The Last Woman He'd Ever Date (Mills & Boon Modern Tempted) Read online

  Bad mistake. As an anti-smile strategy it worked for him but she found her own imagination running wild with the mental picture of some over-the-top confrontation between Hal and Sir Robert as he parked his motorcycle on the marble floor of the entrance hall. The miscreant—in black leathers rather than armour—swearing a fierce oath to return and claim his rightful place. A modern version of the dispossessed knight.

  No.

  Really.

  Why on earth would he do that? Besides, he’d already told her it wasn’t that incident which had got him banned from the estate.

  On the other hand he hadn’t bothered to deny it. And why else would he ride in through the front door, if not to make some statement of intent.

  ‘It’s a bit of a cliché isn’t it?’ she suggested, pushing him to tell her what had really happened.

  ‘Clichés are what happen in moments of high drama, Claire.’

  True her own small drama had contained just about every cliché in the book, but it was his story she was interested in.

  ‘What drama?’ she asked. ‘How high?’

  More importantly, who had he made that promise to? His mother? Sir Robert? Or just himself? Who was still around who might know?

  Her mother almost certainly, but they’d have to be on speaking terms before she could ask her.

  His mother…

  ‘How is your mother?’ she asked.

  He glanced at her, a slight frown buckling his forehead as, unsurprisingly he hadn’t followed her thought processes. ‘She’s well enough. She’s living in Spain.’

  ‘Will we see her? What does she think of you buying the estate?’

  ‘She doesn’t know.’

  ‘Oh.’ Weirder and weirder… ‘She was always very kind to me. I missed her when she left.’ She looked at him, but his expression gave nothing away. ‘After your father died.’

  His mouth tightened. ‘It was an accident waiting to happen. The towpath on a foggy night is no place for a drunk.’

  ‘Hal…’ she warned, with a touch to his arm, reminding him that they weren’t alone. Curling her fingers back when he looked across at her. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. About your dad.’

  ‘Why would you? You were never around when he came home after closing time.’

  ‘No.’ Had he been a violent drunk, or a sullen one? She restrained a shiver. ‘Even so it was a shocking thing.’

  ‘Why don’t you say what’s really on your mind, Claire? Where was I when my mother needed me?’

  ‘No… At least I assumed the ban was still in place,’ she said. ‘I begged my mother to speak to Sir Robert. It seemed so cruel.’

  ‘Did you?’ Was that a smile? Stupid question, her heart rate had gone through the roof… ‘And did she?’

  She shook her head. ‘She said I didn’t understand. That it wasn’t that simple. That you’d never come back.’

  ‘How wrong can you be?’ He took the slip road off the ring road. ‘Have you told her?’

  ‘That you’ve bought Cranbrook Park? No.’

  ‘Mothers. Always the last to know anything…’ He shrugged. ‘Well, when you do you can inform her that she was wrong on both accounts. It wasn’t the ban that kept me away.’

  He slowed for the roundabout, his hand brushing her leg as he changed down. She jumped as his touch shot through her like a charge of electricity but he didn’t appear to notice.

  ‘The boring truth is that I was in India on business when it happened and my mother made sure that I didn’t hear about it until it was all over and done with. I had her out of here the minute I did.’ He glanced at her. ‘She wouldn’t leave before. In case you were wondering.’

  ‘Why would I wonder? I had no idea you were so successful. Or that she might be unhappy.’ She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry, Hal.’

  ‘Don’t be. At least not for me.’ He picked up speed, reached for the stick shift to change up but before she could move her knees out of the danger zone, he said, ‘Jack North wasn’t my natural father.’

  Claire, stunned, opened her mouth, but couldn’t think of a thing to say and closed it again.

  Hal, shockingly, laughed. ‘Could that be you losing the power of speech?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’

  Not his father?

  Well, that made sense in a weird sort of way. They hadn’t been a bit alike…

  ‘Well, maybe. Just a bit,’ she admitted, with a rueful smile.

  So who was? Someone on the estate? Who did he look like? There was something flickering in the back of her mind. Something she’d heard, maybe, or seen…

  ‘Was that your intention?’ she asked, refusing to ask him outright. If she’d learned anything in her brief dealings with Hal North, it was that if he wanted her to know something he’d tell her. If he didn’t, he’d change the subject.

  Then, suspiciously, ‘Was it even true?’

  Working with Hal North Rule Number Five: Don’t believe everything he says.

  ‘If it was my intention, clearly I’m going to have to try harder,’ he said, turning off the road and pulling into the riverside car park. ‘But why would I lie?’

  ‘To wind me up?’

  ‘Why would I bother when you do such a great job all by yourself.’

  Okaaay…

  Working with Hal North Rule Number Six: Disregard Rule Number Five.

  But why would he tell her something so personal? Did he really believe that removing her from the news desk would totally silence her? Surely no man so careful of privacy would be that naive?

  No way. He’d told her because it didn’t matter. She’d mentioned the tragic accident in that first piece she’d written about him, but Jack North was a drunken labourer who’d fallen into the river and drowned one misty night. How much worse could it get?

  No. He simply wanted to shock her. Send her off on some wild goose chase, no doubt. But while her curiosity was aroused she felt nothing but relief that she wouldn’t have to write it.

  Get this Wish thing over with and she’d happily report town-council meetings and agricultural shows until the cows came home.

  He’d climbed out, opened Ally’s door while she struggled to make sense of it. ‘First one to the island gets an ice cream,’ he said, as he lifted her down, then having wound her up, stood back to let her race away over the bridge.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake.’ She scrambled down. ‘Not before lunch!’

  ‘And the milkshake you promised her?’

  She glared at him. ‘Don’t go too close to the water, Ally!’

  ‘Spoil sport.’

  ‘Try responsible…’ She sighed. ‘Oh, never mind.’

  He was right. She’d been happy enough to use a treat to wind up Hal and Ally was having a miserable half term. An ice cream would do no harm.

  She walked on, Hal’s hand still on her arm, holding her at his side as if fearing that she, too, might bolt, run on ahead.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hal. It’s half term. Jessie Michaels usually has her in the mornings. She and Savannah are best friends, were best friends. They’ve fallen out.’

  ‘How are you managing?’

  ‘Like every other woman in my situation. And every man. With a combination of help from my friends, expensive childcare and, when all else fails, doing what I did today and taking her with me to the office.’

  ‘Not ideal.’

  ‘No. She’s being good, but it’s a bit like living with a volcano with the lid on. You know it’s going to blow and that the longer it takes the worse it’s going to be.’ She sighed. ‘At least now, thanks to you, I can work at home.’

  ‘You don’t sound particularly grateful.’

  ‘Forgive me if I don’t weep with gratitude, Hal, but I don’t think you meant to be kind.’

  They’d reached the far end of the bridge where Ally was waiting for them, jumping up and down with excitement.

  ‘I won, I won…’

  ‘You beat us,’ Hal said, taking a handful of coins from his pocket. �
�Okay, let me see… I think I’ll have a ninety-nine…’ He looked at her. ‘Claire?’

  She shook her head but said, ‘The same. A small one.’

  ‘Two ninety-nines and whatever you want for yourself,’ he said, dropping the change into Ally’s upturned hands.

  ‘She’ll buy something ghastly with a load of E numbers,’ Claire protested.

  ‘Fuelling the volcano,’ he said, taking her arm and heading along the bank. ‘We’ll be looking at the ducklings, Alice,’ he called back.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Claire said.

  ‘The ice cream? Lunch? Or are you telling me that you don’t want to be the Wish Fairy?’

  Oh, fudge, here comes the smile again…

  ‘I thought it was your aim in life to wave a wand over everyone and make their dreams come true.’

  ‘If I wave it over the rose garden will you send away the contractor?’

  ‘You can try.’

  Alice caught up with them, walking carefully as she carried a little cardboard tray supporting their ices. Hal took one and offered it to her. There was a momentary collision of fingers, fuelling the little personal volcano inside her. The ice should have melted on the spot.

  He took one for himself, accepted his change, then, admiring the traffic-light coloured nightmare that would have her daughter spinning like a top, said, ‘That looks interesting.’

  Resisting the urge to snatch it out of Ally’s hand, she bit off the top of the chocolate flake on her own ice. Seeing her spin and whoop, even if it was an additive-induced high, had to be better than the misery of the last week or two.

  ‘Rose gardens, dog walkers, donkeys,’ Hal said as he steered her along the bank in Ally’s wake until they reached a bench.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Magic-wand time. You appear to have a soft spot for dog walkers, donkeys, even teddy bears.’

  ‘Especially teddy bears,’ she said, sitting down on a bench strategically placed so that two weeping willows offered a theatrical view of the river. A stage set with brief walk-on parts by passing swans, oarsmen, a passenger boat on its way upriver to Melchester.

  ‘Everyone, in fact, except me.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  HAL sat down next to her, stretching out in the sunshine, crossing his long legs at the ankles.

  ‘You’ve got a wish in return for your sponsorship. Just say the word and I’ll do my best to deliver.’

  He turned his head, regarding her from beneath heavy lids. ‘Anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Anything that’s legal, honest and decent,’ she replied to what was clearly a loaded question. ‘Or have you already got what you wanted?’ she asked. ‘Me, sidelined.’

  ‘You’re not being sidelined, Claire,’ he said, taking the chocolate flake out of his ice, using it to scoop out a dollop of ice cream, sucking it clean, then biting a chunk off the end. ‘On the contrary. You are going to be centre stage, making Maybridge a better place to live. Isn’t that what you wanted? What your teddy bears picnics and public footpaths are all about?’

  She dragged her eyes away. ‘All I want,’ she said, ‘is for you to accept the responsibility that goes with owning a great estate. And the Wish Fairy, as I’m sure you know, is a role for an intern.’ Which was true. ‘At least the dressing up bit. The features editor usually coordinates the whole thing and some pretty young thing fresh out of school and happy to make a fool of herself in return for getting her picture in the paper, dons the wings and sprinkles fairy dust.’

  ‘You don’t do fun?’ he asked, watching Ally as, lolly in one hand, she gathered up sticks to drop in the river for a game of Poohsticks around the willow.

  ‘No. Yes! What’s that got to do with it? This is my career. I have to be taken seriously.’

  ‘Do you? Always?’ He propped an elbow on the back of the bench and turned to face her, his light eyes thoughtful.

  ‘That was the plan, but once I’m in a tutu and wings with all my cellulite on show, there isn’t a chance in hell of anyone treating me as anything but a joke.’

  ‘Whatever happened to that little girl who yearned for a red-leather skirt, Claire?’

  ‘The same thing that happened to the boy who rode up the steps of the Hall. She grew up and sadly, a knicker-skimming leather skirt isn’t a great look once you’ve outgrown size zero.’

  ‘You’d still look good in one.’ He sucked, thoughtfully, on the ice. ‘Perhaps not red.’

  ‘It has to be red. That’s the whole point of inappropriate clothing. It has to make the grown-ups tut.’ The whole point of inappropriate behaviour, she thought, remembering the barely understood longing to be the girl at the bus stop with Hal North’s arm around her.

  This brand new desire to be anywhere with Hal North’s arm around her. Here, now…

  She didn’t need her mother to warn her that he was just as dangerous now as he’d always been. More so. Back then she’d been too young, beneath his notice. Now…

  From the first moment she’d set eyes on him there had been a frisson of awareness, a quickening that provoked this need to challenge him, make him look, make him see her. And he was here, she was here, sitting beside the river on a sunny day, eating ice cream.

  ‘Growing up,’ he said, ‘how we all longed for it. The freedom to do what we wanted, be whoever we wanted. We had no idea how lucky we were, wasting precious time before life became all about responsibility with no time to kick back, goof off.’

  ‘You don’t become a millionaire by fooling around.’ She never doubted that those threads of silver amongst the near-black hair had been hard-earned. She wasn’t the only one who’d missed out on playtime. ‘What would you do, Hal? If you could goof off for just one day.’

  ‘You know. You were there, remember?’

  ‘Taking a motorcycle to bits?’

  ‘Putting it back together. Riding over the sandpits on the far side of the Cran.’

  ‘Idiot.’

  ‘I tickled a trout this morning. It’s years since I’ve done that but I had it there between my hands, purring with pleasure before I let it go.’

  ‘Really? Can you really do that?’

  ‘Want me to teach you how?’ he asked and her heart rate seemed to slow to match the way a smile moved across his face. The slow-motion deepening of the creases bracketing his mouth, straightening of his lips, lifting of hard cheekbones. The faintest contraction of lines fanning out from eyes that gleamed with a dangerous light. The kind of smile that could burn a woman who didn’t have an asbestos guard around her heart. A warning that they were no longer talking about fish.

  ‘I thought it was just a tall story, a fisherman’s yarn,’ she said.

  ‘You have to know where the fish hide, stand perfectly still, be endlessly patient.’

  And in her mind’s eye she could see herself standing in the shallow water, Hal behind her, his arms around her as he guided her…

  ‘You stroke them so gently that they don’t know you’re there. Mesmerise them with your touch, make them want more…’

  ‘I hate fish,’ she snapped, as her hormones jangled, uncomfortably, certain now that he wasn’t talking about any old trout. ‘Ally, be careful!’ Hal caught her arm, keeping her at his side when she would have leapt up to pull her away from the bank. ‘She’ll fall in,’ she protested.

  ‘It’s shallow and I’m watching her. She won’t come to any harm.’

  ‘She’ll get wet.’

  ‘It’s warm. She’ll soon dry off.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I’m an overprotective mother?’ she said stiffly.

  ‘Only because you are an overprotective mother,’ he replied. ‘It’s understandable, but you need to fight it.’

  ‘Why? What do you know about it?’ she demanded, as she watched her daughter, ice lolly in one hand, Poohsticks in the other teetering on the edge as she leaned over to drop them in. ‘I would never have been allowed…’ She would never have been allowed to get that close to the
water, to risk getting her feet wet, mud on her clothes when she’d been Ally’s age. She caught herself. ‘I’m responsible. She has no one else.’

  ‘Relax,’ Hal said softly and she felt the tension flow from her limbs.

  She forced herself to take her eyes off Alice for the merest second.

  ‘Don’t do that! I’m not one of your blessed fish!’

  ‘No.’ What was that expression? Sympathy? She didn’t need that. No… It was something else, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  ‘It’s hard to be everything. Everywhere. To keep her safe. I want so much for her…’

  ‘Take care you don’t turn into your mother, Claire.’

  ‘What?’ His words were like a slap, the shock of it taking the breath from her body, pushing her to her feet. ‘Never!’

  ‘I wonder if Alice ever longs for a red-leather skirt?’ Hal sucked a smear of ice cream from his thumb with mesmerising slowness. She wanted to look away, couldn’t… ‘What does she dream about? Do you know? Have you ever asked her? Did your parents ever ask you?’

  ‘Parents do what they think is best for their child,’ she said, aware that she was on the defensive, that she knew too little about what her child was thinking. What was making her unhappy.

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Mine did everything they could for me.’

  ‘Lucky you.’ He crunched up the remains of his ice. ‘But even with the best of intentions they don’t always get it right. How did they respond to Alice’s arrival?’

  Feeling rather stupidly way up on her high horse, she sank back onto the bench. ‘My dad died a week before Ally was born.’

  ‘Bad timing.’

  She sighed. ‘Is there a good time to die?’

  ‘In bed at the end of a life well lived?’

  ‘Yes, well, his was cut short by pancreatic cancer. Two years—’ chemo, remission, more chemo ‘—it took two years. He kept working until weeks before the end,’ she said. ‘Refused to rest. He said he’d have all the time in the world for that.’

  He didn’t say he was sorry, but then her father had always been on his case. Had, it seems, been the one to deliver his banishment. What threat had he used to keep him away from his home? From his mother? It would have had to be something big.