Free The Colonel and His Daughter by Teresa Ashby Page B

Didn’t they think she had any taste?
    Two minutes later she had to pass a group of ladies in a huddle outside the village hall.
    “It’s not . . .” Greta gasped.
    “It can’t be . . .” Marjorie said.
    “Never,” Dorothy cried. “Trudy, what are you doing dressed up like a bag lady? Are you going to a fancy dress party?”
    “I’m not Trudy,” Trudy shouted. “I’m just visiting.”
    And she hurried on her way before they could ask any more questions. She just couldn’t understand why it was that people could see so easily through her disguise. What was giving her away?
    She’d even affected a scuttly fashion of walking to hide her usual confident stride.
    Barely ten steps further down the road, a hand fell on her shoulder.
    “Afternoon gorgeous, where have you been all my life?”
    Her shoulders slumped. Bernard! If people didn’t keep stopping her, she would have been well away by now.
    He’d arrived in the village for his niece Julia’s wedding a few days ago and had been practically camped on her doorstep ever since, convinced that she’d lit his fire.
    Well, so she might have done, but he hadn’t lit hers.
    “You can stop playing hard to get,” he declared. “You and I were meant for each other. You know it, I know it . . .”
    “We don’t know any such thing,” she said.
    “We have a past,” he said. “You can’t deny that. And we’re both footloose and fancy free.”
    “I went out with you once,” Trudy said. “Forty years ago.”
    “And you remember it.”
    “Of course I do! I’ve still got the scar on my foot where you trod on it in your winkle-pickers. And you two-timed me with Maureen Withers.”
    “Happy days,” he sighed. “I’ve always carried a torch for you, Troodles. You’re a fine looking woman even in that . . . that odd get up. Those glasses, that red lipstick . . . rather sexy I say!”
    “Go away, Bernard,” she said.
    He took a step backwards and grinned.
    “Still intent on playing hard to get, eh?” he chortled. “I’ll go along with that – for the time being. But I warn you, I have plans for us, my darling.”
    “I’m not your darling,” she insisted.
    “Not yet,” he said, giving her a huge exaggerated wink. Then he turned and sauntered off, whistling cheerfully.
    Trudy hurried on her way.
    The closer to the edge of the village you got, the bigger the houses and the more rampant the hedges. Trudy ran along the edges of the hedges, diving into driveways and crouching behind bushes.
    All this subterfuge! It wouldn’t be necessary of course anywhere else, but in Great Evensbury you couldn’t blow your nose without Dilys Parsons putting an article about it in the church newsletter.

    Meanwhile, up at the big square red brick house on the edge of the village, Colonel Amadeus Potts paced the floor of his drawing room, pausing in his stride only occasionally to flick back the dusty curtain and peek out.
    It wasn’t exactly dust. More like terminal disintegration. Mrs Benson had offered to vacuum them on a number of occasions, but so far he’d resisted, fearing they’d crumble to tatters.
    “Where is she Fortescue?” he asked the big ginger cat who was sprawled in a square of sunlight on the rug. “She said she’d be here at three and it’s now five minutes past.”
    Fortescue looked at him and blinked and because Potts had spoken and he liked the sound of his master’s voice, even if it was a tad strained, Fortescue began to purr loudly.
    “Quiet Forty,” Potts muttered. “I can’t hear m’self think with you rumbling away like a bally generator. I’m waiting for Mrs Benson, don’t you know?”
    There was a crash and Wellington, a white boxer, charged towards the front door. He put his head down and sniffed loudly at the crack under the door, his tail going round in circles.
    “I didn’t say Mrs Benson was here you fool, Welly,” Potts called out. “I said she wasn’t here. Oh, what’s the use? You don’t listen to a thing I