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‘The old girl’s vintage,’ Sean confirmed. ‘She’s your Great-Uncle Basil’s pride and joy, but right now she’s in need of a good home.’
As he said this, he looked over her shoulder into the house, no doubt intending to emphasize the point.
He didn’t visibly flinch but the hall, like the rest of the house, was desperately in need of a coat of paint. It was also piled up with discarded shoes, coats and all the other stuff that teenagers seemed to think belonged on the floor. And of course, her rubber gloves.
That was the bad news.
The good news was that he couldn’t see where the carpet had been chewed by the dog that had caused them all so much grief.
‘Vintage,’ she repeated sharply, forcing him to look at her instead of the mess behind her. ‘Well, it would certainly fit right in around here. There’s just one small problem.’
More than one if she was being honest and honestly, despite the fact that the aged family car had failed its annual test and she was desperate for some transport, she wasn’t prepared to take possession of a vehicle that was short on seats and heavy on fuel.
Walking, as she was always telling her sisters, was good for you. Shaped up the legs. Pumped blood around the body and made the brain work harder. And they all had a duty to the planet to walk more. Or use public transport.
She walked. They used public transport.
There was absolutely no chance that either of her sisters would consider using the bike when it meant wearing an unflattering helmet and looking, in their words, ‘like a dork’ when they arrived at school and college, respectively.
‘Which is?’ he prompted.
She didn’t bother him with the financial downside of her situation, but kept it simple.
‘I don’t have a Great Uncle Basil.’
Finally a frown. It didn’t lessen the attraction, just made him look thoughtful, studious. Even more hormone-twangingly desirable.
‘You are Lovage Amery?’ he asked, catching up with the fact that, while she hadn’t denied it, she hadn’t confirmed it either. ‘And this is Gable End, The Common, Longbourne.’
She was slow to confirm it and, twigging to her reluctance to own up to the name, the address, he glanced back at the wide wooden gate propped wide open and immovable for as long as she could remember. The letters that spelled out the words ‘Gable End’ were faded almost to nothing, but denial was pointless.
‘Obviously there has been some kind of mistake,’ she said with all the conviction she could muster. Maybe. Her grandmother might well know someone named Basil who needed somewhere to park his ice cream van, but he wasn’t her uncle, great or otherwise. And, even if she’d wanted to—and she didn’t—she had no time to take on an ice cream round. End of, as Geli was so fond of saying. ‘Please take it away.’
‘I will.’ Her relieved smile was a fraction too fast. ‘If you’ll just help me get to the bottom of this.’
‘Some kind of muddle in the paperwork?’ she offered. ‘Take it up with Basil.’
‘It’s not a common name. Lovage,’ he said, ignoring her excellent advice.
‘There’s a good reason for that,’ she muttered.
One of his eyebrows kicked up and something in her midriff imitated the action. Without thinking, Elle found herself checking his left hand for a wedding band. It was bare, but that didn’t mean a thing. No man that good-looking could possibly be unattached. And, even if he was, she reminded herself, she wasn’t. Very firmly attached to a whole heap of responsibilities.
Two sisters still in full-time education, a grandmother who lived in her own make-believe world, and a house that sucked up every spare penny she earned working shifts in a dead-end job so that she could fit around them all.
‘You don’t like it?’ he asked.
‘No … Yes …’ It wasn’t that she didn’t like her name. ‘Sadly, it tends to rouse the infantile in the male, no matter how old they are.’
‘Men can be their own worst enemies,’ he admitted. Then said it again. ‘Lovage …’
This time he lingered over the name, testing it, giving it a deliciously soft lilt, making it sound very grown-up. And she discovered he didn’t need the smile to turn her bones to putty.
She reached for the door, needing something to hang on to.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ she snapped, telling herself to get a grip.
The man was trying to lumber her with a superannuated piece of junk. Or, worse, was a con artist distracting her while an accomplice—maybe Basil himself—slipped around the back of the house and made off with anything not nailed down. Well, good luck with that one. But, whatever he was up to, it was a cast-iron certainty that flirting was something that came to him as naturally as breathing. And she was being sucked in.
‘If that’s all?’ she enquired.
‘No, wait!’
She hesitated a second too long.
‘Right name. Tick. Right address. Tick—’
‘Annoying male, tick,’ she flashed back at him, determined to put an end to this. Whatever this was.
‘You may well be right,’ he agreed, amused rather than annoyed. Which was annoying. ‘But, while you might not know your Great-Uncle Basil, I think you’re going to have to accept that he knows you.’ He looked down at the envelope he was holding, then up at her. ‘Tell me, are you all named after herbs in your family?’
She opened her mouth, then, deciding not to go there, said, ‘Tell me, Mr McElroy, does she … it,’ she corrected herself, refusing to fall into the trap of thinking of the van as anything other than an inanimate object ‘does it go?’
‘I drove her here,’ he pointed out, the smile enticing, mouth-wateringly sexy. Confident that he’d got her. ‘I’ll take you for a spin in her so that I can talk you through her little eccentricities, if you like,’ he went on before she could complete her punchline, tell him to start it up and drive it away. ‘She’s a lovely old girl, but she has her moods.’
‘Oh, right. You’re telling me she’s a cranky old ice cream van.’
‘That’s a bit harsh.’ He leaned his shoulder against the door frame, totally relaxed, oblivious of the fact that the rose scrambling over the porch had dropped pink petals over his thick dark hair and on one of those broad shoulders. ‘Shall we say she’s an old ice cream van with bags of character?’
‘Let’s not,’ she replied, doing her best to get a grip of her tongue, her hormones, her senses, all of which were urging her to forget her problems, throw caution to the wind and, for once in her life, say yes instead of no. ‘I’m sorry, Mr McElroy—’
‘Sean—’
‘I’m sorry, Mr McElroy,’ she reiterated, refusing to be sidetracked, ‘but my mother told me never to take a ride with a stranger.’
A classic case of do as I say rather than do as I do, obviously. In similar circumstances, her mother wouldn’t have hesitated. She’d have grabbed the adventure and, jingle blaring, driven around the village scandalising the neighbours.
But, gorgeous though Sean McElroy undoubtedly was, she wasn’t about to make the same mistakes as her mother. And while he was still trying to get his head around the fact that she’d turned him down flat, she took a full step back and shut the door. Then she slipped the security chain into place, although whether it was to keep him out or herself in she couldn’t have said.
He didn’t move. His shadow was still clearly visible behind one of the stained glass panels that flanked the door and, realising that he might be able to see her pinned to the spot, her heart racing, she grabbed the rubber gloves and beat a hasty retreat to the safety of the kitchen.
Today was rapidly turning into a double scrub day and, back on her knees, she went at it with even more vigour, her pulse pounding in her ears as she waited for the bell to ring again.
It didn’t.
Regret warred with relief. It was a gorgeous May day and the thought of a spin in an ice cream van with a good-looking man called to everything young and frivolous locked up inside her. Everything she had never been. Even the scent of the lilac, wafting in through the kitchen door, seemed hell-bent on enticing her to abandon her responsibilities for an hour and have some fun.
She shook her head. Dangerous stuff, fun, and she attacked the floor with the brush, scrubbing at the already spotless quarry tiles, taking her frustration out on something inanimate while she tried to forget Sean McElroy’s blue eyes and concentrate on today’s problem. How to conjure two hundred and fifty pounds out of thin air to pay for Geli’s school trip to France.
There was nothing for it. She was going to have to bite the bullet and ask her boss for an extra shift.
Sean caught his breath.
He’d been having trouble with it ever since the door of Gable End had been thrown open to reveal Lovage Amery, cheeks flushed, dark hair escaping the elastic band struggling—and failing—to hold it out of a pair of huge hazel eyes.
Being a step up, she’d been on a level with him, which meant that her full, soft lips, a luscious figure oozing sex appeal, had been right in his face.
That she was totally oblivious of the effect created by all that unrestrained womanhood made it all the more enticing. All the more dangerous.
Furious as he was with Basil, he’d enjoyed the unexpected encounter and, while he was not fool enough to imagine he was irresistible, he thought that she’d been enjoying it, too. She’d certainly been giving as good as she got.
It was a long time since a woman had hit all the right buttons with quite that force and she hadn’t even been trying.
Maybe that was part of the attraction.
He’d caught her unawares and, unlike most women of his acquaintance, she hadn’t been wearing a mask, showing him what she thought he’d want to see.
Part of the attraction, all of the danger.
He’d as good as forgotten why he was there and the suddenness of her move had taken him by surprise. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been despatched quite so summarily by a woman but the rattle of the security chain going up had a finality about it that suggested ringing the doorbell again would be a waste of time.
He looked at the envelope Basil Amery had pushed through his door while he was in London, along with a note asking him to deliver it and Rosie to Lovage Amery.
He’d been furious. As if he didn’t have better things to do, but it was typical of the man to take advantage. Typical of him to disappear without explanation.
True, his irritation had evaporated when the door had opened but, while it was tempting to take advantage of the side gate, standing wide open, and follow up his encounter with the luscious Miss Amery, on this occasion he decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
It would take more than a pair of pretty eyes to draw him into the centre of someone else’s family drama. He had enough of that in his own backyard.
A pity, but he’d delivered Rosie. Job done.
CHAPTER TWO
Take plenty of exercise. Always run after the ice cream van.
—Rosie’s Diary
ELLE, hot, flustered and decidedly bothered from her encounter with Sean McElroy, found her concentration slipping, her ears straining to hear the van start up, the crunch of tyres on gravel as it drove away.
It was all nonsense, she told herself, mopping up the suds, sitting back on her heels. She’d never heard of anyone called Basil Amery. It had to be a mistake. But the silence bothered her. While she hadn’t heard the van arrive, she hadn’t been listening. She had, however, been listening for it to leave.
The sudden rattle of the letter box made her jump. That was the only reason her heart was pounding, she told herself as she leapt to her feet. She wasn’t in the habit of racing to pick up the post—it rarely contained anything but bills and she could wait for those—but it was an excuse to check that he’d gone.
There were two things on the mat. The brown envelope Sean McElroy had been holding and a bunch of keys. He couldn’t, she told herself. He wouldn’t … But the key fob was an ice cream cornet and she flung open the door.
Rosie was still sitting on the drive, exactly where he’d parked her.
‘Sean McElroy!’ she called, half expecting him to be sitting in the van, grinning at having tricked her into opening the door.
He wasn’t and, in a sudden panic, she ran to the gate, looking up and down the lane. Unless he’d had someone follow him in a car, he’d have to walk, or catch a bus.
She spun around, desperately checking the somewhat wild shrubbery.
Nothing. She was, apparently, quite wrong.
He could.
He had.
Abandoned Rosie on her doorstep.
‘If you’re looking for the van driver, Elle, he rode off in that direction.’
Elle inwardly groaned. Mrs Fisher, her next door neighbour, was bright-eyed with excitement as she stepped up to take a closer look at Rosie.
‘Rode?’
‘He had one of those fold-up bikes. Are you taking on an ice cream round?’ she asked.
The internal groan reached a crescendo. The village gossips considered the Amery family their own private soap opera and whatever she said would be chewed over at length in the village shop.
‘Sorry, Mrs Fisher, I can hear my phone,’ she said, legging it inside, pushing the door shut behind her. If she’d left it open the woman would have considered it an invitation to walk in.
She sat on the bottom of the stairs holding the envelope, staring at the name and address which was, without doubt, hers.
Then she tore it open and tipped out the contents. A dark pink notebook with ‘Bookings’ written on the cover. A bells and whistles cellphone, the kind that would have her sisters drooling. There were a couple of official-looking printed sheets of paper. One was the logbook for the van, which told her that it was registered to Basil Amery of Keeper’s Cottage, Haughton Manor, the other was an insurance certificate.
There was also a cream envelope.
She turned it over. There was nothing written on it, no name or address, but that had been on the brown envelope. She put her thumb beneath the flap and took out the single sheet of matching paper inside. Unfolded it.
Dear Lally, it began, and her heart sank as she read her grandmother’s pet name.
Remember how you found me, all those years ago? Sitting by the village pond, confused, afraid, ready to end it all?
You saved me that day, my life, my sanity, and what happened afterwards wasn’t your fault. Not Bernard’s either. My brother and I were chalk and cheese but we are as we’re made and there’s nothing that can change us. Maybe, if our mother had still been alive, things would have been different, but there’s no point in dwelling on it. The past is past.
I’ve kept my promise and stayed away from the family. I caused enough heartache and you and Lavender’s girls have had more than enough of that to bear, losing Bernard and Lavender, without me turning up to dredge up the past, old scandals. The truth, however, is that I’m getting old and home called. Last year I took a cottage on the Haughton Manor estate and I’ve been working up the courage to write to you, but courage was never my strong point and now I’ve left it too late.
I have met your lovely granddaughter, though. I had lunch at the Blue Boar a couple of months ago and she served me. She was so like you, Lally—all your charm, your pretty smile—that I asked someone who she was. She even has your name. And here, I’m afraid, comes the crunch. You knew there would be a crunch, didn’t you?
Rosie, who by now you’ll have met, is a little hobby of mine. I do the occasional party, public event, you know the kind of thing, just to cover the costs of keeping her. The occasional charity do for my soul. Unfortunately, events have rather overtaken me and I have to go away for a while but there are people I’ve made promises to, people I can’t let down and I thought perhaps you and your granddaughter might take it on for me. A chance for her to get out of that restaurant once in a while. For you to think of me, I hope. Sean, who brings this to you, will show you how everything works.
I’ve enclosed the bookings diary as well as the phone I use for the ice cream business and, in order to make things easier for you, I’ve posted the change of keeper slip to the licence people so that Rosie is now registered in your name. God bless and keep you, Lally. Yours always, Basil
Elle put her hand to her mouth. Swallowed. Her great-uncle. Family. He’d been within touching distance and she’d had no idea. She tried to remember serving someone on his own, but the Blue Boar had a motel that catered for businessmen travelling on their own.
