it. I’ll see you downstairs.”
He crossed to the door, hesitated a moment and turned. “Welcome back, Rachel.”
She heard his soft footfalls on the hall runner, then on the stairs, still muffled but faster, as though he were hurrying away from her.
After freshening up and exchanging her shoes for cool, flat-heeled sandals, Rachel went downstairs and crossed the big dining room to the French windows that led onto the brick-paved terrace.
Bryn and his mother were sitting at a glass-topped cane table. A large tray held cups and saucers and a china coffee pot with matching milk and sugar containers.
Bryn got up immediately and pulled out another cushioned cane chair for Rachel. The grapevine overhead on its beamed support shadowed his face, and dappled his mother’s dress.
While Lady Donovan poured coffee and talked, he sat back in his chair, looking from her to Rachel with lazy interest that might have been feigned. There was a vitality about Bryn, a coiled-spring quality that didn’t fit easily with leisurely afternoon teas. He curled his hand around his cup as he drank, and his eyes met Rachel’s with a hint of amusement as his mother opened a barrage of questions about life in America.
When their cups were empty Rachel offered to help clear up. But Pearl, who had insisted Rachel was old enough now to call her by her given name, shook her head. “I’ll deal with these. We haven’t brought you here to do housework. Bryn, take Rachel around the garden and show her the changes we’ve made.”
Bryn, already standing, raised an eyebrow at Rachel and when she got up put a hand lightly under her elbow, his fingers warm and strong.
“Who does do the housework?” she asked him as they descended the wide, shallow steps that brought them to ground level. Surely it was too much for one person.
“We have a part-time housekeeper.” He dropped his hand as they reached the wide lawn. “She comes in the afternoon three times a week but doesn’t work weekends.”
They crossed the grass, passing the solar-heated swimming pool that had been retiled in pale blue, refenced with transparent panels and was almost hidden among flowering shrubs. Their feet crunched on a white-shell path winding through shrubs and trees underplanted with bulbs and perennials and creeping groundcovers.
The Donovans had allowed Rachel and her brothers free rein in the garden on condition they didn’t damage the flowerbeds. She had loved playing hide-and-seek, stalking imaginary beasts, or climbing the trees, and knew all the hidden places under low-hanging branches or in the forks of the old oaks and puriris.
“The fish have gone,” she said as they walked under a sturdy pergola—a recent addition—smothered by twining clematis, into an open space paved in mossy bricks. Two rustic seats invited visitors to admire a bed of roses instead of the goldfish pond she remembered.
“Too much maintenance,” Bryn told her, “and mosquitoes loved it.”
Wandering in the shade of tall trees, they eventually came to a high brick wall. Where there had once been a gate giving access to the house her family had lived in, an arched niche held baskets of flowering plants.
“You know we leased out the farm and cottage?” Bryn asked her, and she nodded, hiding a smile. Only someone who’d lived in a mansion could have called the estate manager’s house a cottage.
The path veered away from the wall towards an almost hidden summerhouse, its tiled roof moss-covered and latticed walls swathed in ivy geranium and bare winter coils of wisteria.
Rachel hoped Bryn hadn’t noticed the hitch in her step before they walked past it. She didn’t dare look at him, instead pretending to admire the pink-flowered impatiens lining the other side of the path, until they came to another pergola that a star jasmine had wound about, bearing a few white, fragrant blooms.
Rachel touched a spray, breathing in its scent and setting it trembling.
A lean hand reached past her and snapped the stem.
She looked up as Bryn handed the flowers to her. “Thank you,” she said, suddenly breathless. They stood only inches from each other. His eyes were on her face, his expression grave and intent and questioning. She ducked her head to smell the jasmine and, turning to walk on, brushed against him, her breasts in fleeting contact with his chest.
Heat burned her cheeks, and when Bryn caught up with her she kept her gaze on the jasmine, twirling the stalk back and forth in her fingers as they walked.
And because she wasn’t looking where she was going, a tree root that had intruded onto the path took her by surprise and she tripped.
Bryn’s hands closed on her arms, his breath stirring a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Thanks.” Her bare toes stung but she didn’t look down, giving him what she hoped was a reassuring smile.
He drew back, checked her feet and hissed in a short breath.
“You’re bleeding.” He released her arms to hunker down, his hand closing about her ankle. “Lean on me,” he ordered, lifting her foot to his knee so she had no choice but to put a hand on his shoulder to balance herself.
“I’ll bleed all over you,” she protested. “It’s nothing.”
His hand tightening as she tried to withdraw her ankle, he glanced up at her. “Looks painful,” he said. “Let’s get you back to the house.” Standing up, he placed a firm hand under her elbow again. Inside, he steered her to the downstairs bathroom and, ignoring her claim that she could manage on her own, sat her on the wide edge of the deep, old-fashioned bath and found a first-aid kit in a cupboard. He let her wash her injured foot, then patted it dry with a towel, dabbed on disinfectant and wrapped a toe plaster around the wound.
“Thank you,” she said, picking up her discarded sandal and standing as he put away the first-aid box. She’d dropped the jasmine on the counter next to the washbasin and he picked it up as he turned to her again.
Instead of handing it to her he tucked the stalk into the knot of hair on top of her head, gave her an enigmatic little closed-mouth smile, then ushered her out with a light touch at her waist.
Pearl came out from the kitchen, saying, “Are you staying, Bryn? I’ve got a nice bit of pork in the oven.”
He checked his watch. “For dinner, thanks. But I’ll be off after that.”
Noticing the sandal in Rachel’s hand, and the dressing on her toe, Pearl said, “Oh! Are you hurt?”
“Just a stubbed toe,” Rachel said, and after assuring his mother she was fine, left Bryn to explain while she went upstairs to unpack.
When she came down again he and Pearl were in what the family called the “little sitting room”, as opposed to the much larger front room suited to formal entertaining.
Bryn held a glass of something with ice, and Pearl was sipping sherry. Bryn rose and offered Rachel his wing-backed chair, but she shook her head and sat on the small, ornate sofa that with the chairs completed a U shape in front of the brass-screened grate.
“A drink?” Bryn said, still on his feet. “I guess you’re old enough now.”
“Of course she is,” Pearl said. To Rachel, she confided, “He still thinks of you as a little girl.”
“Not so, Mother,” he told her, but his eyes, with a disconcerting gleam in their depths, were surveying Rachel. “Although,” he drawled, dropping his gaze to her feet, “the plaster does seem like old times.” Transferring his attention back to her face, he teased, “You had a hair-raising sense of adventure as a kid.”
Quickly she said, “I’ve grown out of that. I’d like a gin and bitters if you have it, thanks.”
Without further comment, he crossed to the old kauri cabinet that served as a drinks cupboard and disguised