With this thought in mind after her shower, she changed into a soft loose top and an old pair of jeans and went downstairs to make herself a meal.
While she ate it she studied one of her gardening books, and as always was both depressed and uplifted by the photographs in it of wonderfully perfect gardens, where design and nature flowed harmoniously into one another.
She was just wondering if she could perhaps have a pergola running the width of her garden, dividing it into two and providing a luscious, rose-scented bower for her to enjoy during the summer months, when someone knocked on her door.
Frowning, she went to see who it was, glancing at the clock as she did so. It was just gone ten; rather late for visitors.
Keeping the safety-chain fastened, she opened the door and then froze as she saw Ben Frobisher standing outside, his face illuminated in the light from the doorway. He looked, she noticed anxiously, as though he had been involved in some kind of minor accident or a fight.
‘Ben! What…?’
‘I’m sorry, did I startle you?’ he apologised as he saw the shock in her eyes.
She had automatically started to open the door properly, and as he stepped inside he told her, ‘I had to call round, if only to thank you for your timely warning.’
‘My warning? What warning?’
‘About Charlesworth,’ Ben reminded her as she closed the door behind him.
There was a rip on the sleeve of his jacket, she noticed, the kind that looked as though it might have been caused by a sharp object, such as a knife. She shivered sickly.
‘I’ve been in London for the last few days,’ Ben was telling her. ‘I only got back late this afternoon. I went home and then I decided to go round and see how they were getting on with the conversion. Just as well I did,’ he added grimly. ‘I’d barely arrived there. In fact, I was upstairs checking something when four youths broke in through the back door. I heard the noise they were making, and rushed downstairs to find one of them about to hit Rob James, the security watchman, with a heavy piece of wood. When they realised he wasn’t there on his own, I think it put the wind up them a bit. Two of them ran off straight away. The others…’ His mouth compressed. ‘One of them had a knife, the other… Well, there was a bit of a struggle, and unfortunately both of them got away. There was nothing to indicate that Charlesworth was responsible, of course, but in view of what you overheard…’
Miranda shivered. She had heard stories… rumours… vague whispers that one of the reasons Ralph had become so successful so quickly was because of his way of getting rid of any competition by using threatening tactics of violence or damage to property and possessions. As far as she knew, no one had ever been able to prove anything against him, but that did not stop the rumours from circulating.
‘Did you call in the police?’ she asked him.
‘Yes, but, as they told us, there is really very little they could do. What I have done is arrange to get in another night watchman and to make sure that all the doors have proper security-locks on them.
‘It makes my blood run cold to think what might have happened if I hadn’t been there. One man against the four of them wouldn’t have stood a chance.’
‘No,’ Miranda agreed gravely. She was still feeling slightly sick inside as she realised how easily Ben could have been hurt… or worse.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben commented. ‘I shouldn’t have come barging in here like this, but I suppose I’m still so hyped up over the whole thing that I needed to talk it over with someone, and since you were the person to warn me about Charlesworth in the first place…’
‘Let’s go into the kitchen,’ Miranda suggested. Tiny vibrations of shock were convulsing her body. ‘I’ll make us both a drink.’ As he followed her into the kitchen an unpleasant thought struck her.
Could it be partially her fault that Ralph was trying to get at Ben, and not solely because he had lost the contract?
Ben was right behind her as she walked into the kitchen. She turned round immediately to ask him if she was in any way to blame, but the impulsive words were never spoken as the bright light of the kitchen revealed to her the blood drying on the cut on his face.
Without even thinking about what she was doing, she reached out instinctively to touch it, her eyes huge with pain and anxiety as her fingers trembled against it.
‘You’re hurt.’
The words trembled in the silence between them.
‘Not really; it’s just a scratch.’ Ben’s voice was equally strained, unsteady, his speech slow and almost slurred.
She wasn’t sure how it had happened, but suddenly she was standing so close to him that she could feel the too-rapid thud of his heart, feel the heat coming off his skin.
‘Miranda.’
As he whispered her name, drawing out every syllable, his arms came round her. It was like coming home, like finding peace. It was… it was like knowing that she had found a haven she had wanted all her life.
‘He might have killed you.’
The words hurt her throat. She knew that she was trembling violently, that her eyes, her voice, must be betraying her to him, but she couldn’t check the emotions filling her.
‘No.’
The denial was soft but firm. He lifted her hand from his face and carried it to his lips gently kissing her palm, making her tremble again, but not this time with fear.
‘Miranda…’
His hands were framing her face, his thumbs making gentle circular caresses against her skin. One of them touched her mouth, rubbing against her lower lip. He was looking right down into her eyes, and she could see the heat that burned in his, knew with a savage kick of sharp awareness that he wanted her, that in his heightened emotional state his adrenalin-fuelled anger had given way to physical desire.
As his thumb slowly caressed her bottom lip he bent his head towards her. She closed her eyes, clinging dizzily to him, shuddering beneath the force of the sensations engulfing her as his tongue touched the moist softness of her mouth.
Held in his arms, tightening around her, she felt his muscles contract; felt the increased thud of his heart; felt her own body’s response.
While he kissed her she clung to him, returning each passionate embrace, jettisoning caution and self-preservation, feeding the desire that burned so hotly in him with her eager response to him.
As he kissed her he made a soft male sound of pleasure deep in his throat and then shifted the weight of his body from one foot to the other, pressing her intimately against him. Instead of recoiling in rejection of his arousal, Miranda found that she was actually trying to move closer to hi
m, arching her spine and moving her hips, but even her awareness of how dangerously she was behaving, even the knowledge that she had never behaved so wantonly, so foolishly in her whole life wasn’t enough to stop her.
Ben’s hands slid roughly down her body, shaping her hips then cupping her bottom, pulling her urgently into the heat and intimacy her senses so achingly sought.
It was an appeasement of the ache inside her of a kind, but it was not, she recognised tormentedly, enough. Not anywhere near enough.
While she was still trying to understand where it had come from, this need that burned so uncontrollably within her, Ben was kissing her throat, muttering words she could not distinguish into her skin, setting off small explosions of sharp pleasure where she felt the moist heat of his mouth on her flesh.
She was still clinging to him, but now, somehow or other, her hands were inside his jacket, pressed hard and flat against his shirt.
She heard Ben mutter something she couldn’t comprehend, and then abruptly he was easing some space between them. While her deprived senses were still battling to accept the torment of losing her intimate physical contact with him, he was wrenching open the buttons on his shirt, seizing her hands, pushing them inside the unfastened garment and placing his own over them as he closed his eyes and shuddered visibly.
As he let go of her wrists and drew her back in his arms, he urged her, ‘Touch me, Miranda. You can’t know how much I want to feel your hands on my skin… your mouth…’
She shuddered herself, not sure if it was the heated erotic contact with his bare flesh that was responsible for her own fierce upsurge in desire, or his husky passionate demands.
When he kissed her he groaned beneath his breath, his muscles straining against her, his skin so hot and damp where she touched him. She could feel the hardness of his nipples beneath her palm. When she moved her hand against him, he breathed in sharply, his breath rattling in his throat.
‘Oh, God, Miranda.’
His hands were beneath her own top now, sliding round her ribcage, moulding the eager softness of her breasts, freeing them from the constriction of her bra.