problem in the bedsit gets seen to—or the rotting window frames get fixed, or the rancid carpet gets taken up? I wonder how poor Mr Travis would feel if a letter from my lawyer landed on his desk tomorrow morning.’
‘You wouldn’t! ‘
‘Oh, I would, believe me. The man’s a crook who’s decided to take advantage of you. I’m not a superstitious guy, but I’m beginning to think that my mother’s phone call was the hand of fate, because another month in that place in the middle of January and you would have been the one occupying the hospital bed—with pneumonia! No wonder you wear ten layers of clothing when you come to work. You’ve probably become accustomed to that!’
‘I don’t wear ten layers of clothes when I come to work.’ The words ‘charity case’ were swimming in her head, making her feel nauseous.
‘You weren’t equipped for life in London.’ Luc steamrollered over her interruption. ‘You grew up in a vicarage and spent your short working life in a garden centre watering plants. I can’t say that I enjoy being anybody’s caretaker, but I’m beginning to see why my mother wanted me to get involved.’
‘That’s the most horrible thing you could ever say to me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because…’ Because, a little voice said nastily, she didn’t want Luc Laughton to think of her as a hapless country bumpkin who needed looking after. She wanted him to think of her as a sexy young woman—or even just as a woman. Fat chance! He hadn’t even noticed her outfit. At least in any way that could be interpreted as complimentary.
‘Well? I’m not in the habit of doing good deeds, but I’m willing to change my life rules for you. You should be flattered.’
‘No one’s ever flattered to think that they’re too stupid to take care of themselves,’ Agatha told him stiffly. Her eyes stung but she wasn’t going to feel sorry for herself. She was going to remember that she was about to have dinner with a dishy, eligible man who would never have asked her out if he had thought that she was as pathetic as Luc made her out to be.
‘I’ve always found that it pays to be realistic,’ Luc responded bracingly. ‘When my father died and I came home to that financial mess, I realised very quickly that I could do one of two things: I could sit around, get depressed and become bitter or I could just go out and begin to rebuild everything that was lost.’
‘I find it hard to think of you getting depressed or feeling bitter.’
‘I don’t allow those negative feelings to influence what I do in life.’
‘I wish I could be as strong minded as you,’ Agatha was forced to concede, thinking of all the doubts she had nurtured over the years despite her very happy background.
When her friends had all started experimenting with make-up and going on diets so that they could look like the models in magazines, she had taken a back seat, knowing that inner beauty was all that mattered, and that wanting to look like someone else or aspire to someone else’s life was a waste of time. Of course, in London, the whole inner-beauty conviction had taken a bit of a knocking. She had largely felt like a fish out of water when she had gone out with her girlfriends from work, who had developed amazing skills of transformation, morphing from office workers to vamps with a change of clothes and bold make-up. Her stretchy black dress which made her feel horrendously exposed because it was fairly short with a fairly revealing neckline was still conservative compared to the stuff some of her friends wore, and she was so unaccustomed to wearing jewellery that she had to stop herself from twiddling with the strands of chunky copper round her neck.
‘I mean,’ she continued, musing, ‘You’re so sure of yourself. You set your goals and you just go after them. Like a bloodhound.’
‘Nice comparison,’ Luc muttered under his breath.
‘Don’t you ever sit back and wonder if you’re doing the right thing?’
‘Never.’ With more than half the journey completed, Luc thought that it was time he got down to the business of quizzing her about her date. More and more, he got the feeling that she was a loose cannon, an innocent released to the mercy of any passing opportunist. ‘So this Stewart character…?’ he prompted.
Brought back down to earth with a bump, Agatha blinked. Her mind had been wandering. She had almost forgotten about Stewart.
‘Yes…?’
‘How did you meet him? ‘
‘Oh, usual way,’ she said with a casual, studied shrug; this was the perfect opportunity to prove to him that she wasn’t as abnormal as he seemed to think she was. ‘At a bar. You know…’
‘At a bar? You go bar hopping?’
‘When you say “bar hopping”…’
‘Moving from bar to bar,’ Luc intoned very slowly, emphasising each word. ‘Getting more and more drunk before finally landing up somewhere, barely able to stand.’
Agatha bid a fond farewell to nurturing that misconception for him. The whole idea sounded pretty disgusting. She had heard ample stories of girls who had got themselves in trouble by doing just that sort of thing. Her father had counselled at least three that she could remember.
‘When you told me that you were worried about me getting into trouble, that’s not what you were talking about, was it? You didn’t really think that I might end up pregnant by some guy whose name I never found out because I had gone out and had too much to drink, did you?’
‘Calm down. I don’t think you’re the kind of girl.’
Insult or compliment? she wondered. Compliment, she decided. ‘I met him at a wine bar. Near the office, actually. I went there with a couple of girls from work. We were having a drink and the bar tender brought over a bottle of champagne and told us that Stewart had sent it for me. When I looked over, he waved and then he came across to join us, and he and I ended talking for quite a while.’
‘What about?’
‘Lots of things,’ Agatha told him irritably. ‘He’s very interesting. And very smart. Also good-looking.’
‘I’m beginning to get the picture.’
‘He wanted to know all about what I did, which was great, because most guys just like talking about themselves.’
‘I didn’t realise that you were that experienced…’
‘I’m not experienced…with men in London. Naturally I’ve been out with quite a few boys at home, and generally speaking they just want to talk about football or cars. Very stereotypical.’ She slid her eyes across to Luc, and as usual her mouth suddenly went dry, and she felt hot and flustered for no apparent reason. This was the first real conversation she had ever had with him, and she was enjoying herself, much as she loathed to admit it. ‘What do you talk about when you go out with a woman?’ she found herself asking curiously.
‘Strangely enough, I find that it’s the women who tend to do all the talking.’ He had little interest in holding hands over the dinner table and sharing his thoughts with someone he planned on bedding.
‘Perhaps you make a good listener,’ Agatha suggested doubtfully. ‘Although I’m not really sure that you do. You didn’t listen to me when I told you that I could take care of myself.’
‘And evidence of your living conditions proves that I was right on that score.’
‘Maybe I should have been a little more insistent with Mr Travis,’ she conceded, giving a little ground on this one thing—because he had yet to discover, in addition to all the other problems he had listed, the temperamental fridge and its even more temperamental close relative, the oven. ‘But I’m a big girl when it comes to dealing with everything else.’
‘That’s true enough on the surface,’ Luc murmured. ‘You might look