A Very Passionate Man

Trouble was, it wasn’t just the gate. Even the slightest thing seemed to irritate him out of all proportion these days. Anyway, you’d think her husband or boyfriend would fix the damn thing for her. She certainly didn’t strike him as the type of woman who’d be happy to get her hands dirty doing anything practical like DIY. And who the hell dressed in white to do gardening? The woman clearly didn’t have the sense that she was born with. Annoyed that his pretty neighbour was occupying more of his thoughts than she ought to be, Evan stalked into the kitchen to make a drink. When he discovered he was out of coffee his frustrated curse punctuated the air. Tunnelling his fingers through black hair, that if left long would have a distinct wave in it, he shut his eyes for a moment in a bid to calm down, but failed miserably as a stray memory of his ex-wife infiltrated its way stealthily into his mind. If Rebecca hadn’t stung him for most of his wealth in their divorce settlement, he wouldn’t have spent the past two years working himself into the ground to build up his fitness business again. Two gruelling years when he had sacrificed damn near everything—his home, his friends, his social life—to claw back most of what he had lost. It was testament to his blind single-mindedness that he had succeeded. The business was doing even better than ever. With over twenty fitness outlets all bearing the Evan Cameron name dotted round the country, he could afford to take things a little easier now. When he hadn’t done any such thing, a three-week bout of influenza had made the decision to slow down for him. Slow down? Evan grimaced bitterly at the thought. Bring him to his knees, more like. In all his thirty-seven years he had never been so ill or so mentally and physically battle-scarred. To tell the truth, it had scared him rigid. How ironic that a man who promoted health and fitness had succumbed to illness all because of self-neglect.

Forcing himself to breathe more evenly, Evan opened a cupboard above the plain white counter in search of a malt drink. He should know better than to crave caffeine in the middle of the night, anyway. Five minutes later, his mood slightly improved and his drink made, he sought out the big, squashy sofa in the comfortably furnished living-room then reached for the remote and switched on the TV. As he strove to concentrate on yet another rerun of The African Queen unfolding before him, he tried to blot out the sound of Rowan Hawkins’ rickety gate creaking noisily back and forth.

Rowan was attempting to replace the rusty hinges on the gate. Dressed in jeans and a skinny-rib red sweater, her glossy brown hair scooped back into a pony-tail, she tried in vain to unscrew the tightly embedded steel screw in the one remaining hinge. Trouble was, her hands were freezing. The sun was shining but the icy wind cut like a razor and she could barely get enough leverage on the screwdriver to turn the thing at all. ‘Damn!’

Could anyone blame her if she felt like sitting there and crying like a baby? First she’d discovered she’d acquired a Neanderthal for a neighbour, and second she’d learned that ‘do it yourself’ was definitely not her natural province. She would just have to spend some of the small legacy Greg had left her after paying for the house on funding some urgently needed jobs that needed doing round the place. Like this gate. It should have been so simple. It looked simple, Rowan reflected, as her brow knit in frustration. But right now splitting the atom might be simpler.

‘Having trouble?’

Rowan glanced up in shock at the deep, masculine voice and heat rushed into her body as if she’d been dropped into a vat of hot water. Frosty eyes the colour of green ice stared back at her with disconcerting directness. Despite a helpless stirring of rage swirling deep in her belly, she couldn’t help but be compelled to study the tough male visage. He was without a doubt commandingly masculine yet at the same time beautiful, and Rowan was even more disturbed by him than she had been on their first encounter—when he’d grudgingly halted the escape of her wayward straw hat. But, all the same, she’d be damned if she would give him the satisfaction of thinking she was some kind of helpless little woman who didn’t know what she was doing.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

Laying down the screwdriver, she rubbed her hands briskly together to get the circulation flowing back into her cramped fingers, deliberately keeping her expression carefully blank.

‘That damn gate of yours kept me awake all night with its creaking.’ Folding his arms across a chest that was disconcertingly wide, with muscles like steel beneath his black sweater if the strongly corded sinews in his forearms were anything to go by, Rowan’s hostile neighbour presented her with yet another forbidding scowl.

‘Why do you think I’m trying to fix it? It kept me awake too.’ That and another awful nightmare about Greg walking out in front of that car…

‘So you know what you’re doing, then?’

She thought she saw just a hint of a smile touch those austere-looking lips of his, but then told herself she must be mistaken. Something told her that smiles from this man would be as unlikely as honeysuckle growing in the Arctic. Anyhow, she was too busy being incensed by that superior, condescending tone of his to care one way or the other.

‘Frankly, Mr Whatever-Your-Name-Is, it’s none of your business. Now, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just leave me alone and let me get on with it.’

‘Evan Cameron.’

‘What?’ Rowan blinked up at him.

‘My name. It’s Evan Cameron.’ But don’t get your hopes up. Just because I’ve told you my name it doesn’t mean we’re going to be friends. She heard the words echo through her head even though he hadn’t actually voiced them.

‘Fine. Good. I’ll know who you are if anyone knocks on my door by mistake, then.’ Her fingers curled around the screwdriver again and determinedly she trained all her concentration on trying to undo the obstinate screw.

‘Give it to me.’

‘What?’

The screwdriver was deftly removed from between her freezing-cold fingers before she even knew what was happening. Shocked by the contact of his larger, rougher hand brushing against hers, Rowan stood up to her full five feet five inches and glared at the black-haired whipcord-lean specimen of forbidding male towering over her.

‘Why don’t you get inside in the warm and I’ll see to this?’

If he’d meant to sound solicitous of her welfare all of a sudden, Rowan itched to tell him that he’d failed. Her creaking gate had annoyed him, that was all, and he was anxious to get it fixed so he wouldn’t have to endure another sleepless night because of it. Another woman might be grateful he was going to fix it at all and save her a job, but not Rowan. As far as she was concerned, if someone couldn’t offer help with a good heart then it wasn’t really help at all. She’d rather blunder on under her own steam and make a pig’s ear of the job than allow some hostile male with an overstated sense of his own machismo to take charge.

‘I didn’t ask for your help and neither do I require it, Mr Cameron. I’m sure you have better things to do than stand out here in the cold and fix my annoying gate on a Sunday morning.’

Holding out her hand, Rowan tried to ignore the thundering of her heart as her own soft brown eyes duelled with frosty green. ‘I’d like my screwdriver back, please.’

‘You got a man about the house, Ms Hawkins?’

‘That’s none of your business. And before you say anything else, don’t you dare stand there and condescend to treat me like some vacuous little female who doesn’t know one end of a power tool from another, because I—’

‘Do you?’ Evan’s lips twitched into a smile before he could help it.

Her shoulders stiffening in resentment, Rowan glared in disbelief. ‘Do I what?’

‘Know one end of a power tool from another?’

‘This is ridiculous! Give me my screwdriver and just go. Please go!’

‘Please yourself.’ Shrugging those broad shoulders of his as if he really didn’t give a damn, Evan returned the tool to her outstretched hand. He turned to walk away, then stopped and glanced back for a few disturbing seconds, his cool gaze sizing Rowan up as if he definitely found her wanting in the physical department. ‘Funny how the phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” springs to mind. Fix that gate, Ms Hawkins, or I’ll be knocking on your door in the middle of the night so that you can share my night-time torment.’

And with that he walked away, as if he were some arrogant lord of the manor and she a mere peasant trespassing on his land. Giving vent to her fury, Rowan jammed the screwdriver back into the screw and nearly howled in pain when it slipped and almost took the skin off her thumb.

Two hours later, her belly grumbling for lunch and her body stiff with cold, Rowan got up off her knees and had to admit defeat. Two hours…two hours, for God’s sake! And that damn hinge still wouldn’t budge. As she hurried back up the path towards the house, she glanced surreptitiously at her neighbour’s windows. Satisfied that she wasn’t being observed, she rushed inside and carefully shut the door behind her. Ten minutes later, phone directory in one hand and a steaming mug of hot chocolate in the other to warm her, Rowan sat herself down at the circular pine kitchen table with the telephone to see if she could locate a nearby odd-job man. She was still seething from Evan Cameron’s parting remark—‘night-time torment’ indeed! She was just about to pick up the phone to punch out a number when the melodic sound of the doorbell trilled ominously through the house.

‘You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that.’

‘Meaning?’

Bristling at the humour in Evan Cameron’s previously glacial green eyes as his awesome physique dominated her doorway, Rowan didn’t know how she resisted the urge to slap that smirk clean off his wretchedly handsome face.

‘For two hours now I’ve watched you struggle with that hinge in the cold and wind, and, whatever I think of your misguided stubbornness to prove a point, I’ve got to respect the fact that you didn’t give up trying. Let me put you out of your misery and mend the gate for you, then I promise I won’t bother you again.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘WHAT does it take to get through that thick skull of yours?’ Rowan heard herself demand. ‘I don’t want you to fix my gate. If I can’t fix it myself then I’d rather any other man in the world fixed it than you!’

The woman was even more stubborn than he’d thought. Evan knew he was mostly to blame for her current animosity towards him, but still he’d gone to her house with the best of intentions, and was it his fault if she refused to see that it made utter sense for him to fix her broken gate? She’d said she’d rather ‘any other man in the world’ fix it than him. Perhaps there wasn’t a husband or boyfriend around, then? There must be a good reason she was trying to repair the damn thing herself.

His green eyes narrowed with reluctant interest. In her floaty white dress of yesterday Rowan Hawkins had looked small and unbelievably slender. Today, in tight black jeans and a figure-hugging red sweater, Evan could see she had curves in plenty. His gaze was momentarily distracted by the angry rise and fall of her eye-catching breasts beneath her sweater and he cursed the inevitable reaction low in his groin. Despite his purely male response she really wasn’t his type at all. He liked his women taller and on the willowy side. He especially wasn’t attracted to women with that lost look in their pretty brown eyes, or women who thought it was an infringement of their human rights if a man so much as held a door open for them—never mind offered to mend broken gates.

‘Fine.’

Only it wasn’t fine. Not really. There was still the little matter of the creaking gate potentially keeping him awake for a second night in a row. The wind coming in off the sea was still fierce, and even now the damn thing was squeaking for all it was worth. If it carried on any longer he’d be fit to be tied. ‘Perhaps you could get your husband to fix it, then?’

Evan knew by the sudden shadows that crept into her eyes that he’d said the wrong thing. He’d deliberately baited her just for the hell of it. Oh, why hadn’t he just left well enough alone and walked away? He was the one who’d told her he wasn’t the neighbourly sort and now he was annoying himself with his dogged persistence in trying to win a response from her.

‘I don’t have a husband.’

‘Not the end of the world.’ Shrugging, Evan dug his hands into his jeans pockets, wondering how he could tactfully withdraw from the pain that was all too evident in her soft brown gaze. ‘You’re probably better off without one. I can’t say the married state is one I’d recommend.’

‘Really? Your cold cynicism can’t win you many friends, Mr Cameron. For your information, my husband was killed in a road accident. I loved him with all my heart and miss him like you can’t begin to imagine, so how do you figure that I’m better off without him?’

Her voice breaking on a sob, Rowan retreated, stricken, behind the solid wooden door with its peeling white paint and the sound of it slamming reverberated through Evan’s skull like cannon fire. For a long moment he simply didn’t move. Of all the crass, tactless, supremely stupid things that had ever come out of his mouth, his last comment to Rowan was probably the worst. Now not only did he loathe his own apparent inability to be even the smallest bit sensitive to a woman who was clearly in pain, but he also detested the unhappy knack he’d acquired in the past two years of distancing himself emotionally from the rest of the human race. Since Rebecca had done her worst it had been Evan’s safety valve, but now he despised himself for allowing it to become a habit.

He considered knocking on Rowan’s door again to apologise, but realised that under the circumstances she’d probably just tell him to go to hell. Too late, he was there already… He clicked his tongue and backtracked down the path to stare down at the offending gate with a rueful shake of his head.

An hour later he had it mended, new hinges and all. The curtain at one of Rowan’s front windows twitched slightly as Evan stood up, but he deliberately glanced away, stretching his arms high above his head to ease out the cramp in his muscles before gathering up his tools. He had no intention of waiting around for acknowledgement of what he’d done—not that he expected it. Instead, closing the gate smartly behind him with a satisfying click, he strode back down the path to his own house and headed straight for the television remote in the living-room. He’d drown out the painful self-recrimination tumbling around in his head with the athletics meet that the BBC were broadcasting and hopefully forget about everything else but the pursuit of athletic excellence and competing with the best.