Liz Fielding: Tempted by Trouble

Lucky them.

Even sweaty Lycra had to be a better look than an ancient shirt tied around the waist with an equally geriatric psychedelic tie. Sexier than the jeans bagging damply around her knees.

It wouldn’t normally have bothered her and, to be fair, the man standing on the doorstep hadn’t made much of an effort, either. His thick dark hair was sticking up in a just-got-out-of-bed look and his chin was darkened with what might be designer stubble but was more likely to be a disinclination to shave on Saturday, when he didn’t have to go into the office.

Always assuming that he had an office to go to. Or a job.

Like her, he was wearing ancient jeans, in his case topped with a T-shirt that should have been banished to the duster box. The difference was that on him it looked mouth-wateringly good. So good that she barely noticed that he’d made free with a name she’d been trying to keep to herself since she’d started kindergarten.

Swiftly peeling off the yellow rubber gloves she’d kept on as a ‘Sorry, can’t stop’ defence against one of the neighbours dropping by with some excuse to have a nose around, entertain the post office queue with insider gossip on just how bad things were at Gable End, she tossed them carelessly over her shoulder.

‘Who wants to know?’ she asked.

Her hormones might be ready to throw caution to the wind—they were Amery hormones, after all—but while they might have escaped into the yard for a little exercise, she wasn’t about to let them go ‘walkies'.

‘Sean McElroy.’

His voice matched the looks. Low, sexy, soft as Irish mist. And her hormones flung themselves at the gate like a half-grown puppy in a let-me-at-him response as he offered his hand.

Cool, a little rough, reassuringly large, it swallowed hers up as she took it without thinking, said, ‘How d’you do?’ in a voice perilously close to the one her grandmother used when she met a good-looking man. With that hint of breathiness that spelled trouble.

‘I’m doing just fine,’ he replied, his slow smile obliterating all memory of the way she looked. Her hair, the lack of make-up and damp knees. It made crinkles around those mesmerisingly blue eyes and they fanned out comfortably in a way that suggested they felt right at home there.

Elle had begun to believe that she’d bypassed the gene that reduced all Amery women to putty in the presence of a good looking man.

Caught off guard, she discovered that she’d been fooling herself.

The only reason she’d escaped so far, it seemed, was because until this moment she hadn’t met a man with eyes of that particularly intense shade of blue.

A man with shoulders wide enough to carry the troubles of the world and tall enough not to make her feel awkward about her height, which had been giving her a hard time since she’d hit a growth spurt somewhere around her twelfth birthday. With a voice that seemed to whisper right through her bones until it reached her toes.

Even now they were curling inside her old trainers in pure ecstasy.

He epitomised the casual, devil-may-care, bad-boy look of the travelling men who, for centuries, had arrived on the village common in the first week of June with the annual fair and departed a few days later, leaving a trail of broken hearts and the occasional fatherless baby in their wake.

Trouble.

But, riveted to the spot, her hand still in his, all it needed was for fairground waltzer music to start up in the background and she’d have been twirling away on a fluffy pink cloud without a thought in her head.

The realisation was enough to bring her crashing back to her senses and, finally letting go of his hand, she took half a step back.

‘What do you want, Mr McElroy?’

His eyebrows lifted a fraction at the swift change from drooling welcome to defensive aggression.

‘Not a what, a who. I have a delivery for Lovage Amery.’

Oh, no …

Back to earth with a bump.

She hadn’t ordered anything—she couldn’t afford anything that would require delivery—but she had a grandmother who lived in a fantasy world. And her name was Lovage, too.

But all the questions tumbling out of her brain—the what, the who, the ‘how much?’ stuff—hit a traffic jam as his smile widened, reaching the parts of her that ordinary smiles couldn’t touch.

Her pulse, her knees, some point just below her midriff that was slowly dissolving to jelly.

‘If you’ll just take this …’

She looked down and discovered that this delectable, sinewy package that had those drooling hormones sitting up and begging for whatever trouble he had in mind was offering her a large brown envelope.

The last time one of those had come calling for ‘Lovage Amery’ she’d taken it without a concern in the world, smiling right back at the man offering it to her.

She’d been younger then. About to start college, embark on her future, unaware that life had yet one more sucker punch to throw at her.

‘What is it?’ she asked, regretting the abandonment of the rubber gloves. Regretting answering the door.

‘Rosie,’ he said. As if that explained everything. ‘You are expecting her?’

She must have looked as blank as she felt because he half turned and with a careless wave of the envelope, gestured towards the side of the house.

She leaned forward just far enough to see the front of a large pink and white van that had been backed up towards the garage.

She stared at it, expecting to see some disreputable dog sticking its head out of the window. She’d banned her sister from bringing home any more strays from the rescue shelter. The last one had broken not only their hearts, but what remained of their bank balance. But Geli was not above getting someone else to do her dirty work.

‘Where is she?’ she asked. Then, realising this practically constituted an acceptance, ‘No. Whatever Geli said, I can’t possibly take another dog. The vet’s bills for the last one—’

‘Rosie isn’t a dog,’ he said, and now he was the one looking confused. ‘That’s Rosie.’

She frowned, stared at the picture of an ice cream sundae on the van door, little cones on the roof, and suddenly realised what she was looking at.

‘Rosie is an ice cream van?’

‘Congratulations.’

Elle frowned. Congratulations? Had she won it in one of the many competitions she’d entered in a fit of post-Christmas despair when the washing machine had sprung a leak on the same day as the electricity bill had arrived?

Surely not.

She hadn’t had any warning of its arrival. No phone call. No letter informing her of her good fortune. Which was understandable.

This would have to be the booby prize because, desperate as she was, she wouldn’t have entered a competition offering a second-hand ice cream van as first prize.

She wouldn’t have entered one offering a new ice cream van, but at least she could have sold it and bought a new washing machine, one with a low energy programme—thus dealing with two problems at once—with the proceeds.

While unfamiliar with the latest trends in transport, even she could see that Rosie’s lines were distinctly last century.

Already the sorry owner of an ancient car that had failed its annual MOT test with a list of faults a mile long, the last thing she needed was to be lumbered with more scrap.

‘Congratulations?’ she repeated.

‘You appear to have twenty-twenty vision,’ he teased.

‘A very old ice cream van,’ she pointed out, doing her best to ignore the gotcha grin, the faded black T-shirt clinging to those enticing shoulders and figure out what the heck was going on.

‘Actually, she’s a nineteen sixty-two Commer ice cream van in her original livery,’ he said, without a hint of apology. On the contrary, he seemed to be under the impression that it was a good thing.