Summer At Willow Tree Farm: the perfect romantic escape for your summer holiday

by Heidi Rice

  ‘No wonder it hurts.’ Her eyes met his, the concern in them disturbing and captivating at one and the same time. ‘Stay there, I’m going to ring the clinic.’

  ‘I’m not going back there,’ he said, trying to sound demonstrative, even though he knew he might have to. He wasn’t such an idiot that he’d risk losing his hand. But anything less than that and he was prepared to fight like hell to stay put. He hadn’t had one of those nightmares in years. He did not want them becoming a regular occurrence again.

  She nodded slowly, the knowledge in her eyes somehow more disturbing than the argument he’d been expecting. ‘Duly noted, but don’t panic. It might not be necessary.’

  She headed for the door. ‘As long as you do exactly what I say.’ She smiled, the twist of her lips decidedly smug. ‘I hope you realise, you’re now entirely at my mercy, Dalton.’

  *

  ‘I sneaked all this stuff past Dee and called the clinic from my mobile so she wouldn’t hear me on the house phone. Which meant trekking all the way to the far corner of the vegetable garden, because that’s the only sodding place I can get a signal.’ Ellie dabbed at the angry swelling with the antiseptic wipes, keeping a tight grip on Art’s wrist in case he flinched. Although, as usual, he was the picture of stoicism.

  Frankly a little less stoicism and a lot more common sense would have gone a long way in the last couple of days. Who the heck was so flipping stoic they let their hand rot off? She tore open another of the wipes she’d filched from Dee’s first aid supplies.

  ‘Why did you have to sneak them past her?’ he asked, as if he honestly didn’t know.

  She dabbed at the stitches again, making sure they were clean, before ripping open the packet of sterile gauze with her teeth.

  ‘If she’d seen me carting this lot in here, she would have been fussing over you for the next decade.’

  Holding the gauze in place, she began wrapping his hand with the bandage.

  Once she was satisfied it was suitably covered, she tore the ends and tied it.

  She placed his hand back on the desk. ‘So you totally owe me one.’

  He nodded. And his lips twitched. The almost smile had her heart knocking against her ribs.

  She’d genuinely panicked he was going to have to get his hand amputated when she’d seen what he’d managed to do to the wound. Thank God, the clinic nurse had been a lot less worried once Ellie had finally got her on the line.

  The instructions had been simple. Check his temperature. Clean and re-dress the hand. Dose him up with painkillers. Get him to his GP’s for a course of antibiotics. Tell him to stop being an idiot.

  His temperature had been in the normal range. He’d refused the heavy duty painkillers but agreed to take Nurofen and paracetamol, she’d changed the bandage, and made an appointment for him at the GP in Gratesbury for this afternoon, so the first four directives had already been covered. All that remained now was to impress upon him what an idiot he was being. And re-check the wound every day, reapplying new dressings if necessary, the stitches could come out in a week’s time and as long as he didn’t get it infected again all should be well.

  ‘What did the clinic say?’ he asked.

  ‘The nurse basically said if you don’t have a temperature, it’s probably just a localised infection. But you need to keep an eye on it and get a course of antibiotics.’ She began packing the contraband supplies back into the box. ‘Which means you can go to the GP’s this afternoon and I’m keeping an eye on it from now on, because you’re obviously incapable of doing that.’ She scooped up the empty wipe packets and dumped them into the bin under his desk.

  The crisis had been averted. Art wasn’t going to lose his hand just yet. And Dee hadn’t discovered what a twerp he was.

  ‘So why don’t you tell me now exactly why you haven’t been eating your food?’ Ellie asked, still irritated by his cavalier attitude. ‘And don’t give me any bullshit, because I can still rat you out to Dee.’

  He watched her, his eyes narrowing, but he didn’t look away when he said: ‘I’m left-handed.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So I can’t eat with my right hand, it goes all over the place.’

  ‘Let me get this straight, you’ve been starving yourself because you’re worried about making a mess? Are you kidding me?’

  He looked at his injured hand, cradled in his lap, the tips of his ears turning an interesting shade of red.

  ‘Why didn’t you ask for help, Art?’ she asked, not quite ready to give him a break. He might be a man, but that did not mean he got to be a total moron. ‘I could have cut up your food for you, or Dee, or even Toto.’

  He tapped the fingers of his good hand on the desk. ‘No one’s cutting up my food.’

  ‘It’s better than starving to death.’

  He shrugged, the stubborn expression suggesting she hadn’t won that argument. ‘It’s not that bad, I managed to find some finger food from the pantry after Dee had gone to bed to keep me going.’

  So he’d been raiding the pantry in the middle of the night, simply to avoid having to ask Dee to give him food he could eat with his fingers?

  ‘Very clever,’ she said. ‘Except Dee now thinks you’re about to die of malnutrition.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to worry. I’ve been looking after myself for years.’

  ‘Of course she has to worry, she loves you.’

  He frowned. Apparently this was news to him.

  ‘And whether or not you can look after yourself is debatable, frankly.’

  ‘It feels good now.’ He lifted his bandaged hand off the table and cradled it back in his lap.

  ‘That’s only because the Nurofen is kicking in.’ She took the rest of the packet out of the first aid box and placed it on top of the paperwork he’d been doing when she walked in. Whatever he’d been writing, it looked a mess. The spidery scrawl barely legible. ‘Make sure you keep dosed up on them until the antibiotics kick in. You’re sure you don’t want to take the other stuff the doctor gave you tonight? It should help you sleep.’

  He glanced away. ‘Yeah, maybe, if it’s still sore I’ll take some tonight.’

  Hmm, no he wouldn’t. She wondered if he had a phobia of painkillers as well as hospitals.

  Luckily, getting to the bottom of Art Dalton’s bizarre behaviour was not her concern.

  ‘And talk to Mum about the food situation. Or I will.’

  He considered the request. The pulse in her neck throbbed as she waited for a response.

  It suddenly seemed vitally important she make him understand he needed to keep her mum informed. Or she’d worry. Which was fairly ironic.

  What right did she have to insist he be a better surrogate son to Dee, when she’d been an absentee daughter for nineteen years?

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ he said at last.

  ‘Good.’ She wiped her hands on her jeans, nervous and not sure why.

  She closed the first aid box, tucked it under her arm. ‘I should get these back to the pantry.’

  Art caught her wrist in his good hand. ‘Listen, thanks, Ellie.’

  She looked down, the feel of the rough calluses against delicate skin triggering a memory she didn’t want.

  He let her go.

  Had he remembered it too? Because that would be mortifying.

  ‘I owe you one,’ he said.

  ‘Too right you do,’ she replied. ‘But there’s no need to thank me, because I plan to collect, when you’re least expecting it.’

  A smile touched the corner of his mouth. ‘Why am I getting the feeling I’m going to live to regret this?’

  ‘Probably because you are.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘I don’t need you to do the paperwork,’ Art asserted. ‘I’ve got a system.’

  Ellie cast a critical eye over the mess on Art’s desk, more than ready to call in yesterday’s debt.

  From the pile of order forms and invoices, the files stacked up in dusty towers on the wind
owsill, and the Excel spreadsheet open on the computer that hadn’t been updated since yesterday, it was obvious the man didn’t have the first clue what he was doing. Plus, there was his injured hand to consider. He couldn’t even hold a pen properly.

  No wonder this job gave him a headache. It was giving her a headache just watching him struggle with it, hunched over his desk with all the enthusiasm of Bob Cratchit on Christmas morning.

  She had hinted heavily during last night’s supper, but, true to form, Art hadn’t asked for her help. So she’d been forced to demand he take it.

  And lo and behold, as soon as she had, she’d smacked straight into Art’s I-Don’t-Ask-For-Help-Because-I-Have-Testicles bollocks.

  She fixed Art with her best Testicles-Be-Damned look. ‘What system is that exactly?’

  She’d tried to bring it up subtly, because she knew male egos could be delicate things. But Art’s ego was clearly too stubborn to appreciate subtlety.

  ‘My. System.’

  ‘All right, and I don’t suppose the fact you can’t even hold a pen is going to interfere with your system?’ She whisked the sheet of paper he’d been slaving over when she’d walked in off the desk. ‘What exactly is this supposed to say?’ But, as she scanned the scrawl, she realised the atrocious handwriting wasn’t the only problem. ‘You can’t even spell.’

  The minute the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Art had once boasted about how he didn’t do school, and his ego had always seemed more than robust enough.

  But when he grabbed the sheet back from her, she knew she’d embarrassed him. And she suspected it had nothing to do with his ego or his testicles, and everything to do with the fact he had some sort of learning difficulty. Because no matter how little schooling you’d had, no one forgot how to spell ‘the’.

  ‘Thanks for the observation,’ he said. ‘Now piss off.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t need your apology. I need you to piss off.’ He sounded mad now rather than embarrassed, which had to be a default position to salvage his pride.

  ‘Why are you in charge of the paperwork if you’re dyslexic?’

  The look he sent her was one of deep suspicion. She supposed she deserved that. ‘I took it on because Dee asked me to do it when Pam died.’

  So Dee had asked Art and Art had said yes, even though it was probably the very last job he would want to take on, because he had been here and Ellie hadn’t.

  ‘Does Dee know you have a learning difficulty?’ she asked, but of course she must know. Perhaps Dee didn’t realise how severe it was.

  ‘Stop making it sound like it’s a big deal. I’m managing OK. I know how to use spell check. I get Toto to read and double-check anything important. Being dyslexic doesn’t make me an imbecile.’

  The flat tone made Ellie wonder how many times he’d had to defend his intelligence before. Probably hundreds. No wonder he’d never been a big fan of school.

  ‘But surely you could use some help? At least until your hand is healed?’

  ‘Why are you so keen to help me out with this shit?’ The suspicion was back.

  ‘Because it’s not shit to me. I love doing admin. Balancing budgets, organising schedules, managing overheads are my passion. While other women can have orgasms over a new pair of Jimmy Choos, I can have an orgasm over a balanced IRS return, or a fully itemised Excel spreadsheet.’

  ‘Jimmy who?’

  ‘Only the greatest shoe designer in the world ever,’ she said, waving away the ignorant comment. ‘I want to be useful while I’m here. And, as much as I’ve enjoyed doing kitchen chores with my mum and picking a billion strawberries, that’s not the best use of my skill set.’

  ‘Maybe you could feed the chickens?’

  ‘I don’t think so. One of the hens nearly pecked Josh to death yesterday. And animals tend to like him. They don’t tend to like me.’

  ‘Then I’ve got the perfect job, you could help Jacob set the rat traps in the back barn.’

  ‘No way!’ she shrieked, her skin crawling at the thought of being anywhere within a twenty-mile radius of a rat. She was about to tell him that when she noticed the sly tilt of his lips. ‘You sadist, you enjoyed that.’

  He chuckled. ‘Maybe a bit.’

  ‘Now you’ve had your little joke, I should remind you that you owe me one.’

  ‘I wondered when you were going to bring that up,’ he said, but he was still smiling. Not just a sadist. But a smug one to boot. The bastard.

  ‘Don’t even make jokes about rats, it’s not funny.’

  ‘It is if you could have seen your face.’

  ‘Haha,’ she said, with a distinct lack of amusement. ‘I’m calling in the debt. You have an admin ninja in your midst and I’m going to force you to use her, unless you want to be a welcher.’

  He laughed, the sound doing strange things to the muscles in her abdomen. He really was sinfully handsome. For a smug sadistic bastard. The pirate scruff on his face caused by his inability to shave only added to his rugged, bit-of-rough appeal.

  ‘All right, knock yourself out.’ He dumped the sheet of paper onto one of the many piles on his desk. ‘But only if you promise not to screw with my system.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  She so was screwing with his screwy system. She could already feel the adrenaline charging through her veins at the thought of getting her hands on the stacks of files and turning the Manhattan skyline effect he had going on into something ordered and efficient and – oh, the joy of it – properly alphabetised. That delving into the farm’s accounts would also allow her to satisfy her curiosity about the project’s financial situation was just an added benefit.

  ‘And my debt to you is paid in full as of now,’ he added.

  ‘Understood.’

  And not a problem, seeing how big he was going to owe her, once she’d finished ordering and alphabetising his rubbish system to within an inch of its life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The following Monday, Ellie was elbow deep in a pile of order forms dating back to when Madonna was still a virgin when Dee popped her head round the study door.

  ‘Tess and Annie are here to pick up their kids. We’re just about to have some tea and…’ Dee paused in mid-sentence to step into the room. ‘My goodness, you’ve certainly made a few changes in here.’

  Ellie stood and dusted off her jeans, surveying the damage she’d done to Art’s so-called system. She’d seen very little of him over the weekend. But whatever he’d been doing, at least his hand seemed to be healing because she noticed this morning at breakfast he’d managed to shave off the hipster beard.

  ‘I know it looks like a hatchet job,’ she said, ‘but most of this paperwork can be binned. You only need tax records dating back six years and–’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ Dee interrupted with an absent smile, obviously not that interested in the tax regulations. ‘It looks like you’ve definitely earned a break. And Tess has already got the kettle on.’

  ‘A tea break sounds like a great idea,’ Ellie said.

  The nerves dancing in her stomach began to do the polka.

  How could she swap small talk over tea and cake and not mention what she had discovered in the last three days about the farm’s financial situation?

  Almost as soon as she’d begun delving into the accounts, it had become clear the business needed to make some substantial changes if it was going to survive much longer. But exactly how aware was Art of the financial cliff they were teetering on the edge of, and how much had he told Dee?

  She did not want to step into the middle of an emotional minefield. She and her mum hadn’t discussed the past. Their relationship, such as it was, was still fragile and at times awkward. The last thing Ellie wanted to do was challenge Dee’s loyalty to Art or her faith in this place. Especially as she knew she would lose. Just like she had nineteen years ago, when her mother had decided to stay here with Pam and Art, instead of returning to London with he
r.

  Ellie was well over that betrayal now. She’d made her own life and her own spectacular mistakes, and if her marriage to Dan had taught her one thing it had been to be emotionally self-sufficient.

  But was she really ready to test that theory? And have her mum reject her again? And, perhaps more importantly, did she really want to challenge Art’s authority over the accounts? Because that’s what she’d be doing. If her relationship with her mother was fragile, her relationship with Art was even more problematic. That something about him still tugged at her, still made her want to delve behind his stoic, taciturn shield and find out what kind of man lay beneath, was not something she wanted – or needed – to encourage. Because she had a distinct feeling the man behind the shield was as much of a hard arse as the one in front of it.

  But how could she keep the farm’s financial problems a secret? And if she told her mother how precarious things were, wasn’t it her duty to make constructive suggestions to help her sort it out?

  To add to her confusion, she’d found something in Pam’s old files that had intrigued her. And got her thinking of a possible solution. But it was a long shot, which might fail, even if Dee and Annie and Tess were interested in hearing about it.

  Not surprisingly, the nerves in her stomach were dancing a jig by the time she followed her mother into the kitchen. Tess and Annie were busy setting the table, with her mother’s legendary lemon drizzle cake getting pride of place. Annie’s twins were corralled in the playpen Dee kept in the kitchen and Melody was hard at work colouring in a picture of her favourite Disney princess, Anna from Frozen.

  Seeing the children made Ellie think of Josh, which did nothing to calm her jittery stomach.

  His taster day at Gratesbury Secondary had been a roaring success on Friday and the head teacher had called that evening to suggest he attend classes for the rest of the term as an exchange student. Josh had been enthusiastic and so Ellie had been forced to bottle her concerns when she’d sent him off on the bus that morning wearing his brand-new Gratesbury Secondary sweatshirt.