CHARLOTTE LAMB - Dreaming

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

ZACHARY WEST loaded the last canvas into the back of the van, then checked yet again that everything was securely fastened down. He didn’t want any accidents en route . That was why he was taking the canvases himself, instead of sending them with the courier service Leo had wanted him to use.

‘Much safer, Zac!’ Leo had urged on the phone. ‘And much less trouble for you! They’ll pack them up; you won’t have to do a thing!’

‘I prefer to do it myself.’

‘That’s crazy, Zac. These people are experts! They—’

‘I once lost a canvas when someone who was carrying it dropped it, fell over, and put a foot through it. Never again. I pack them up myself, and I’m driving them to London, too.’

‘Why are you so stubborn, you irritating man?’ Leo had demanded, but Zachary would not change his mind.

He thought long and hard before he did anything, but once he had made up his mind he didn’t change it, whatever anybody said. In the last resort, he believed, you could only rely on yourself, and life had proved him right. Zachary West was grimly self-sufficient, and it showed.

His black leather jacket and jeans coupled with his height gave an almost menacing look to his rough black hair, razor-cut features and hard jawline. Of this Zachary was quite unaware, even when he got sideways looks of uneasiness from people in the street. He was rarely conscious of other people. His mind obsessed with his work, he had no time to waste on anything else.

He rarely went to London and there had been no woman in his life for a year or so, since he’d found out that his last girlfriend was dating someone else at the same time. Zachary had brutally told her what he thought of her and hadn’t seen her since. He had barely thought of her, either, except when he found something of hers around the cottage—a handkerchief, still sweet with her perfume, a small comb, a red lipstick.

Frowning, he would get rid of them, but for a while the cottage would hold her presence: Dana’s bright, seductive eyes and amused mouth hovering on the air like the smile of the Cheshire cat. Zachary exorcised it with relentless work.

When he wasn’t painting he looked after the garden, grew his own vegetables and fruit, kept chickens so that he had free-range eggs whenever he needed them, and when the hens stopped laying eggs Zachary killed and cooked them to supplement his diet. He lived simply and did his own housework and washing.

The red-brick cottage had been built in the reign of Queen Anne for a retired sea captain who wanted to pretend he was still at sea. The house looked out over the windy coastline of Suffolk and in a gale the old timbers creaked and groaned as if they were at sea. Nothing had changed in that view in the last three hundred years; it was still a wild and lonely place with the savagery of the sea in front of it and behind it flat, low-lying fields with winding roads buried secretly among them.

The village, Tareton, was a mile away, the nearest little town, Whinbury, a good twenty-minute drive past that. That isolation was what had drawn Zachary to the place. Here he could work uninterrupted and without distractions and when he needed anything he couldn’t get in the village shop—paints or canvases, for instance—he could always drive into Whinbury and there pick up the main road to London as he would be doing this evening.

The light was going as Zachary came out of the cottage again, locking the door behind him as he looked up at the darkening spring sky. It was early for twilight—was there rain in those clouds? He didn’t enjoy driving long distances in the rain, especially at night. Grey eyes frowning, he looked at his watch. He should be in London by seven. With luck, the rain might hold off until then.

As he drove, he thought of the coming exhibition and all the turmoil which would accompany it. His mouth twisted cynically. Leo loved it, of course; he revelled in the Press showing, the society parties, the art critics with their reviews and their rich, smart friends. Zachary hated it.

He was dreading the whole experience; he should never have let Leo talk him into it. It wasn’t his first exhibition, it was his third, but he had not had one for some years because he disliked them so much, and he didn’t need to drum up custom. He wasn’t a portrait painter, looking out for rich people to paint. He painted landscapes, still life; they sold well because people knew what they were about, they did not need to have them explained. Leo thought that...

At that instant, out of the corner of his eye, Zachary caught a flicker of white and instinctively turned his head. There it was again, a whiteness, floating sideways, above a leafy hedge, through the growing dusk.

‘What on earth is that?’

He narrowed his eyes, but still couldn’t make it out clearly. A piece of paper blowing in the wind? A white bird? A barn owl? One didn’t often see their white faces haunting these lanes any more, but Zachary loved them and regretted that.

His foot hit the brake. As his van slowed he went on staring, the hair standing up on the back of his neck as the whiteness flowed on alongside him, on the other side of that hedge. No, that wasn’t a bird, or an owl. What in the name of heaven was it?

Zachary didn’t believe in ghosts, and disliked things he could not rationally explain. He was an artist, with trained eyes; he knew what tricks the eye could play, how the eye and brain together could deceive. There had to be an explanation, but what was it?

His van slowed almost to a stop as he reached a gate through which he saw a garden and behind that, at a great distance, along a tree-lined drive, the pale, shadowy shape of a large white house. The floating whiteness reached it too, a second later, and turned in the air.

As it did so, Zachary suddenly realised what he had seen, and began to laugh a little angrily because he felt a fool. Just for a second he had almost thought he saw a ghost.

But it was only a girl: a small, slender girl with long, straight dark hair, framing a pale oval face. Her head must have been turned away from the road, her dark hair hiding her face, making her head invisible to him.

That was why he hadn’t realised he was watching a human being as she walked behind the hedge. All he had seen was the white dress she wore—a flowing garment with long, billowing sleeves. Now she leaned over a gate in the hedge, staring out into the road, clearly visible to him. Briefly, she looked across at Zachary, in his van, then her dark blue eyes moved on indifferently, to watch the road ahead of him, the road into Whinbury.

Grimacing, Zachary drove on. If he hadn’t been in a hurry he would have stopped to ask her if she was human. Or was she a witch-girl weaving spells in the twilight? He laughed at himself again. Oh, come on! he told himself—stop thinking nonsense. At this time of the evening it was easy to let the imagination run riot, especially in a state of heightened excitement.

She was neither a ghost nor a witch-girl. But she had a strange, unearthly beauty; he couldn’t help being curious about her and wondering what she had been doing, walking alone in the twilight garden. Who had she been waiting for? A lover? There had been a sense of urgency in her fixed waiting, the intentness of those blue eyes—and yet at the same time Zachary’s antennae, the intuitions of an artist accustomed to reading what lay behind people’s faces, had picked up no passion, no sensuality. There had been something else entirely in that face. What? he thought, frowning, trying to pin down his shifting impressions. Something almost nun-like: a purity in the oval of her face, in her widely spaced blue eyes, in her gentle pink mouth, as if she came from another plane, a spirit world.