LITMIR.BIZ

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derisive snort. ‘If I hadn’t turned up you’d have been damned lucky to be alive right now.’

      The brutality of his harsh words sent a shiver running through her, but Maggie refused to let him see it. Instead she did what she had trained herself to do, which was to focus on her ultimate goal and ignore everything else.

      ‘How long will it be before the river goes down?’ she asked him. ‘If we wait here?’

      ‘Wait…?’ Finn couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice. ‘Lady, a river like this could take days to subside,’ he told her, impatient of her naivety. People like her shouldn’t be let loose in the country. They had as much idea of how dangerous nature could be as a child had of crossing a motorway.

      ‘Days…?’

      In his driving mirror Finn saw the panic flaring briefly in Maggie’s eyes, and against his will he wondered what had caused it. What the hell was he doing, getting curious about her?

      ‘How…how many days?’ Maggie asked, fighting not to betray her concern.

      Finn shrugged. ‘That depends. The last time we had a flood like this it was well over a week.’

      ‘A week…’ Now there was no hiding the despair in Maggie’s voice. And, if the road really did lead only to the man’s farm, it looked as if she had no choice but to spend that week with him.

      They were almost at the top of the hill now, and automatically she turned round in her seat to look back the way they had come. The Tarmac glistened wetly, a narrow black ribbon against the autumn landscape, and as for her car—she could just about see its roof above the floodwater as it lay at an angle, wedged against a tree.

      With the initial shock of what had happened over, Maggie was filled with unfamiliar panic and anxiety. Her clothes, her mobile phone, her bag—with her money and credit cards and all those taken-for-granted things that reaffirmed who and what she was—had gone, swept away from her by the flood with her car. She was, she recognized with stomach-dropping resentment, totally dependent on her rescuer.

      In his rearview mirror Finn carefully monitored the emotions shadowing Maggie’s eyes. He knew how to read people, and how to second-guess their thoughts; city life had taught him that. City life, like this city woman. What was a woman like this one doing in such an out-of-the-way country area? Everything about her screamed that she was not a country-lover. And every instinct he had was telling him that she was trouble.

      Finn knew danger when he saw it, right enough, but for some reason he couldn’t understand he had an overwhelming urge to go ahead and walk right into it, he recognised, with a grim disbelief at his own totally uncharacteristic behaviour as he heard himself saying, ‘If you’ve got friends in the area you can ring them from the farm to tell them what’s happened.’

      What the hell was he doing, practically inviting her to involve him in her life? Finn asked himself angrily. There was no way he wanted to be there. She irritated and antagonised him to the point where…To the point where he just knew he had to take her in his arms and see if that deliciously full soft mouth felt as good as it looked.

      Finn clenched his jaw. What the hell was happening to him? To think…to imagine…to want…He shook his head, appalled by the sheer inappropriateness of his unwelcome thoughts.

      ‘I’m not visiting friends,’ Maggie denied tersely.

      Finn waited, expecting her to elaborate, and then when she didn’t wondered why he should find her refusal to confide in him so intensely aggravating. By rights he should have been pleased that she was so determined to keep her distance from him.

      Maggie could feel herself starting to bristle with irritation as she recognised that her rescuer was expecting her to tell him what she was doing in Shropshire. As though she was a child being called to account by an adult. Well, her business was none of his, and besides, the very nature of Maggie’s career meant that secrecy and discretion were of prime importance—so much so that they were now second nature to her. Anyway, why should she divulge her very private reasons for being in the area to this…this farmer?

      They had crested the hill now, and the lane narrowed even more ahead of them, meandering through pastureland towards a pretty Tudor farmhouse. A small herd of animals grazing in one of the fields was disturbed by the Land Rover and raced away from the fence, capturing Maggie’s bemused attention.

      ‘What are those? Llamas?’ she asked, unable to check her curiosity.

      ‘No, llamas are much larger. These are alpaca. I keep them for their wool.’

      ‘Their wool?’ Maggie repeated, watching as the small herd stopped and one of its braver members craned its long neck to stare at them.

      ‘Yes, their wool,’ Finn repeated, adding sardonically, ‘It’s highly prized and very expensive—and I wouldn’t be surprised if your ‘designer’ hasn’t used it in his clothes.’

      The way he’d said the word ‘designer’ was so challenging that Maggie itched to retaliate, but before she could do so he had put the Land Rover in a higher gear and switched on the radio, so that any attempt she might have made to talk would have been drowned out by the sound of the announcer.

      ‘Sounds like we’re not the only ones to be caught out by this freak storm,’ Finn commented.

      ‘Thank you,’ Maggie told him tartly. ‘But I don’t need a translation. I do speak English.’

      The auction was in six days time—the river had to have gone back to normal by then. She wished now that she had not given herself this extra time, but she had hoped to be able to convince the agent, when she talked with him face to face, to accept her offer for the Dower House prior to the auction taking place. She was fully prepared to pay, and to pay generously to secure the house. Anything to see her grandmother smile again.

      They were driving into the farmyard now—in the paddock beyond it Maggie could see hens scratching in the grass and ducks on the pond. An idyllic scene, no doubt, to some people. But not to her, no way, and especially not when it came inhabited by a man like the one who was now turning round in his seat towards her.

      ‘Let’s just get one thing straight,’ he was telling her grimly, ‘I don’t like this situation any more than you do, and, moreover, I was not the one who stupidly drove my car into a river which was plainly in full flood. Neither was I the one who made a wrong turning and ended up—’

      ‘There was no flood when I tried to cross the ford,’ Maggie interrupted him sharply. ‘It just seemed to come out of nowhere—as though…’ As though some malign fate had been waiting for her, she wanted to say, but of course she was far too sensible to make such a silly comment. ‘And, since you apparently own this wretched place, I should have thought you would have a legal obligation to warn motorists of just how dangerous it is to use the supposed ford.’

      Ignoring her mistaken belief that he owned the farm—this was no time to become involved in minor details—Finn barred his teeth savagely in an unfriendly smile whilst he reminded Maggie unkindly, ‘Since this road is private, and on privately owned land, there isn’t any need.’

      ‘That’s all very well,’ Maggie countered immediately, ‘but perhaps you could explain to me just how a person is supposed to know that, if there isn’t a sign to tell them so?’

      ‘There doesn’t need to be a sign,’ Finn told her through gritted teeth. ‘It’s perfectly plain from any map that this is virtually a single-track road which leads to a dead end. Women,’ he exploded sardonically. ‘Why is it they seem pathologically incapable of reading maps?’

      Maggie had had enough—all the more so because of the small inner logical voice that was trying to tell her unwantedly that her adversary had a point.

      ‘I can read a map perfectly well, thank you, and I can read human beings even better. You are the rudest, most arrogant, most…irritating man I have ever met,’ she told him forcefully.

      ‘And you

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