He had found out that hardly anyone was in, Poppy knew, because he had rung the office to check the situation. After hearing the news he seemed to relax even more, and threw himself into the day with renewed enthusiasm.
He stopped looking at his watch, stopped eyeing the phone and his car, and generally began to join in the holiday atmosphere with a vengeance. Poppy wondered how long it was since he’d had a holiday, and thought this probably counted as one of the few genuinely workfree days he’d had in years.
If so, then it was about time, and she was heartily glad she’d gone to the office and fetched him, however inadvertently. Quite apart from her own pleasure in his company, there was the pleasure of seeing him with the boys—and that, she thought wryly, was worth all the frustration and turmoil those altogether too brief kisses had wrought in her...
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS early the following morning before Tom and Peter got the tractor out and cleared the short stretch of lane that led to the village. Once that lane was cleared, James was able to get away fairly promptly.
It seemed odd without him, and yet in a way Poppy wasn’t that sorry to see him go, because she was finding the nights a strain and the thought of another night with him so near and yet so far had her climbing walls. The boys, though, were in no hurry to get back to school, and complained bitterly when Poppy insisted they should return after elevenses.
‘But it’s not worth it!’ George wailed, ever the vocal one. ‘It’s only for the afternoon—not even all of it by the time we get there! Can’t we stay another night?’
‘And get snowed in again, perhaps?’ Poppy said with a smile.
‘Is it likely?’ William asked, just a little wistfully.
‘No. Come on, we’ll feed Hector one last time and then go. You’ll be there for playtime after lunch if we hurry.’
‘We could play here,’ George reasoned. ‘And, anyway, Hector will miss us.’
‘Bridie will miss us more,’ William said unhappily, fondling the dog’s ears. She lolled against him, grinning cheerfully, quite unaware of their impending departure. Poppy felt a pang of guilt. Bridie was, technically speaking, her dog, although since she’d been away from home her brothers had tried to train Bridie as a gun dog. However, she was useless, because she hated the noise of the guns, and Poppy missed her. Would James mind if she took the dog back to his house? After all, she’d suggested the boys could have a pet—
But Bridie?
Poppy swallowed. Would James be furious? He liked the dog, although getting him to admit it would be like pulling teeth. The dog, certainly, adored him.
Did she dare?
She went into the kitchen while the boys ‘helped’ Tom on the tractor, and suggested it to her mother.
‘I think it would be wonderful for them,’ Audrey Taylor said immediately.
‘Even James?’ Poppy asked wryly.
‘Even James—perhaps especially James. I think it’s a marvellous idea. Why don’t you take her back with you today?’
‘Won’t you miss her?’
Audrey pulled the dog’s long floppy ears lovingly. ‘Of course—but then, so do you, and the boys are talking about getting a Lab puppy from the Bridgers. They’ve had gun dogs for years, and they don’t seem to have untrainable progeny like this nitwit.’
Bridie lolled her tongue and looked cute, and Poppy laughed. ‘All right, useless, you can come with me—but only if you’ll promise to be good.’
Fat chance.
Poppy took the boys to school, then drove back to the farm and collected Bridie. The dog was delirious with excitement, a state in which she spent most of her life, and Poppy made her lie down on the back seat on a thick blanket and then, with the bed and bowls and blankets and lead and other endless bits and pieces loaded into the boot, they headed back to Norwich.
Would James be furious? Should she have contacted him? The trouble was, after a whole day out of the office and a late start that morning, she didn’t dare interrupt him again. Oh, well, Bridie could always go home again if he realdy didn’t want her...
James stood transfixed in the entrance hall. There was a frenzy of barking coming from the back of the house, and all across the elegant marble floor was a trail of muddy footprints. A blue blanket that had definitely seen better days was dragged half through the sitting room doorway, and the mortal remains of a cardboard box sat abandoned on the third stair.
‘We don’t have a dog,’ he said under his breath, bewildered, and then, after a pause, ‘Do we?’
His heart in his boots, he picked his way through the debris on the floor and opened the kitchen door.
Big mistake. A conker-coloured missile hurled itself across the room, plonked two great muddy paws in the middle of his clean shirt and washed him.
‘Bad dog, get down!’ Poppy yelled, and the dog dropped to its haunches, trailing mud down the front of James’s shirt and trousers. Another suit that needed cleaning. He sagged back against the door and looked up, stunned, into Poppy’s wary eyes.
‘Bridie?’ he said weakly.
‘Mmm.’
Relief flooded him. ‘Thank God for that For a moment I thought you’d brought a dog home for us to keep.’
The boys fidgeted on their chairs and Poppy swallowed. James looked from one to the other and waited warily. Poppy cleared her throat and attempted a smile. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose I have.’
He felt the dread creep back agam. ‘You have?’
She smiled bravely, a better effort this time. She was obviously getting her second wind. ‘Well—sort of. I thought we could try with her. We talked about the boys having a pet, and you seemed to get on so well with her. I didn’t think you’d mind too much.’
His jaw dropped. ‘A pet—?’ He flapped a hand ineffectually, groping for control of the situation. ‘I thought you meant a hamster or a goldfish—something small and contained, not—’
He looked down at Bridie, now sitting wiggling at his feet, tail swishing ingratiatingly, tongue lolling, eyes sparkling with untold mischief. He scrubbed a hand over his eyes and dropped it, and found a cold wet nose pressed into his palm. Without thinking he fondled her ears, and the tension seeped out of Poppy and the boys like air out of a punctured tyre.
He shrugged away from the door, stepped over Bridie’s lashing tail and made his way to the table. A dog bed lay by the boiler in a little alcove that used to house—he couldn’t remember what it used to house, but whatever it had been it was now gone, and Bridie’s bed was installed there, for better or worse.
Oh, God.
He dropped into a chair, glanced at his watch and then again at the boys. ‘Isn’t it past your bedtime?’
‘Poppy said we could stay up and wait if you weren’t too late.’
He met Poppy’s eyes, defiant and a little guilty. ‘Using the boys as ammunition. Poppy?’ he teased gently.
Soft colour touched her cheeks, and he knew he’d scored a direct hit. ‘Actually, they were just on their way up to bed now,’ she said quickly, with a look at the boys that dared them to defy her, and they vanished from sight.
‘Mrs Cripps won’t like it,’ he said into the ensuing silence.
Poppy said nothing, and James got the distinct feeling that Poppy didn’t actually care if Mrs Cripps liked the dog or not. In fact, since Poppy had been with them the place seemed cleaner and tidier than it had been for ages, so she was probably doing more than the rather shorttempered and stern Mrs Cripps anyway. She seemed to be coping all right with the twins. He wondered if even the amazing Poppy would be able to keep pace with the devastation of Bridie.
He looked down at the kitchen floor, covered in muddy paw-prints, and then at the perpetrator, who had slumped to the tiles by Poppy’s feet, clearly exhausted by all that generation of chaos. Was she really here to stay? Poppy seemed happy to have her here, and the boys were certainly pleased. He sighed in surrender. How much havoc could one dog cause anyway?
‘Poppy!’
Poppy’s heart sank. She knew that tone of voice. After three days of Bridie in the house, she was used to James’s yell of frustration when he discovered the dog’s latest crime.
Yesterday she’d somehow got into the library, emptied the wastepaper basket and then eaten it. The day before she’d been curled up asleep in the middle of James’s bed, the remains of one of his socks dangling from her lax jaws. Poppy wondered with a feeling of impending doom what today’s little sin was.
She didn’t have long to wait. James came bounding down the stairs, a pair of shoes dangling from one hand. Oh, dear. He held one out to her and Poppy forced herself to look at it.
Oops. His dress shoes, now complete with—or rather without—mangled laces and with rather more ornamentation than before around the top of the toes. Her eyes shut and she forced them open again. Yup. Still the same.
She sighed, seeing her salary evaporating at a rate of knots. ‘Sorry. I thought I’d shut the door.’
‘Obviously not—unless she can open them?’
Poppy swallowed. ‘Not knobs. She can push handles down, but she can’t turn knobs.’
‘Well, thank heavens for small mercies,’ he said with a thread of sarcasm. ‘Do you suppose we can manage to keep her confined, then? Or at least watch her? Is it too much to ask that I should be able to come home and find my home as I left it?’
Poppy sighed again. ‘I’m sorry, I truly am. I will keep a closer eye on her. She’s been allowed to get away with things. She needs a firm hand.’
James muttered something about not being the only one, and went back upstairs with his ruined shoes. Poppy went back into the kitchen, sank down onto the floor next to the dog, who was now sleeping, an expression of blissful innocence on her face, and stared balefully at the creature.
‘You are a pain,’ she said sternly.
The dog cracked an eye open and thumped her tail. Poppy resisted the urge to stroke her lovingly and tell her it was all right, because it wasn’t all right. She stood up again, went over to the stove and stirred the pasta sauce. With her luck it would have burned and caught on the bottom of the pan.
James appeared at her shoulder and sniffed. ‘Smells good. I’m sorry I’m not going to be here.’
She turned and looked at him blankly. ‘You’re not?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Sorry. Another meeting with the Birmingham crowd, which starts tonight and will go on most of tomorrow, I expect. We’ve taken over the firm and slimmed them down, and we’re just setting up the mechanics for expanding the computer notebook manufacturing part of the operation. There are so many changes and advances in laptop computers these days, and it’s the place to be. Mobile office is what it’s all about.’
‘Pity yours isn’t a bit more mobile—you’d be able to bring it home,’ Poppy said quietly.
James sighed and ran a hand round the back of his neck. ‘Look, OK, I should have given you some warning if I wasn’t going to be here so you didn’t cater for me—’
‘It’s not that,’ Poppy cut him off quickly. ‘It’s the boys. It’s Friday night, James. They’ve been talking about what you’re going to be doing with them over the weekend, and I have no doubt it will be me that has to tell them you’re not around—again.’
He let his breath out on another harsh sigh, and Poppy felt guilty for putting pressure on him. She should tell him it didn’t matter, that she was sure he was doing his best to be with the boys, but the trouble was she wasn’t. Oh, he thought he was, but couldn’t they have scheduled the meetings for the week?
‘Who set the meetings up?’ she asked casually.
‘What? Oh, Helen. She does all the scheduling.’
‘How convenient,’ Poppy muttered under her breath, and stirred the sauce so violently it splashed over the front of the pan and spattered her jumper. Tears of rage filled her eyes, and she snatched the teatowel from the rail and started to scrub at the marks.
James’s gentle hands closed over hers and removed the teatowel, then used it to wipe up the sauce that had splashed her chin. ‘Don’t get mad with me, Poppy,’ he pleaded softly. ‘I am trying to be here as much as possible.’
‘It just isn’t possible often enough,’ she muttered, headily conscious of the touch of his fingers steadying her jaw as he dabbed at her cheek.
‘I’ll wind up the meeting tomorrow as soon as I can, I promise,’ he vowed, and the darned man managed to sound sincere.
Poppy scowled, and a fleeting smile crossed his lips. ‘Don’t frown, you’ll get wrinkles,’ he murmured, moving closer, and then he bent his head and touched his tongue to her top lip. ‘Sauce,’ he said by way of explanation, and then, without any explanation or excuse or justification, he lowered his head again—and kissed her.
Poppy forgot about the sauce, about the meeting, about being angry with him. She forgot about everything except the feel of his lips on hers, the touch of his tongue, the warmth of his mouth, the feel of his body under her hands. She would have forgotten her name, except James kept murmuring it against her lips, the soft whisper of his breath teasing her still further.
It was the ringing of the phone that brought them to their senses and had them moving apart like automatons. Poppy was sure her eyes must be glazed, and her lips felt full and puffy and curiously bereft.
She watched as James picked up the phone and muttered his name gruffly, then gave a short sigh and shoved a hand into his pocket. ‘OK, Helen, I’ll see if I can find it—oh, and by the way, while I’ve got you and the others aren’t there, I’d like to get away tomorrow as early as possible—why? To be with the boys. Yes, I know, but the snow was hardly my fault and it was unavoidable. Yes, I know I didn’t have to be there, but I was, and it happened—no, Helen, I wasn’t exaggerating the situation,’ he said with elaborate patience.
Poppy, eavesdropping shamelessly, thought she wouldn’t have bothered to be patient. She would have told the bossy woman where she got off, and in no uncertain terms. In fact her hands itched to snatch the phone from James and do it anyway, but she resisted the impulse. She couldn’t believe he couldn’t see through the scheming witch. Very likely this meeting hadn’t been necessary at all, or at least not at such length. Couldn’t they have done much of the discussing over the phone with a conference call, or by fax?
Poppy ground her teeth, prayed for patience and stirred the spaghetti sauce—carefully. No way was she having James dabbing at her again, not until she had him to herself and Helen’s phone had been disconnected so she couldn’t interrupt!
He hung up but she kept her back to him, unsure how to react after that kiss. It had been superficially innocent, a fairly chaste kiss to the average onlooker. For Poppy, though, on the receiving end, it had been mind-blowing and leg-melting, and it was probably a good job he was going out tonight on second thoughts, because it meant she could sneak off to bed with a good book and take her mind firmly off Mr James Carmichael and his very kissable mouth...
‘Poppy!’
‘Oh, Lord, what now?’ she muttered, throwing down the teatowel in her hand and heading for the stairs at a run. James’s bedroom door was standing open, and so was the door to his en suite bathroom. The yells were coming from in there, so she went in, quite without thinking, and found James sitting up at one end of the bath, naked as the day was long, with Bridie bouncing in the water at the other end and chasing a back-scrubber round the bottom of the bath with her nose.
Poppy stood there transfixed, not knowing whether to feast her eyes on the sight of James’s lean, firm body—and, yes, he did have hair on his chest, just across the breastbone between his copper-coloured nipples—or chase Bridie out of the bath.
- Then the dog lunged towards James; he leapt to his feet and shot out of his end of the bath, and with a huge and very soggy leap Bridie followed him, stopped dead in the middle of the room and shook, just as George and William arrived, open-mouthed, on the scene. They dived for cover behind Poppy, and James made a lunge for Bridie with a towel i
n a vain attempt at damage limitation.
It was too much for Poppy. Clutching her sides, she sank against the wall, slithered down it to the floor and folded over in a heap, helpless with laughter. The expression on James’s face was a gem, and she was sure he’d see the funny side eventually.
‘Damned animals in the bath!’ he was yelling, the towel now wrapped hastily around his waist ‘First the bloody penguin, now that wretched, festering Godforsaken mutt—!’
‘She’s not a mutt!’ the boys chorused.
Poppy, sensing an eviction order pending, quelled her laughter, grabbed the wretched, festering et cetera, and ran for cover. Bridie thought it was a wonderful game, and bounced and twirled beside Poppy all the way down the stairs.
She stopped at the bottom to shake again, and Poppy was in two minds about sending her in to shake all over the pristine and tediously ivory drawing room. She thought better of it. The dog was on a sticky wicket as it was, without Poppy’s help. She dragged her into the kitchen, rubbed her dry and tried to din some sense into her ears. The dog just grinned, tongue lolling, and then a moment later dashed to the door to greet James.
He was in a bathrobe now, firmly belted round his waist, his bare damp legs sticking out from under the knee-length hem. Poppy, stationed as she was on the floor, was in an excellent position to admire the firm, well-muscled length of his lower legs. However, she thought it might be a frightfully good idea to get to her feet, offer him a drink and an apology, and try and smooth the ruffled waters just a tad.
She stood up, screwed up her courage and met his eyes.
Was that humour she saw lurking in their hazel depths? She gave him the benefit of the doubt, and grinned. ‘Soffy about that. I meant to warn you. We learned very early on to lock the bathroom door—Bridie loves to have a bath, and she doesn’t tend to care if it’s occupied already.’
It was humour. His lips twitched and he turned away, trying to maintain a dignified distance. ‘I noticed,’ he said drily. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any point suggesting you take her to obedience classes?’
Just Another Miracle! Page 11
