you think they would be able to fend for themselves?’
‘Not the way you’ve mollycoddled them. What on earth have you packed in this case, Georgie? It weighs a ton.’
A note of defensiveness crept into her voice. ‘I’ve brought my presents. Stuffed them in alongside some clothes.’
‘I suppose it’s a woman’s right to travel heavy,’ Pierre said, unlocking the front door and pushing it open with his foot so that he could heave her case into the hall. Didi was asleep. Having wanted to stay up so that the three of them could enjoy a glass of port around the tree before turning in, she had found the day too long for her in the end and they had settled her up to bed before heading off to Georgie’s house to collect her things. ‘But you’re only staying over for one night! How many change of outfits can one person need for one night and a day?’
‘I brought a bit extra just in case I ended up staying longer than planned,’ Georgie confessed. ‘I’ve been caught out twice now having to spend the night somewhere without a change of clothes. I decided to take a few precautions this time.’ This was one of those moments when she was reminded of the impermanence of their situation and she wasn’t about to face it head-on. Not on Christmas Eve.
She skipped towards the staircase and looked back at him over her shoulder with a pretence of sultriness, eyelashes fluttering, smile coy. She had teased him some time ago that since he was probably a dab hand at dealing with women who did things like flutter their lashes, and since she had never done that before, then she would practise on him, but then she had taken it back, saying that she had forgotten that his women were too busy thinking about the World Economy to have time for lash-fluttering. He had laughed but hadn’t denied it and now, ever so often, she would play the sex siren just for the heck of it.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#