Eve Devon - The Little Clock House on the Green

‘And you do, I suppose?’

‘Plus, you have really weird hair,’ he replied, without missing a beat.

She sniffed. ‘I’ll have you know that my current deconstructed/reconstructed Amy Winehouse do is all the rage. At least, it will be for prom,’ she added, as if that explained everything.

It really didn’t, but being as he was lying on the floor in a building he’d just decided to buy, with a girl averse to talking in normal sentences, he was so far past surreal it would be silly to care.

Hell, maybe the knock had rendered him unconscious and he was the one hallucinating. As if to double-check the woman lying under him was indeed really real, he stared back down at her. That was when he noticed the tear tracks.

‘You’ve been crying,’ he accused.

The fun that had come back into her eyes left again.

‘Hey, your hair isn’t that bad,’ he added, trying to soften his claim about her crying.

Her full lips twitched. ‘It really is, but it was made with love, so I had to go with it. Are you going to let me up, then?’

‘Thinking about it,’ he replied, trying to come up with an excuse that meant he didn’t have to. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Are you uncomfortable?’

She gave him a look that said, not entirely, which he took as encouragement.

Fine by him to stay on the floor with her.

‘So are you going to tell me why you’ve been crying?’ he prodded, wanting to know what it was that had sent her whirling into his arms.

Immediately the shields came up. He shouldn’t have pressed it. He felt bad for landing on top of her, though – wanted to make sure he hadn’t put some of the sting in her eyes.

‘It’s fine. I’m fine,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘Let me up, will you?’

‘Or, we could do the Snow Patrol thing and let me lie with you and just forget the world.’

‘So tempting. And yet…’ This time there was a note of steel in her voice that had him holding his hands up in surrender.

‘Okay, letting you up now… Although I feel obliged to mention, that in order for me to let you up, you’re going to have to unwrap those gorgeous long legs of yours from around me first.’

For a second, she looked like she didn’t really want to and he really liked how that made him feel, so much so that when, a few moments later, he felt her legs loosen their hold around him, disappointment punched him in the gut.

Rising to his feet, he pulled her with him.

‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ he asked. ‘No wooziness? No sprains? No serious damage done?’

She smoothed her hands over her torso and then down her long, long legs, making him completely lose his train of thought. ‘I think I’m good. You okay?’

‘Me? Oh, I’ll live. Had a perfect landing, didn’t I?’

‘I guess it’s not every day you get taken down by a whirling dervish in wild wellies. Sorry about that, by the way.’

‘Apology most definitely accepted. Daniel,’ he said, by way of introduction, taking her hand to make a formal handshake.

‘Daniel,’ she said, as if testing out the feel of his name on her tongue. She shook his hand firmly and then, with a tip of her head, queried, ‘Not Dan? Danny?’

Daniel went from being super-aware of the sound of his name on her lips to being on the back foot. He never went by Dan and certainly never Danny. Danny Westlake was his father. ‘Just Daniel,’ he reiterated, waiting to see what she made of that.

She hesitated, as if she could tell there was a story behind his insistence, and then seemed to accept that it wasn’t her right to know that story. It only made him like her more.

‘Okay, Just Daniel. I’m Kate.’

‘As in, Kiss me, Kate ?’ he rallied, determined to settle his heart-rate back to a more normal rhythm. Unless he had the worst luck in the world and Kate was a racing-car fan, he doubted she’d have put the name Danny and the name Westlake together and come to a confirmation that meant their budding acquaintance was over before it had really begun.

‘As in, just Kate,’ she answered, although he could swear she was holding back a smile.

‘So, Just Kate, are you the owner of this beautiful building?’

‘I am. Well, what I mean is that I’m going to be.’

‘You’re interested in buying it?’ He tried to hide the disappointment, worried he could feel so let down at the news when he’d only been in the building less than thirty minutes.

‘I’m going to buy it,’ she said, with complete confidence.

She couldn’t be more than mid-to-late twenties. He wasn’t much older than that. His gaze slid over her attire. She didn’t look like the horse-and-hound set, who came from money, were schooled privately and then lived in Chelsea for a few years before moving back home to add to the country pile, so how could she possibly afford it?

‘Sounds like you have some sort of special advantage,’ he said, shoving his hands into his pockets.

‘I guess you’d call it a home advantage.’

Daniel frowned. ‘Is that what the current owner is looking for? Someone who knows the area? I’d have thought they’d be more interested making as much money from the sale as possible.’

She shook her head. ‘The owner of this particular building isn’t like that. At least, I’m banking on that being the case,’ she admitted.

So maybe she didn’t have the funds and was getting a little ahead of herself? Daniel let the prospect sink in. If the owner wasn’t looking for top market value – just wanted to get shot of the property as quickly as possible, he was probably still in with a chance of buying it himself. His inner-sensible did a double-take. Buying a building because someone else was implying he couldn’t was even crazier than wanting to buy it in the first place. ‘Maybe the owners are more interested in someone being able to make something of this place,’ he said, almost to himself as excitement in his business idea notched up a gear.

‘That’s what I intend to do. Make something of it, I mean,’ Kate declared, sliding her hands into the frayed pockets of her exquisitely short shorts.

She looked so wonderfully brave and naively defiant standing in front of him that he found a grin starting at the corners of his mouth and spreading.

‘Well, this is going to make life interesting,’ he told her, ‘because so do I.’

Her jaw dropped open. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I intend to make something of this place too. Soon as I walked in, I knew,’ he said, making himself ignore the shock streaking naked through her eyes. Telling himself that business was business and if he’d been more assertive with West and Westlake then he might have stopped everything from turning out like it had. ‘This place is perfect.’

‘Perfect for what?’

‘For me.’

‘For you? You’re seriously interested in buying The Clock House?’

‘I’m seriously intending to buy The Clock House.’

‘But you can’t,’ she spluttered.

‘Why not?’

‘Because…’

‘Because?’ For a moment he was worried those lovely chocolate brown orbs were going to fill with water and he’d be lost, but after a few seconds a fire sparked the amber flecks reminding him of a phoenix bursting into life again.

‘Because I know the owner. And I know he’ll sell to me.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she answered.

‘You’re convinced then that you can get together the capital needed to buy a place of this size?’

She smiled.

No, grinned.

Like a Cheshire cat.

And he should not find that sexy!

He began to revisit his theory that she was some sort of multi-millionairess. Maybe this is what she did – went about playing at businesses, trying to find one that took her fancy. Well, not this time, sweetheart, he thought, as resolve settled in his guts.