Harriet drew in a quick breath. ‘I could consider that.’
‘Excellent.’ Rafael strolled to the back of the car and reached in to emerge again with a bottle of vintage champagne and two glasses.
‘We’re celebrating?’ Once again Harriet was thoroughly disconcerted. She was starting to appreciate the strong streak of unpredictability that made Rafael Flynn such a powerful competitor in the business world. In old-fashioned parlance he was a law unto himself, for he had not once reacted as she’d expected him to. It was, she reflected headily, an incredibly unsettling attribute.
Breaking open the champagne, Rafael sent the golden liquid foaming down into the delicate goblets. ‘Let’s drink to mixing business with pleasure.’
‘But I don’t…’ Tiny bubbles burst and tickled Harriet’s upper lip as she sipped.
‘Neither do I, usually.’ Setting down his glass, Rafael moved lazily closer. ‘But I get a kick out of breaking rules.’
A tiny twist low in her tummy filled Harriet with restless heat.
‘Are you game?’ Without warning Rafael filched the glass from her hand. His eyes glittering with high-voltage energy, he eased her very slowly up against his lean, muscular physique.
Her heart started hammering like a clockwork toy that had been overwound. She knew she should match her words to her behaviour and break away, but her every urge fought that commonsense. ‘Last night I had been drinking…’
‘Don’t be so serious,’ Rafael censured with wry amusement.
Harriet flushed to the roots of her copper hair. ‘I just think—we’re partners—and then there’s Luke—’
Rafael lifted and dropped a broad masculine shoulder with careless cool. ‘That’s up to you. You have two weeks to agonise about it.’
‘Two weeks?’ Harriet gasped involuntarily. ‘You’re planning to be away that long?’
A raw smile of appreciation lit his hard dark features. ‘I’ll meet you here on the Friday, at six in the morning…we’ll go for a ride along the beach. I keep a mare here as company for my gelding. Try her out while I’m away.’
Rafael checked his watch and ran her straight back home. Indecision was cutting Harriet in two, and she felt foolish for having paraded it. To fling, or not to fling, she punned pathetically.
‘By the way,’ Rafael murmured levelly when she opened the passenger door to get out, ‘I’m not into one-night-stands.’
Her face flamed, and she almost fell out of the car in her eagerness to escape. ‘Neither am I.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
CHAPTER FIVE
HARRIET had supper with Fergal’s mother on Sunday evening. Treated like an honoured guest, it slowly sank in on Harriet that Mrs Gibson had decided that she would make a suitable girlfriend for her son. Cheerfully ignoring all the bossy older woman’s coy and encouraging comments, Harriet managed to extract herself again without causing offence.
Patrick Flanagan had also called round that afternoon, and asked her out to Dooleys. She’d turned him down as tactfully as she could.
It was the following week before she finally got the chance to visit the village gift shop and buy the earrings she had seen for her stepfather’s wife, Nicola.
Luckily for her the earrings were still unsold. While she waited for the sales assistant to remove them from the display, Harriet had the sensation that she was being watched, and turned her head. An elegant dark-haired woman rearranging shelves on the other side of the shop treated her to a stony-eyed stare. Harriet coloured, and then asked herself why she had somehow come to expect everyone local to greet her with a warm, welcoming smile.
‘Robert…weren’t you planning to set up the new exhibition in the gallery this morning?’ the brunette enquired acidly of the overweight older man who had emerged from the back of the shop with his arms wrapped round a large unwieldy carton. ‘You’ll need to get a move on if you want it finished in time.’
As Harriet confirmed that she would take the earrings, the same woman took over from the assistant and ran the purchase through the till in silence. ‘So, you’re Agnes Gallagher’s girl from England,’ she remarked when she gave Harriet her change. ‘Are you planning on staying here for long?’
‘For good, I hope.’ Harriet tucked the tiny package carefully into her bag and looked up with a smile. ‘Did you know my mother?’
The brunette shot her a scornful look of dislike. ‘Not as well as all the men knew her…if you know what I mean.’
Ludicrously unprepared for that unpleasant reply, Harriet stiffened with surprise and anger. ‘I think I’ll pretend I don’t.’
‘Do as you like.’
Her face burning, Harriet walked back out of the shop. That would be the last time she shopped there, she thought, appalled by the offensive crack. She wondered what, if anything, Eva had done to rouse such animosity. That woman could easily have gone to school with her mother. Eva freely admitted that she preferred male company to female, and often complained that her looks and her popularity with men made other women envious. The status and wealth her mother had acquired since she left Ballyflynn might also have provoked jealousy, Harriet reasoned ruefully.