Husband-To-Be Page 6

  By working at breakneck speed Rachel had managed to determine the need for further research by the third week in April—just in time to set herself up for a whole summer’s worth of fieldwork. After just a week in the field she’d made an important discovery. She should, she realised now, have taken longer coffee-breaks.

  Rachel sloshed back to shore. The reedbeds weren’t the only thing that needed further research, but she wouldn’t be able to see anything else any better in this rain. If she couldn’t carry out any more observations today, she reasoned, she might as well go by the house and bring her paperwork up to date. No need to see Grant, who probably wasn’t there anyway—and even if he was she didn’t see why she should have to avoid him.

  She got on her bicycle and began weaving her way unsteadily along the softened dirt of the access road.

  The fact was, she thought, brooding darkly, that she probably would have forgotten the kiss—well, at least put it behind her—well, anyway, only thought about it a couple of times a week—if Driscoll had behaved differently. He’d sulked all the way through dinner that night, complaining over and over again about the humiliation of his interview with Grant. Mallett had said this, and Driscoll should have said that, and Mallet had said this, and all Driscoll could think of to say had been that.

  It had occurred to Rachel, uncomfortably, that she’d spent an awful lot of the last six years listening to postmortems of unfair exams and bad interviews, soothing Driscoll’s ego and assuring him that he was brilliant and sure to get something soon and that it probably hadn’t been as bad as he’d thought.

  Then she’d thought she was being unfair. The ivory tower was a figment of the imagination of people who had nothing to do with the academic world. Academia was as much a rat race as anywhere else, and good people often didn’t do well. She was probably feeling unsympathetic for completely different reasons.

  What with her travel for fieldwork, and the frenzy of writing up her own research and helping Driscoll to write up his, they’d never really had the chance to become physically close. That was probably why she’d felt so remote watching Driscoll stuff chips into his mouth while he complained about Mallett. The feeling of remoteness had infuriated her; she’d felt as if Grant was looking over her shoulder murmuring, Told you so. Well, she’d show him, she’d thought. At the first break in Driscoll’s monologue she’d suggested they spend the night together in a London hotel.

  Now, Driscoll had always been preoccupied with work. He’d never seemed to feel he could spare much time for anything else, and he’d never shown much interest in even the mild lovemaking they’d engaged in up till then. It hadn’t been fair to expect him to reverse the habits of a lifetime and show the kind of enthusiasm Grant would probably have shown at such a suggestion. Rachel had had to admit, though, that she’d expected something better than what she’d got: Driscoll had just looked irritated at the interruption, then continued where he’d left off.

  ‘Maybe it would help to take your mind off this,’ said Rachel, feeling less and less enthusiastic. Still, at least she was trying.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Driscoll said impatiently. ‘Anyway, what would we do about contraception?’

  ‘Isn’t there a late-night chemist at Marble Arch? You could get something there…’

  ‘What?’ Driscoll turned bright red. ‘Go into a chemist? There might be a girl at the till.’

  It seemed to Rachel that this coyness was rather out of place in a zoologist, but she said impatiently, ‘All right, I’ll go in.’

  Driscoll sighed—a long, deep, put-upon sigh. ‘I’m really not in the mood, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I’d have thought you could see that. And anyway, I’ve got another interview tomorrow. I’m going to need my sleep. I don’t know what’s got into you, Rachel; we’ve already discussed this on numerous occasions. Neither of us needs our intellectual productivity disrupted. It’s preposterous to jeopardise our careers with the kind of turmoil sexual activity could bring.’

  Well, maybe he had a point, Rachel thought grimly now, cycling through the rain. Considering the turmoil she’d been in for the past two months just because of one stupid kiss, maybe he was right. But Grant’s words had come, unnervingly pat, into her mind. ‘Why get married? Why not just swap offprints?’ For one unthinkable moment she’d even thought of saying it—of saying it, what was more, to a man who’d just had the worst interview of his life.

  She’d been so horrified by this evidence of her nasty, selfish nature that she’d been unusually sympathetic for the rest of the evening. She hadn’t been able to help being aware of the strain this had put her under, probably because of her nasty, selfish nature. That, unfortunately, had made her even angrier with Grant, whom she could imagine saying, Told you so. And the fact that Driscoll had remained sublimely unaware of the effort she was making had made her even more annoyed with Driscoll.

  It had been almost a relief to get back to the country, go through the paperwork and find she’d have to get her teeth into a solid stint of fieldwork.

  Almost. Rachel toiled up the rutted access road, which was now cutting its way up a slope. Rain sprayed her face and dripped down her chin. She reached the top of the hill and wobbled down the other side, and for a moment was torn by envy of the lucky girl who was ensconced, at this very moment, in the dry, carpeted office which was to have been Rachel’s domain.

  In the moment of envy her attention left the road, to be brought back, abruptly, by the roar of a four-wheel-drive vehicle flying down the hill towards her. The access road was too narrow for two, too wet and muddy for sudden stops, and in the pouring rain—especially as it hadn’t occurred to her to put her lights on—the bicycle was probably invisible.

  The access road was lined by thick bushes here. The first break was close to the bottom of the slope. Gritting her teeth, Rachel pedalled furiously, bucketing down the ruts of the road. She reached the bottom just ahead of the vehicle.

  There was no time for thought With a wrench of the handles, Rachel shot off the side of the road and into a convenient, rainwater-filled ditch.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘RACHEL? Rachel! Are you all right?’

  Rachel would have known that voice anywhere. In fact, she decided, staggering to her feet in four feet of dirty water and dragging her bicycle up from the depths, she should have known who the driver was even without the voice.

  ‘Rachel?’ said Grant. To give him his due, he’d actually got out of the car. He was standing at the side of the road, about six feet above her head. ‘Do you need help getting back up?’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Rachel. Her interest had been caught by a clump of yellow iris a few feet away.

  With a mighty shove, she heaved the bicycle out of the water and left it on its side above the waterline. Dirty water was pouring out of the sleeves and neck of her yellow plastic mac; well, she couldn’t get any wetter than she already was. Rachel struggled out of the yellow mac and tossed it up beside the bicycle.

  It actually did feel better being out in the rain in just her jeans and T-shirt. Shaking water out of her eyes, Rachel waded forward.

  She was in a kind of stream-bed that ran under the road. According to the estate map it was a man-made watercourse, a drainage ditch put in about five years ago.

  What was interesting was that there seemed to be clumps of yellow iris along the water’s edge for quite a distance—she couldn’t see how far in the rain. It wasn’t an endangered plant, or even an uncommon one in England, but it was still encouraging to see how quickly adaptation to man’s interference had taken place.

  ‘Rachel, what the hell are you doing there?’ demanded Grant. As so often with Grant, words were not enough; before she could answer he had plunged down the bank to extract the answer in person.

  Rachel didn’t look at him. She’d had a lot of practice in not looking at Grant over the past weeks: every time she’d been to the house, in fact. It was embarrassing looking at someone if you’d just been remembering, i
n lurid detail, every second of the couple of minutes you’d spent in his arms. Since not a day—or, she sometimes thought, an hour—went by without her remembering those two minutes it seemed as if she always had been just remembering them every time she happened to come across Grant. If she hadn’t, being in the same room with Grant always guaranteed that she made up for lost time.

  ‘Look at this yellow iris,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Rachel,’ said Grant, ‘there is a time and a place for everything, and if you ask me this is emphatically not the time to be contemplating the beauties of nature. To mention just one little circumstance, I couldn’t help noticing that you’re soaked to the skin. It seems churlish to complain when the results are so spectacular—I like to think I have just as much appreciation of natural beauty as the next man, if not more—but you’re a valuable commodity, Dr Hawkins, and I don’t want you to catch pneumonia.’

  ‘It must have grown up in just five years,’ said Rachel.

  ‘You don’t say,’ said Grant.

  ‘Grant,’ Rachel said patiently, ‘you don’t understand. According to the estate map, this waterway is an extremely recent man-made feature. It’s wonderful that such a complex system of waterside vegetation has grown up so quickly.’

  Grant squatted down on his haunches just above the waterline and fixed the bed of iris with a thoughtful eye.

  ‘All right, I can see it’s nice,’ he said. ‘But it’s still raining, and you’re wet, and I’m wet, and staying wet is not going to give it a better chance of survival.’ He held out a hand. ‘Come on, R. K. V.; we need you back at the ranch.’

  His hand grasped hers, and he hauled her out of the water.

  ‘If you want to make yourself useful,’ said Rachel acidly, ‘you can get the bicycle back on the road. What on earth were you doing out here anyway? Isn’t there enough for you to do back at the house? It’s a ridiculous time to go careering around the countryside at a hundred miles an hour.’

  ‘I came to pick you up, of course,’ said Grant, hoisting the bicycle effortlessly to one shoulder and clambering, not quite so effortlessly, back up the slippery grass bank to the road. ‘What happened to you, anyway? Did you lose control?’

  ‘It was deliberate,’ said Rachel. ‘A four-wheel-drive vehicle was coming the other way at a hundred miles an hour.’

  ‘Completely unnecessary. Look where I stopped,’ he said cheerfully, tossing the bicycle into the back. Rachel looked sourly at the vehicle, which stood a good five feet short of the spot where her bicycle track veered suddenly off the road.

  ‘If only I’d known it was you,’ said Rachel.

  Grant grinned and opened the door for her with a flourish. Rachel climbed in. Grant went round the other side and got behind the wheel.

  Suddenly they were cut off from the rain, which now pelted down on the roof of the vehicle. Rachel realised that Grant was almost as wet, though not as dirty, as she was. He was wearing office clothes, though he must have left his jacket in the car when he’d got out; a white shirt was plastered to his muscular chest and shoulders, thin grey trousers clung to sinewy thighs.

  ‘Right,’ said Grant. ‘First things first. The first thing is to get you out of those wet clothes, and regrettably—’ the blue eyes flashed her a gleaming look ‘—but bearing in mind your value to the project, the second thing is to get you into some dry ones. I think there’s a T-shirt in the back. It’s not much, but it’s better than what you’ve got on, and we’ll be back at the house soon.’

  ‘Good,’ said Rachel. ‘Then I’ll change at the house.’

  ‘You’ll change here and like it,’ said Grant. He twisted around, extracted a big blue T-shirt and a rather battered pair of khaki shorts from the back, and handed them to her. ‘But I promise not to look—at least not for the first thirty seconds.’

  ‘You’re just as wet as I am,’ said Rachel. ‘Why don’t you change?’

  He grinned at her. ‘Only if you promise not to look—the other way, I mean.’

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, Rachel found herself laughing. ‘You’re impossible,’ she told him. ‘What on earth is the point of getting married if you’re going to go on automatically flirting with every other woman you meet?’

  ‘There’s nothing automatic about it,’ he protested. ‘And I don’t flirt with every other woman—you’re the only other woman in my life.’

  ‘And I suppose that makes it a lot better.’

  ‘Of course it does. I think it must be like quitting smoking. You know—you cut down gradually. Well, if I were quitting smoking I’d probably be quite proud of myself for being down to one a day, and I don’t flirt with you every day.’

  ‘That’s probably because you don’t see me every day,’ said Rachel. ‘You flirt with me every time you do see me. I wish you’d stop.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Grant. ‘It can’t make any difference to you. You’re happily engaged to Mr Clean. You walked away unscathed from a kiss like a charge of dynamite the other day; why should you worry about a little light flirtation?’ He was still smiling, his voice light and bantering, but Rachel glanced at him doubtfully.

  ‘You know, I think I got you wrong; you’re not Spidergirl at all,’ he said. ‘You’re Supergirl. High explosives go off in your arms without even scorching the costume on the lovely superheroic torso. Speaking of which, if you don’t clothe it in that dry T-shirt I’ll do it for you with pleasure. It unsettles me to see my pet environmentalist run off the road—I keep forgetting how indestructible you are—and after all the excitement I could do with a cigarette. Aka a little light or not so light flirtation. Tell you what, though—I’ll give you sixty seconds.’

  He turned abruptly to look out into the rain. ‘And one and two and three and four and two and two and three and four and three and two…’

  Rachel tore off her clammy T-shirt and put on the dry one in her lap. She pulled off her boots, wriggled out of the cold, wet jeans and slipped into the shorts, which swam on her slim hips. The dry clothes felt very soft and old, wonderfully comfortable after the hard, stiff jeans and chilly shirt she’d taken off. Grant turned back.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘That’s the hell of these environmental impact studies, isn’t it? The environment has a nasty habit of making an impact on the student. There’s no gratitude in, this world.’

  ‘Why do you think I wanted a pink-collar job?’ Rachel said bitterly. ‘It’s all very well for you to go rushing about like a knight in shining armour to rescue me from the elements. If it weren’t for you I’d be sitting in a nice dry office telling people you’re on another line.’

  ‘You know you love it really,’ he told her. He twisted round and now brought a rather battered towel from the back, which was beginning to remind Rachel of the wrecked ship in The Swiss Family Robinson. Any minute now he’d bring out a grand piano.

  ‘You don’t want to sit around with wet hair,’ he informed her, and, before she could stop him, he had thrown the towel over her head and rubbed it briskly over her hair. Somehow, being unable to see made her more conscious of his presence, more aware of the strength and gentleness of the hands that held her head; she could feel her cheeks redden as he pulled the towel away. In spite of herself, in spite of all the arguments she’d had with herself in the last month, Rachel was beginning to be worried. Surely she shouldn’t feel this way about another man when she was engaged to Driscoll?

  The rain was still drumming on the roof of the four-wheel-drive. Grant ran the towel over his own head, rather less thoroughly than he had over Rachel’s, it seemed to her—and after all her hair wasn’t any longer than his was. His eyes met hers; the gleam of amusement in them suggested he’d read her thoughts.

  Suddenly something occurred to Rachel. Grant thought she’d been unaffected by his kiss, when unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. Everything he’d said, though, suggested it hadn’t just been a casual incident for him either. Maybe it had even had as big an impact on him as it h
ad on her, though that wasn’t terribly likely. Yet he was obviously still prepared to go ahead with his engagement.

  So maybe the fact that she’d thought about it so much was nothing to worry about. After all, Grant had so much more experience than she did. If he could call a kiss ‘a charge of dynamite’ and see no reason not to marry someone else anyway, there was nothing to worry about. As she looked into that open face, with its amused eyes and faintly smiling mouth, she felt again as she had before, that this was someone she could ask anything.

  Fine. She’d ask Grant about it.

  ‘Grant?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Hawkins?’

  ‘I’m not sure “unscathed” is quite the right… I mean, I wouldn’t say I was exactly unaffected by that kiss. Do I gather that you—I mean it wasn’t just a casual—um—thing for you either?’

  ‘I suppose you do gather that,’ he said, still smiling. ‘At least, it’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘But you’re obviously not worried about it; I mean there’s no reason as far as you’re concerned not to go ahead with your marriage plans. So there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go ahead with mine.’

  ‘You know what I think of your engagement. Let’s not have that argument again,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘But you would say it’s fairly normal actually to enjoy a little fling with someone else?’

  ‘So it seems,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what I think too,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Are you suggesting we have another one now?’ he asked.

  Rachel stared at him in dismay. His tone of voice wasn’t that of someone trying to trap her or trip her up. It was a simple request for information. The terrible thing was that the idea was suddenly so tempting. Instead of going over and over that same memory she could just kiss him again. It would be wonderful. In fact, it would be better than last time, because this time it could go on a lot longer.

  ‘No,’ she forced herself to say. ‘I—I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’