The City-Girl Bride

Well, at least if she had something to eat now she could retreat to her room and stay there. Who knew? By tomorrow the river might be fordable again. Certainly if it was possible for a person to will that to happen then that person would be Maggie.

Skirting the large table in the middle of the room, she looked disparagingly at the untidy mess of books and papers cluttering it. An old-fashioned chair complete with a snoozing cat was pulled up in front of the Aga, not a bright shiny new Aga, Maggie noticed, but an ancient chipped cream one. The whole house had a rundown air about it, a sad shabbiness that evoked feelings in her she didn’t want to examine.

Maggie had spent the early years of her childhood being dragged from one set of rented lodgings to another by her mother after the break-up of her parents’ marriage. Every time her mother had met a new man they had moved, and inevitably, when the romance ended, they had moved again. In some people such a life might have created a deep-seated need for stability and the comfort and reassurance of a close loving relationship with a partner, in Maggie it had created instead a ferocious determination to make herself completely and totally independent.

This house reminded her of those days and that life and she didn’t like it. Nothing in Maggie’s life now—the life she had created for herself—was shabby or needy, nothing was impermanent or entered into impulsively without cautious and careful thought. Everything she surrounded herself with was like her: shiny, clean, groomed, planned, ordered and controlled.

Or rather like she normally was, she corrected herself, as she looked down at her unshod feet in their expensive designer tights. Maggie never went barefoot—not even in the privacy of her own home—and most certainly never in anyone else’s home. To her being barefoot was surely synonymous with being poor, and vulnerable, and either of those things made her feel weak and afraid and angry with herself for feeling that way.

Quickly she went to open the fridge door. She was becoming far too dangerously introspective. As she looked into the fridge her eyes widened.

Finn pushed open the back door and removed his boots. The paddock was a quagmire of mud, partially due to the activities of the ducks and partially to the recent downpour. He had had the devil of a time catching one of the bantams, and had even got to the point of consigning the little wretch to the devil and the nightly marauding fox, but in the end his inherent concern for its safety had won out and he had persevered, finally managing to lock it up safely.

He was cold and hungry and his afternoon’s unscheduled meeting with the alpaca breeder had meant that he hadn’t made the chilli he had intended to prepare for his supper. He had an evening’s worth of paperwork in front of him, which he wasn’t looking forward to. Perhaps he was making life harder for himself than it needed to be by refusing to install a computer. It would certainly make his paperwork easier.

As he kicked off his muddy boots he could see Maggie staring into the open fridge.

‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded as he walked across to her.

‘Everything in here’s raw,’ Maggie responded in consternation. Like him, she was hungry, and had somehow been expecting…well, if not the kind of meal that would be served at one of London’s stylish restaurants, then at least a pizza.

An answering frown of disapproval furrowed Finn’s own forehead, as he listened to her.

‘What else did you expect? This is a farm, not a supermarket,’ he told her dryly. ‘We live at the beginning of the food chain, not at its end.’

‘But it all needs cooking,’ Maggie protested. She was looking at him with a mixture of hauteur and disdain that made Finn long to shake her.

‘Look, this isn’t some fancy city restaurant; of course it needs cooking.’

To his astonishment Maggie slammed the fridge door shut and stepped back from it. ‘I’ve decided that I’m not hungry,’ she told him coolly.

‘Well, no, I don’t suppose you are. You look as though you don’t live on much more than a few overrated radicchio leaves,’ Finn told her unkindly.

Maggie wasn’t sure what infuriated her most, his contempt for her figure or his contempt for her lifestyle. And anyway, how did a man like him know to name the City’s current of-the-moment salad ingredient? Maggie wondered sourly.

‘Well, you may not be hungry, but I most certainly am,’ he told her, reaching past her to re-open the fridge door.

At such close quarters Maggie could actually feel the male heat coming off his body as well as see its unwantedly disturbing male strength. What on earth was the matter with her? She had never been the kind of woman who had been interested in or affected by the sight of a well-defined muscular torso. And he had the kind of facial bone structure that any male model would pay a plastic surgeon thousands for, she decided unkindly, driven by a raw need to somehow punish him for making her aware of him at all, even if it was only in the privacy of her own thoughts. He was all taut male planes and angles, and as for his eyes—surely it was impossible for a man with such dark brown hair to have such shockingly dangerous steel-blue eyes?

‘Changed your mind?’ she heard Finn asking her.

‘What…? I…?’ As she started to stammer with unfamiliar self-consciousness she wondered how on earth he could have guessed that she was unexpectedly being forced to revise her first impression of him as a man she found physically unappealing, despite his good looks.

‘You look hungry,’ Finn explained patiently.

She looked hungry! Maggie felt her face start to burn, and then realised that Finn couldn’t possibly mean what she had thought he meant, that he couldn’t possibly know what she was thinking and feeling…yes, feeling…For a man she hardly knew—a man she didn’t want to know. What on earth was happening to her? The thoughts she was having—they were…they were impossible, inadmissible, unthinkable. But as they stood facing one another, with the fridge door open between them, the most peculiar feeling was sweeping over Maggie, an odd sort of light-headedness combined with an awareness of Finn as a man in the most shockingly intimate sort of way, so shocking, in fact, that—Maggie shook her head, trying to dispel her riotously erotic thoughts, her face growing pink at their tem

erity and inventiveness. This was totally alien to her. She had never before imagined, dreamed, nor wanted to imagine or dream such things, such needs, such desires. Even the air she was breathing seemed to be filled with a sense of urgency and excitement—of expectation, almost—that she was totally at a loss to understand. It was almost as though someone or something outside herself was forcing her to see Finn in a different light…

Finn’s eyes narrowed assessingly as he saw Maggie’s pupils dilate. She had started to breathe more quickly, her lips parting, her breasts rising and falling in a way that made it impossible for him not to be aware of her femininity. He had the most extraordinarily intense desire to close the fridge door and to take her in his arms and…

Grimly he turned away from her.

‘I intended to cook a chilli for my own supper; there’ll be more than enough for two.’

He sounded curtly dismissive, as though he was secretly hoping she would refuse. Well, tough—why should she? She wasn’t going to go to bed supperless just to please some arrogant, impossible man. No way.

‘I take it you won’t be cooking dinner wearing that?’ she said tartly, determined to wrest control of the situation into her own domain as she flicked a deliberately disparaging glance at his ancient coat.