Free Unknown by Unknown

hot coffee.
    ‘You’re lying.’ But Pattie no longer felt degraded by her scruffiness. She could laugh about it, and he shook his head, ‘No, I’m not,’ and she knew that he thought she was pretty.
    He went to a chest of drawers and opened one, and she sipped her coffee and watched. He was tall, broad-shouldered. His black hair curled slightly over the polo-neck of his sweater and she had a sudden urge to get out of bed and go across and stand behind him and put her hands over his eyes and say, ‘Guess who?’ because she wanted to touch him. Like she had touched the amulet, for luck and security? But she smiled wryly at that idea, because it was not at all the same. She said, ‘I’m sorry about last night, making such a fool of myself.’
    ‘You didn’t.’
    Anyone else would have thought she had. She went on, ‘And for landing myself on you.’
    Duncan turned from the chest of drawers, putting a brown and white checked shirt on top. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was a shaker.’
    ‘You could put it stronger.’
    ‘That I could.’ They both laughed and he went on, ‘It was pretty galling being observed by a journalist who’d come to write about me, and every time I looked up there you were, brooding in the chimney piece, looking downright malevolent.'
    She grimaced, ‘I thought you were horrible.'
    ‘I am,' he agreed cheerfully. 'I'm so bloody horrible that I'm not fit to be let loose full time among my fellow human beings, especially when a book gets to the nitty-gritty. That’s when I come up here and shut myself in and hope for something to keep the rest of them out. Like snow. But I’m not often this lucky with the weather.’
    He was a man who had to be alone, she could understand that. No man is an island, the poet said, but Duncan was pretty nearly one. Pattie sat with her chin on her knees, hands clasped around her ankles, surveying him with wide dark eyes. ‘This makes it like a little island, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Only you’ve got a castaway. Or a stowaway. Are you going to throw me out?’
    He had threatened to. He might have done, but she was safe now. ‘There were moments,’ he said. But when she cracked and tried to destroy his work and ran wild he had shown only compassion. She promised, ‘I’ll be as quiet as a mouse,’ and wrinkled her nose, twitching mouselike, and he laughed,
    ‘Come on down and I’ll show you where I keep the cheese.’
    She was wearing a slip, bra, pants and tights, but when she threw back the bedclothes and stepped out she suddenly felt absurdly shy. Her nervous little laugh must have sounded as though the cold air had hit her, because he said, ‘Get dressed by the fire.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘all right, and please would you have anything you could lend me while I wash my undies, like a shirt?’
    ‘Take your pick.' He nodded towards the chest of drawers. ‘I’ll see about breakfast and you’d better be hungry.'
    She giggled again. She was feeling nervous as a kitten; and excited, because everything had changed. The lodge was no longer her prison, more like a spaceship heading for the stars.
    Pattie took two shirts. There were plenty of them, so she picked out two, one for days and one for nights, because she could well be here another week or so. She got into the day shirt, cinched it in at the waist with her belt, then threw back the bedclothes and started to make the bed.
    There was a double sleeping bag, with sheets and pillows and a duvet thrown over, and a good springy mattress. She made it neatly and stood back and looked down at it, and found she was blushing and knew that there was a glow about her.
    Her boots clattered on the stairs as she hurried down. She didn’t need to creep any more. She would be unobtrusive while Duncan was working, of course, but he had forgiven her for being here—and what was more she had forgiven herself. So now she would make the best of it. She would get her article and she might get a very good friend.