by Rosalie Ash
'Oh, well, you'd better come in,' she said, moistening her lips nervously. Catching a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror, she groaned inwardly. She looked pale, tense and dishevelled. Matt was gazing at her with his usual unfathomable expression, but as usual she had the sensation that he could read her mind and was solemnly mocking her.
'I was just wondering what to cook for you,' she said, as he followed her into the kitchen. 'My mind seems to have gone rather blank this evening.'
'Why don't I cook for you?'
She glanced at him sharply, but his face was composed, not mocking.
'Are you serious?'
'Of course.' He took off his jacket and hung it on a hook at the back of the door. The white T-shirt clung to his hard torso, just as the chinos clung to his hips and the muscular length of his thighs. He glanced round the kitchen with a businesslike expression. 'Where's your store-cupboard?'
She turned, pointing to the larder door. 'Beans on toast?' she suggested wryly.
Matt raised an eyebrow, scanning the rows of cans and packets and selecting an armful including tuna, rice, chicken soup, curry powder, mayonnaise. Victoria subsided into a chair by the Aga, and watched his spare, economic movements. There was no denying Matt was good to look at, and good to watch in action, she admitted, watching him opening cans with absorbed concentration.
'I need a saucepan and a gratin dish,' he said, glancing up and finding her eyes on him.
'Fine. If you're trying to impress me with your efficiency, you're succeeding,' she said coolly, supplying the required equipment. 'Do you cook for yourself all the time?'
'No. I have a housekeeper who comes in and prepares things. Cooking is something I do for pleasure. I find it relaxing.'
'I quite like cooking, but it's a lot more relaxing watching someone else doing it!' She frowned, watching him stirring soup, mayonnaise, cream and curry powder in the saucepan, and jumped up to find a large plastic apron, butcher-striped in navy and white, in the table drawer. 'Wear this. If you're anything like me you'll be covered in splashes when you've finished.'
Matt slipped the loop over his head, ruffling his blond hair slightly at the front, then fiddled with the ties behind him, with a crooked grin as the tapes stubbornly refused to tie.
'Here, let me do it,' Victoria suggested, tying it firmly round his waist as he carried on with his sauce-making. Standing so close to him brought a strange feeling to her legs, and she backed away hurriedly and regained the sanctuary of her chair by the Aga. She felt confused by her jumbled feelings. Two years ago this would have been the very zenith of her longings, a whole evening in Matt Larson's company. The fact that he was willingly cooking supper for her added a new dimension of intimacy she would never have dared dream of. She had to keep reminding herself that Matt was here tonight, being charming and helpful, not because he found her irresistible, but because he needed her friendship to gain access to his son. A perfectly logical strategy on his part. She supposed she couldn't blame him for it. It was just so painful to the ego, so bitterly ironic.
Matt was putting cooked rice in the dish, then a layer of tuna, and pouring the creamy-looking sauce over the top having squeezed some lemon juice into it beforehand. He sprinkled grated cheese on it, and sliced a tomato with the skill of an expert chef to arrange down the centre. It looked beautiful.
'Brilliant,' Victoria told him, reluctantly impressed by his cool expertise. 'Now what do you do with it?'
'It goes in the hottest part of your Aga for forty minutes or so, and we have a drink while we wait,' Matt explained gravely. The both eyed the scene of chaos on the table, and Victoria found herself smiling involuntarily, in spite of her tension.
'Amendment. The sous-chef cleans up all this lot first!'
Matt shook his head, grinning at her so disarmingly she felt her stomach melting. 'Certainly not. I'm a meticulously tidy cook. You go and have a shower or hot bath or something, you look as if you haven’t stopped all day.’
‘Thanks.’ She grimaced, glancing down at herself, ‘But I know what you mean.’
‘I’ll pour you a drink for when you come back down.’
With a shrug and a smile, she took up the offer, retreating upstairs and taking a blissful half hour to shower, tidy her damp freshly washed hair into a scrunchie and change into clean jeans and a favourite pale green V-neck cashmere jumper.
The clean-up operation was complete when she got back down to the kitchen. The supper was smelling delicious. Matt handed her a glass of chilled white wine. She was dazzled by his efficiency. And secretly touched that he remembered her favourite drink.
‘Your housekeeper can't find a lot to do!' she said.
'Oh, she does. I'm paranoid about tidiness.'
'It's a good job you don't live here, then,' said Victoria, speaking without thinking. Then she blushed scarlet as Matt's cool silver eyes turned thoughtfully on her.
'Is it? I admit I'm also paranoid about children growing up with two parents.'
The blush grew hotter, and Victoria put an iron clamp on her wayward emotions. 'In an ideal world, I agree,' she said flatly. 'But acting was never my strong point.'
'I'm sorry?' Matt's voice sounded scrupulously polite, but cooler.
'I mean some people might be able to play-act a relationship for the sake of a child. But not me.'
'I see.' Matt appeared to have withdrawn again, his tone reminiscent of the ice-cool manner she remembered only too well. 'Sit down a moment, Victoria.'
She sat down obediently at the table, eyeing him warily, and Matt sat in the chair opposite, the pale eyes intent on her face.
'This isn't easy for me, either,' he said, in a low voice. 'If acting is not your strong point, grovelling isn't mine.'
'Nobody's asking you to grovel!' she burst out heatedly, but he shook his head, his eyes lidded and unreadable.
'No. Wrong word. I'm no good at this, Victoria. I'm very bad at apologising.'
'No apology needed either,' she cut in stiffly, gripping her hands into tense fists in her lap. 'Never apologise, never explain, isn't that the motto? I never used to approve of it, but now it strikes me as a good saying.'
'Nevertheless, I do have some explaining to do, and you're not making it easy for me.'
'Why? Why do you need to explain anything? You never pretended any feelings for me, Matt. Why pretend any now?'
Matt stood up abruptly, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and glaring down at the chair he had just vacated.
'Are you saying you feel nothing at all now?'
'Feel nothing at all? Oh, no, I feel great love for my baby son, and great pride in my farm.'
'For me,' Matt interrupted stiffly. 'What are your feelings towards me?'
She took an unsteady breath. 'To be honest…I don't know. Indifference might be the most accurate description.' Her heart was thudding so loudly she was terrified he would hear it. Could Matt guess just how dishonest she was being?
Matt made a sudden, wry face.
'Indifference is very negative. Could you work towards casual friendship? That might be a slightly more promising starting-point.'
'For what purpose?'
'If we're going to have any kind of partnership, we're going to need more than indifference to make it work.'
'But we're not going to have any kind of partnership,' she snapped, pushed beyond her limits. 'What on earth makes you think that?'
'We have a son, Victoria,' said Matt, his tone ominously patient. 'We are his parents. We need to work out some sort of arrangement. Even someone as apparently immature as you must be able to grasp that fact.'
'My God! Doesn't adolescent infatuation blind people to the realities! Two years ago, I thought you were cold, withdrawn, repressed, but calf-love definitely blinded me to your smug arrogance!'
Matt said nothing, and her outburst hung in the air, echoing around the silent kitchen. There was a muscle twitching in Matt's cheek, but his face was deadpan, and she had no way of knowing if her words h
ad amused or infuriated him. She had the unsettling awareness that Matt brought out the very worst in her, and that she couldn’t seem to do anything about it.
He turned away and opened the Aga, and extracted the gratin dish. An even stronger delicious savoury smell wafted out at her.
'This is ready. Where shall we eat it?'
She hesitated. 'There's a fire lit in the sitting-room, we could eat it there if you don't mind eating off a tray.'
Matt shook his head. 'We'll eat off trays,' he agreed firmly, gathering wine, cutlery and plates as she handed them out, and following her down to the sitting-room at the front of the farmhouse.
Flames from the logs were throwing shadows over the beamed walls, reflecting in the rows of pictures and on the glossy dark oak furniture. Victoria switched on some lights, and the eerie, other-worldly atmosphere disappeared at once.
It was a large, square sitting-room, with pale green carpet and comfortable worn leather upholstery, with French doors which led out on to the walled garden. It was south-facing, light and sunny in the summer, and warm in the winter. One of her favourite rooms.
A three-seater sofa stood parallel with the fire, and self-consciously Victoria avoided it, sitting instead in the small Queen Anne chair by the fire.
She plugged in Archie’s baby monitor, while Matt sat down in the deeper club armchair on the other side.
She was briefly reminded of the way her parents used to sit in the same positions, and fought off the familiar wave of sadness, tinged with bitterness. She had made a discovery about her parents' relationship while her father had been ill in hospital, and she had been searching for the missing pieces of bird china, and she had never been able to think of them in quite the same way again.
Matt was looking at the small electronic monitor with interest.
‘Is that in case he wakes up and needs you?’
She nodded, shrugging slightly defensively. ‘Only very occasionally, he wakes up crying in the evenings. I’ve never been one of the ‘just leave them to cry’ brigade. You’d be surprised how many parents are, but I just think small children need reassuring that a grown-up is there if they feel scared in the night.’
Matt’s gaze darkened slightly, but picked the monitor up and inspected it more closely, ‘I’m glad to hear it. It’s good to think my son is growing up feeling secure and loved.’
‘It’s how I felt when I was small. I was always conscious of feeling that my parents loved me.’
'It even shows the temperature in his nursery?’ Matt’s eyes were suddenly warmer, ‘I don’t need to ask if my son is in good hands, do I?’
‘No. No, you don’t.’ Victoria took a sip of wine, her throat suddenly tight with emotion. She successfully suppressed the urge to say ‘my son’. Jessica’s lecturing was having a subliminal effect.
‘I know I've said this before, but I was very sorry to hear about your father's death,' said Matt. He reached over, topped up her wine and poured a glass for himself, 'Was it sudden?'
'He…he was ill for about six weeks. In hospital for three. It was heart and liver failure. But you must have seen how he was when you came to value stuff that weekend. The piles of whisky bottles said it all…' She stopped, meeting Matt’s questioning gaze then lowering her eyes, anxious to change the subject, 'The Mildred Butler fetched a good price, didn't it?'
'A crazy price, 'Matt agreed cautiously, 'I was in New York when it was auctioned, and of course an American bought it.'
'I remember you said they were very keen on that kind of thing in America.'
'Yes. You say you couldn't find any more of the cream ware?'
'No. Well, yes,’ she blurted out, unintentionally, ‘But the one piece I did find got broken.’
‘That was bad luck.’
‘Well, no, not really.’ She felt her colour rising, but she couldn’t help herself, maybe it was because he was being so unexpectedly nice, so disturbingly different from the man she remembered from the past, she suddenly wanted to talk to Matt about it. ‘I smashed it.’
He lifted an eyebrow in surprise. ‘I had the feeling something was wrong when we were talking about the cream ware at the De Lembers dinner. Do you feel like telling me why?'
Chapter Sixteen
She took a deep breath.
'Oh, on my hunt for more cream ware I just found out my father had been having an affair. There were loads of letters hidden inside a soup tureen, at the back of an old sideboard. I suppose in these days of one-in-three divorces, it's quite unrealistic to imagine any married couple could remain faithful to each other for long.'
Matt said nothing, but watched her face thoughtfully. When the silence stretched out, she felt compelled to continue, 'The letters were from a woman called Joanie. They dated back to when I was about thirteen. The funny thing was when I read them I understood all sorts of things. Times when Dad had missed my school play, or my birthday party. Things like that. It's amazing how naive you can be, isn't it?'
‘So you smashed the cream ware tureen? Deliberately?’ There was a note in Matt’s voice which sounded almost in awe of such wilful destruction.
‘Yup. Hurled it against the wall.'
‘Did that make you feel better?’
‘Only for a couple of minutes.’ She pulled a rueful face, and Matt leaned forward, his eyes dark.
'You've had a rough time, Victoria,' he said at last. 'I'm sorry.'
'Oh, don't be! I'll survive. At least one good thing to come out of it was getting to know my other sister, Megan, again. She went to live with an aunt in Northumberland when I was only thirteen.’
'Did you talk to your father about the letters?'
'Hardly. He was lying in a hospital bed. He was dying.' She stopped, aware of a shake creeping back into her voice and anxious to disguise it.
Unwanted tears were blurring her eyes, stinging and hot. She turned her face away, and dashed a hand across her face.
'Victoria…' Matt was in front of her, taking her into his arms and holding her there, tight against him, even though she stayed stiff and unyielding.
'I'm sorry, I don't know why I’m crying, it was ages ago, I’m over all that now,' she choked, muffled against his shirt.
'It's all right. Crying is supposed to do you good,' Matt said, on a wry note. 'Although the sound of a woman crying always makes me want to run a mile.'
She extricated herself, and glared at him through her tears.
'No one's stopping you,' she said shakily.
'I'm not running anywhere. Don't take offence again. I'm just trying to be honest,' he amended, ruefully. 'Here.' He took a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and she accepted it silently, scrubbing her face with it and blowing her nose.
Matt sat back and took a drink of wine.
'So far your experience of life hasn't been too good, then,' he murmured thoughtfully. 'You were brave enough to attempt a relationship with me, and I let you down badly, didn't I? And then you found out that relationships are hardly worth the pain of bothering because even your own father was cheating. Is that it?'
She shrugged, eyeing him coldly. 'Don't try and patronise me, Matt,' she snapped, back in control again. She screwed the white handkerchief into a ball between her fists, and drew a deep breath. 'Whatever my philosophy is these days, it's really no business of yours.'
'Whatever you say,' he said, at last. ‘I’m glad you’ve been reunited with your sister Megan. Does she live back at home now?’
‘Sort of. She has part of this house to live in, it divided up quite easily so that she has the east wing at the back. But she keeps going back to her shared house up in Northumberland. And she’s away lots of weekends, doing voluntary work.’
Matt looked at her enquiringly.
‘She runs gardening therapy workshops for drug addicts!’ Victoria smiled slightly, adding, ‘Recovering addicts, that is.’
‘She sounds interesting. I’m looking forward to meeting her. How does she feel about being based back at Roundwell
after so long?’
‘Very mixed up, I think. It turns out she’d found out about Dad and this… this other woman and couldn’t stand to be around him! That’s why she left.'
‘Do you think your mother knew? About the affair?’
‘Oh yes. Megan said she told her…’
Victoria stopped. She had a sudden unwelcome flashback to the stress and tensions of that time in her life. The awful time when Megan went to stay with Aunt Grace ‘for a couple of weeks’, but never came back. Victoria had felt so confused and angry herself for a while. She’d forgotten how bad that had all felt. She and Megan had been close, Jessica had been the eldest sister, bossy and overpowering at times, and she and Megan had taken refuge together, enjoyed ganging up on their big sister. When Megan disappeared from her life it was a painful wrench. A horrible time in her otherwise idyllic recollections of family life. She must have subconsciously blocked all that out until just recently.
