Mistaken Adversary. Penny Jordan

ball of panic and dread snowballing up inside her and, as always, she was afraid of it, trying to push it down and out of the way, totally unable to allow it to gather momentum, to force herself to confront it. She was so desperately afraid of losing her aunt, so mortally afraid.

      The cottage was only small: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a tiny boxroom which she was using as her office, and then downstairs a comfortably sized living-kitchen area, a small cosy sitting-room and a dining-room which they never used, preferring the comfort of the kitchen. Its garden was large and overgrown: a gardener’s paradise, with its rows of fruit bushes, its well-stocked borders, its small fishpond and its vegetable beds. But it was Aunt May who was the gardener, not her, and Aunt May—

      Georgia swallowed the angry tears gathering in her throat as she remembered the look on her aunt’s face when they had first come to look at the cottage. It had been that look of almost childlike wonder and pleasure which had pushed Georgia into taking the final step of committing herself to buy the cottage, even though she knew she could barely afford it. She had bought it for Aunt May. They had had nearly three months in it before Aunt May’s health had started to deteriorate, before the doctors had started talking about a further operation, before it had become necessary for Aunt May to have far more intense nursing than Georgia could provide.

      Refusing to allow what she knew to be tears of self-pity to fall, Georgia headed for the stairs, carrying the work she had collected. She knew without looking at it that it would keep her busy for the rest of the afternoon and for long into the night, but she didn’t care. She needed the money if she was to keep on the cottage, and she had to keep on the cottage for somewhere for Aunt May to come home to when she was eventually able to leave the hospice. And she would leave it. She would come home. She had to.

      Tiredly, Georgia went upstairs to the small boxroom which housed her computer. The cottage was old, and its loft space had been home to many hundreds of generations of house martins. The latest occupants scratched busily and noisily above her head while she worked. At first they had disturbed and alarmed her, but now she had grown used to the noise, and almost found it companionable. The cottage had originally been used to house agricultural workers, but had been sold off by its original owner, together with the land on which it stood. A prime site for development, the estate agents had told her. With so much land the cottage could be extended. Its privacy was virtually guaranteed, surrounded as it was by farmland, and at the bottom of a track which went virtually nowhere. But Georgia couldn’t have afforded to extend it even if she had wanted to. She could barely afford the mortgage repayments, and then there was the cost of the hospice and her own living expenses, plus running the small car which was an absolute necessity now with Aunt May in the hospice.

      Her head was beginning to ache, the letters on the screen in front of her beginning to swim and blur. She rubbed her eyes tiredly and glanced at her watch, unable to believe how long she had been working. Her whole body ached, her bones feeling almost bruised as she moved uncomfortably in her chair.

      She had lost weight in these last few months, weight some might say she could ill afford to lose. She wasn’t a tall woman, barely five feet five, with small delicate features that were now beginning to have the haunted, pinched look of someone under severe stress.

      Her fair hair, which in London she had always kept perfectly groomed in a slick, neat hairstyle, had grown down on to her shoulders; she had neither the money nor the energy to do anything about getting it cut. The expensive London highlights had been replaced by the natural streaked effect of sunlight, just as her skin had gained a soft peachy warmth from that same exposure. She had never thought of herself as a particularly sensual or sexually attractive woman, but then she had never wanted to be, being quite content with the neatness of her oval-shaped face and the seriousness of her grey eyes.

      She had her admirers: men who—like her—were too busy climbing the corporate ladder to want any kind of permanent commitment, men who, while admiring her and wanting her company, appreciated her single-minded determination to concentrate on her career. Men who respected her.

      Yes, her career had been the sole focus of her life—until she had realised how ill Aunt May was. At first her aunt had protested that there was no need for her to go to such lengths—to give up her career, her well-structured life—but Georgia hadn’t listened to her. It wasn’t out of some grim sense of duty that she had made her decision, as one of her London friends had intimated. On the contrary, it had been out of love. Nothing more, nothing less—and there had not been one second of time since that decision had been made when she had regretted its making. All she did regret was that she had been so busy with her own life that she hadn’t realised earlier what was happening to her aunt. She would never be able to forgive herself that piece of selfishness, even though Aunt May had reassured her time and time again that she herself had known about and ignored certain warning signs, certain omens, which should have alerted her to seek medical help earlier than she had.

      The sound of a car coming down the bumpy track that led to the cottage alerted her to the arrival of her potential lodger. He was someone who apparently needed accommodation locally for a few months while he sorted out the financial affairs of a small local company his city-based group had recently taken over.

      Georgia knew very little about the man himself, other than that the agency for whom she worked had been able to vouch for him as someone eminently respectable and trustworthy. When she had expressed doubts that someone as highly placed and wealthy as the chairman of a progressive and profitable group would want to lodge in someone else’s home rather than rent somewhere, Louise Mather, who ran the agency, had informed her that Mitch Fletcher did not fit into the normal stereotype of the successful entrepreneur-cum-businessman mould and that, when he had approached her for help with the additional staff he needed to recruit, he had told her that all he needed was somewhere to sleep at night and where he would remain relatively undisturbed by the comings and goings of the other members of the household. For that he was prepared to pay very well indeed and, as Louise herself had pointed out when she had urged Georgia to think seriously about taking him on as a lodger, he was the answer to all her financial problems.

      Wearily Georgia stood up, clutching the back of her chair when she went slightly dizzy. She had not, she realised, eaten anything since suppertime last night, and even then she had pushed away the meal she had made barely touched.

      Perhaps the discipline of having to provide meals for a lodger might force her to eat more sensibly. In these last few weeks since her aunt had gone into the hospice, she had found preparing and then eating her solitary meals more and more of a burden. Some evenings, once she returned from her final visit of the day to the hospice, she felt far too drained of energy and emotionally wrought-up to bear to eat, and yet logically and intelligently she knew that she needed the energy that came from a healthy well-balanced diet.

      She glanced out of the window and saw the car stop outside the front gate. A steel-grey BMW saloon, it looked sleekly, almost arrogantly out of place outside her humble home.

      As she went downstairs she reflected that this Mitch Fletcher was probably writing the cottage off as unsuitable even before she opened the door. She did not, she acknowledged as she went towards the front door, really want the hassle, the responsibility, of sharing her home with someone else. She was afraid that the inevitable inroads it would make into her life would somehow threaten the need she felt to devote every second of her spare time either to being with her aunt or willing her to get better, to recover and come home.

      When she opened the door the cool words of greeting and introduction hovering on her lips fled in disordered confusion as she recognised the man standing there.

      As he stepped forward, Georgia recognised that, infuriatingly, she had somehow or other by her silence lost control of the situation—because it was he who broke the silence, extending his hand towards her and saying, ‘Miss Barnes? Mitchell Fletcher. I understand from Louise Mather that you have a room you’d be prepared to let. I think she’s explained the position to you: I’m looking for somewhere temporary to stay while I’m working in the area.’

      As he spoke, he came forward, and Georgia discovered that she was stepping back almost automatically, allowing him to walk into the hallway.

      Until