She passed him without looking up into his face, walking with careful measured steps to Mrs Cox’s front door and slipping inside quietly like a small ethereal shadow. As the door closed behind her, Blade remained staring at it for a long, long time, and when, eventually, he sat back in the car his face was wet and his fists tightly clenched as he drove them against the hard unyielding dashboard time and time again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IF ANYONE had told Amy that she would laugh again, especially in Blade’s presence, she wouldn’t have believed them, but that was exactly what she found herself doing five days after the fateful visit to Blade’s cottage.
The intervening days had settled themselves into a pattern almost without her being aware of it. Blade arrived mid-morning to work in the overgrown jungle of a back garden, where he remained until after she had left for work. From the vastly improved appearance of the front garden she assumed he moved there once she was safely out of the way to avoid any chance of their meeting. It hurt, but not as much as seeing him would, she reminded herself grimly night after long night when she lay awake tossing and turning into the early hours.
If she thought about it, it frightened her that she barely recognised herself any more. The old Amy had been very young and childish, painfully insecure and with a need to be loved that had been almost obsessive. The new creature born of all the anguish and hurt was different … She didn’t know if this new woman was better, she only knew she was different.
John had said much the same thing when he had called in the restaurant the day before for a late lunch. She found that she was suffering more for Blade than herself, which gave her the courage to go on. He, at least, would have the chance of a long and full life once he had put the bitterness concerning their marriage behind him, but it was the final irony that the new Amy would have been a tower of strength to him if things had been different, she thought painfully. When she thought back, in the peace and quiet of the long night hours, there had been so many times when he had arrived home tired and drained with the demands that his huge empire made on him. He drove himself too hard. She nodded to herself in the shadowed darkness. But the chance to tell him was lost now.
She had just returned to her room on the morning of the fifth day with a cup of coffee and some toast, made hastily before Blade arrived, when she heard his deep rich voice with its American accent greet Mrs Cox in the kitchen. Her heart thudded into her mouth, but she was getting used to that now, she reminded herself firmly, and then for a few minutes all was silence and tranquillity.
The uproar, when it happened, was sudden and intense and at the same moment as she became aware of Blade swearing loudly and profusely, Amy heard Mrs Cox calling her name frantically. She took the stairs two at a time, thankful she had dressed early in jeans and T-shirt, to enter the kitchen in a burst of adrenalin that stopped abruptly at the sight that met her eyes.
‘It was a swarm of bees,’ Mrs Cox gabbled quickly. ‘He must have disturbed them.’
‘A swarm of bees?’ She repeated the little woman’s words vacantly as she gazed at Blade, big and heart-stoppingly attractive, but undeniably rattled as he glared at Mrs Cox ferociously, his bare torso and legs pinpricked with red.
‘There was no need to cause such a fuss,’ he ground out irritably through clenched teeth as he raked back his hair harshly. ‘A few bee stings never hurt anyone.’
‘Unless you’re allergic.’ Mrs Cox was determined to make a drama out of a crisis. ‘My sister’s boy nearly died with just one. Terrible time of it he had. Swelled up like a balloon.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Cox.’ Blade’s face was a study in self control. ‘But I shall be perfectly all right, I do assure you.’
‘I think we’ve got some cream somewhere.’ Whether it was hysteria born of anti-climax or the sight of Blade totally out of his depth for once Amy didn’t know, but the desire to laugh was growing dangerously by the second. He was so furious at being caught out, so enraged that the small insects had had the temerity to attack him, that she had to bite her lower lip until it drew blood in an effort to keep control, and Mrs Cox didn’t help, continuing to describe her nephew’s brush with death at the hands of a bee with enormous relish that increased at Blade’s lack of a suitably awed response.
‘Here we are.’ As Amy fished the tube of cream and antihistamine pills out of the first aid kit in the back of the big pantry, she motioned for Blade to sit down on the kitchen stool. ‘I’ll just bathe the stings with cold water first and make sure none is left in,’ she said quietly, ‘before I put the cream on.’