That Tender Feeling (3 page)

‘Certainly,' he said, looking momentarily puzzled, as though wondering what he was still doing there as he moved aside to let her pass.

She felt his eyes boring into the back of her as she walked away. Even though it made her feel uneasy, she was flattered by his attention. She lifted her head, walking tall and trying to swing freely from the hips with jaunty nonchalance, just as if devastating men were in the habit of following her with their eyes. Actually, her figure adapted well to trousers, and she had quite a neat rear view; not that it would be apparent now that she was snuggled in her bulky sheepskin coat.

She sailed out of the swinging door. Only then could she relax. No, she couldn't. She heard his step pounding after her. That was unbelievable. To be looked at was one thing, but to be chased after—wow! She might not have had Cinderella's fairy godmother on hand to deck her out in the kind of impression -making clothes she would have liked him to see her in, but she must have done something right.

Wrong again. In her confusion, she had only walked out without paying her bill—and it was with that transgression that he was about to confront her. Not that she knew it straightaway, but when the realization was bluntly driven home to her, it made her feel even more of a fool.

His mantle of self-assurance was firmly back in place as he trapped her wrist in a blood-stopping grip and inquired in the most sardonic drawl she had ever heard, ‘Haven't you forgotten something?'

Still it didn't click. She checked. Handbag, gloves, scarf. ‘No, I appear to have everything, thank you.'

‘Enjoy your meal, did you?'

‘Yes, it was very—oh, my goodness!' At last, it dawned on her. In the kind of ‘pale' voice that went with vividly flushed cheeks, she choked out in alarm, ‘I walked out without paying.'

‘Precisely. It's a quaint British custom that unfortunately must be observed.'

‘You don't think I did it on purpose, do you?'

‘Oh, no, I wouldn't think anything of the sort,' he said in a tone that hinted at just the reverse. ‘I'm quite sure it was an oversight.'

‘It was.' How dare he be so insulting! Damn his mocking, arrogant smile. That smile? It teased the edge of her awareness. She was more certain than ever that she knew him from somewhere. It rankled that she couldn't remember where. ‘And even if it wasn't, what's it got to do with you?'

‘Nothing. I'm just a public-minded citizen doing my duty.'

He soon made it known to her what he considered that duty to be—to accompany her as she suffered the ignominy of having to go back inside and rectify her shameful omission. And did he have to keep such a tight hold of her wrist? She was returning voluntarily. She didn't need the assistance of a jailer. Yet even in her temper, she registered the thought that it was a nice hand, large and strong, dependable. The kind of hand you'd want on your side in times of trouble.

Attempting to thrust it off, she said, ‘Do you mind! I'm not about to run away.'

That secured her release and allowed her to skip a pace ahead of him.

The waitress looked coyly amused and brushed aside Ros's apology, saying, ‘Please don't give it another thought. It's easy to tell that you usually have an escort to pay for you.'

The girl meant to be kind and said that to put Ros at her ease; but her awareness of his wry nod of agreement added to her frustration. In these days of equal pay, she did not go through life sponging off men but accepted the sharing of expenses as the fair price to pay for women's much-prized equality. She knew that not all women thought this way; some chose to accept the liberation but shun the liability. Glenis, for example, brought her own logic to bear on the subject and never paid even when her man friend earned less than she did. She justified that by saying that women's expenses were higher and she needed her money to buy the pricey cosmetics and clothes to make herself lovelier for her male escort. She said that men liked to be seen with a well-dressed, expensively turned out woman, and therefore they should pay for the privilege.

Ros settled the offending bill. Then, angered by his mocking assumption that she was the same as those women, she added a monstrously generous tip, to make up, and left.

This time no pounding steps followed her. She didn't know what she was getting into a state about. It didn't matter what he thought of her. Probably she would never see him again. That would suit her perfectly well. He could only serve as an added complication in a life that was complicated enough already.

CHAPTER TWO

It was quite dark. Trees met overhead, turning the road into a black canyon. The car's headlights picked up ghostly shapes. A small animal darted into their beams before scurrying away to safety.

Ros thought about the haven of Aunt Miranda's old-fashioned high bed, as soft as thistledown. As a child, she had found it difficult to climb into and had used a small stool to give her a leg up and then dived into its enfolding softness. Her child's vivid imagination had conjured up stories around the patchwork quilt, making mountains out of her knees that the handsome prince then charged up on his pure white steed to rescue the fair maiden held captive in pillow castle.

She thought her imagination wouldn't have much leeway that night. She was so achingly tired she knew that she would fall asleep instantly.

After going on seemingly forever and forging deeper and deeper into isolation, she finally slowed down to negotiate the turnoff road that led to Hawthorn Cottage. The potholed road was hazardous even in daytime. It served only two cottages. Hawthorn Cottage forked off to the left, Holly Cottage to the right. So she supposed the authorities didn't think it merited the cost of keeping it in good repair. She wondered if Mrs. Heath still lived at Holly Cottage. If her memory served her correctly, she was younger than Aunt Miranda. The two cottages, both named after prickly shrubs with red berries, had always caused a certain amount of confusion. Inevitably, Ros had frequently acted as delivery girl, taking parcels and letters to Mrs. Heath that had gotten to Hawthorn Cottage in error. At first, Ros had gone to Mrs. Heath's in fear and trepidation, but a rewarding wedge of homemade pie or oven cake, the latter split and buttered while warm so that the butter melted into the fragrant fluffy softness of the inside, had gone a long way to soothing her qualms, and she had begun to look for excuses to visit. Ros had quickly come to realize that Mrs. Heath had a lot in common with her oven cake. She was only crusty on the outside.

On losing her initial shyness, she had accepted Mrs. Heath's invitation to visit anytime, and an unlikely friendship had developed between the taciturn old lady and the introverted young girl. Sometimes, when visitors had overflowed at Hawthorn Cottage, she had slept in the tiny spare room at Holly Cottage. The only time she hadn't liked going there had been when Mrs. Heath's grandson was staying with her. He had been a gypsy-dark youth back then, ten years her senior; so that by the time she had reached the age of ten, he had been double her age, a man. Everyone had said then he was good-looking, but in Ros's eyes he had appeared sinister. In all the stories she'd read, the good prince had been golden-haired, while the black-haired prince had been the wicked villain to be feared—as she had feared him. His name was Cliff Heath. She had taken one look at that saturnine face and had naturally called him Heathcliff.

Mrs. Heath had fallen about laughing when she had first heard Ros address him by this name, but not so her grandson. He had looked fiercer than ever and made as though to pounce on Ros, causing her to tremble in her shoes and regret her boldness. Mrs. Heath had insisted that he was only teasing, but Ros hadn't been so sure. Usually, she had believed implicitly in Mrs. Heath's wisdom, but this had been one time when she had felt more inclined to trust the evidence of her own eyes, and a stolen, under-her-lashes glance had seen all that forbidding black disapproval.

She had been twelve at the most when, to her immense relief, he'd gone to work abroad. He had been in the same line as her father—civil engineering. She had always believed that his admiration of her father had influenced his choice. She wondered as she approached the cottages what Heathcliff had made of his life and where he was. She remembered her father's once saying that he was brave and reckless and brilliant, that he had the ability to be anything he chose and would go far. She hadn't thought of him in years. She wondered what perverse twist of fate had made her think of him then and realized with a start of surprise that she had seen a fleeting resemblance to him in the man who had magnetized her thoughts in the Gillybeck Arms.
He
couldn't possibly have been Heathcliff—could he? No, she'd known an instant aversion to Heathcliff, keen enough to last a lifetime and totally at variance with the feelings that the stranger had aroused in her.

She brought the car to a somewhat jerky and grinding halt outside Hawthorn Cottage—which arrival, even with due consideration to the appalling condition of the road, was far removed from her usual proficient driving standard. Her concentration was elsewhere.

She was surprised to observe that the old gate was still tied up with a piece of wire, just as it had been the last time she had been there. That was odd. The same old gate, in the same state of disrepair. She remembered no mention of a new gate on the sheaf of invoices she had received, yet she would have thought that a new gate would have had some priority in the repairs. If that was a small matter of disconcertion, her next finding came as a shock. Her key, the brand-new key that had been mailed to her to fit the newly fixed locks, wouldn't fit. That was very strange indeed.

She stumbled back down the overgrown, uneven flags of the path to her car and rummaged in the glove compartment for her flashlight. Playing the beam over the cottage, she saw that the roof, the windows, everything, were in the same state of disrepair as she had last seen, when she came to inspect her inheritance.

She got back into her car, huddled forlornly behind the steering wheel and shivered, mainly from the cold cut of the wind blowing down from the moor but also from a tiny sliver of alarm. What did it mean? And where did she go from here? She had thrown her old key away, and she didn't feel like breaking her way in. In any case, what would be the point? The cottage wouldn't be habitable. The gate hadn't been replaced, the roof still had a whopping great hole in it, and it would be a fair guess that the inside repairs hadn't been carried out, either. Tomorrow she'd make an early call on the agent in charge of the work and find out what was going on, but where did that leave her tonight? Right out in the cold. She could, she supposed, go back to Gillybeck and book a room for the night at the Gillybeck Arms, but it was a long way; she had been driving all day, and she was exhausted.

The next idea that came into her mind was infinitely more appealing. Why didn't she do what she used to do when her gregarious aunt had filled the cottage with people to bursting point, that is, beg a bed for the night at Holly Cottage? That would only entail going partway down the dark and treacherous road and taking the other fork. She had called at Holly Cottage the last time she was there, but no one had been at home. In the old days, it had been Mrs. Heath's habit to trek across the moor to the farm in the next hollow to buy dairy produce, so that's where she could have been. On the other hand, it was possible that she felt too old to be living in such an isolated spot on her own and had found accommodation elsewhere. The thought skipped across her mind that she remembered hearing Mrs. Heath say that if ever Aunt Miranda left, she would make a home for herself with one of her children. She had just one daughter; Ros recalled that her name was Alice. And one son, Howard, who was Heathcliff's father.

In a matter of minutes, she brought the car to a stop outside Holly Cottage. It was in darkness, but that told Ros very little, because old ladies tended to go to bed early.

Ros opened the gate, noticing how easily it swung back on its hinges, and, without hazard, walked up the evenly flagged path. M'm—strange. The door, like the gate, was also new. The last time she had been there, the cottage hadn't been in a much better state than Aunt Miranda's. Obviously, Mrs. Heath had set her home in order. Or someone had.

If Mrs. Heath still lived there, would it be an imposition to knock on her door? A voice in her head seemed to say, ‘Certainly not, girl. Don't be fainthearted. Get on with it.'

Upon that, Ros raised her hand to the door knocker, bringing it down three times. If Mrs. Heath had sold out and she found that she had roused a stranger from his or her bed, surely, in the circumstances, her explanation and apology would gain sympathy, and then she could follow her first idea and try her luck at the Gillybeck Arms.

Although she knocked again, still no one answered, and a thread of suspicion, already alerted, began to weave itself deeper into her thoughts. She remembered all those instances in the past when the two cottages had been confused, when someone had taken the left fork instead of the right, or vice versa. Mistakes were made. Only last week she read an account in the newspaper of the wrong building's being demolished. She had a sheaf of invoices in her possession to prove that repairs had been carried out somewhere. Not at Hawthorn Cottage, to be certain. So . . .

There was one sure-fire way to find out. She took from her pocket the key that the agent had sent to her. If that fitted the lock, there would be little doubt in her mind that the repairs she had paid for had been carried out at Holly Cottage by mistake.

The key slid in effortlessly and turned with the same ease. Ros located the light switch without difficulty. She entered, not without a certain amount of trepidation. She supposed the ethics of the situation would still amount to trespass, but no way could she not have gone in and looked round. It was a tremendous relief to see Mrs. Heath's homely furniture in the newly decorated rooms even though, when she ventured upstairs, her tentative peep into the master bedroom brought no trace of her old and very dear friend.