Poison Flowers by Natasha Cooper Page A

tiresome: you might have thought I’d need to know that,’ said Willow mildly. ‘Will you at least try to get answers to my other questions?’
    â€˜Very few murders are caused by events or emotions from the distant past. Willow,’ he said, and then added a little crossly: ‘What are you smiling at?’
    â€˜I didn’t realise that it showed,’ she said.
    â€˜Well it did. You looked transformed by it,’ said Worth, as though the compliment was being dragged from him. ‘It made you look happy.’
    â€˜I am, except when I think about the murderer, the victims, or you as the victim of your colleagues’malice,’ she said, smiling more openly at him. ‘I was just thinking that you are the only man I know who could say something like that – about murders not being caused by things from the past – without sounding patronising or contemptuous.’
    As she spoke, Tom Worth’s craggy face also relaxed into a smile, and his right hand stretched out towards her. Willow put her own into it.
    â€˜Well, Will? What about it?’ he asked, as though he were suggesting a walk in the park. Willow was not deceived, but she was not pressed into a decision either.
    â€˜Why not?’ she said at last.
    As he was shutting the door of her bedroom, Willow turned back, suddenly aware of the risk he represented to her peace of mind.
    â€˜Don’t say it, Will,’ said Tom, gently brushing one hand across her lips, leaving a trail of sensation where he had touched her. His certainty and the feel of his skin on hers made her breathless.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember, too. Come to bed.’
    She put out both hands and he gripped them, leaning forward to kiss her. His hands left hers and she felt him pull her closer until she was leaning against him. Her muscles seemed to have turned to jelly and something had happened to her mind. She could think of nothing but him and the dizzying sensations that his hands and his lips and his body sent through her.
    By the time they were lying on her huge, soft bed; she knew that any risk was worth taking and reached for him, to take and to give.
    Two-and-a-half hours later Willow got quietly out of bed to run a bath. When she went back into the bedroom she saw that Tom was still asleep, flat on his back, his dark hair falling over his forehead and his right hand lying on top of the linen-covered duvet, palm upwards. He looked vulnerable and almost unbearably attractive as he lay against the brilliantly white linen. Willow stood, clutching the primrose dressing gown around herself and looking at him.
    Love had not been an element in either of her lives before Tom had appeared to smash through her self-sufficiency and the perfect arrangements she had made to keep herself protected from difficult and frightening emotion. Looking back to her peculiar childhood, she understood why her parents had treated her as they had, but having discovered how completely incompetent she was in the real world of feelings she found it hard to forgive them.
    Richard, who had his own distaste for emotion, had been the first person in whom she had ever confided or for whom she had allowed herself to feel any affection at all. Now she was confronted by feelings that were far stronger than that and she was terrified. She did not know how she would read or what she would do, whether she could survive a real passion and whether she could give enough. It was obvious that unless she sent Tom Worth away her life would change, and yet the idea of its changing worried her still. Nothing could be clear-cut any more; everything seemed dangerous and frightening in a world where she cared so much for someone else.
    A changing note in the sound of the bathwater rescued her from her introspection and she went to turn off the taps. Lying back in oiled and scented water wrought its usual calming influence over Willow’s mind and by the time Tom