‘You’re wasting your time, you know,’ she told him curtly; ‘there’s absolutely no way that spending a month or even six months in the middle of the Welsh countryside is going to change anything about me or my outlook on life. And besides,’ she challenged him, her eyes narrowing watchfully, ‘surely I’m right in thinking that the normal duration of such courses would only be two weeks at the most?’
He looked, Christa recognised in swift triumph, almost uncomfortable—uncomfortable and rather caught off balance by her question, although he quickly hid it, turning his head slightly away from her so that she couldn’t see his full expression. Was that just discomposure she had seen in his eyes or had there been a hint of anger there as well? she wondered gleefully. If she had managed to get under his skin already, then so much the better. She was not afraid of his anger—she welcomed it. When people lost control of their emotions they betrayed themselves more easily.
‘Normally, yes,’ she heard him agreeing, ‘but in your case…’
‘You decided to balance the scales in your own favour and give yourself extra time,’ she suggested tauntingly.
To her surprise he didn’t try to deny her accusation or to defend himself, instead giving her a look that for some unaccountable reason made her pulse start to race frantically and her heart to execute a high-dive.
‘It’s no good,’ she repeated quickly, ‘I shan’t change my mind…
The long, level look he gave her rather surprised her. That he should acknowledge her antagonism was to be expected, but that he should allow her to see that it affected him wasn’t. Men like him were very much into control of their own emotions as well as those of the people around them. She would have expected him to want to give her the impression that he was above acknowledging her dislike, not to react to it with such a very male and challenging gleam in those cool, grey eyes…The kind of gleam that, if she was foolish enough to be vulnerable to his particular brand of male magnetism, could quite easily have made her heart beat just a little faster and her body…
‘You sound very sure about that.’
The gleam was gone now, replaced by a cool, distancing scrutiny. ‘I am,’ Christa confirmed firmly. ‘I know myself very well.’
‘Yourself, or the self you allow yourself to be? You do realise how stressful such rigid control of your personality is, don’t you?’
Christa glared angrily at him.
‘And you would know about such things, I take it. Tell me…what exactly did you do before you jumped on the modern bandwagon of the…the quasiprofessional soothsayer and reader of runes?’ Christa demanded insultingly.
She waited for the storm to break, for the grey eyes to darken and the sensually curved male mouth to utter retaliatory insults, but to her consternation he said simply instead, ‘I lectured in psychology at Oxford. I don’t want to rush you, but it would be a good idea if we could leave pretty soon. I don’t want to get back too much after dark. We haven’t had much wind recently, and if the power supply is low it might mean starting up our subsidiary generator…’
The speed with which he changed subjects, the apparent calmness in his manner after delivering a statement which had left her feeling as flattened as though she had been mown down by a boulder, left Christa floundering and impotently angry, not just with him but with herself as well.
A lecturer in psychology…
‘It was in the brochure, along with the qualifications of the other members of our staff.’
The quiet statement brought a surge of humiliated colour to Christa’s skin, despite her attempts to stop it.
‘A generator,’ she repeated, determinedly adopting his own tactics. ‘Does that mean you don’t have a proper reliable electricity supply?’
‘We aren’t on the national grid, no,’ he agreed. ‘Our electricity is generated by wind machines. We try at the centre to be as environmentally aware and as independent as possible. That includes generating our own electricity, growing our own fruit and vegetables. We even tried supplying our own meat, but that didn’t work out too well.
‘The sheep became too tame and no one wanted to send them to market,’ he explained. ‘Same with the hens; none of us could bring ourselves to wring their necks.’
Mentally, Christa contrasted what he was saying with the lives of some of the people in the villages she had visited in India and Pakistan. There they did not have the luxury of allowing their livestock to become tame pets.
As though he had read her mind, he said quietly, ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking and you’re probably right, but would you have wanted to be the one to sign the death warrant?’
His perception was beginning to disconcert her.
‘It would depend whose name was on it,’ she told him pithily.
The sound of his laughter surprised and irked her. He was supposed to get offended, angry, to be betrayed by his pride and ego into revealing himself as he really was-not to be tolerantly amused.
Daniel Geshard was dangerous, Christa acknowledged uneasily. His claim that a month on one of his courses would change her entire outlook on life was one she still scathingly discounted. Her own claim to herself that, knowing who he was, or more importantly what he was, there was not the slightest risk of that initial tug of empathy and attraction she had felt towards him being rekindled—that claim was the truth, wasn’t it?
‘What’s wrong?’
Christa tensed against his choice of words—not the impersonal, ‘Is something wrong?’ but the much, much more personal, ‘What’s wrong?’ as though he already knew her so well that it was taken for granted that he knew that something was.
‘What’s wrong?’ She gave him a cold stare. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she told him bitingly, ‘apart from the fact that you’ve interrupted me in the middle of some important work, practically forced your way into my home, tried to take total control of my life…’
‘The decision to accept my offer was yours,’ he pointed out easily. ‘You could always have refused.’
Liar, Christa wanted to say. He knew damn well she could not have refused it without totally losing face. As she turned her back to walk away from him she heard him saying to her, ‘You’ll need to pack at least three changes of outdoor clothes, plus a warm weatherproof coat. When we get snow…’
‘Snow?’ Christa stopped and whirled round. ‘It’s October,’ she objected derisively. ‘We don’t get snow in this country in October…’
‘Maybe not, but Wales is a different country and we do get snow, and we’re up in the mountains, high enough to have bad snow as early as September in some years.
‘Did you manage to get walking boots, by the way?’ Daniel called after her.
‘Walking boots?’
‘It was on the list of required clothing,’ he told her.
And the list had no doubt been with the brochure which she had thrown away, Christa acknowledged hollowly. What else had she omitted to discover through that foolish piece of stiff-necked pride?
‘No, I did not manage to get walking boots,’ she enunciated grimly. ‘But then I shan’t need them as I shall not be doing any walking.’
If she had expected him to respond to her challenge by arguing with her she was disappointed…As though she simply hadn’t spoken, he continued easily, ‘Well, don’t worry about it too much. There’s an excellent sports and climbing equipment shop in our local market town. You’ll like visiting it—everyone does. It’s still very much a traditional market town, with a weekly cattle auction. You’ll enjoy it…’
Christa gave him a withering look.
‘I hardly think so,’ she told him dismissively. ‘I’m a city person, I’m afraid…’ It wasn’t really true, but she was beginning to feel not just resentful but, more worryingly, slightly afraid of the way he seemed to be continuously reading her mind, second-guessing her. ‘Watching some bucolic farmers haggling over the sale of a handful of ragged sheep is hardly my idea of pleasure…
‘No?’ The dark eyebrows
rose. ‘That isn’t what I’ve heard. Apparently they’ve learned to be extremely wary of the English cloth-lady in the factories of India and Pakistan.’
Christa tensed warily. Where had he learned that?
‘Buying cloth is my job…watching other people buying sheep isn’t. Besides, I thought the ethos behind these courses was that one put aside all thoughts of work and learned, instead, to play,’ she commented mockingly.
‘Our ethos, as you call it, is to teach people, to help people to live well-balanced and fulfilling lives; to learn to acknowledge and accept that the human psyche has other needs besides the more material ones.’
‘Oh, the trauma of the poor stressed-out executive,’ Christa taunted disparagingly. ‘How great his need, how noble the role of the one who eases it for him. There’s a real world peopled by human beings who are starving…dying…’
‘Yes, I do know,’ he told her quietly.
There was a certain note in the quiet male voice which for some reason made Christa flush slightly and look away from him, as though she was the one in error…at fault.