“Bye,” Dan answered, and put her change in the till.
“So you’re friendly with at least one person in this village,” Claire said before she could think better of it. Eight hours of surly silence had taken its toll.
Dan gave her his usual stare. “That’s about right.”
“Are you from here?” Claire asked. “Or are you an offcomer like Lucy?”
“Offcomer,” Dan answered, and Claire couldn’t say she was surprised.
Chapter nine
Rachel
Rachel stared at Andrew West standing on her doorstep and said the first thing that came into her head. “Oh no. Not you.”
“May I come in?”
She really, really did not want Andrew West in her house. Not with the burned sausages on the stovetop and Lily’s music blasting and her mother groaning faintly from the downstairs bedroom. Plus she was pretty sure Meghan’s underthings, including several lacy thongs, were draped over the radiator in the sitting room to dry.
“Okay,” Rachel said after a moment, without any grace. She stepped aside so he could enter.
Andrew ducked his head to avoid the low stone lintel and then stood in the tiny hallway, cluttered with shoes and discarded hats and scarves and a whole lot of Lego.
Rachel picked up a woolly beanie that always seemed to be lying on the floor even though no one ever wore it and hung it on one of the coat hooks. “Come into the kitchen,” she said. “I’m just burning our tea.”
Andrew followed her into the kitchen, which was little bigger than the hall, his quiet gaze taking in everything Rachel never wanted someone like him to see. The peeling linoleum, the ancient cooker and wheezing fridge, the dripping tap and the burned sausages, their greasy smell hanging in the air and clinging to her skin.
Nathan looked up from his coloring book, his expression turning alert at the sight of a stranger.
“Hello,” Andrew said to Nathan, and then he shoved his hands in the pockets of his parka, clearly ill at ease, which gave Rachel a twist of savage amusement. Let him be a little uncomfortable in her domain. Let him see how close and constricting her life was. Fine. It would be worse for him than for her. Maybe.
“I’m not sure why you’re here.” She banged a pot on the stove and reached for a bag of peas from the freezer. Unfortunately she hadn’t realized it was open and as she jerked it out of the freezer, peas sprayed the kitchen floor like tiny green bullets.
“Oops, Ray-Ray,” Nathan said, looking pleased by the mess.
Rachel sighed and pushed the peas into a pile with her foot. “Never mind, Nathan. I’ll clean them up later.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Claire,” Andrew said. “But if you’re busy...”
Rachel arched an eyebrow. “Oh, you think I’m busy?” she said as she poured the rest of the peas into the pan. “Why on earth would you think that?”
Andrew neither apologized nor rose to the bait. “I can come back later.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
Nathan’s face crumpled a bit. Clearly he was sensing the hostility. Rachel took a deep breath, forcing herself to stay calm. She didn’t want Nathan dissolving into tears, and frankly, she shouldn’t care what Andrew West thought of anything. Being so openly aggressive showed him she did.
“Sorry, I’m not actually trying to be rude. But is it important? Because I have a lot going on at the moment. As I told you before.”
“Actually, it is,” Andrew said. “I wouldn’t have come here otherwise. I can tell you have a lot going on, Rachel.”
The quietly spoken words deflated her a bit. “Right, then.” No doubt he wanted to tell the details of Claire’s sob story. And a tiny, mean little part of her wanted to hear them. “We can talk, but not here.” She was fighting the urge to push Andrew out of her house before he saw any more of her sad little life. She’d thought she could take it, but now she didn’t think she could. “Let me sort things here and then we can talk outside, okay?”
“It’s bucketing down at the moment,” Andrew pointed out. “How about I buy you a drink at the pub?”
Which would be the closest thing she’d had to a date in more than five years. “Not the pub,” Rachel said. She couldn’t bear everyone’s speculative gazes when she came into the Hangman’s Noose with Andrew, the good-natured but uncomfortably pointed ribbing she’d get. “Let’s go somewhere else.”
“Raymond’s?” he suggested, which was the classy bistro that had opened in the old train station a handful of years ago. Rachel had never been inside.
