Susan Fox - Reclaiming His Wife

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘A TOBOGGAN!’

Taylor stared disbelievingly at the sleek, well-made contraption Jared had dragged around to the front of the house and thought back to his disturbing words in the kitchen earlier about having fun. ‘You’re never going to get two of us on that thing!’ And when she could see that that was his intention, ‘You’re crazy!’ she laughed.

From the other side of the narrow slatted frame, Jared gave a casual shrug. ‘Possibly,’ he conceded with a wry compression of lips, but she sensed a hidden depth of meaning in the way he said it.

‘Where did you get it?’ It was obvious he had dug the sledge out of the old shed. But then something rang a bell with her, even as he started to remind her. Just large enough to take two adults, at a push, he had constructed it himself under the keen eye of his grandfather when he had been a mere youngster. Its cleverly constructed design, though, with the painstaking curvature at its front, showed how good he was with his hands and what a talented, caring craftsman he might have been if he hadn’t chosen to make his living with his brilliant intellect instead.

Like him she had already donned a thick anorak, woollen hat and gloves and scouted around for some wellingtons from a previous visit when he had suggested she get ready for a walk.

Now the green eyes she lifted to his were shining with anticipation and excitement. ‘Well? Are you going to take me for a ride?’

So he did, laughing at her eagerness as they came out of the lane and trudged, with the sledge trailing behind them, up the frozen, steeply rising ground.

From the top of a long sweep of snow-blanched terrain he stopped, and Taylor turned to look about her.

They had come a long way, much further than she had expected. She couldn’t see the house now, only the smoke drifting up from its chimney above a belt of trees. Now and again she caught the faintest traces of its sweet woody scent on the air. Below it, on the flat pastures of the valley, sheep huddled together, feeding on silage and hay, fat woollen bundles, heavily pregnant with lambs, or with their young already braving the unexpected freeze-up at their mothers’ sides. A tractor was moving away from them, out of range of her hearing, and yet if she listened she could almost imagine she could hear the throb of its engine on the absolute stillness of the air.

Perhaps that was why the travel brochures and magazines referred to this valley as the loveliest in England, Taylor appreciated, allowing her eyes the luxury of a full breathtaking survey.

Grey and white stone houses—clustered in hamlets— crouched beside open fields and seasonally stark woodands, a tranquil haven within the deep yawning mouth of the mountains. She could see the meandering river glinting in the sun, disappearing now beneath one of the many small stone bridges that were a feature of the area, appearing again between twisting, wooded banks, joining the dark oval of Derwent Water on its south side with Bassenthwaite Lake to the north. The low stone boundary walls of the outer fields, she noticed, stretched to the very foothills of the mountains, while beyond, at the head of the valley, the dramatic assembly of craggy peaks dominated the whole scene, austere, magnificent and awesome.

Like him, Taylor decided as her gaze came back to where Jared was stooping, doing something to the toboggan. Behind him their own mountainside glared down at them, its face cruel and inclement, giving no quarter to the unwary hiker.

He would know every curve and bend of these hillsides, she thought, with a marked degree of respect for him; know which ones to traverse and which to avoid. And it surprised her to realise that she didn’t doubt for one second that she would be safe with him. That in spite of all that had happened, between them, she would trust him with her very life if she had to.

A small frisson ran through her just from the sight of his bent head in the dark wool hat, from watching him securing the tow-ropes and thinking about what those capable gloved hands could do to her.

Suddenly then he stood up, caught her looking at him through the dark glasses he had recommended they both should wear and colour stained her cheeks, already pink with the cold.

‘ OK .’ With sighed resignation she dropped a swift glance to the sledge, before meeting those shielded dark eyes again. ‘Thrill me,’ she purred huskily, slipping her hands into her pockets.

It was the worst thing she could have said, of course. Or the best, she thought, depending on which way she wanted to look at it, because if he had been intending to break her in gently to the experience of tobogganing then, after that rather foolhardy challenge, all his reservations went by the wayside.

‘I’ll make you scream,’ he promised excitingly, as she clambered onto the wooden slats in front of him, and he proceeded to do just that, laughing at her shrieks as he nudged them off the top of the slope to bring them flying down the hillside at a startling pace.

Faster and faster they seemed to go, gathering momentum as they descended so that she wondered if they would ever be able to stop.

‘I can’t believe this! How can you do this to me?’ she screamed above the rush of steel over the ice, shrieking even more loudly as the toboggan hit a bump, then another, so that she bounced back against him, laughing hysterically.

It was a tight squeeze sitting there between his legs with her own legs drawn up in front of her, and with her hands gripping the sides of the sledge as if her life depended on it, although she had no worries on that score.

Caught between Jared’s hard thighs and those powerful arms clutching the ropes, she was vibrantly aware of his strength and the solid padding of his body both ready to protect her if she did take a tumble.

All around them free-roaming sheep with brightly painted rumps stared after them as they sailed past, and Taylor laughed at their bemused faces, catching their tremulous chorus of bleats through the rush of the cold clean air.

‘You rotten…!’ Swearing amicably, she was still laughing as they ploughed into a deep drift and came to a sudden halt, sending white flakes flying everywhere. ‘You made it bump deliberately!’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did,’ she argued. ‘You singled them out just to pay me back.’

‘So what if I did? You asked for it,’ he reminded her wickedly, arguing back. Like children, she thought. Without a care in the world.

‘I could have come off.’

‘No you couldn’t.’ His thighs tightened on either side of her, emphasising his point. ‘Only if I did,’ he murmured silkily, ‘and the worst you could have experienced would have been a roll in the snow.’

His murmured approval of the idea suddenly made Taylor disturbingly conscious of the powerful legs entrapping her, of the strong arm around her middle and the warmth of his breath fanning her cold cheek when she sent him a challenging glance over her shoulder.

‘OK.’ He lifted his hands, palms outwards in acceptance. ‘So you don’t share the same view.’

He was laughing down at her, the glare of the sun, with the brilliance of the snow bouncing off his dark glasses, accentuating every line and curve of his magnificent bone structure, the hard-etched jaw and forehead, that proud straight nose, the gleaming whiteness of his teeth.

He was different here, she thought. Different from the hard-headed, hard-working and often disdainful entrepreneur who had had far too little time for her back in London and who, when he had found time to be with her, had scared her witless with his brilliance and his power over her mind and body. But here she hadn’t even seen him using his mobile phone.