‘Yes?’ Her boss’s son repeated his query. ‘I say, are you still there, Caroline?’
‘Sorry—just thinking.’ She pulled in a breath and went on more firmly, ‘I’ve done all that could be done here.’
‘Great! I should be with you around four. We can stop off for something to eat on the way…’ his voice lowered huskily ‘…and continue the conversation we were having before you had to go away. Ciao, sweetheart!’
She flinched at the endearment Ben had used so effectively during the last twenty-four hours, sounding as if he’d really meant it, and replaced the receiver with unsteady hands. She didn’t want any other man to call her sweetheart. She didn’t want any other man, full stop.
And what conversation had Michael been referring to? The getting-to-know-each-other-better one, she supposed with a spurt of misery. Remembering her almost clinical detachment at the time when she’d vaguely supposed that her friendly relationship with Michael Weinberg was worth exploring further, she grimaced. How objectively she’d weighed up the pros and cons: to remain single or form a relationship and a family.
It would never happen for her. There was nothing wrong with Michael: he was intelligent, nice-looking, they had much in common. But like the few other men she’d dated during the past twelve years, he wasn’t Ben.
Caroline put her fingertips to her aching temples, her glossy head bowed. Right from the start, all those years ago, Ben had spoiled her for any other man. She dragged her lower lip between her teeth, her breath burning in her lungs.
Hadn’t he admitted it had been exactly the same for him? Confessed to having brought her back to Langley Hayes with the intention of finally laying those memories they had of each other to rest, proving beyond any shadow of doubt that what they’d had was nothing special?
And hadn’t he admitted frankly that it hadn’t worked that way? And what had he told her? She pushed her jumbled hair away from her face. ‘I suggest you start listening to your heart.’
As he’d listened to his when he’d excused the hateful letter she’d left with his mother just hours before she’d left this house for good. Excusing it, putting it down to a seventeen-year-old’s panicky reaction against making a serious commitment. He’d been wrong, of course, but he had been trying to understand and make allowances because there had been love in his heart and he’d listened to it?
Could she have misjudged him?
Something sweet, a tender fledgling certainty, blossomed in her own heart. Maybe he hadn’t driven away in the middle of a temper tantrum, furious because he’d been shown up as far less than perfect. But had gone because he’d needed time on his own to figure out how he was going to convince her he’d been telling the truth.
Caroline walked from the room, closing the door quietly behind her, her mind made up now.
She could readily accept that her father had lied about Ben accepting that pay-off. He would have done anything, said anything, to break up their affair, put a stop to it before Jeremy Curtis got to hear of it. His plans for marrying her off into a wealthy family would have been put in jeopardy.
That left Maggie Pope.
Letting herself out of the house Caroline noted that dull grey clouds had covered the sun, the fickle English spring veering back to winter. She shivered, but began a brisk walk into the village.
There was plenty of time before Michael arrived to collect her to find Maggie and demand the truth. Provided she hadn’t left the area.
But that wasn’t likely. Her widower father kept the village pub, as his father and grandfather had before him, and Maggie had helped out ever since she’d left school the minute she’d reached sixteen. Continuing to live and work there would be the ideal answer for a single mother with no qualifications.
Even as a chilling wind blew out of nowhere, Caroline’s heart sang and she listened. Ben hadn’t lied, he wasn’t callous now—witness his plans for Langley Hayes—and he hadn’t been callous when she’d first known him and had fallen in love with him.
Ben had wanted to marry her way back then and he wanted to marry her now! And they wouldn’t have wasted twelve long years if she’d been more mature, refusing to believe those lies until she’d talked to him and had heard what he’d had to say, keeping her faith in him despite her father’s insistence that he’d gone for good.
Vowing she’d make it up to him, she lengthened her stride, hugging the hedgerows for protection from the increasingly steady drizzle.
The only enigma was why Maggie had lied. Out of spite? Because the wild, sexy Ben Dexter had never touched her and she’d wished he would?
Caroline had known of his reputation, who hadn’t? Sometimes, home from boarding school for the holidays, she’d visited the general store, had heard a group of village girls drooling over the hunky Ben Dexter, giggling and preening if he’d happened to roar by on the old motorbike he’d used to get around on, some of them boasting that they’d ridden pillion with him, implying a whole lot more.
Had Maggie been jealous because she hadn’t been one of the lucky ones? Deciding to get her own back by telling everyone that she had?
Whatever. Speculation was getting her nowhere. She had to have the truth, discover what had lain behind the lie that had done so much damage, and she knew she was going to have to wait a short while longer when the heavens opened as she reached the outskirts of the village.
Scurrying, her head down, she headed for the store where she could shelter until the worst had passed.
A violent tapping on a window-pane had her skidding to a standstill.
Dorothy Skeet beckoned her frantically and Caroline dived thankfully under the porch of the pretty cottage and pushed on the open front door.
‘You’ve got drenched!’ Dorothy clucked as she emerged from a door on the right. ‘I saw you coming down the lane—you can see everything from my front window—and I said to myself, Poor Miss Caroline will get a right soaking! Now, come and dry off by the fire and I’ll get you a towel for your hair. And what about a cup of tea? I could fancy one myself.’
Acquiescing gratefully, Caroline entered a cosy, cluttered room and rough-dried her hair in front of the fire that crackled in the tiny hearth while Dorothy went to make the promised tea.