Sheltering Rain Read Online Free

Bay.”
    â€œNo, thank you.”
    â€œPerhaps I could ask you to show me some of the local sights? I’ve never been to Hong Kong before.”
    â€œI’m very sorry, but I was just on my way out,” said Joy, who found she still couldn’t look at him.
    There was a long pause. He was definitely staring at her. She could feel it.
    â€œAnywhere nice?”
    â€œWhat?” Joy felt her heart thumping against her chest. Why wouldn’t he go?
    â€œYou said you were going out. I just wondered . . . well, where?”
    â€œI’m going riding.”
    â€œRiding?” Here she looked up, hearing the eagerness in his voice. “Are there horses here?”
    â€œNot here,” she said. “Not on the island, anyway. In the New Territories. A friend of my father’s runs a stables up there.”
    â€œWould you mind if I tagged along? I ride a bit back home. Miss it terribly. In fact, I haven’t seen a horse for nine months.”
    He said it in the wistful way that most servicemen talked about their families. His whole face, she realized, had sort of opened out, all the rather severe planes of it softening and lifting. He was, she had to admit, terrifically handsome, in a grown-up sort of way.
    But he had watched her disgracing herself over the balcony.
    â€œI’ve got a car. I could drive you. Or, just follow you, if that was more—er—convenient.”
    Joy knew her mother was bound to be horrified when Bei-Lin told her that Miss Joy had disappeared in a car with a strange man, but the aftershocks probably wouldn’t be that much worse than if she had stayed under her feet all day, providing a verbal punching bag for Alice’s hangover. And there was something rather delicious about skimming along the quiet roads with this strange, tall, freckled man, who, rather than making her feel awkward and clumsy with words, as most officers did, simply talked and talked himself, about his horses in Ireland (curiously, he didn’t have an Irish accent), the wildness of the hunting country where he lived, and, by contrast, the endless claustrophobic boredom of being confined to ship, stuck in the same tiny world, with the same people, for months and months at a time.
    She had never heard a man talk as he talked, free of the endless clipped observations that characterized most of the officers she spoke to. Edward’s speech was uncluttered and frank. He spoke like someone deprived of language for a long time, whole sentences coming out in gasps, like a drowning man gulping at air, and his laughter punctuated his sentences with huge, bellied guffaws. Then periodically he would stop, glance at her as if embarrassed by his own lack of reticence, and be quiet until the next thought bubbled out of him.
    Joy found herself laughing, too, at first shyly, her own self gradually liberated by this strange man, so that by the time they arrived at the stables she was glowing and giggling in a way totally alien to her. After a forty-minute absence, Alice would not have recognized this daughter at all. In fact, Joy hardly recognized her, sneaking glances at the man next to her, averting her eyes coyly when he met hers, generally behaving—well—like Stella.
    Mr. Foghill said he would let him ride. Joy had been secretly hoping he would, and once Edward had stood in the small yard with him, talking in reverent tones of great hunters he had known, and agreeing on the evident superiority of Irish bloodstock over English, the little widower had lost all his initial stiffness, and even recommended his own horse, a towering young chestnut with a crafty buck. He had demanded Edward take him around the manège for a couple of circuits, just to check on his seat and hands, but what he saw evidently satisfied him, for they were then riding slowly out of the gates, and up the road toward the open country.
    By this stage, Joy didn’t know what had come over her. She found it