Liz Fielding: Instant Fire

She laughed. ‘Do you read minds for a living?’

‘No, but I was a site engineer myself once.’

‘Were you?’ Jo gave him a sideways glance from under long, dark lashes. He’d come a long way from that lowly position. ‘And I have no doubt that a great many girls picked you up.’

He turned and smiled. ‘A few,’ he admitted. ‘And your father certainly knew how to tease.’

‘Yes, he did.’ She had worked on sites with him during the long summer holidays from university and she had seen him at work. Had been the butt of his jokes, too. The slightest mistake was ruthlessly exploited. She had hated it, but it had toughened her up. The Aston purred as he drove gently down the lane. ‘This is a lovely car.’

‘Yes, it was my father’s. He hasn’t driven it much in recent years but he wouldn’t let me buy it from him until he considered I was old enough to be trusted with it.’

‘And are you?’

‘Thirty-three?’ he offered. ‘What do you think? The old man wanted to wait another year. He didn’t have his first Aston until he was nearly thirty-five. But I forced his hand. I threatened to buy a BMW.’ He turned into the George’s car park.

‘What a dreadful thing to do!’ But the laughter in her voice softened the words.

‘Wasn’t it?’ Their hands touched as he reached to unclip her seatbelt and they looked up at the same moment. For a long second Jo thought the world must have stopped spinning. ‘I want to kiss you, Jo Grant.’ His voice grated over a million tiny nerve-endings and she swallowed. Her pulse was hammering in her ears and she could hardly breathe. Girls weren’t supposed to kiss men they had just met. They certainly weren’t supposed to admit they wanted to.

Jo fought the inclination to meet him halfway and lifted one brow. ‘And do you always get what you want, Clayton Thackeray?’

‘Always,’ he assured her.

Flustered by the unwavering certainty in his eyes, she made an effort at a laugh. ‘Really, Mr Thackeray, I thought the form was that you wine and dine a girl before you make a pass,’ she said, attempting to hide her bewildering, unexpected hunger for this man, bury it under a flippancy she was far from feeling.

Clay Thackeray stared at her for a moment, then he released the seatbelt, making her jump, breaking the spell. ‘You’re right, of course. And this is only lunch. I’ll have to give some thought to the question of dinner.’

Before she could gather her wits he was opening the car door for her. His hand under her arm seemed to burn through the sleeve of her jacket and neither of them spoke as he led her inside the restaurant. Clay caught the eye of the waiter and they were shown straight to their table in the corner, overlooking the river.

Jo kept her eyes firmly on the view from the window, anything but face the man opposite. She spent her working life with men and they rarely managed to find her at a loss for a word. But right now she couldn’t think of a thing to say. At least nothing that made any sense.

No such problem tormented Clay. ‘Let me see if I can read your thoughts again,’ he suggested. Jo’s grey eyes widened. The disturbing thoughts racing unbidden through her mind were not the kind she wanted him to read. ‘Duck?’ he said softly, a suspicion of laughter in his voice.

‘Is that an instruction or an observation?’ she asked, making a supreme effort to keep the atmosphere light.

‘An observation,’ he replied, drily, pointing to the birds on the riverbank. ‘You seem to be fascinated by them; I thought perhaps you were deciding which one you wanted for lunch.’ He offered her the menu. ‘Or perhaps you’d rather run an eye over this?’

Jo buried her face in the menu and by the time the waiter returned to take their order had regained something of her natural composure.

‘Something to drink?’

‘A pineapple juice topped up with soda, please.’

Clay relayed this request to the waiter and added a mineral water for himself.

‘You said you have just come back from Canada?’ Jo asked, leading the conversation into neutral territory. ‘What were you doing there?’

‘Working. My mother was a French Canadian. When she died I realised how little I knew about her or where she came from. I wanted to find out.’

‘And now you’re having a holiday?’

He hesitated for a moment before he said, ‘Not exactly. But I’m looking up old friends. When the receptionist at Redmonds said Joe was working here it was close enough to home to take a chance on finding him at the site.’

‘Home?’ She tried to ignore the treacherous rise in her pulse-rate at the thought of him living near by.

‘I bought a cottage on the river at Camley when I was over at Christmas.’

He was staying, and she was ridiculously, stupidly pleased. ‘I love Camley. It’s so unspoilt.’ She was babbling, but he seemed not to notice.

‘Yes. It’s the reason I bought the place.’ He pulled a face. ‘Stupid, really. My offices are in London; a service flat would be a lot less bother. But I couldn’t resist the cottage. It’s old and it needs a lot of work, but I suppose that was part of its charm. The builder has finished putting the structure to rights and it’s habitable, but I’m just camping there at the moment.’

‘So you’re not going back to Canada?’

‘Not permanently. At least for the foreseeable future.’ He regarded her with steady amusement. ‘Are you pleased?’ he asked.

The arrival of the waiter saved her from the embarrassment of a reply and she regarded the poached salmon he placed before her with a sudden loathing for its pinkness … the same colour that she was only too aware was staining her cheeks.

‘Hollandaise?’ Forced to look up, she discovered that he wasn’t laughing at her as she had suspected. His smile was unexpectedly warm. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘Very pleased.’

She swallowed and took the dish he offered. ‘Did you work with Dad for long?’ she asked, the catch in her voice barely noticeable.

‘He was my first project manager. I came to Redmonds from university and was put to work under him. I was very fortunate. You must miss him.’

‘Yes, I miss him. I wanted him to …’ Her voice trailed away. That was too private a need to be shared. Not something to be spoken aloud.

Sensitive to the fact that he had strayed into dangerous territory, he changed the subject, describing his life in Canada, the country. On safer ground, Jo at last began to relax.

When coffee arrived he sat back in his chair and regarded her seriously. ‘So what are your career plans, Joanna? Surely you don’t intend to stay on site?’

‘I was the first woman that Redmonds employed as a site engineer,’ she said, with a certain pride. ‘I plan to be the first woman they appoint as a project manager.’

If he was surprised he hid it well enough, but his next question suggested that he had some understanding of the problems involved. ‘Does that leave you any room for a personal life?’

‘Not much,’ she admitted.

‘But what about marriage? Raising a family?’

‘Men manage to have both.’ She was no stranger to this argument. Her sister had tried so many times to persuade her to take up a more conventional career that she had once offered to make a tape recording and play it at least once a day to save her the bother. But Heather had long since stopped trying to change her and confined her efforts these days to improving her wardrobe.

‘True, and probably not very fair. But men don’t get pregnant. Climbing up and down ladders might get to be a bit of a problem, don’t you think?’

Since Jo had no intention of getting pregnant in the foreseeable future, she ignored the question and glanced at her watch. ‘It’s late. I should get back.’