‘You know there’s a strict order for creditors: tax authorities, banks … These things take time, but we’re doing all we can to pursue your royalty payments.’
Was no one in a hurry these days? At least he’d found a builder who could spare him half-an-hour to give him a quote, albeit with a few caveats about his very busy schedule.
Gethin put his foot down. Might as well give the smart, hired Land Rover a run for his money; that’s what potholes were for, wasn’t it? He was just beginning to enjoy himself when he caught sight of a single light coming towards him in the dusk and hit the brakes. Almost instantly, he realised that the single light didn’t belong to a motorbike, but a van whose offside light was winking so feebly that he hadn’t spotted it at first. Swerving into the hedge, he winced as he heard the hawthorn branches scratching at the pristine paintwork and pulled up just a nanoparticle short of disaster.
He opened the door and heard music. Not the angels playing their harps, luckily, but bloody Doris Day telling him how much she yearned to be kissed.
‘Move over, darling!’ he snarled to his temporary neighbour, Coralie, when she wound down the window. ‘That’s what you should have done, instead of wrapping yourself up in your bloody music!’
‘You were the one hogging the road!’ she said, looking taken aback. ‘And going far too fast!’
‘I managed to see you in time and stopped,’ he went on. ‘If I’d been some old farmer in a tractor, you might not have been so lucky. If you’d have checked your vehicle before setting off, you’d have noticed that offside light’s on the blink. Your windscreen’s iced up, too.’
‘The heating’s dodgy,’ she mumbled.
Gethin shook his head. ‘It’s not the only dodgy thing, is it? This has got to be one of the ugliest vans I’ve ever seen.’
‘Oh, don’t start on Betty, too!’ she said, sounding so vexed that he peered into see who else was in there.
‘Betty Blue, because of her colour,’ she offered with a weak smile.
‘Well, I’m glad you think it’s funny,’ he said, seething. ‘I just hope my builder appreciates the joke when I tell him why I’m late. Let’s get moving, shall we?’
She didn’t seem especially keen on the idea, then he worked out why. ‘Oh, I get it!’ he said, leaning over her again. ‘Women drivers can’t reverse, can they? Well, don’t you worry your pretty little head, I’ll do the gentlemanly thing.’
He stomped back to the Land Rover and reversed it back, hard. The butt-ugly van showed no signs of following, but then he saw the driver’s door open and a pair of Wellingtons drop beneath it. Shortly after, Coralie stood up in them and, with the door still open, applied her shoulder to the frame.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were stuck?’ he asked, running back and noticing for the first time that she’d steered into a pile of slushy snow at the side of the lane to avoid him. The Land Rover would have slid out of it comfortably, but Coralie’s heap of rubbish needed some coercion.
‘Get in,’ he said roughly. ‘Now put it in second gear – you do know which one that is, do you? Then, when I say, let the clutch out very slowly.’
Marching round to the back of the van, hoping that she really did know where second gear was and didn’t find reverse instead, he hefted his shoulder against the bodywork and with a bit of brute force, the van was free. Coralie gave him a wobbly thumbs-up sign which did little to improve his mood, especially when he returned to the Land Rover and realised that it was only possible for her to get home if he reversed all the way back to the pair of cottages.
And now he was running late for the builder, too. ‘Sodding mobiles!’ he muttered seeing the ‘service unavailable’ message, having got out of the car in the vain hope of picking up a signal. Willing the guy he was supposed to be meeting to hang on at his father’s house until he got there, he decided to save the lecture he was going to give his neighbour about the state of her van for another time. ‘You can come in and use the landline, if it helps,’ she offered, quietly. ‘You might stand a better chance of getting through.’
He glared at his useless phone in frustration. ‘I’ve only got a mobile number for the builder I’m supposed to be meeting. If he’s up at the cottage there’s no signal there. Besides, he’s never in a hurry to answer his voicemail.’ What a backwards place this was!
He shoved the phone back in his pocket. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said, remembering his manners and looking at his neighbour for the first time since she’d got out of the car. ‘Coralie?’ he said, shocked at the sight of her. ‘What’s wrong?’
Chapter Five
Even in the fading light, he could see how pale she was, her lips drained of colour. And shaking; he could hear her keys jangling in her hand. Either she felt the cold far more than him, or he’d frightened the life out of her. He mentally replayed their near miss in the lane and all he could hear was his hectoring tone, a soundtrack of constant criticism: her music, her car, her driving. No wonder she was scared. He’d behaved like an utter bully; cruel and overbearing when she was in no position to fight back. Hell! He was no better than his father. Yet another unwelcome legacy.
‘Are your house keys on that bunch?’ he asked, self-disgust making his voice gruff. She nodded and his stomach lurched at the distress in her eyes.
‘I think we should get you inside, that’s all,’ he said, more gently, ‘before you’re frozen solid.’
A gentle bump beside them, as her cat jumped down from wherever it had been hiding, seemed to reassure her.
‘Hello, Rock,’ she sighed, as the little animal rubbed itself against her Wellingtons.
‘Your key, Coralie?’ he reminded her. She offered it to him and he felt the cold brush of her fingers before she bent to scoop the cat up in her arms. It seemed only natural to place a guiding arm round her shoulders to usher her inside and he tried to ignore his inner voice observing what a good fit she was. None of that leaning-over problem he had with very small women, or stretching up to accommodate tall ones.
‘It used to feel very cold here,’ she explained, turning and catching his bemused expression as he looked around at the cosy room with its eclectic blend of junkshop finds and vintage fabrics. ‘The oranges and red just warm everything up.’
‘They do that all right,’ he agreed, comparing it to the stream-lined minimalism of his New York apartment, somewhat necessitated by its compact size admittedly, and wondering how any man could put up with all the girlie clutter. ‘But standing there won’t stop you shivering.’
When Rock jumped out of her arms and strutted over to the wood burner, Gethin helped her shrug off her coat. Her feminine, floral scent and her hair in its forties’ style rolls put him in mind of old-fashioned glamour and movie stars like Rita Hayworth and made him curious about whether or not she had a leading man. Then a glance at her pinched face reminded him that rather than worrying about who was or wasn’t sweeping her off her feet, he ought, at least, get her to sit down.
‘Shouldn’t you try to catch up with your builder?’ she reminded him, before perching on the edge of the oversized red sofa.
‘Another time.’ He shrugged. The least he could do after bawling her out was to make sure she wasn’t in a state of shock before abandoning her. ‘Let’s get you sorted out first. This is my fault for forcing you off the road. I’m sorry if I was hard on you.’
‘No.’ She shook her head and hunched over her folded arms. ‘You were right. I should have made sure my windscreen was completely clear before setting off. It’s just that it’s such a short drive from the garden centre to here. I often walk it, especially when I’m not carrying stock. I thought I could get away with it. But if anyone had been walking along the lane, I probably wouldn’t have seen them. I could have killed someone.’ Her face looked even more pallid against the blaze of colourful cushions behind her.
‘But you didn’t,’ he said firmly. ‘We both made mistakes, but there’s no harm done. You’re just shaken, that’s all.’ Mainly
by his brutish behaviour, he thought, with another wave of self-disgust. ‘Got any brandy here?’
‘There might be a bottle at the back of the cabinet.’ She waved in the direction of a dark oak thirties’ sideboard. ‘Help yourself.’
‘I meant for you,’ he said, smiling in spite of everything. ‘But now that you’ve mentioned it …’
The embers in the wood burner were turning silvery. He added another log from the basket beside it, patting Rock, who he’d had to disturb in the process, by way of an apology, then turned his attention to the cupboard.
‘Babycham?’ He threw her a look of disbelief over the Deco-patterned door.
‘What?’ She frowned. ‘I like the Bambi glasses.’
‘Well, I don’t.’ He shuddered. Glasses with faces? That was definitely a girlie touch too far. Tia Maria it was then, although the last time he’d drunk the syrupy liqueur was probably for a bet. He poured a couple of measures and accidentally took the seat next to her on the sofa, instead of the armchair as he’d intended.
‘You really do like everything to be pre-loved,’ he teased, handing her one of the Schooner sherry glasses just like the ones his gran used to own.
‘Not everything,’ she said, eyeing him warily as he sat back next to her. ‘Some things have gone through too many hands even for me.’
Man, thought Gethin, scratching his head. The grapevine had been busy, even if the phones didn’t work. Kiss the wrong girl in Penmorfa and you were branded as a philandering Lothario for the rest of your days. The gossips would try to carve him up whatever he said. Instead of aftershave, maybe he ought to sprinkle himself with a little salt and pepper before venturing out in future?
He thought of his last visit, the previous March; a bright spring day at the modern crematorium twelve miles away. Daffodils nodding and the few villagers who had made the funeral service shaking their heads that Gwyn Lewis’s only son had buggered off immediately after the ceremony. Even though they’d been more than happy to drink themselves sober again at his expense on the money he’d left behind the bar in The Foundered Ship, for the wake. Just as well his hectic schedule had kept him so busy since then or he might have been tempted to remind one or two of them about that.
‘The vintage look just suggested itself when I did my first craft fair,’ Coralie continued, reclaiming his attention. ‘It works well with the products and it’s popular with customers, too. They like the association with old-fashioned values and the nod to more innocent times.’
Old-fashioned values were overrated in Gethin’s opinion. Despite Alys’s claims to the contrary, he was willing to bet that if you scratched at whatever visitor-friendly face Penmorfa tried to put on the same long-held petty resentments would still be festering underneath. Fair play to Coralie for believing she could tap into the tourist market, but he didn’t want a bottle of over-priced bubble bath, and all his memories of the place were unhappy. He couldn’t think of a single thing that would draw him back to the village.
‘Besides, we throw too much away,’ she said, furrowing her brow. ‘Sometimes it’s good to save what other people might have rejected or discarded.’
Was she speaking from experience? Had someone broken her heart and put her on the scrap-heap? He glanced at her and thought about what she’d said to him in her shop; if she’d escaped to Penmorfa, she must have left something pretty bad behind. Not that he had any intention of asking her what it was, because that would be dumb.
‘Like Rock?’ he suggested, before she got too serious.
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed, nodding.
‘And butt-ugly vans and Bambi glasses.’
‘Hey!’ She shot him a look. ‘You were doing really well for a while there.’
He was pleased to see some colour returning to her cheeks; that had to be a good sign.
‘All right,’ she admitted. ‘So I might have developed a bit of taste for kitsch, too. When I was a little girl, my grandparents had a glass-fronted cabinet in their front room which was filled with all kinds of treasures: blown-glass animals, dolls in national costume, souvenirs from their holidays. I longed to open it and handle the contents, but I was never allowed. Perhaps I’m making up for it now? What started as a marketing strategy is at risk of becoming a serious eBay habit.’
A small smile lifted the sad set of her mouth. Then she raised her hand to a disobedient curl that had uncoiled and was brushing her cheek. The soft swell of her breasts beneath her black angora cardigan caught him off guard and made him catch his breath. She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She turned to him and he found himself meeting her questioning tawny gaze.
He was dimly aware of the hiss of the wood burner and Rock purring to himself, but they were being drowned out by the sudden thudding of his heart. Her eyes held his and the room grew still. Gethin swallowed and dropped his gaze to her mouth. A voice inside his head ordered him to back away before things started getting messy. Even the sofa creaked a warning as he shifted his weight to get comfortable. Jesus! He really had become a monster, he decided, leaning back quickly and reaching for his glass of Tia Maria. The poor woman was in shock and here he was thinking about making a move on her!
‘“Less is more” can be good, too,’ he advised before draining his glass. ‘Possessions only make life complicated.’ So did families and one house too many. And women. He stood up to leave, but she got up at the same time and he nearly walked into her. And there was her mouth again, all soft and enticing. Keep it simple, stupid, he reminded himself and wished her good night.
Pausing on her doorstep to allow the cold air to dissipate some of the heat he’d built up, he reflected that little had he known, as a small boy, that he’d have reason to be grateful to Mair for drumming the Welsh alphabet into him. When Coralie had looked at him with eyes he could have drowned in, it was only by reciting the letters very slowly in his head that stopped him confirming everything all the gossips had ever said about him.
When Coralie closed her front door behind her the next morning, she was dressed for the cold and prepared with a can of lubricant to ease the screws of the casing that housed Betty’s broken headlight. She was unprepared, however, for the flat tyre that was also waiting for her. Terrific. She cast a longing look at the drawn curtains of the house next door, before quickly dismissing the thought.
Gethin Lewis probably wouldn’t appreciate a summons at this hour. Besides, she could tell from the way he’d shot off at the earliest opportunity that he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d welcomed having to come to her rescue. He struck her as someone who was far too self-contained to think about help at all, either giving or receiving it. She, on the other hand, was compelled to rescue stray cats, glasses with faces, forgotten recipes, and any amount of unwanted and discarded flotsam and jetsam because she needed to. Because, after everything that had happened, she liked to feel that she was still capable of saving something.
Opening the back of the van, she dug out tools and some old carpet to kneel on whilst she found a jacking point for the wheel. A stiff wheel nut almost had her weeping with frustration before she composed herself, flexed her aching fingers and freed it. Leaning panting against the wheel arch, she hoped fleetingly that Gethin Lewis would look out of his window and take pity on her. After an hour, she had finally changed a tyre, a headlight bulb and a set of clothes and was sitting in the driver’s seat waiting for everything to warm up when Gethin came down his front path and waved to her.
‘Need a hand with that front bulb?’ he asked, when she opened the window.
‘Yes,’ said Coralie, inwardly sighing at what the last hour would have done to his expensive jeans. ‘Tell me if it’s working, will you, please?’
‘But –’
‘Humour me,’ she insisted.
His eyebrows rose as she winked both lights at him.
‘And slow down in these lanes, if you’re taking your new toy out,’ she advised before reversing out, ‘you’re not in New York now.’
The smi
le on her face died when the post van flagged her down at the other end of the lane. Along with the junk mail was an envelope which she knew contained more unwelcome post. Another month, another visiting order, but familiarity didn’t make the routine any easier. Coralie checked the mirrors and drove away carefully. However difficult it was for her, it was so much worse for him. Ned needed her.
Hurrying past the Summerhouse Café on her way to her shop unit a few minutes later, Coralie stopped short at the sight of Kitty inside and went in to see what she was up to.
‘I was thinking about how to cheer this place up for the Valentine’s Twmpath,’ Kitty said, taking a tentative stab at an enormous cobweb with a broom. ‘It’s lost something since Marika and Jerzy left. Jerzy mainly,’ she added with a grin.
‘Well, yes he was a good reason to drop in at the café,’ Coralie had to agree, fondly remembering Jerzy, with his soulful dark eyes, floppy hair and ready smile. She pulled her Fair Isle jumper down over the waistband of her wide-leg forties’ trousers and considered the matter. ‘But I’m guessing for this place to keep itself it needs more than good-looking staff. How about using it for informal wedding receptions? The setting would be great for photos.’
‘It would have to be a small one,’ Kitty said, undoing a packet of Love Hearts. ‘There’s the fire certificate to consider; we’re likely to be close to the maximum number for the twmpath.’ She sighed and held out the sweets.
‘“Marry Me”,’ laughed Coralie. ‘No offence, Kitty, but you’re not my type.’
‘So who is?’ Kitty said, slyly. ‘Who are you hiding from us then? Who do you go sneaking off to meet? Anyone special?’
Guessing that she’d been the subject of some speculation, Coralie pulled a face and crunched on her Love Heart. Alys had once done some fishing on the subject of lost loves. If only it was that simple. On balance it was better to let everyone assume that she was broken-hearted than having to explain about the broken lives. ‘I wish,’ she said at last. ‘I just about keep up with my family. My previous job took me all over the country. I used to help other companies run their businesses more efficiently. I was never in one place long enough to meet anyone and now I’m too busy.’
Move Over Darling Page 5
