The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,47

stopped too. Beads of mist hung from his hair and his coat collar; he looked as though he’d been dipped in crystal. ‘There is absolutely no reason to apologise,’ he said quietly. ‘I was a bit of an arse. I have no right to go poking about in your life. If you want to keep control over things, well, it’s nothing to do with me and I dare say you have your reasons.’

‘You’ve told me things, though, about you, about your life.’

‘You don’t have to reciprocate, Katie,’ he said quietly. I could see his eyes, large and dark behind his glasses, scanning over my face. ‘It’s not a tit-for-tat situation.’

‘You basically accuse me of having a control complex, and I don’t even get a right of reply?’ I smiled to mitigate my words. From one of the houses that lined the street, front doors opening straight onto the pavement, I heard a burst of conversation and someone laughing, practically the first sign of life I’d come across in Steepleton proper today, apart from the colour-blocks that were Thea. Out on this street it was just Gabriel and me, the thin haze of moisture and the sound of the sea, so the reminder that other people were there too, just indoors, was somehow reassuring.

‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ he said. His eyes had left my face now and he was looking up towards the top of the hill. ‘Of course, you don’t.’

‘You’ve been so open with me, telling me about—’ mindful of the fact that if I could hear people they could probably hear me, I lowered my voice ‘—how your childhood was.’

‘Maybe I just needed someone to talk to. Thea’s right, I don’t get out much. And women don’t make conversation with me, generally. Once they get the idea that I can’t see and my main job is making bloody quilts for American tourists to hang on their walls.’ A note of bitterness was evident now.

‘You’re amazingly good at it, though.’ I thought about the muted, perfectly blended colours and the tiny, even stitching. ‘And being good at something is attractive.’

He was focusing on my face again now, almost locked into my eyes. ‘You think so? Even if it’s something usually only found attractive by eighteenth-century settlers or people who’ve read too much Little House on the Prairie?’

His intensity was a little scary, out here in this deserted street. Not him – despite being tall and rangy, Gabriel couldn’t have scared me with his almost mannered politeness and his physical distance – but, just something, there in the depths of those brown eyes made me feel as though I’d admitted to something that had blown my careful self-control open.

‘You said coffee.’ I broke the gaze and moved a few steps forward up the road. ‘I’m freezing.’ I shivered theatrically, although I was more wet than cold. ‘I hope the café is open this late in the year.’

A momentary hesitation, as though he wanted to keep our previous conversation going, but then he smiled, and shook his head, little drops of water flying from his hair. ‘Oh, yes. Nothing properly closes down until after Halloween.’

‘You do realise how sinister that sounds, don’t you? Like Steepleton is some kind of sacrificial centre.’

‘Halloween or, rather, the autumn half-term, is the official end of the holiday season. You learn stuff like that when you live in a seaside town. It’s when we pack away the ice-cream machines and get out the Christmas decorations.’

We’d reached the café now, the estate agent sign almost invisible behind the running condensation down the window. There weren’t many houses for sale, evidently, certainly not in Steepleton. Most of the ones pictured were halfway to Dorchester, and had been for sale for a while, judging by the way the damp had wrinkled the pictures.

Maisy was typing furiously when we went in, her nails clicking over her keyboard, but she stopped as soon as she saw us. Well, as soon as she saw Gabriel, anyway.

‘Wow, Gabe, twice in one year! You trying to chat me up?’ Her eyes skimmed over me. ‘And how’s Harvest Cottage? You’ve not come to complain that Mr Coombes is still walking about the old place, have you?’

She must have worked on that laugh. Nobody who worked in an estate agency should have a laugh so high pitched, it sounded as though she were calling a colony of pipistrelles back to the roost.

‘There’s not been any sign of him,’ I said, evenly. ‘It’s probably the