That Tender Feeling Read Online Free Page A

what she was getting into a state about. It didn’t matter what he thought of her. Probably she would never see him again. That would suit her perfectly well. He could only serve as an added complication in a life that was complicated enough already.

CHAPTER TWO
    It was quite dark. Trees met overhead, turning the road into a black canyon. The car’s headlights picked up ghostly shapes. A small animal darted into their beams before scurrying away to safety.
    Ros thought about the haven of Aunt Miranda’s old-fashioned high bed, as soft as thistledown. As a child, she had found it difficult to climb into and had used a small stool to give her a leg up and then dived into its enfolding softness. Her child’s vivid imagination had conjured up stories around the patchwork quilt, making mountains out of her knees that the handsome prince then charged up on his pure white steed to rescue the fair maiden held captive in pillow castle.
    She thought her imagination wouldn’t have much leeway that night. She was so achingly tired she knew that she would fall asleep instantly.
    After going on seemingly forever and forging deeper and deeper into isolation, she finally slowed down to negotiate the turnoff road that led to Hawthorn Cottage. The potholed road was hazardous even in daytime. It served only two cottages. Hawthorn Cottage forked off to the left, Holly Cottage to the right. So she supposed the authorities didn’t think it merited the cost of keeping it in good repair. She wondered if Mrs. Heath still lived at Holly Cottage. If her memory served her correctly, she was younger than Aunt Miranda. The two cottages, both named after prickly shrubs with red berries, had always caused a certain amount of confusion. Inevitably, Ros had frequently acted as delivery girl, taking parcels and letters to Mrs. Heath that had gotten to Hawthorn Cottage in error. At first, Ros had gone to Mrs. Heath’s in fear and trepidation, but a rewarding wedge of homemade pie or oven cake, the latter split and buttered while warm so that the butter melted into the fragrant fluffy softness of the inside, had gone a long way to soothing her qualms, and she had begun to look for excuses to visit. Ros had quickly come to realize that Mrs. Heath had a lot in common with her oven cake. She was only crusty on the outside.
    On losing her initial shyness, she had accepted Mrs. Heath’s invitation to visit anytime, and an unlikely friendship had developed between the taciturn old lady and the introverted young girl. Sometimes, when visitors had overflowed at Hawthorn Cottage, she had slept in the tiny spare room at Holly Cottage. The only time she hadn’t liked going there had been when Mrs. Heath’s grandson was staying with her. He had been a gypsy-dark youth back then, ten years her senior; so that by the time she had reached the age of ten, he had been double her age, a man. Everyone had said then he was good-looking, but in Ros’s eyes he had appeared sinister. In all the stories she’d read, the good prince had been golden-haired, while the black-haired prince had been the wicked villain to be feared—as she had feared him. His name was Cliff Heath. She had taken one look at that saturnine face and had naturally called him Heathcliff.
    Mrs. Heath had fallen about laughing when she had first heard Ros address him by this name, but not so her grandson. He had looked fiercer than ever and made as though to pounce on Ros, causing her to tremble in her shoes and regret her boldness. Mrs. Heath had insisted that he was only teasing, but Ros hadn’t been so sure. Usually, she had believed implicitly in Mrs. Heath’s wisdom, but this had been one time when she had felt more inclined to trust the evidence of her own eyes, and a stolen, under-her-lashes glance had seen all that forbidding black disapproval.
    She had been twelve at the most when, to her immense relief, he’d gone to work abroad. He had been