Chapter Two

One look at the battered brown leather Chesterfield and Eloise knew exactly why Kym objected to it. In contrast to the austere desk and a very professional working area on one side of the room, the sofa looked distinctly louche and a little too redolent of rampant shag-fests du temps perdu.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ Ross invited.

Eloise gave only a fleeting thought to how many women had done just that on this spot in the past and tried to fold herself into as small a space as possible, feeling like the village idiot Ross probably thought she was. It was bad enough being caught wandering round his bedroom but how, she thought as he switched on a couple of low lamps, could she not have recognised him?

No one with even a flicker of interest in popular fiction could fail to miss those compelling features staring moodily out from one of the prominent displays in bookshops everywhere. A direct gaze that dared you to come closer at your peril, soft Byronic curls that made you want to try – regardless of the consequences. Eloise had put seductive publicity shots down to cunning lighting and a sympathetic photographer, but she had to admit, with a sinking feeling, that the enigma in the flesh wasn’t so bad either.      

Usually described as ‘darkly humorous’, his clutch of clever, stylish thrillers had spawned a series of gritty TV spin-offs. Eloise had sat through an episode one evening, but had felt the need to cheer herself up with some Jilly Cooper before she could turn out the light. However beautifully crafted and blackly funny other people found Ross Farrell’s work, it was much too disturbing for her taste.

Swiftly scanning his bookshelves, she looked for textbooks on forensic medicine, criminal trials or any evidence to show that the stuff didn’t just come out of his head. After all, what kind of personality would invent such gruesome scenarios, she asked herself, with another quick glance at her host. Noting the amusement flickering in his eyes and in the small smile that lifted the corners of his mouth, softening his brooding expression, she began to wonder exactly why he had brought her to his study.

‘So, Eloise Blake,’ he said, his deep voice gruff as he handed her a drink. ‘Are you a professional nosy parker or do you do anything else with your time?’

Despite the blunt question, his eyes were surprisingly warm and friendly. Deciding it was probably safe to assume she wasn’t there to play out a scene in his next book, Eloise knocked back a couple of fingers of Scotch and, feeling somewhat revived, concluded that a straight answer would be the best defence. ‘I design tapestries.’

‘Really?’ Ross’s dark eyebrows shot up and the corners of his mouth twitched. ‘How quaint.’

‘Yes, well, you probably would say that.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, your line of work is stabbed bodies rather than stabbing canvas. I expect it does sound rather twee to you.’

His stern features were lifted by a sudden grin, ‘I might press flowers in my spare time for all you know.’

Eloise shot him a look that showed she rather doubted it.

Laughing, he shook his head. ‘You’d believe it if I wrote romantic novels, I bet. Sure, I write about the dark side of human nature but that doesn’t make me a nasty person,’ he went on. ‘I work in a competitive industry. I have to create an original product and I have to market it. If you really believed that I was as evil as one of my characters you wouldn’t be sitting here with me now, would you?’

Leaning back against the leather sofa, he held her gaze until Eloise was annoyed to feel herself blushing.

‘It’s only fiction,’ he went on softly. ‘Fairy tales for grown-ups, like Beauty and the Beast or Little Red Riding Hood. What big teeth you have, Grandmother, and all that.’

Trying not to think too much about being gobbled up, Eloise attempted to steer the conversation in a more serious direction. ‘Don’t you ever worry about the consequences of what you write?’

‘You think my readers will all go out and copy what’s in my books?’ he scoffed. ‘Believe me, those sorts of people don’t need to read books for their inspiration. They do what they do anyway. Oh, they might try to justify their actions by citing this influence or that, but it doesn’t have to be something they’ve read, it could be something they’ve seen or something they’ve simply taken a dislike to.’ He gave her a bad boy grin. ‘I daresay some of them even dream up their ideas when they’re stabbing away at their tapestries.’

‘Designer tapestries may not have the same cachet as designer violence but at least I’m trying to create something beautiful,’ Eloise sniffed.

‘Come on, Eloise,’ he teased. ‘You can’t jump to conclusions about me and not expect me to fight back a little? I mean, I associate tapestries with charming chintzy scenes and maiden aunts, but does that make you prim and proper?’

Something went awry with the extinguishing glare she’d intended for him when she looked up and met the provocative challenge in his storm-grey eyes. She wanted to laugh, but it was hard enough to breathe when he was looking at her like that, daring her to buck the stereotype. Just because he was so full of himself, every bit the successful author, with his arms stretched along the back of the sofa and his head tilted back so that his dark hair touched the collar of his white shirt, why should she care? What did it matter to her if he thought she was demure and old-fashioned?

Living quietly, untroubled by rampant hormones and heartbreak, was far more peaceful than sitting here now feeling the heat rise in her body simply because a man was staring at her with an intensity that made her feel as if she was the last woman on the planet. And she could certainly do without some long-lost nerve endings picking this moment to emerge from dormancy, tingling as if yearning to spring into action.

Some annoying reflex action made her drop her gaze to his mouth and a little voice observed that it was a shame it was so far away from her. A mouth like that, she reckoned, ought not to keep itself to itself. But that would be madness, wouldn’t it? Reckless. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d kissed a stranger at a party and yet … He shifted and his arm dropped lower, almost touching her. He moved a little closer, all body heat and danger, and she thought she heard, from somewhere in the distance, the crash of breaking glass. It was either that or the sound of her guard dropping, but whatever it was, her common sense heard it too. Taking a deep breath as she eventually found the right words, she was about to speak when the door flew open and someone said her lines for her.

‘Ross! What the heck do you think you’re playing at?’

As Kym’s head swivelled in her direction, Eloise found herself being regarded with a stare as chilly as a dip in dry-ice. When followed up with a haughty head-to-toe appraisal, Eloise was afraid that, given a light tap, she’d probably shatter into a million pieces. Gratefully she noted that once no obvious competition had been detected, Kym’s expression defrosted a little.

‘I should have known Ross had found a willing victim to bore about his books,’ she said, ruffling his curls. Her own beautifully cut hair swung exactly into place as she straightened up and turned to Eloise. ‘He’ll monopolise anyone patient enough to give him the slightest encouragement so it’s sweet of you to listen when you could be having a good time. I expect poor Nigel will be wondering where you are, too.’

She turned back to Ross. ‘Come on,’ she ordered. ‘I know that all these calming colours and natural fabrics were supposed to help your creative flow, but this isn’t really the time to be holed up in your study, not when you’ve got other people waiting to meet you.’

Eloise remembered to stop opening and closing her mouth before Kym was inspired by her feng shui principles to throw her in a goldfish bowl and find a wealth corner for her to enhance. For a moment she’d been convinced that Ross was going to demonstrate some of the bad behaviour her fevered imagination believed he was capable of. Perhaps she really had designed one tapestry too many? Realising that Kym expected someone to do something, she pulled herself together and spoke.

‘I really ought to get back home,’ she announced, standing up. ‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’

‘But you’ve only just got here,’ Kym said, raising her eyebrows.

‘I know,’ Eloise agreed, ‘but I promised Gracie I wouldn’t be long. She’s only three and she doesn’t really like being left alone.’

The brief, but very chilly, silence that followed was broken abruptly by the Hookfield youth, who had made such an inept waiter, dragging a giggly girl, exploding out of a tiny top, into the study.

‘Oops! Sorry mate,’ he said, with a nod at Ross before turning to the girl, ‘there’s some kind of threesome going on in this one. We’ll have to find somewhere else.’

Kym yelped and shot after them with Eloise at her heels, thanking her lucky stars for the diversion. She staggered unnoticed past a heaving mass of Hookfield residents, who had now overcome their initial awe and inhibitions and were waving glasses in noisy groups, crunching on canapés and sending splatters of chilli dipping sauce flying over the pristine coir flooring.

‘Bloody disgusting!’ she heard someone mutter, and turned to see her least favourite neighbour, Brett Dorling-Jones, shovelling up pizza and glaring at a couple dirty-dancing in the middle of the room. ‘Why is it always the ugly buggers who have to maul each other in public?’ he asked his wife through a mouthful of half-chewed food, ‘It turns my stomach, princess, it really does.’

Eloise took a glance at his puce face and decided to escape before the evening deteriorated any further. Ross and Kym were more of the sort of incomers the village didn’t need. Even worse, they were practically guaranteed to bring a steady import of friends, filling the drive opposite with four by fours or yomping off across the Downs in brand new Barbours in the firm belief that they were reinvigorating the rural economy.

Hookfield residents, on the whole, were a quiet lot used to their village playing the poor relation to Ebbesham, a prosperous commuter town. Eloise liked the fact that people kept themselves to themselves and their heads bent against the biting wind that swept across the Downs at this time of year. It was one of the reasons she’d chosen to live there. Unfortunately the relative isolation of the village was fast becoming its redeeming feature. People who previously rejected the place now regularly searched for “for sale” boards there, drawn by the idea of being within striking distance of Ebbesham’s facilities without joining the urban sprawl. Then they expected everyone else to celebrate.

Well, she’d seen enough. The lovely old house might look enchanting, at least from the outside, but in Ross Farrell, it came complete with its very own beast. The best thing she could do from now on was to stay well clear.

 

The next day Ross sat up in bed, wincing as his warm bare back met the cold iron bedstead, and watched the jewelled morning light from the stained-glass windows dance across the snowy wasteland that was now his bedroom.

‘Simplicity,’ Kym had decreed. ‘A clear room for a clear focus.’

He rubbed his hand across the stubble on his jaw and decided to remain unshaven. Kym would probably disapprove of that too, but he couldn’t be bothered and it wasn’t as if smooth skin would help him write again. He was beginning to wonder what would. Finn, his off-beat detective hero, had made him a household name and earned him a lot of money. Others had profited along the way, thanks to the TV spin-off: the actor past his sell-by date whose career had been revived, the young actress who had proved herself to be more than just another pouting starlet and TV executives who could breathe again as their viewing stats soared. And then … nothing. From two books a year to nothing in two years, whilst rumours abounded about why the author who could do no wrong suddenly couldn’t write.

Putting on a white towelling gown – another of Kym’s touches – he wandered down to the kitchen where the homely painted wooden units had been replaced with surgical steel. Somehow it was easier to imagine kidneys being transplanted here than devilled, he couldn’t help observe. But at least he’d hung on to his beloved Chesterfield. He chuckled to himself, thinking about the expression on his new and nosy neighbour’s face when he’d diverted her into his study. He was used to glamorous women pressing their numbers into his hand at social functions, but finding one cheeky enough to hide in his bedroom made an interesting change.

It crossed his mind that his first thought of elderly spinsters stitching away at their canvasses seemed at odds with Eloise Blake. All those sinuous flowing lines of her berry-red dress reminded him of a medieval damsel. In another age she would have made a wonderful model for the Lady of Shalott.

‘There she weaves by night and day, a magic web with colours gay,’ Ross murmured to himself. This damsel in distress hadn’t wasted any time in leaving her loom for the chance to look round Prospect House though – and got more than she’d bargained for, he thought, recalling her shocked gasp as she walked into him and the warmth of her soft feminine curves pressed against his chest. Those curves had looked very inviting, sitting on the sofa next to him like that, but fate – and Kym – had intervened in the nick of time.

From the consternation in her clear blue eyes when Eloise had surveyed his study, anyone would think he was as much of a beast as she seemed to imagine. Certainly all that softness and heat so close to him had brought out some of his base instincts, but evidently there was something much more solid than a mysterious curse preventing Eloise Blake from having fun. She’d left her child at home alone. As Kym remarked later, pointing to the terraced-house opposite, living two minutes away was no excuse for the woman’s behaviour. What sort of cold-hearted mother did that? No wonder she’d fled the housewarming party in such a hurry; her conscience must finally have caught up with her.

Casting his troubled eye over disciplined rows of glass jars already lining up on the scrubbed shelves, he brewed coffee which he drank from a white china cup. Staring out at the twisted trunks and tangled branches of the wooded tracks of the Downs, he began to wonder if cutting himself off to live in the country would really suit him if he was already so desperate for excitement that he’d come close to making a clumsy pass at the first attractive woman to cross his path. He blew out a deep breath, thanking his lucky stars at a narrow escape when a movement in the bushes made him start … and suddenly his new neighbour didn’t seem even faintly amusing. Not content with making herself at home in his bedroom, she was there now, cowering in the undergrowth pointing a camera at him.