wooded banks, joining the dark oval of Derwent Water on its south side with Bassenthwaite Lake to the north. The low stone boundary walls of the outer fields, she noticed, stretched to the very foothills of the mountains, while beyond, at the head of the valley, the dramatic assembly of craggy peaks dominated the whole scene, austere, magnificent and awesome.
Like him, Taylor decided as her gaze came back to where Jared was stooping, doing something to the toboggan. Behind him their own mountainside glared down at them, its face cruel and inclement, giving no quarter to the unwary hiker.
He would know every curve and bend of these hillsides, she thought, with a marked degree of respect for him; know which ones to traverse and which to avoid. And it surprised her to realise that she didn’t doubt for one second that she would be safe with him. That in spite of all that had happened, between them, she would trust him with her very life if she had to.
A small frisson ran through her just from the sight of his bent head in the dark wool hat, from watching him securing the tow-ropes and thinking about what those capable gloved hands could do to her.
Suddenly then he stood up, caught her looking at him through the dark glasses he had recommended they both should wear and colour stained her cheeks, already pink with the cold.
‘OK.’ With sighed resignation she dropped a swift glance to the sledge, before meeting those shielded dark eyes again. ‘Thrill me,’ she purred huskily, slipping her hands into her pockets.
It was the worst thing she could have said, of course. Or the best, she thought, depending on which way she wanted to look at it, because if he had been intending to break her in gently to the experience of tobogganing then, after that rather foolhardy challenge, all his reservations went by the wayside.
‘I’ll make you scream,’ he promised excitingly, as she clambered onto the wooden slats in front of him, and he proceeded to do just that, laughing at her shrieks as he nudged them off the top of the slope to bring them flying down the hillside at a startling pace.
Faster and faster they seemed to go, gathering momentum as they descended so that she wondered if they would ever be able to stop.
‘I can’t believe this! How can you do this to me?’ she screamed above the rush of steel over the ice, shrieking even more loudly as the toboggan hit a bump, then another, so that she bounced back against him, laughing hysterically.
It was a tight squeeze sitting there between his legs with her own legs drawn up in front of her, and with her hands gripping the sides of the sledge as if her life depended on it, although she had no worries on that score.
Caught between Jared’s hard thighs and those powerful arms clutching the ropes, she was vibrantly aware of his strength and the solid padding of his body both ready to protect her if she did take a tumble.
All around them free-roaming sheep with brightly painted rumps stared after them as they sailed past, and Taylor laughed at their bemused faces, catching their tremulous chorus of bleats through the rush of the cold clean air.
‘You rotten…!’ Swearing amicably, she was still laughing as they ploughed into a deep drift and came to a sudden halt, sending white flakes flying everywhere. ‘You made it bump deliberately!’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you did,’ she argued. ‘You singled them out just to pay me back.’
‘So what if I did? You asked for it,’ he reminded her wickedly, arguing back. Like children, she thought. Without a care in the world.
‘I could have come off.’
‘No you couldn’t.’ His thighs tightened on either side of her, emphasising his point. ‘Only if I did,’ he murmured silkily, ‘and the worst you could have experienced would have been a roll in the snow.’
His murmured approval of the idea suddenly made Taylor disturbingly conscious of the powerful legs entrapping her, of the strong arm around her middle and the warmth of his breath fanning her cold cheek when she sent him a challenging glance over her shoulder.
‘OK.’ He lifted his hands, palms outwards in acceptance. ‘So you don’t share the same view.’
He was laughing down at her, the glare of the sun, with the brilliance of the snow bouncing off his dark glasses, accentuating every line and curve of his magnificent bone structure, the hard-etched jaw and forehead, that proud straight nose, the gleaming whiteness of his teeth.
He was different here, she thought. Different from the hard-headed, hard-working and often disdainful entrepreneur who had had far too little time for her back in London and who, when he had found time to be with her, had scared her witless with his brilliance and his power over her mind and body. But here she hadn’t even seen him using his mobile phone.
Here he was fun to be with—was taking time to relax— and for the first time she was seeing a new and exciting playfulness in him that unsettled as much as it pleased her. She wasn’t ready just to shelve all her fears and her anxieties and go back to him, and she was worried that this sudden absolute interest in her—his decision to give her all his undivided attention—was just a ploy to get her back; that, once there, their marriage would revert to being the same insecure and tumultuous farce that it had been before.
‘No,’ she assured him firmly, negating his suggestion— however flippant—of any further intimacy between them, even though her body throbbed and her breath came quickly through her lungs just from thinking about it. ‘It just complicates things,’ she said.
For a moment those hard thighs gripping hers tightened inexorably. Another glance over her shoulder revealed how the bright sun made a hard, cruel feature of his mouth.
What was he thinking? she wondered hectically, scanning the sudden, stark rigidity of his face. But then almost at once his features relaxed, as did his hold on her.
‘Come on,’ he rasped, springing to his feet a second after she did. ‘Let’s get this thing back up the hill.’
After that the morning resumed most of its earlier conviviality for which Taylor was relieved. She didn’t want to be forced to look too closely at her feelings for him. She wanted to enjoy these moments together without any pressure from him.
There was tension in her laughter now though as she travelled, clinging to his long legs, down the crisp cold hill, even when she fell off in an unharmed, shrieking heap with him, and emerged from her fall, pelting him with snow. There was also circumspection in the way he touched her, as though he were avoiding any reoccurrence of what had transpired between them the previous night.
They were lovers who had just crossed a threshold and become what they knew they should be. What they really were. Estranged partners, she thought painfully, dusting snow off her anorak and track suit bottoms. Strangers, shackled together merely by bad weather and by that keen astuteness of Jared’s in knowing that she would come.
She straightened suddenly, a hand shielding her eyes— in spite of her sunglasses—as her ears registered the continuously mournful bleating some distance away.
‘What is it?’ Jared was beside her, brushing snow from his shoulder. His shielded gaze followed hers to the stream winding down towards the valley, its swollen silver waters tumbling between craggy banks.
‘I don’t know. A lamb in distress. It keeps calling but there’s nothing answering,’ Taylor said, concerned.
‘Probably been a bit too adventurous and like most kids preferred to ignore sound parental advice,’ Jared murmured dryly, but Taylor was only half listening.
She could see it now, down by the beck, its small cloven feet slipping over icy stones, its black-hooded face lifting with each cry that came piercingly on the air.
‘There it is!’ she said, pointing to the spot between two overhanging trees where the river-bank curved steeply.
‘It’s been born too early for all this savage weather,’ Jared commented sympathetically.