I was having a good day until George Challoner turned up.
It had rained almost every day since I had arrived in
Yorkshire, but that morning I woke to a bright, breezy day.
By some miracle Audrey had started first time, and I hummed
as I drove along the country lanes lined with jaunty
daffodils to Whellerby Hall.
When I arrived at the site, Frank, the lugubrious
foreman, had even smiled—a first. Well, his face
relaxed slightly in response to my cheery greeting, but in
my current mood I was prepared to count it a smile.
Progress, anyway.
The ready–mixed concrete arrived bang on time. I
stood and watched carefully as the men started pouring it
into the reinforced steel raft for the foundations. They
clearly knew what they were doing, and I had already
checked the quality of the concrete. After a frenzied
couple of weeks, I could tell Hugh that the project was
back on schedule.
Phew.
Everything was going to plan. I had it all worked out.
1. Get site experience.
2. Get job overseas on major construction project.
3. Get promoted to senior engineer.
And because I was an expert planner, I had made sure all
my goals were Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic
and Time–bound. I was aiming for promotion by the
time I was thirty, an overseas job by the end of the year,
and I was already getting site experience with the new
conference and visitor centre on the Whellerby Hall estate.
True, things had got off to a shaky start. Endless rain,
unreliable suppliers and a construction team made up of
dour Yorkshiremen who had apparently missed out on a
century of women's liberation and made no secret of their
reluctance to take orders from a female. My attempts to
involve them in team–building exercises had not gone
down well.
For a while, I admit, I had wondered if I had made a
terrible mistake leaving the massive firm in London, but my
plan was clear. I badly needed some site experience, and
the Whellerby project was too good an opportunity to miss.
And now it might all just be coming together, I
congratulated myself, checking another grid off on my
clipboard. I'd won a knock–down–drag–out
fight with the concrete supplier, which might account for
Frank's—sort of—smile and now we could start
building.
Perhaps I could let myself relax, just a little.
That was when George arrived.
He drove the battered Land Rover as if it were a
Lamborghini, swinging into the site and
parking—deliberately squint, I was sure!—next
to Audrey in a flurry of mud and gravel.
I pressed my lips together in disapproval. George
Challoner was allegedly the estate manager, although as far
as I could see this involved little more than turning up at
inconvenient moments and distracting everyone else who was
actually trying to do some work.
He was also my neighbour. I'd been delighted at first to
be given my own cottage on the estate. I was only working
on the project until Hugh Morrison, my old mentor, had
recovered from his heart attack, and I didn't want to get
involved with expensive long–term lets so a tied
cottage for no rent made perfect sense.
I was less delighted to discover that George Challoner
lived on the other side of the wall, his cottage a mirror
image of mine under a single slate roof. It wasn't that he
was a noisy neighbour, but I was always so aware of him,
and it wasn't because he was attractive, if that's what
you're thinking.
I was prepared to admit that he was extremely easy on
the eye. My own preference was for dark–haired men,
while George was lean and rangy with hair the colour of old
gold and ridiculously blue eyes, but, still, I could see
that he was good–looking.
OK, he was very good–looking. Too
good–looking.
I didn't trust good–looking men. I'd fallen for a
dazzling veneer once before, and it wasn't a mistake I
intended to make again.
I watched balefully as George waved and strode across to
join me at the foundations. The men had all brightened at
his approach and were shouting boisterous abuse at him.
Even Frank grinned, the traitor.
I sighed. What was it with men? The ruder they were, the
more they seemed to like each other.
'Hey, Frank, don't look now but your foundations are
full of holes,' said George, peering down at the steel
cages.
'They're supposed to be that way,' I said, even though I
knew he was joking. I hated the way George always made me
feel buttoned–up. 'The steel takes the tensile
stress.'
'I wish I had something to take my stress,' said George.
He had an irritating ability to give the impression that he
was laughing while keeping a perfectly straight face.
Something to do with the glinting blue eyes, I thought, or
perhaps the almost imperceptible deepening of the creases
around his eyes. Or the smile that seemed to be permanently
tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Whatever it was, I wished he wouldn't do it. It made me
feel...ruffled.
Besides, I had never met anybody less stressed. George
Challoner was one of those charmed individuals for whom
life was a breezy business. He never seemed to take
anything seriously. God only knew why Lord Whellerby had
made him estate manager. I was sure George was just playing
at it, amusing himself between sunning himself on the deck
of a yacht or playing roulette in some swish casino. I knew
his type.
'What can we do for you, George?' I said briskly. 'As
you can see, we're rather busy here today.'
'The guys are busy,' said George, nodding at the
foundations where the men had gone back to pouring the
concrete. 'You're just watching.'
'I'm supervising,' I said with emphasis. 'That's my job.'
'Good job, just watching everyone else do the work.'
I knew quite well that he was just trying to wind me up,
but I ground my teeth anyway. 'I'm the site engineer,' I
said. 'That means I have to make sure everything is done
properly.'
'A bit like being an estate manager, you mean?' said
George. 'Except you get to wear a hard hat.'
'I don't see that my job has anything in common with
yours,' I said coldly. 'And talking of hard hats, if you
must come onto the site, you should be wearing one. I've
reminded you about that before.'
George cast a look around the site. Beyond the
foundations where the concrete mixer churned, it was a sea
of mud. It had been cleared the previous autumn and was now
littered with machinery and piles of reinforcing
wires. 'I'm taller than everything here,' he objected. 'I
can't see a single thing that could fall on my head.'
'You could trip over and knock your head on a rock,' I
said, adding under my breath, 'with any luck.'
'I heard that!' George grinned, and I clutched my
clipboard tighter to my chest and put up my chin. 'I never
had to wear a hard hat when Hugh Morrison was overseeing,'
he said provocatively.
'That was before we'd started construction, and, in any
case, that was up to Hugh. This is my site now, and I like
to follow correct procedures.'
I promise you, I wasn't always unbearably pompous, but
there was just something about George that rubbed me up the
wrong way.
'Now, that's a useful thing to know,' he
exclaimed. 'Maybe that's where I've been going wrong!'
His gaze rested on my face. Nobody had the right to have
eyes that blue, I thought crossly as I fought the colour
that was stealing along my cheekbones. My fine, fair skin
was the bane of my life. The slightest thing and I'd end up
blushing like a schoolgirl.
'So what's the correct procedure for asking you out?' he
asked, leaning forward confidentially as if he really
expected me to tell him.
I kept my composure. Making a big play of looking over
at the foundations and then checking something off my list,
I said coolly: 'You ask me out, and I say no.'
'I've tried that,' he objected.
He had. The first night I arrived, he had popped round
to suggest a drink at the pub in the village. He asked me
every time he saw me. I was sure it was just to annoy me
now. Any normal man would have got the point by then.
'Then I'm not sure what I can suggest.'
'Come on, we're neighbours,' said George. 'We should be
friendly.'
'It's precisely because we're neighbours that I don't
think it's a good idea,' I said, making another mark on my
clipboard. George wasn't to know it was meaningless. 'You
live right next door to me. If we went for a drink and you
turned out to be some kind of weirdo, I'd never be able to
get away from you.' 'Weirdo?'
He was doing his best to sound outraged, but he didn't
fool me. I could tell he was trying not to laugh.
Pushing my hair behind my ears, I glared at him.
'Maybe weirdo isn't quite the right word,' I
allowed, 'but you know what I mean.'
'I see.' George pretended to ponder. 'So you think that
after one date, I might never leave you alone? I might
pester you to go out again or fall madly in love with you?'
My beastly cheeks were turning pink again, I could feel
it. 'I don't think that's very likely.' 'Why not?'
I looked down at my clipboard, wishing that he would
stop asking awkward questions and just go away.
'I'm not the kind of girl men fall madly in love with,'
I said evenly after a moment.
Sadly, all too true.
George pursed his lips and his eyes danced. 'OK, so if
you're not worried about me falling for you, maybe you're
worried you'll fall madly in love with me.'
'I can assure you that's not going to happen!' I snapped.
'That sounds like a challenge to me.'
'It certainly isn't,' I said. 'I'm just saying that
you're not my type.'
Of course, he couldn't leave it there, could he? 'What
is your type, t...