He shook his head. ‘No, wait.’ He took a card out of his wallet and handed it to her. ‘Pay for the food. And whatever’s needed for the open house party. Tell them to help themselves to whatever wine is left in the cellar.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Michael will find it very different,’ he said, reluctant to let her go, disapproval in every line. She knew how he was. That he never got involved.
‘That’s the point of a holiday,’ she said and—for the first time since he’d known her—she refused the opportunity to talk at length about her son, about anything and left him standing on his doorstep.
He closed the door, opened the envelope, took out the drawing and traced every line of Natasha’s spicy sweet sleeping body with his finger.
Sated, replete, every desire satisfied...
‘Not just you, Sugarlips,’ he murmured. ‘Not just you.’
* * *
Natasha opened her eyes and lay quite still, not sure for a moment where she was. Then, as everything came into focus and she saw the distant hills through a tall window, she remembered. She was at Hadley Chase, lying in the bed that Darius Hadley had slept in as a boy.
She’d crawled into it some time after midnight, every limb aching, too exhausted to bother with the curtains—nothing but a passing owl would see her—and curled into his pillow, wishing he was there with her.
No chance.
For a while she’d been warmed by the fact that he’d asked the security people to check on her, bring her something hot to eat—he must have known that the old range cooker wouldn’t deliver on day one—and she had sent a text, thanking him. Nothing fancy.
Thanks for supper. Most welcome. T
No more, no less than any well brought-up woman would do.
There was no response. Of course not. You didn’t expect a reply to a bread-and-butter thank-you note. The food, she reminded herself, had been no more than a courtesy. She might have mortally offended his sense of honour, but she had organised a freebie clean-up of his house: noblesse oblige and all that.
She reached for her phone, kidding herself she was checking the time—hoping that he might have unbent sufficiently to ask if she was okay in the empty silence of the night.
Nothing. No texts. No missed calls.
She sighed, rolled out of bed, winced a little as she stood up. Her knees creaked and her shoulder hurt from all the stretching and bending and scrubbing, but at least there was hot water for a shower.
She stoked up the oven, took a cup of tea out into the garden and sat on a bench beneath a climbing rose massed with creamy buds. A small muntjac doe with a tiny fawn wandered across the lawn within feet of her. She took a photograph with her phone and Tweeted it—there was nothing like cute animals to get a response—not forgetting to add the website URL.
Her mother and sisters-in-law would arrive with a ton of food, she knew, but ten adults and eight children were going to take a lot of feeding so she headed to the village to make the day of the butcher and the couple who ran the village store and farm shop. Orders placed, she treated herself to coffee and a muffin at the pub while she took advantage of their free Wi-Fi to check her Facebook and Twitter pages.
There were a couple of messages on Facebook asking her to get in touch, one from a publisher, the other from the features editor of a magazine, both asking her to ring them.