LITMIR.BIZ

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proposed to her … stumbling over the words a little, making her aware of both how much she liked him and how vulnerable he was. He had wanted to buy her a ring, but in the end they had decided to save the money instead. At twenty-four, she felt she was too mature to need the visible trappings of their commitment to one another. Only, recently that commitment hadn’t seemed quite so strong, on either of their parts.

      The sudden sound of someone banging on the outer door made her jump. She got up uncertainly and hurried towards the kitchen door, opening it and stepping into the porch.

      As she reached for the outer door, the knock sounded again, demanding impatiently that she hurry.

      She fumbled with the lock and then turned the handle. The wind caught the door, pushing it back so hard it almost knocked her over, and a very Australian and irritable male voice proclaimed ‘At last! Thank heaven for that.’

      Cousin Val … it had to be. But by no strength of the imagination was Cousin Val what she had expected … what any of them had expected.

      ‘This is the Llewellyn farm, isn’t it?’ the Australian voice demanded, and Sorrel nodded. Her own voice seemed to have deserted her for some reason. Temporary paralysis caused by shock, she told herself, as she stepped back into the kitchen. The shock of discovering that Cousin Val was not, as they had all supposed, a woman, but a man … Very much a man, Sorrel acknowledged as he followed her inside the kitchen, shrugging off a snow-covered sheepskin jacket as he did so, and then bending to tug off his wellingtons.

      ‘I thought I wasn’t going to make it,’ he told her calmly. ‘I had to abandon my car way down the bottom of the lane. Fact is, I had no idea there was going to be this kind of weather.’ He looked round the kitchen and frowned, picking up her tension.

      ‘Is something wrong? You did get my letter?’

      ‘Oh, yes, we got your letter,’ Sorrel told him bitterly. ‘But we assumed, because you signed it Val, that the Val was short for Valerie.’

      ‘Valerie?’ He stared at her. The snow had melted on his head, revealing thick black hair, well-cut and clinging damply now to his skull.

      As he stood up, she realised how tall he was, how very broad-shouldered, even without the enveloping sheepskin.

      ‘We thought you were a girl,’ Sorrel told him tensely.

      He gave her a slow look. His eyes, she realised, were grey—cool and hard as granite.

      ‘Did you, now?’ He seemed faintly amused. ‘I suppose I should have thought of that. The Val is short for Valentine … a family name on my mother’s side. She was part Russian. So you thought I was a girl. Well, as you can see, I’m not. It doesn’t matter, does it?’

      Doesn’t matter? she thought! Just wait until he knew!

      ‘As a matter of fact, it does,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘You see, this farmhouse is no longer occupied and we didn’t realise you were planning to visit us until it was too late to let you know what a bad time you’d picked—’

      ‘What do you mean, it isn’t occupied? You’re living here, aren’t you?’

      He seemed more annoyed than concerned, and for some reason that annoyed her.

      He had walked past her without so much as a ‘by your leave’, and was standing in front of the range. The small canvas bag he had brought in with him was still on the floor, snow melting on it.

      ‘I left the rest of my stuff in the car. How long is this snow likely to last?’

      ‘I don’t know!’ Sorrel told him grittily. She had seldom experienced the antagonism towards anyone that she was experiencing now, and never without undue provocation. So what was it about this man, with his air of easy self-assurance, that so rubbed her up the wrong way? She could feel herself bristling like a defensive cat confronted by a large dog. She didn’t want him invading her space. She didn’t want him anywhere near her, she realised.

      ‘Mm … Well, someone must know. Where’s the rest of the family?’

      ‘Not here,’ Sorrel told him succinctly, and had the pleasure of seeing him momentarily disconcerted.

      CHAPTER TWO

      APART from the hissing of the kettle which Sorrel had filled automatically and set on the hob, the kitchen was silent with tension. Then Val broke the tension, saying curtly, ‘Let me get this straight. Your parents don’t have the room to put me up right now, so, thinking that I was a young woman, they press-ganged you into coming up here to welcome me and stay with me until such time as your twin brothers go back to university.’

      ‘I didn’t say I was press-ganged,’ Sorrel said stiffly.

      ‘You didn’t have to,’ came the dry response. ‘It was written all over you.’

      ‘Oh, I see. You only need to take one look at a person and you know immediately what they’re thinking, is that it?’ she snapped at him, and then was appalled with herself. How on earth had she allowed him to get so dangerously under her skin that he could provoke her this easily?

      Dangerously under her skin? A tingle of apprehension shivered over her body.

      ‘It seemed the most sensible solution. If we’d had the slightest idea that you—’

      ‘Yeah, I know. Nothing would have persuaded you to come up here if you’d known you were going to have to spend three days alone with a man. Hell, I thought modern women were supposed to be fully emancipated. Let me tell you, lady, in Australia it’s the male of the species who needs to protect himself from the female, not the other way around, especially if he’s made himself a bit of money.’

      ‘Really?’ Sorrel looked down her nose at him. ‘Am I to presume that you’re speaking from personal experience or merely hearsay?’

      There was a moment’s silence, during which he gave her a lightning look of such chilling intensity that she almost shivered. She had struck a nerve there, no doubt about it, and privately she was astounded by her own recklessness. It was completely out of character for her to behave like this.

      ‘Well, now,’ he told her in a calm drawl, ‘to use an American phrase, that’s for me to know and you—’

      ‘And you can keep the knowledge to yourself,’ Sorrel interrupted him, hot flags of temper burning in her cheeks. She wasn’t used to men who treated her like this: men who dominated their surroundings by their height and breadth, men who practically oozed sexuality in a way that was positively unnerving.

      The kettle reached the boil and started to sing. Sorrel reached for it automatically, and then cried out as she forgot about the metal handle and scorched her skin.

      Instantly Valentine was at her side, moving with surprising speed for such a large man, whipping up a cloth and removing the kettle from her burned hand, rushing her over to the sink to swish icy-cold water over her hot, blistered skin.

      She tried to pull away, to regain control of the situation, but his body trapped her against the sink. She was a tall girl—taller, in fact, than Andrew and her father, but Valentine was at least a head taller. He made her feel fragile and vulnerable in a way that made her heart thump—or was that just the effect of the adrenalin released by her pain?

      ‘Have you anything to put on this?’ he asked her tersely.

      Sorrel nodded. ‘There’s a medicine chest upstairs in the bathroom. I’ll get it. It will be quicker,’ she added, when she saw he was going to object. ‘It’s only a small burn.’

      Once upstairs, she refrained from giving in to the cowardly impulse to shut herself in the bedroom and stay there. Her mother had never dreamed of this outcome when she had cosily announced that Sorrel and her cousin could share the large double bed.

      Valentine would simply have to sleep downstairs. But on what? There were only a couple of easy chairs in the

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