by Penny Jordan
Her lover…Who had he been, the man who had fathered that bright-voiced little girl who had spoken to him so confidently and gravely? Where was he now? He didn’t want to think about it, and so he turned abruptly on his heel and walked back to the door.
Kate let him go. Even now she couldn’t regret last night; her body still pulsed slightly in the aftermath of their pleasure. If he had chosen to stay, to touch her…The tiny quivers of sensation within her became fierce darts that made her catch her breath.
She must forget about last night, she told herself sternly. She must get up and ring Cherry. She must keep herself busy, so that her enforced stay here would soon pass and she would be free to return to reality and forget this brief span of time here with Silas.
* * *
She had intended to go over to the main building to see if she could help out immediately after she had had her breakfast, but when she rang the farm she discovered that Cherry was out with her father and so she decided to stay in the house until she returned, even though her mother assured her that she was feeling more cheerful.
‘Your father’s taking her up to Sam Benson’s this afternoon,’ she told her.
Sam Benson was a neighbouring farmer who was her father’s keenest rival at the sheep-dog trials. Her father didn’t approve of the methods Sam used to train his dogs, considering that the other man verged on being too harsh.
‘He’s teaching her to play chess as well,’ her mother told her with a chuckle.
Chess was her father’s favourite game, although he didn’t get much opportunity to play. He had taught both her and David when they were younger. David hadn’t liked the game, being too impatient, but she had quite enjoyed it. She had played it with Silas, although she was by no means as skilled at it as he was.
‘She already knows the rudiments,’ she told her mother.
Kate had discerned quite early in her daughter’s life that she had an aptitude for both maths and music—gifts she had acquired through her father, Kate suspected.
It was late morning before Kate could speak to Cherry herself. As her mother had said, Cherry sounded far happier than she had done the previous evening. She was full of excited chatter about her morning, but broke off to ask Kate, ‘Who was that man I spoke to before? He was nice.’
‘Oh, that’s the man who runs the centre,’ Kate told her huskily, praying that her daughter would never have cause to know how much she was lying to her, if only by default.
‘Cherry seems mightily taken with whoever it was who answered the telephone this morning,’ her mother confirmed, when Cherry handed over the telephone to her grandmother.
‘It’s the man who runs the centre. Silas Edwards,’ Kate told her in a strained voice.
‘Edwards, you say?’ her mother queried, repeating Silas’s surname, and then Kate heard her saying to her father, ‘Isn’t that the man who’s bought Jessop’s farm, John?’
Kate heard her father’s reply quite clearly, and her stomach was still churning when she replaced the receiver. She remembered someone saying Silas had bought a farm locally. There must be a hundred reasons why Silas had bought the farmland that ran adjacent to their own, but she couldn’t think of a single one. Why, when he had told her himself that he was dedicated to his career and the worldwide travelling it involved, had he bought himself a remote hill farm?
She was still trying to puzzle out the answer when the phone rang again.
She picked it up automatically, giving the number. There was silence from the other end, and then a woman’s voice, crisp and light, enquiring coolly, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure whom I’m speaking to.’
‘Kate Seton,’ Kate told her, trying to sound equally calm, while her heart thumped madly as her senses picked up on the undercurrent of surprised hostility in the other woman’s voice. Who was she? A friend? A lover? A woman who had far more right to be here in Silas’s home than she did herself? That thought hurt.
‘Seton?’ The voice sharpened again. There was a pause, and then she said briskly, ‘I wonder if you’d give Silas a message for me. Could you tell him that Susie rang? Oh, and that we’ll be coming up with the boys as planned, but that I’ll get in touch with him before then.’
Susie…the boys…Kate’s heartbeat started to ease a little.
She had jumped to erroneous conclusions once before in the past with disastrous consequences; this time she would be wise to be more cautious. Could this Susie be Silas’s sister? What had he said she was called?
Since it was almost time for lunch, there seemed little point in going to the centre. Instead, she opened the fridge and made herself a light snack from the food her mother had sent.
After that she collected her own washing, and, after a moment’s hesitation, Silas’s as well. It seemed churlish not to when all she had to do was to put it in the machine.
Odd how, even in these progressive days, to do a man’s laundry was a sign of intimacy.
Half-way through the afternoon exhaustion overwhelmed her, and when Silas came back at five o’clock he found her fast asleep in an armchair.
She looked young and vulnerable, and he ached to touch her. By rights, he ought still to be working, but he hadn’t been able to concentrate. All he had been able to think about was Kate. Kate now…Kate then. Kate who had followed him all through the years, haunting him, and who haunted him now.
Unable to stop himself, he reached out and touched her hair, letting a soft curl slide through his fingers.
As he bent over her, Kate woke up. For a moment she was confused and disorientated and she reached up to him, her face radiant with joy, only to remember abruptly that this was now, and the days when she had had the right to reach out towards him were long gone.
To Silas, her abrupt withdrawal was another sign that, although physically she desired him, he was not the man she loved, and so he stepped back from her himself, his face closed and shadowed.
‘Don’t get up,’ he told her curtly as she started to move. ‘I only came back to get some papers.’
It was a lie, but it would be easier to go back and attempt to do some of the work he should have already done than to stay here with her.
He was half-way out of the door before Kate remembered to give him his message.
‘Yes, my sister and her family. They’re planning to spend a few days with me en route for their annual holiday in Scotland.’
‘I’m surprised you want to be bothered with them,’ Kate challenged him, ‘in view of the way you feel about family life.’
The look he gave her was bleak. If that was what she wanted to think, why should he disillusion her? For the sake of his pride, it was better that she should believe he didn’t want to be a father rather than know the truth. Had she been a different sort of woman, a woman to whom children weren’t important, he could perhaps…
Perhaps what? Beg her to love him as he had once believed she did? As he closed the front door behind him, his face contorted in harsh lines of pain.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A WEEK. One week…Over now, and yet it had seemed more like a lifetime. Or at least parts of it had, Kate acknowledged, trying not to remember those hours in Silas’s arms that had passed like as many seconds.
And now, this afternoon, she would be free to leave. She was probably already free to leave. So why was she hesitating before ringing her father to tell him that she was ready? Why was she standing here in Silas’s kitchen, staring down the drive, almost as though she was willing him to appear?
Why should he? Common sense told her that he must be eager for her to go. What had happened between them—well, that was something it seemed they both wanted to forget. And yet he had wanted her so much. Surely she hadn’t been wrong about that?
She reminded herself how small her experience really was, and how easily she could have read more into Silas’s response to her than there actually had been, simply out of her own mind.
Cherry would be waiting for her at the farm. Cherry. A frown
touched her forehead. For the last two days her daughter had seemed very subdued. Her parents had noticed it as well, but neither of them had been able to give Kate any explanation for it, other than to say that she was probably missing her.
But Kate, with a mother’s instinct, knew it was something more. Cherry hadn’t guessed the truth, surely? Her heart missed a beat and then steadied. Of course not. How could she? No, it would be some small, childish problem that was darkening her daughter’s life and displacing the joy from her voice.
She glanced at her watch. It was five o’clock. Silas wouldn’t come now. She reached out to pick up the telephone and call her father.
‘Kate…’
She spun round in shock. Silas must have walked back to the house along the path that curled through the park, and that was why she hadn’t seen him.
‘I’m just ringing my father to ask him to come and pick me up,’ she told him formally, avoiding looking directly at him. If she did, he would have to see in her eyes how she felt about him, and that was the last thing she wanted.
‘I’ll drive you home,’ he told her roughly. ‘Just give me half an hour to shower and change.’
‘There’s no need—’ she began.
But he overruled her, saying savagely, ‘There’s every need,’ and her heart jerked at the raw sound of the words as though he had actually pulled its strings, as though the need he spoke of was that elemental fierce pulse that kept her awake at night.
When he came downstairs his hair was still damp, and where his shirt touched his skin the fabric had darkened slightly, as though beneath its covering his skin was still moist.
The thought made her body go weak, and she turned away from him hastily.
‘I’ll just go up and get my things…’
‘I’ll bring them down for you.’
Sighing faintly, Kate walked into the kitchen. Her cases weren’t heavy and she could quite easily have carried them herself, but she admitted that there was something rather pleasant about being female and cosseted on occasions.
Even so, she insisted on carrying one of them out to the Range Rover and helping Silas to load them. His movements were deft and assured. He was the sort of man a woman would always feel comfortable with: protected by his masculinity but never threatened by it. He was male, without being macho.
‘All set.’
He wasn’t looking at her, she saw, checking out of the corner of her eye, and so she hesitated for a fraction of a minute, looking at the house, wanting to imprint it on her memory. It wasn’t a particularly attractive building, but it was here that she and Silas had come together, and she would always remember it with an ache of sadness.
‘Kate…’
She hadn’t heard him move, and when she felt his hand cupping her elbow she jumped. His grip tightened, his breath warm against her skin as he asked curtly, ‘Is something wrong?’
She was a woman, not a girl, Kate reminded herself, pinning a bright smile to her face as she turned to meet the look in his eyes.
’No. Nothing.’
And then, turning, she pulled away from him and walked firmly towards the waiting Range Rover.
Neither of them spoke again until they were through the gates. The sight of the small flock of sheep grazing freely in the parkland made Kate say, ‘You must be pleased that the new breed is turning out so well. Graham was telling me that it was your idea originally to try a new high-yield, low-disease-prone strain.’
‘It’s too early to congratulate ourselves yet,’ was Silas’s curt response. ‘And certainly far too early to expect the Ministry to give full approval. But so far…yes, I am pleased.’
‘So how long will it be before they can actually breed them in places like Ethiopia?’ Kate asked him.
‘Three years, maybe two if we’re lucky,’ he told her shortly.
‘So how long will it be before you go back there?’ Kate asked him miserably. All at once it was too much of an effort to pretend any longer. In many ways it would have been less cruel of fate to have ensured that they had never met again, rather than for her to have to suffer the anguish of knowing exactly what she had really lost all those years ago.
At eighteen she had loved Silas as a girl of that age does: hedonistically, sensuously, selfishly in many ways. Now she realised that she loved him with a mature woman’s love, recognising his integrity and compassion, his strength and his vulnerability.
Wrapped in her own thoughts, she didn’t see the expression that crossed his face. Go back…In many ways he wished he could, but the illness he had suffered had left him with a physical vulnerability that meant that he could not be pronounced medically fit for such gruelling work. Field work in places such as Ethiopia was barred to him, which was why…
He looked at Kate and saw that she was waiting for his response.
Her eyes looked anxious and strained. No doubt she was regretting their lovemaking, perhaps even fearing that he might be contemplating continuing their relationship. For her sake if nothing else, he ought to reassure her, and so he lied and told her, ‘Not long.’
They were almost at the farm. Kate could see the familiar outline of it and then they were driving into the yard, scattering the hens and geese, and Cherry was opening the back door and running toward them.
Surely Cherry had grown? Her jeans seemed too short for her long legs, and her skin was tanned a healthy country brown from the long hours she had spent outside with her grandfather. She greeted Kate rapturously, and then turned from her mother to study Silas.
Kate felt her heart pound with dread as they looked at one another. Would Silas see himself in their child, as she so often did?
Apparently not. Gravely, formally, he extended his hand and shook Cherry’s small, grubby paw.
’Gran says you’re to hurry up and come inside because she’s just brewed some tea,’ Cherry announced forthrightly, and somehow or other Kate found that, instead of politely thanking Silas and watching him drive out of her life, the three of them were walking into her mother’s cosy kitchen.
She saw Silas looking round appreciatively, and tried to see the room through his eyes. It was so familiar to her that she tended to overlook its appeal.
It was a large, rectangular room, which would have been dark if it hadn’t been for the benefit of electric light. The walls were old and almost two feet deep, the stone mullioned windows small, and during the summer her mother normally kept the back door open to allow in more light.
The floor still had its ancient flags, and the rag rugs that Kate remembered from her own childhood and which she remembered her mother telling her had been made by her grandmother.
The oak units, the kitchen’s only relatively modern touch, had been made by her father one bad winter from wood he had seasoned himself, and he was justifiably proud of them. The scrubbed table was several hundred years old, but her mother swore that it was impossible for her to make pastry on anything else.
The Aga was a new one, replacing the ancient model Kate remembered; it was also fire-engine red, a colour her mother had confessed she had fallen in love with in the shop.
The old-fashioned wing-chairs either side of it were slightly shabby. Kate remembered that her mother had been threatening to re-cover them for years. She herself was a clever needlewoman, and she made a mental note to find out what kind of fabric her mother had in mind and to take over the task for her as a small thank-you for all that she was doing for Cherry and herself. She could also make her some new curtains while she was here, Kate mused, and the walls could do with a fresh coat of paint.
Living on her own on a teacher’s salary, she had quickly learned how to make the most of her small home, and, although she didn’t consider herself to be artistic in the strict sense of the word, she enjoyed being creative with her home—a gift that Cherry had inherited from her.
Here, though, there were differences. Her mother’s kitchen bore very evident signs of male occupation of the house; small things that were missing f
rom her own home. It bothered her at times that Cherry was growing up without any male influence on her life, and she was pleased that her daughter had struck up such a bond with her father.
As she was thinking about him, the latter came in. Since it was extremely rare for him to be off the fells at this time of the day during the summer, Kate suspected that he had come deliberately to inspect Silas. She was touched and amused, and then wryly surprised at her reaction, remembering the many, many rows that had taken place in this very kitchen when she was in her early teens because of her parents’ insistence on vetting the young men she went out with.
Now she found it touching that her father should take such a protective interest in her.
‘It is good of you to bring Kate back, Mr Edwards,’ her mother began, smiling warmly when Silas offered,
‘Please call me Silas, Mrs Seton. And as for being good…’ He gave a wry grimace. ‘I felt I could hardly do less in view of the fact that it was our work at the institute which was responsible for your daughter’s incarceration.’
‘Well, not entirely,’ her mother chuckled. ‘There was, after all, Annabel’s part in it.’
‘Annabel? Oh yes, of course, the goat,’ Silas agreed.
‘I see you’ve got some sheep grazing in the paddocks. Are they Merinos…’ her father asked Silas sharply.
Kate held her breath, wondering how he would answer her father’s question. Her father knew all there was to know about sheep and their breeding, and Kate suspected that he was quite well aware that those grazing on the paddocks were different from his own prize flock.
‘Not exactly,’ Silas answered him easily. ‘They’re a new breed we’re hoping to introduce, but as yet their development is only in the very early stages.’ As he went on to explain the technical details to her father, adding that it was the tests they were carrying out on the flock that had been responsible for the quarantine problems, Kate was torn between pleasure at seeing the man she loved getting on so well with her parents, and pain because no one other than herself would ever know of the very special relationship he had with them, especially with Cherry.
