Page 61 of The Price of Love
‘Ssshhhhh. Willow!’
‘Who’s going to overhear — a traffic warden hell-bent on industrial espionage?’
‘Even so. Whose is it? His?’
I smiled. ‘Hack it and you’ll find out.’
Cal rubbed a hand over his unshaven cheeks and then grinned. ‘Go on then, I could do with the practice. Been a long time since I had a personal. What are we looking for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Even better, a full-file job. It’ll be just like old times.’
‘I don’t want to know what you used to get up to.’
Again the sideways look. ‘Ah, you do really. You want to know everything about me. And even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you anyway.’
‘Shut up and drive.’
The white house had a kind of dejected air about it when we arrived, like a puppy tied to railings. The fields looked unkempt and there was a corner of guttering coming away from one edge of the roof. Cal sighed as we went into the kitchen, and opened the windows to let out the overcooked air. ‘It’s going to kill me to sell, but . . . Since Great-Aunt Mary died, there’s so much stuff I can’t do around the place.’
‘You could pay someone to do things like the guttering though.’ I looked out of the window to the paddock. ‘And look after Winnie.’
‘I can’t have anyone stomping around. Not with the tech I’ve got going on out in the barn. Too risky. Besides it’s a lonely old house, especially in the winter. I don’t want to be camped out here. Shit, I’ve just thought, you’re not going to want it now, are you? Now that . . . I mean, sorry, I’ll shut up now.’
My fingers gripped around the edge of the kitchen table and I felt the solidity, the permanence of it, the safe security of the four walls. ‘I want to live here.’ I dug my nails into the wood. ‘I’vestill got my dreams, Cal. They weren’t all dependent on marrying Luke. With the money from the council I’ll have enough to live on for a while until I get some sort of business up and running, even after I’ve bought the place. So, I’ll be poor, but I’ll have my own roof and my own land and I can always grow food and if the electricity gets cut off, I’ll go to bed early.’
‘And the loneliness?’
‘I’ll get a cat.’
Cal nodded slowly. ‘That should deal with the mouse shit in the larder problem. Good call.’
‘And besides, you’d still be around, wouldn’t you? With the barn and all.’
Cal turned away from me, fiddling with the Aga plates. ‘I don’t know. I might have to shift somewhere else. Security.’
The bruise that was my heart gave a little twitch. ‘Oh,’ I said damply. ‘Oh.’
‘Okay then.’ I knew Cal was getting into work mode when he fixed his hair back away from his face like this. ‘Pass me the laptop. Let me see what I’m doing.’
I handed the case over without speaking. As he took it, our fingers brushed and I felt it, as though he were wearing acid gloves. ‘I’ll go and see to Winnie then, shall I?’
‘Mmm.’ I’d lost him. Everything about Cal changed when he had a computer on his mind. Even his face became different, his eyes unblinking, his mouth a tight line of concentration. I watched him for a moment, the way his flexible fingers removed the black casing from the laptop as matter-of-factly as if he were peeling a banana, the shifting of the machine so that his less-strong arm didn’t take all the weight. There it was again, flittering across the back of my mind, the flash of acknowledgement that he really was a very sexy man — and then he looked up and caught me looking. ‘Go on. Bugger off and see to that goat.’
He’d seen me watching. Seen the desire and longing spread across my face and dismissed it. I took a deep breath and left the room, holding the feeling until I cleared the yard, when I had to spit it into a gorse bush while Winnie watched and sneered.
But at least her close attention made her easy to catch. I moved her into the field by the house and let her loose. By the time this manoeuvre was completed, and I’d finished the swearing and cussing and my face had returned to a colour not associated with emergency situations, Cal was in the barn with the laptop connected to the big computer.
‘Any ideas?’ he asked as I poked my head cautiously round the door. ‘About passwords? Anything he might use? I’ve tried your name and got nothing. Sorry,’ he added.
‘What about Dee-Dee?’ My teeth were so clenched when I said her name that I could hear my jaw cracking.
Cal tapped away at his keyboard. ‘Hey, yeah. That’s got one file. Hmmm, nothing much there, few letters. What kind of guytypeshis love letters, hey? Oh. Sorry. Again. Keep forgetting.’
‘I don’t care if he’s been writing erotic letters to an entire women’s prison.’
‘But there’s nothing in there we could use, it’s all’ — his attention passed from me for a second — ‘pretty hot, actually. Quite heavy. Is he really into all that bondage and repression stuff? Sorry, sorry, any other password potentials?’
