AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Yes, and they gave us a wonderful lunch. But it was rather cold out on the lake. And when we woke up this morning there was a layer of dirty ash all over the town. Do you think it’s going to snow and make things clean again? It’s getting rather nippy out there.’
She ventured into the living room, looking for the fire, as her husband came up the front steps, jingling his car keys and looking very spry for a rotund man of middle years. Belatedly Jennifer remembered Rafe, and nervously trailed Ron Carter’s heels, but she found herself too late to take control of the introductions.
‘You must be the bloke who’s been in the Amazon,’ said Ron Carter, enthusiastically pumping Rafe’s hand when his wife told him that he was Jennifer’s husband. ‘One day deep in the wilds, the next deep into domestication,’ he joked, nodding at the ironing.
Rafe’s eyes had gone first to the clerical collar and then to the bluff, open face with its wide smile. ‘Each has its own merits,’ he admitted, with an answering grin.
‘Raphael—were you named for the painter? People often grow up to bear out their names. I remember Paula mentioning you were doing the photography on your expedition,’ said Margaret.
‘Actually
, I was named for one of the seven archangels,’ Rafe said modestly. As well he might—he was certainly no angel, thought Jennifer. ‘It’s a tradition in my mother’s family. Her brothers are Gabriel, Raguel and Michael.’
‘So that leaves you Uriel, Sariel and Jerahmeel for your sons.’ The Reverend Carter completed the set with a chuckle and Jennifer’s eyes flew to Rafe’s face in shocked recognition as he demurred at the idea of saddling children with unusual names.
Of course he noticed her sharply reactive look, and, thinking that it might be wise to escape his perceptive eye Jennifer began edging towards the door, only to collide with Dot and feel the book behind her back slipping out of her hands.
It bounced with a thud off Dot’s sturdy brown lace-up, ending cover-up on the floor, the elegant grainy black and white photo of a male torso on the front cover seeming to Jennifer’s guilty mind to shriek its contents long and loud to the room. In fact it was only a few seconds before she and Dot simultaneously bent to scoop it up.
Dot’s stubby hand got there first. She perused the cover photo, her thick silver eyebrows descending over her black pebble eyes as she flipped it over and read the blurb on the back. ‘Haven’t read this, have I?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Jennifer in a strangled voice. ‘Uh, I don’t think it’s your kind of book.’
‘I’m old but I ain’t dead,’ Dot told her with a little snort that indicated she recognised exactly what kind of book it was. She handed it back. ‘Everybody needs a little spice in their life now and then. I’ve read some pretty hair-curling things in my time...’
Since her hair was now dead straight, Jennifer guessed that they had had no permanent effect. Murmuring a reply, she beat a hasty retreat before the Reverend and his wife decided to get in on the literary discussion.
She stowed the book back on her bookshelf and hurried over to her desk, thinking that while Rafe was chained to the ironing board she would do a little catching up on her computer. She carefully wiped down the casing with a damp cloth to ensure it was free of volcanic dust before switching it on, and entered the two bookings she had received in the mail into her files, printing out confirmation letters that she would get Susie to post. Then she brought her expenses up to date and typed out her mother’s recipes and notes for the next day’s cooking class.
A printer jam had her cursing, and while she was trying to clear it her mother called on the intercom phone and told her that there was a tradesman at the door offering to spray the ash off the roof and out of the gutters and downpipes using his own tanker of water. Jennifer went downstairs and after intense discussion decided she wanted to wait a few days to see what the mountain was going to do before she spent money on a job that might have to be done all over again. Several other minor distractions intervened before she remembered that she had left the computer suspended in mid-task, and by that time Rafe had finished his ironing and had inevitably ended up wherever he could cause her the most trouble.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded as she walked in to find him swivelling idly in her chair, snooping through her operating system.
‘I fixed your printer problem,’ he said, pointing to the neat stack of papers on the desk. ‘And you had an awful lot of conflicts in your system so I cleaned up the clutter on your hard disk for you. Don’t you run your diagnostic programme regularly?’
‘If I don’t have a problem I don’t see the need to go hunting for one,’ said Jennifer, silently praising her forethought in deleting her compromising files.
‘Ah, well, there we differ. I like to seek out potential trouble and deal with it before it can develop into a serious problem.’
He was talking about more than computers, he was expressing a philosophy of life, and Jennifer wondered if she and her baby were classed as ‘potential trouble’ or ‘a serious problem’. Her heart clenched in her chest as she wondered how he intended to ‘deal’ with it.
‘I see you’re on the Internet,’ he added as the screen registered his arrival back at the desktop, and she reached over his shoulder and smartly tapped the escape button, shutting down the computer, grateful that her password would have prevented him browsing too close to her secrets.
‘You’re welcome to plug your laptop into the phone-line if you want to use a computer,’ she said pointedly, having noticed the slimline case amongst his bags.
He accepted the metaphorical slap on the wrist with remarkably good grace, swinging around in the chair to face her. ‘Thank you, if I’m going to be here a while, that would be useful.’
‘A while?’ she echoed, putting her hand to her stomach.
‘An indefinite period,’ he clarified with beguiling softness, a disturbing gleam of elation in his eyes as he wooed her with his possessive look. ‘A period of discovery, adjustment and adaptation...’
A combination of fear and uncontrollable longing scrambled her brains. ‘Won’t your mini-empire collapse if you’re not there to run it? Don’t you have important things to do—places to go, people to see?’ she said, nervously pushing her glasses up her nose.
‘Not at the moment, no. I think I have my priorities straight, and I’ve always believed in delegation—my employees are used to acting on their own initiative.’ He got to his feet and looked down into her blustering confusion with a terrifyingly tender smile of understanding. ‘Right now you’re the most important thing in my life.’
He had a masterly gift with an exit line, thought Jennifer dumbly as she watched him calmly saunter out through the door. He couldn’t possibly understand how she felt, so how dare he make her feel so...so wretchedly wonderful and stupidly cherished.
‘Right now’ didn’t mean tomorrow, she was still reminding herself fiercely as she helped her mother with the last-minute preparations for dinner. ‘Right now’ was a warning, not a promise, telling her that Rafe’s interest in her was only temporary. Once he had solved the ‘problem’ she represented, he would go back to the sophisticated life in which she could have no part.
