The Healing Stream by Connie Monk Page B

put me off.’
    ‘That’s a pity. I love to lose myself in a book, even if the only time there is has to be in bed at night. Is he a friend of your father’s?’
    By this time they had parked the car and Tessa was getting out ready to fix the ramp.
    ‘I suppose he must be. He sort of comes casually as if he belongs to the family; he always has. Shh! He’s coming over. Don’t let’s be talking about him.’
    Living with her grandmother, Tessa’s had never considered her life to be different from other girls’ of her age. For many of them, trips to the cinema were responsible for the first stirrings of adolescent dreams; pictures carefully cut from movie magazines were pinned to bedroom walls. But not for Tessa. Working in the hotel meant she wasn’t free in the evenings so what more natural than she should look for friendship in books? And of all the books she had read, none had become part of her life as those about the people of Burghton. And now she was about to meet their creator!
    ‘Let me do that for you.’ She heard his voice as she was opening the back doors of the hybrid, a beautiful voice just as she’d known it would be. She was almost frightened to look at him for fear that the picture she had built in her mind would be shattered. ‘I’m quite adept at it, aren’t I, Deirdre? I’ll get you out and then you can introduce me to your friend.’
    ‘She’s Tessa.’
    ‘Ah.’ With the chair wheeled down the ramp to the ground, he turned and held out his hand. ‘How do you do, Tessa. I’m Giles.’
    ‘Yes, I know. You’re Giles Lampton.’ She found herself gazing at him in awe. ‘Deirdre told me. You’re like I expected.’ And she believed she spoke the truth as she gazed at the creator of Burghton, the place she knew so well. He was tallish, slim and yet he gave the impression of strength, his brown hair was neither straight nor curly. But it was his eyes that seemed to hypnotize her, light blue and fringed with dark lashes, she felt they saw right through her.
    Giles laughed. ‘What did she tell you then?’
    ‘I mean, I didn’t know what you would look like. I’d never thought about it. But because I know the characters in your books: Chilvers from the bakery, Reverend Maidment and the family at the rectory, Percy the milkman and his wife Margot, all of them, because I know them as if they’re family really, it’s as if I know
you
, too.’
    All the time she’d been speaking he had still held on to her hand.
    ‘That’s the nicest thing you can say to any writer.’ What a delightful creature she was, he thought, aware that he was the object of her adolescent hero worship and enjoying the situation. He came in for plenty of flattery from the opposite sex and accepted it for what it was worth. But this girl was different. Despite her confident manner, she still had the innocence of childhood about her. And those luminous dark eyes refused to keep the secret of her innermost thoughts.
    ‘Daddy is at the dentist’s,’ Deirdre was saying. ‘But you can come in and have tea with Tessa and me if you like.’
    And ‘like’ he most certainly did, meaning to milk Tessa for all the adulation she was willing to shower on him.
    Much later, driving back to his cottage on the edge of Downing Wood he felt less certain. Yes, the adulation had been there, there was no doubt of that; what he hadn’t been prepared for was a strange and unfamiliar feeling. Tenderness? Yes, but not the sort of tolerant tenderness, probably tinged with humour at the situation, that might be felt for a hero-worshipping youngster. And that’s what she is, he reminded himself. I’m old enough to be her father. Remember the natural way she walked on those ridiculously high heels: straight-backed, seemingly unaware that she’d been bestowed with such natural grace. Smartly dressed in a suit with a tight-fitting straight skirt that had made him conscious of the slight movement of her bottom with each step. Fortunately