A Special Kind of Woman Read Online Free PDF

sounding curiously vulnerable. She turned to him in amazement.
    ‘Like it? It’s wonderful! Of course I like it!’
    ‘Not everybody does. Bit rustic. Jill wouldn’t have liked it—she used to say she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a shed.’
    Hence the vulnerability. Oh, yipes.
    ‘Maybe it wasn’t her kind of thing,’ she said carefully, anxious not to criticise the dead woman. ‘It might be a bit…informal for some tastes.’
    Owen nodded. ‘She liked order and everything in its place. We had a big Victorian house in the town before—formal and elegant and no surprises—and for all she loved them to bits, the dogs weren’t allowed out of the kitchen and breakfast areas.’
    ‘And now I suppose they sleep on your bed,’ she teased.
    He laughed softly. ‘No. Just the settees. It’s a bit hard to stop them when there isn’t a door to close, but I don’t care. It’s not a showpiece, it’s a home.’
    ‘I think it’s gorgeous,’ she said, wondering how to ask him to show her round and unable to say the words. She didn’t know him well enough, and it was such an intrusion.
    ‘You want a guided tour?’
    She pulled a wry face. ‘I’m sorry. Is it so obvious?’
    Owen laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I know what it’s like. I love looking at other people’s houses. It’s so revealing.’
    Thank goodness I didn’t let him up into the flat this morning, then, she thought with a bubble of hysterical laughter threatening. Revealing wasn’t in it. He would have run a mile!
    He took her through the ground floor first, back past the front door in the lobby and through to a pair of bedrooms each with doors out to the garden andtheir own shower room just next to them. ‘Josh has this bit of the house,’ he explained, but it was self-evident in the posters and clutter and general abundance of teenage gear, even without all the things he’d taken away.
    ‘What a good idea,’ she said, regretting the smallness of her flat. ‘It must be more peaceful. Milly’s music drives me potty.’
    He laughed. ‘Ditto. The house isn’t very good at being soundproof with all the open studwork. This way I didn’t have to listen to his dreadful choice in music.’
    They retraced their footsteps back through the sitting room and dining room and into the kitchen. While Cait looked round enviously at all the cupboards and conjured with the very thought of having enough room for a central work island, he put the kettle on the Aga and gave her a quick glance at the pantry and utility room, then he led her up the staircase to the bedrooms.
    ‘This is the spare room,’ he said, taking her along the walkway to the one over the sitting room.
    ‘Oh, it’s huge!’ Cait said, looking round at the four-poster bed nestled under the roof, with the window opposite so you could lie in bed in the morning and look at the woods and the fields and wallow in the beauty of it all.
    ‘Why don’t you sleep in here?’ she asked, sticking her head round the door of the en suite bathroom. ‘It’s gorgeous.’
    ‘I know. It’s a lovely room and it’s got a fabulous view, but I prefer the other one. It’s over the Aga and it’s warmer, and it’s got a funny door. It just appeals to me.’
    She followed him back down the walkway to the other room, and he pointed out the door that was cut along the top to fit the contours of the beam. She had toduck to clear the beam, and climb three little steps, and then they were in his bedroom.
    The bed was huge, and yet it seemed scarcely big enough for the vast expanse of space. A row of doors in aged oak led to the little shower room, the loo and the walk-in wardrobe down one side, and on the other was a window criss-crossed with beams, looking out over the valley again.
    Owen glanced round and rubbed his chin ruefully. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not exactly tidy. Mrs Poole doesn’t arrive until eleven and I left in a bit of a hurry this morning, so I didn’t make the