LITMIR.BIZ

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and was struck by how tall he was. It was unusual for her to be faced with a man who wasn’t more or less on her eye level.

      ‘I’ve come for a book,’ he said, not following her so that she was obliged to turn and look at him, which she found exasperating—not lease because if she didn’t hurry she’d be late, collecting Jade from the child-minder.

      ‘I’d deduced as much,’ she said with stiff politeness. ‘People who come to libraries are generally looking for books.’ So this, she thought, was the man who had succeeded in throwing their calm little village into an excited frenzy. Viewed objectively, she could understand why. He was good-looking, presumably rolling in money and, if the gossip-mongers were to be believed, single. Look a bit harder, she could have told them, and they would glimpse the trail of broken hearts he had left in his wake.

      ‘And generally,’ he said dryly, ‘they expect slightly better service. I don’t even know your name.’

      ‘I’m Miss Turner,’ Sophie told him, without bothering to inject any cordiality into her voice, ‘and, as I said, the library’s closed.’

      Surely you can take a few minutes to locate a book for me. Something on the history of this place.’

      ‘It’s too small to have a history. If you want history, try talking to Reverend Davis.’ She spun around, fished the key out of her coat pocket and walked briskly towards the door, switching off the remaining lights as she went. She didn’t think that he would pursue the conversation if faced with the sobering reality that she might just lock him in, and she was right. What she hadn’t expected was to find him next to her and standing so close that his presence seemed claustrophobic. She was not, by nature, a tactile person. She disliked having her personal space infringed on, and automatically she drew back slightly to put distance between them.

      ‘You’re the first person I’ve met who hasn’t extended the long arm of welcome,’ he said, meeting her eyes and somehow managing to keep them on his face.

      ‘You mean here or in life generally?’

      ‘Has anyone ever told you that you look nothing like a librarian?’

      ‘Much as I would love to stand here, chatting aimlessly to you, Mr Wallace, I’m afraid I really must go now.’ She stepped outside and slammed the door, turning the key once then testing to make sure that it was locked. Not, she thought, that it was likely to be broken into if the door remained open all night long. Ashdown was low on crime. How could you be a committed thug, she thought, if the person you were mugging had tea with your mum once a week and used to babysit when you were a toddler? Difficult.

      She started to walk towards her car, which was parked across the road from the library, and he followed her.

      ‘I guess,’ he said, as she slipped her key into the car door and unlocked it, ‘you’ve heard that I’ve bought Ashdown House?’

      ‘I guess I have,’ Sophie agreed, not enlarging on the observation. ‘Well, goodbye. Hope you have some success, finding out what you want to know about the place.’ She pulled open the car door, slid into the driver’s seat, pulled her coat around her so that it didn’t get trapped in the car door after she had shut it—which it had an annoying tendency to do—and started the engine.

      He rapped against the window, and she irritably rolled it down.

      ‘Can I ask you something?’ he enquired, half leaning into the car, and with a shiver of inexplicable alarm she pulled back, her heart beating furiously. Something about her reaction to him unsettled her. She liked men to keep their distance. She purposefully gave off strong signals that she was unavailable, and she expected them to steer a clear course away from her. Gregory Wallace was fast impressing her as a man who had little respect for other people’s signals—the sort of man who blithely went precisely where he wanted to go and ignored any protests that might get in his way.

      ‘What?’

      ‘To what do I owe your remarkable show of antagonism?’

      ‘My gene pool,’ Sophie told him curtly.

      ‘In other words, you’re like this with everyone?’

      ‘In other words, I have to go now so kindly remove yourself from my car.’

      He stood back. Immediately she wound the window up, manoeuvred the car out of its parking space and raced towards the child-minder’s house. Just before she turned the corner she glanced into her rear-view mirror to see whether he was still there, but he had gone.

      She was half an hour late, and when she arrived she found Jade, drawing intently in the lounge, with a stack of paper and crayons around her, happily unaware of her mother’s delay.

      ‘How has she been?’ she asked Sylvia.

      ‘A doll. As usual. Collected her from school at one, and she was full of it. Louise Dodwell has asked her over to tea on Friday and she’s thrilled to bits.’

      Sophie smiled, and thanked God for the blessing of this small village where everyone knew her daughter and knew how to cope with her disability. How would she have managed otherwise? Oh, of course, she would have found a way, but it was so much easier to be surrounded by people who knew and understood and accommodated.

      She approached Jade and spent a few seconds breathing in her presence, quietly treasuring the miniature copy of herself. It was a shame, she often thought, that her parents were not alive to see Jade. Then she walked directly in front of her daughter, stopped and spoke clearly and slowly, using hand movements as necessary to ask her how her day had been. She received a series of hand movements in response.

      ‘She’s not handicapped,’ the specialist had patiently told her years ago, when Sophie had first noticed that her daughter didn’t seem to respond to sounds the way she should have. ‘She’s deaf. Not profoundly. She can hear, but sounds are a distant rumble and make no sense to her. But deafness isn’t life-threatening, Sophie. You’ll need to take time, but you’ll be surprised at how well Jade will cope with her disability.’

      Everyone in the village knew that Jade was deaf, and because all the children had grown up with the knowledge they always made sure that they were standing in front of her when they spoke. They were curiously gentle with her and from day one at school Jessie, Jade’s teacher, had learnt basic hand movements and had taught them to her class, turning the lesson into fun so that gradually the children began to mix their words with movements.

      Sophie herself had read everything there had been to read on the subject from the time the diagnosis had been confirmed. She had taught herself how to talk, using her hands, and she had started fund-raising in Ashdown and further afield, money that would go to national children’s charities. All the time she was also relentlessly reliving the despair of her broken marriage.

      In time, she had stopped thinking that Jade’s deafness was some sort of obscure punishment for being a failure at holding her marriage together, but thoughts of Alan still left a taste of bitterness in her mouth.

      She tried not to think of him, but she knew that she would never again trust a man, never again open herself up to be hurt. In the space of five years she had grown up and shed her youthful vulnerabilities, like a snake that has shed its outer skin.

      That made it all the more infuriating to find, as she lay in bed that night, that at the back of her mind there were suddenly images of Gregory Wallace, which flitted about like mosquitoes on a hot night, buzzing in the darkness, waiting to feed.

      Hopefully, she wouldn’t lay eyes on him again or, at least, if she did it would be only in passing and from the opposite side of a street. She could always avert her eyes and pretend that she hadn’t seen him. It would be difficult since he stood out in Ashdown like a Martian at a tea party but not totally impossible. Really, he would be around very little. Tycoons had no part in village life. Their bases were always in London and the country house was the status symbol they escaped to once a month if they could spare the time.

      When, the following day, she looked up at a little before twelve and saw him

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