She fought desperately against the effect he was having on her and said shakily, ‘If I’m supposed to find that admission flattering, I’ve got news for you.’
‘Don’t say it,’ he broke in, taunting her. ‘You’d only be perjuring yourself.’
As the hot, indignant words of denial leaped to her tongue, he added smoothly, ‘Your body’s giving you away, Rue, and body language speaks far louder than any amount of words.’
She realised too late that what he said was true. Her nightshirt, plain serviceable cotton though it was, did very little to conceal her awareness of him as a man.
‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed,’ she told him tersely, turning away from him and towards the door.
She was half-way there before she remembered that he still hadn’t told her which was his room, and as she hesitated he seemed to read her mind, because he said softly, ‘Why don’t I just let you find out for yourself which one is mine?’
She lost her temper then, her self-control already frayed not just by his presence but by the aftershock of the fire, and she turned on him and said fiercely, ‘The only reason I’d want to know which room is yours, Neil, is that so I can avoid going within half a mile of it.’
She saw from his face that she had angered him, and, while the atmosphere between them tensed to the point of danger, she knew that it was too late to recall her hasty words.
‘That wasn’t how you felt the other morning,’ he reminded her. ‘You’d have been only too willing for me to take you where we stood.’
Much as Rue longed to fling an icy retort at him, there was nothing that she could say, no defence she could make. That knowledge shone from her eyes as she turned to give him one last look, and unaware of what she was betraying to him, she saw his own eyes darken a little, and the anger ease out of them as he took a half-step towards her. But she had had enough trauma for one night, and before he could come within arm’s reach of her she was out of the room and half-way across the hall.
She deliberately avoided the room which had once been hers, knowing that Neil intended to use it for his mother, and instead chose one of the other bedrooms, opening almost the first door she came to. Having reassured herself that it was unoccupied, she went over to close the curtains and then walked into the en-suite bathroom. It was only as she did so, and saw the door in the opposite wall of the bathroom, that she remembered that this was one of the rooms that shared a bathroom with its neighbour. Not that it mattered; after all, there was only Neil and herself in the house, and he was almost bound to be using the master bedroom, which she knew was down at the far end of the corridor.
She bathed quickly, letting the hot water clean her skin and soothe her tense muscles. The thought of putting her grubby nightshirt back on was not a particularly pleasant one, but caution insisted that she did so. In the morning she would have to ask Neil to drive her over to her house and bring some clothes back for her, much as she hated the thought of being further indebted to him. And then, as she dried herself and pulled on her nightshirt over her head, it suddenly struck her that in the morning she might not have a home.
She had just crawled under the blankets and turned off the light when she heard a brief tap on her bedroom door. Before she could say anything, it opened and Neil came in, carrying a glass of water.
‘I’ve brought you a sleeping tablet,’ he told her briefly, putting the glass of water down beside the bed. ‘No arguments,’ he insisted, when she opened her mouth to tell him she didn’t want it. ‘I need to get some sleep tonight, even if you don’t. I’m still feeling jet-lagged.’
‘Jet-lagged?’ Her eyebrows rose. ‘This is the first time I’ve heard of anyone suffering from jet-lag after a trip to London.’
‘I agree,’ he told her grimly, quite obviously disliking her sarcasm, ‘but as it happens the jet-lag I’m talking about was incurred on a flight back across the Atlantic from New York.’
Numbly Rue swallowed the tablet and took several sips of water.
‘I had a business meeting there,’ he told her, almost savagely. ‘In fact, I should still be there.’ He was looking at her almost as though he disliked her, Rue realised on a sudden shock of pain. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me why I came back,’ he demanded rawly, ‘putting my system through hell, not to mention those of the executives that I took with me? They weren’t too pleased about a round trip to New York and back, which meant almost twenty-four hours in the air. You see,’ he added almost conversationally, ‘I had this odd idea that you might be missing me, that you might be eagerly waiting for me to come back so that we could pick up where we left off the other morning, instead of which…’ he went on, his voice grating harshly against her sensitive ears, ‘I find you on the point of getting yourself burnt alive.’
Rue winced
at the picture his words drew.
‘But you don’t want me, do you, Rue? It was all just a game.’
A game? If only he knew—but he couldn’t know. She mustn’t let him know. Tiredly she told him, ‘If I wanted you, I’d be sleeping in your room, wouldn’t I, instead of one as far away from yours as I could make it?’
He gave her an odd look then and seemed about to say something, but at that moment Horatio came wandering into the room, demanding attention not from her, Rue recognised, but from Neil, to whom he suddenly seemed to have attached himself. Neil saw her look of surprise and said derisively, ‘Unlike his mistress, this dog seems to know who his real friends are. Goodnight, Rue,’ he added. ‘I won’t wish you sweet dreams.’
After he had gone, her mind throbbed with a hundred unanswered questions. Why was he implying that he had rushed back from New York just to be with her, when they both knew that it couldn’t possibly be true? Why was he pretending that his desire for her was so strong that it intruded into his business life—or did he think that she was silly enough and vain enough to believe what he was saying to her? Did he think that he could flatter her into his bed? Didn’t he realise that he had no need to flatter or beguile her, that he simply had to touch her, to look at her? Her thoughts grew cloudy as the sleeping tablet took effect, her eyelids suddenly so heavy that she had to close her eyes.
Rue opened her eyes slowly and reluctantly, stretching luxuriously as she did so, conscious of having slept deeply and very well. As she looked round the room for a clock, vague, unsettling memories of what must have been dreams made her forehead pucker in a small frown. She had dreamed that the fire was about to engulf her, and her terror had made her scream out sharply. In her dream, strong arms had lifted her out of the way of danger, cradling her against a hard male body, holding her safe, comforting her. As she sat up in the large double bed, she saw a neat pile of her clothes waiting for her in a chair.
Neil must have been over to the house and brought them for her. She drew back the covers to get out of bed, and then stiffened as her glance fell on the pillow next to her own. It bore the imprint of someone’s head.
Shock trembled through her. Had those arms that held her not been merely a figment of her imagination, after all? Had Neil actually dared to take advantage of her drug-induced sleep and share this bed with her? For what purpose? she derided herself as she got unsteadily to her feet. Neil was hardly so likely to be starved of female company that he needed to make love to a half-comatose woman, especially a woman who had already shown herself to be more than willing to have him as her lover.
Had Neil slept there? She reached out and touched her fingers to the indented pillow, moving them gently over the shape of his head, tiny tremors of desire stirring her stomach. Dream or reality? She couldn’t deny the fact that those arms wrapped round her body had brought her comfort and warmth, soothing away all her fears. She trembled a little more as she wondered what it would be like to spend all her nights wrapped in Neil’s arms, and then told herself that she was being a fool to waste her time daydreaming about something that was never likely to happen.
She walked over to the window and stared outside. To judge from the height of the sun, it must be almost lunchtime. She had slept away almost an entire morning, something totally unheard of, and yet she couldn’t deny that she felt rested and refreshed from her sleep.
From the window she could see as far as her own cottage, its rooftop just about visible over the high wall which separated it from the field, and her stomach began to churn nervously. How much damage had the fire done? Had it reached as far as the cottage? Had it destroyed the barn completely, and what about her drying shed?