‘I cannot alleviate the ills of the starving—would that I could—but I can help people to come to terms with themselves, to learn to live in harmony with others. If all the world lived in such harmony,’ he told her gently, ‘there would be no wars, or famine.
‘I’ll wait down here for you, shall I?’ he continued.
Christa looked at him blankly. His words had caused her to feel such emotion…He baffled and bewildered her, catching her so repeatedly off guard that she felt like a wooden doll on a string which he manipulated.
Careful, she warned herself as she hurried upstairs, you’re letting him get to you and you mustn’t. Remember what he is, not what he seems to be. He’s a psychologist; he knows how people behave, how they react, and he knows how to project a specific image, how to gain someone’s sympathy and admiration.
But he would soon learn that she wasn’t so easy to deceive, and before her month in Wales was over he would be bitterly regretting his foolish public claim to be able to change her whole outlook on life. God might have wrought such a transformation in St Paul on the road to Damascus, but Daniel Geshard was a mere human being.
A mere human being…She paused, just with one foot on the second flight of stairs, her heart suddenly missing a small beat. There was nothing ‘mere’ about the man, and she would do well to hang on grimly to that fact.
CHAPTER THREE
‘IS THIS it?’ Christa asked in dismay at the ramshackle collection of stone-built, low-roofed buildings beyond the closed farm gate.
‘This’ looked more like a small farmhouse surrounded by farm buildings than a study centre. For starters, from the size of the main building she doubted that it could house more than four or five people.
‘Not exactly,’ he returned calmly, bringing the Land Rover to a halt in front of the gate.
Christa had been startled at first when she had seen the Land Rover. Somehow she had expected him to drive something more…more expensive…more imagereinforcing…A four-wheel-drive vehicle, certainly, but a top-of-the-range model, not this battered vehicle which looked as though it was held together with bits of string.
As he had watched her studying it, Daniel had told her with visible pride that he had rescued and rebuilt the vehicle himself.
‘Yes, it looks like it,’ Christa had agreed grimly, and then had felt oddly mean as she saw the pleasure fade from his eyes. Men did have, somewhere within their make-up, that little-boy eagerness and enthusiasm for certain cherished things.
‘What do you mean, not exactly?’ she asked him suspiciously as he opened the Land Rover door
‘This isn’t the centre,’ he admitted. ‘This is my home…The centre closed down at the end of last month…to give the staff a chance to have a break and to enable the builders to finish work on a new extension.’
‘What…you mean you’ve brought me here under totally false pretences?’ Christa flashed. ‘Well, in that case you can just turn this…this collection of rusty metal and string around and take me back again.’
‘Impossible, I’m afraid,’ Daniel told her calmly. ‘For one thing, I’m almost out of petrol, and Dai won’t be here with a fresh supply for me until some time tomorrow, and for another…it’s too late, Christa,’ he told her quietly, looking at her, watching her. She recognised a small heart-stopping surge of confused emotion—anger because he had deceived her and relief because he was refusing to let her go?
‘You agreed to come here,’ he reminded her, repeating his earlier words to her.
‘I agreed to attend a course held at your centre, not to…what do you mean, all the staff are having a break?’ she questioned him uncertainly.
‘Just that,’ he told her. ‘But you needn’t be concerned; I’m quite happy to conduct your course personally,’ he assured her. ‘In fact,’ he told her, his voice taking on a disturbing husky timbre, ‘I’m positively looking forward to it…’
‘Well, I’m not,’ Christa snapped. ‘And in fact-What’s that?’ she demanded, her eyes rounding with shock as the Land Rover suddenly rocked startlingly from side to side. In her efforts to counteract the rocking effect she reached out instinctively to brace herself against it, one hand pressed against the doorframe, the other…
The other, she recognised, was pressed flat against something much more solid and warm than a doorframe. And that something was Daniel’s chest, his heartbeat a steady regular rhythm beneath her hand.
‘It’s all right.’ She heard him laughing. ‘It’s only Clarence…he’s come to welcome us home…’
‘Clarence…’ Christa stared wildly at him. ‘Clarence,’ she repeated uncertainly. She couldn’t see anyone through the windows of the vehicle.
‘He’s a billy goat,’ Daniel told her, ‘who hasn’t yet learned that a head-butt is not always exactly an approved mode of welcome.’ He was laughing at her, Christa recognised indignantly as she saw the small creases fanning out around his eyes and the humour in the upward curl of his mouth. ‘I’m sorry if he frightened you. I should have warned you…’
‘I wasn’t frightened,’ Christa denied untruthfully.
She started to pull away from him and then tensed in shock as one of his hands covered hers, holding it trapped against his chest while his thumb stroked caressingly over the soft skin of her inner wrist.
She could feel herself starting to tremble slightly; the skin of his hands was slightly rough, as though he spent a good deal of time outside, and the small abrasion of it rubbing against her much softer flesh was causing odd shivers of sensation to quiver through her body.
‘Liar,’ she heard Daniel accusing her softly.
Shaking, she tried to focus on what he was saying to her instead of what was happening inside her.
‘Your pulse is fast,’ he told her in explanation. ‘And a fast pulse means…’
‘All right, so it was a shock,’ Christa admitted, anxious to bring an end to what was becoming an increasingly hazardous situation. Fear was one cause of a racing pulse, it was true, but there were others. She bit her lip, chagrined by the knowledge that what her body had idiotically interpreted as a small caress had, in fact, been nothing more than a clinical examination of her pulse-rate.
‘Whoops, hang on…’ The sensation of Daniel’s arms suddenly coming round her and holding her wrapped tightly against his chest choked the breath out of her lungs, leaving her totally unable to make any kind of verbal protest as Clarence sent the Land Rover rocking a second time.
‘I think he’s getting impatient,’ she heard Daniel saying somewhere above her head.
She was pressed so firmly against him that to make any comment would have meant risking her lips virtually touching the warm, bare skin of his throat as she tried to speak. In fact, if she opened her mouth at all, it would be almost as though she were doing so in order to kiss him.
‘Hey…you’re trembling…it’s all right, Clarence isn’t so fea
rsome. In fact he’s quite a softie once you get to know him…come on.’
Thank goodness he had started to release her and turn away from her to open his door before he could realise that the reason for that small, intense shudder had not been anything to do with Clarence at all, wary though she was of the animal.
What was the matter with her? There was obviously a very large communications gap between her body and her brain; her body was still locked into that first initial meeting between them and the instant attraction she had felt towards him.
It was time that her brain told it very clearly and firmly just what the real situation now was.
‘Come and meet Clarence,’ Daniel invited, holding open the passenger door for her.
Reluctantly Christa climbed out of the vehicle. It wasn’t just the goat that was making her feel on edge, with his impressive set of formidably sharp-looking horns, but the man standing beside him as well.
‘I bought him as a kid. Goat’s milk is extremely good for you and the plan was that his harem would contribute towards making us self-sufficient.
‘Unfortunately things didn’t turn out quite as I’d hoped. It’s cheaper and easier to buy our milk from the supermarket. It wasn’t so much Clarence’s and his wives’ predilection for breaking out of their pen that caused the trouble as their taste for clothes…
‘They ate them,’ he explained with a grin when Christa turned her head briefly away from the wary study of the billy goat to him. ‘I managed to find homes for his wives but Clarence unfortunately has proved hard to rehouse. Still, he makes a very good guard animal and, unlike a dog, he has to be neither licensed nor muzzled.’
Christa didn’t quite like the way the goat was watching her, or her clothes, but she was damned if she was going to admit as much to his owner.
When Daniel turned to walk away from her, calling over his shoulder to her, ‘Hang on a sec, I’ll just get your case,’ Christa had to suppress her desire to betray her weakness and protest.
Clarence returned her determined eye-contact with an unblinking stare that she could have sworn had a faintly taunting element to it. And when the animal suddenly started to move towards her, she had to fight to stop herself from scuttling behind Daniel’s protective bulk.