For Daniel, she wanted to turn heads as they walked down the street…For Daniel, she wanted others to admire and maybe even envy his choice of woman a little, and yet the contents of her wardrobe were geared for her working life, and living here in the country. Warm, practical clothes designed to withstand the elements, good-quality clothes, but clothes that were scarcely worthy of the description “glamorous”.
Just for one fleeting and revealing moment she thought regretfully of the shopping trip her mother had insisted on taking her on the last time they had met. She had refused the enticement of the expensive designer-label clothes her mother had drawn to her attention, pointing out firmly that on her income she could scarcely afford such luxuries, and that, anyway, she had no need of them.
Useless now to regret the soft pastel cashmeres, the fine, delicate silks, the thin, narrow skirts…
Instead she removed from its hanger a pleated woollen skirt in dark blue and green tartan enlivened by bright red and yellow lines.
The skirt had been an impulse buy the previous winter, from an exclusive shop in Bath. With it went a soft yellow sweater, and the sleeveless gilet which was the same dark blue as the skirt, lined with the yellow of her sweater.
The outfit was completed by a scarf, gloves and toning tights.
As she looked critically at her reflection, she wondered if she had the right personality to wear such striking colours. There was no doubt that the outfit was vibrantly colourful, and she hesitated for a moment, torn between leaving it on or changing into something plainer.
The painful ache in her arm decided her. The outfit must stay.
Almost shyly, she went back downstairs. The kitchen was immaculate, and Daniel was waiting for her, reading one of her books on tapestries.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he apologised, smiling at her, ‘but this caught my eye. There’s a panelled room at the Court, or at least there will be if I can find enough panelling to repair the damaged sections. I had thought of using it as my study—a tapestry would look very effective against the panelling.’
‘Very,’ Jessica agreed and then warned, ‘Providing that the panelling is of the earlier type.’
‘It’s early eighteenth century, or so I’m told. I’m afraid I’m not an expert on such things, which is another reason why I want to get hold of a reliable builder.’He grimaced in self-disgust. ‘I thought I was too old to be taken in by a cowboy.’
‘It happens all the time,’ Jessica sympathised. ‘When I first bought this place, I was lucky. The estate agent was a local man and he recommended this firm to me. I think you’ll like him. He’s got his own idiosyncrasies,’ she warned, ‘and works to his own time scale. He can seem a bit taciturn at first, but he does do a good job.’
Daniel hadn’t said a word about her outfit, but the way he looked at her kindled that same feeling in the pit of her stomach which she had experienced the night before.
‘I think we’d better make a move,’ he said huskily, verbally confirming his reaction to her. ‘Otherwise I might just be tempted to forget that we’ve agreed to take things slowly.’
Once inside the Daimler, she realised that she wasn’t going to need the gilet while they were travelling. Daniel had already set the car in motion, and she struggled to remove it, hampered by the constriction of her seat-belt and the painful stiffness of her arm.
‘Hang on. I’ll pull up and help you,’ Daniel told her, bringing the car to a halt and releasing his own seat-belt to reach across and snap hers free. ‘Turn sideways, and then you should be able to slide it off,’ he instructed.
Sitting with her back to him while he reached forward to gently manoeuvre the top free of her arms, she could feel the warm heat of his breath stirring her hair, raising goose-bumps on the nape of her neck.
‘There…that should do it.’
Had she imagined that light, delicate kiss brushing her throat as he lifted her hair free of her collar? She shivered a little, wishing she had the experience and nature to turn round and say, ‘I’ve changed my mind. Take me home and make love to me.’
But even if she had, it was hardly the sensible thing to do—to commit herself so rashly and so completely.
But wasn’t she already committed? Wasn’t she already involved? Wasn’t she even now going to suffer as she had never suffered before in her life, if he left her? And that was what frightened her—that he might grow bored, or change his mind, or simply discover that he had after all mistaken his feelings, and that, while he walked away from her with no regrets, she would spend the rest of her life mourning his loss.
CHAPTER FIVE
THEY were going first to see Daniel’s house, and, although she had often driven past it on her way to the main road which led to Bath and the motorway, Jessica felt a tiny thrill of excitement at the thought of going inside.
Her love affair with old buildings had first begun long before she had reached her teens, when an aunt of her mother’s had invited her to spend a week’s holiday with her in Cheshire and had taken her round some of the country’s wonderful mediaeval and Elizabethan houses.
It wasn’t the grand palaces which appealed to her so much as the smaller, more homely buildings, lived in by what in those days had been minor branches of the nobility, and the new, wealthy merchant classes who so vigorously intermarried with them.
After all, it was those merchants who had been responsible for so many of the beautiful things which had enhanced those homes: carpets, rugs, silks and velvets brought out of the East.
Daniel’s house had been built when the Carolean period was at its apogee.
Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren might have been heralding in the dawn of the fashion for Palladian architecture in fashionable London, but judging from its exterior Jessica suspected, and hoped, that Daniel’s house might have retained at least some of its original panelling.
In an effort to divert her senses from their intense responsiveness to him, she asked him about this as they headed for the house.
‘The panelling in one of the bedrooms is virtually intact, although the original plasterwork ceiling is badly damaged, and then downstairs there’s the hallway, a passage, and what at one time was the library, although most of the library shelves have been ripped out
by a previous owner.
‘At some stage the sitting-room and drawing-room were ‘modernised’, unfortunately. My apologies for the state of the drive,’ he added, frowning as he turned off the main road and in through two stone gateposts, now without gates, and drove along an unkempt, rutted drive.
The trees which must once have lined the driveway no longer existed, and where once presumably there had been a smooth sweep of lawn perhaps studded by fine specimen trees, there was now an area of rough, untidy grass, so that the house was visible not just from the drive, but from the road as well.
‘How much land does the house have?’ Jessica asked Daniel.
‘About two acres, and this piece you can see at the front is probably the only bit that resembles anything approaching a garden,’ he told her ruefully.
‘The whole thing has to be cleared and redesigned, but at this stage I’m trying to concentrate on getting the house properly habitable.’
‘If it’s in such poor condition, wouldn’t it have been wiser for you to have stayed in London until the work’s done?’ Jessica asked him, repeating less aggressively a question she had already asked.
‘Wiser in some ways, perhaps, but I want to be on hand to make sure work is progressing as it should. I’ve got quite a lot of leave due to me which I intend to use to put all the work in hand, and I think I can oversee things much more easily from here than from the city.’
He saw the sadness shadowing Jessica’s eyes as she studied the frontage of the house and asked with a frown, ‘What’s wrong?’
His sensitivity to her moods disconcerted her; she had deliberately kept her fellow human beings at bay for so long that she wasn’t used to people picking up on her feelings.
‘It’s the house,’ she told him. ‘Poor thing…It looks so neglected and unhappy.’ She flushed defensively when she saw that he was smiling a little. ‘Houses do have feelings,’ she told him crossly, guessing that he must think her a sentimental idiot.
‘Well, then, let’s go inside this one and you can reassure it and yourself as to my intentions,’ Daniel suggested, stopping the car and switching off the engine.