So Close And No Closer. PENNY JORDANЧитать онлайн книгу.

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      RUE knew she had a visitor long before the old-fashioned bell-pull clanged in the small front porch. Horatio had started rumbling deep in his throat the moment the car pulled up outside. It would probably be Jane Roselle coming to collect the delphiniums she had promised to have ready for her. If so, she was going to have to wait for half an hour, because she was early, and Rue hadn’t quite finished tying up the bunches.

      Five years ago, when she had first started growing and drying her own flowers and herbs, she had had no idea how quickly her small business would escalate, or the pleasure it would give her, but then, five years ago she had not thought it possible that life could hold pleasure for her ever again. She had been wrong, though. Perhaps her enjoyment was not the kind a young woman in her mid-twenties would normally expect, because it did not encompass any of the things that the rest of the world might consider necessary for happiness. There was no man in her life, for instance—no lover or husband to share her small pleasures and pains. She had no children, no family of any sort, barring Horatio.

      But she was content in her aloneness, preferring it, even welcoming it for its security.

      The bell clanged again, more impatiently, and Horatio’s growl deepened.

      Rue deftly tied another bundle of the tall dried flowers and then hurried across the stone-flagged floor of the drying shed to wash her hands in the old-fashioned stone sink in the corner.

      Her home, Vine Cottage, had once been part of a much larger estate. Vine Cottage itself had housed the estate gardener and, because of this, attached to it was a large assortment of outbuildings, including the comfortably sized drying shed with its old-fashioned heavy beams so ideal for hanging her flowers from. Next door to it was a small two-storey stable with a boarded loft and thick stone walls that kept dry in the wettest of weathers.

      From the doorway in the upper storey, which had once been used, with the help of its small hoist, to store animal feed for the winter, it was possible to see as far as the big house itself and the hills beyond, as well as to look over her own ten-acre field, which was now, as they approached the end of summer, a glorious mass of rank upon rank of rich colour as her flowers bloomed.

      She was just approaching the most critical period of her busy year. A dry late summer and early autumn meant that she could pick her flowers at their peak. Wet, windy weather destroyed the fragile blooms and could mean a whole season’s work going to waste.

      Horatio whined at the door as she walked towards it. He was a dog of large size and indeterminate breed. She had found him abandoned half a mile outside the village three winters ago and, having been unable to trace his owners, had adopted him, or rather he had adopted her, she admitted ruefully as he followed her into the house.

      Vine Cottage, with its small stone-mullioned windows, seemed dark and cool after the hot sunshine outside. The original cottage had grown over the centuries and the house was now in fact a good size, although the many interconnecting rooms made it awkward to traverse in a hurry, Rue acknowledged.

      The small front hallway was little more than a tiny passage with no natural daylight. So when Rue opened the front door she was momentarily blinded by the sunlight, and had to blink rapidly as her eyes adjusted to its brightness, before she realised that her visitor wasn’t the customer she had been expecting, but a total stranger…a total male stranger.

      Instinctively her fingers curled into Horatio’s collar, finding comfort in the soft fur and reassuring solid muscle beneath it, and as though he felt her tension Horatio uttered a deep-throated growl of warning.

      ‘Miss Livesey?’

      He had a very deep voice, as one might expect for a man of his height and breadth, Rue acknowledged, at the same time as she acknowledged that he was obviously not a man who was used to being kept waiting, if that faint tinge of impatience, hardening his words to incisive irritation, was anything to go by.

      As she nodded in acknowledgement, he stepped forward. ‘If I could have a word with you?’

      And, although he phrased the words as a question, Rue was left in no doubt that he fully intended them as a statement of intent. She was forced to step back into the narrow darkness of the hall.

      The man had to duck his head to step under the lintel. All the cottage doorways were low; that did not bother her, as she was barely five foot four herself, but it would be bound to cause her visitor a good deal of irritation were he forced to inhabit Vine Cottage, as by her estimate he was a good two inches above six feet tall.

      Rue thought momentarily of the doorways at the big house, spacious, elegant doorways many of them, designed by Robert Adam to go with the spacious, elegant rooms they opened into. It would surely be difficult to find two more different environments than Vine Cottage and Parnham Court, but Rue knew which she preferred.

      It seemed that she had no option but to invite her unexpected visitor into the pretty sitting-room to the right of the front door. The front of Vine Cottage faced south, warm sunlight spilling from the mullioned windows into the comfortably furnished room. Rue had decorated this room herself, lovingly waxing the beams and then painting their ancient plaster infills with a special lime wash stained palest ochre, which gave the plaster a soft, warm glow.

      She had learned a good deal in the five years she had lived in Vine Cottage, she acknowledged,