Sheltering Rain Read Online Free Page B

ride with, anyway. And wherever we dock, the only ones I meet want to go to cocktail parties and be witty, and to be honest I’m not much cop at all that stuff. I had a girl once—and she was a bit like you—but she . . . well. That’s all gone. And I haven’t met anyone who I could actually relax with for an absolute age.”
    Oh, but Joy wanted to kiss him. I know, I know, she wanted to shout. I feel that way, too. I feel all the things you feel. But she just smiled and nodded, sneaking glances at him from under her wet hair, simultaneously berating herself for her sudden transformation into the kind of girl she had always despised. She didn’t know what she wanted in a man (it had never occurred to her that it was up to her to do the wanting), and now she found herself drawn to him not because of specific qualities, but because of a whole list of negatives: his ability not to make her feel awkward; the fact that he didn’t look like a sack of rice on a horse; his tendency not to look at her as though he wished she were someone else. Something swelled and grew in Joy; it was bigger than nausea, but just as incapacitating.
    â€œThank you. Anyway. Because I’ve had the best time.” He rubbed at his head, so that his hair stood up in front, and looked away from her. “And I know you didn’t really want me to come.”
    Joy stared at him in horror as he said this, but now it was he who looked ahead. She couldn’t think of a way of conveying that he had misunderstood, that it was the being-sick thing that she had been running from, not him, without bringing it all back again, and she didn’t want him to remember her for that. Oh, where was Stella when she needed her? She always knew how to talk to men. By the time she had decided that a short denial was the best response, it was somehow too late, and they were heading back toward the yard, their horses’ heads stretched long and low in front of them, nodding wearily as they headed home.
    Edward offered to help put the horses away, and Mr. Foghill suggested she might like to refresh herself in the ladies’ rest room. On sight of her reflection, she realized that he had been being solicitous. She looked a fright. Her hair was a frizzy, wet tangle, a hair ball in a bathplug. When she tried to run her fingers through it, they halted only inches from her scalp. Her face was both sweaty with humidity and smeared with dust from the trail, and there were green spittle marks on her white shirt, where her horse had attempted to rub his head on her after she had dismounted. She rubbed furiously at her face with a wet hand towel, almost in tears at her inability to remember something as simple as a comb, or spare ribbon. Stella would never have forgotten something like that. But when she walked out, Edward merely greeted her with a broad smile, as if there were nothing remiss in her appearance. It was then that she noticed his own trousers were streaked with sweat and red dirt, clean only from the shin down, where Mr. Foghill had lent him a pair of boots.
    â€œYour carriage awaits,” he said, grinning at his own appearance. “You’ll need to direct me back. I haven’t a clue where we are.”
    Edward was a little quieter on the way home, and Joy felt her own silence more acutely. She could issue directions, but, despite the ease she felt in his company, could still not muster up anything interesting to say. It would all feel somehow shallow, when what she wanted to convey was that in the space of four short hours he had shifted her very world off its axis. In his eyes she saw other lands, green fields and hunting dogs, eccentric villagers, and a world devoid of cocktail parties. In his voice, she heard a speech free from artifice, and cleverness, continents away from the mannered, moneyed language of the Hong Kong expat. In his broad, freckled hands, she saw horses and kindnesses and something else