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‘Papers?’
‘To prove you have a viewing appointment.’
Jack’s mouth tightened as he wondered who Miss High and Mighty Scott-Hamilton thought she was—or who he was, for that matter.
He reached a hand into the inside pocket of his suit and took out his wallet. From it he withdrew a business card.
It was extended with a thin-lipped smile and Esme didn’t need clairvoyance to know she’d annoyed him. She took the card but, without her reading glasses, the small print danced in front of her. Perhaps it would have with her glasses on, thrown back as she had been to her past.
She screwed up her eyes and the print started to come into focus, but not before he suggested, ‘I’ll read it for you if you like.’
This time his tone was milder, less sarcastic, but it still sliced through her. Midge wasn’t the only nickname bestowed on her by her big sister Arabella when they were children, only she’d confined the use of Dumbo to outside parental range.
‘I’m not that thick, you know!’ she snapped back.
He looked surprised, as if such a thought had never crossed his mind. ‘Have I ever suggested you were, Mi—Esme?’
In fairness, no. He was the one who’d suggested otherwise.
‘I just remember you wearing reading glasses,’ he added.
She cringed a little. Was she forever printed on his mind as a plump, bespectacled teen? At the time she’d longed for him to look her way, to notice. It seemed he had. She just hadn’t measured up.
She stared back down at the card until the bold lettering came into focus:
Jack Doyle
Managing Director
J.D. Net
She didn’t bother scrutinising the telephone number. She was too busy absorbing the rest. He was MD and it wasn’t Jadenet as she’d heard her mother say—but J.D. Net. As in, Jack Doyle Net?
What else had her mother said about their prospective buyer? Some American internet entrepreneur worth mega-bucks. Had her mother been in the dark or was she too proud to admit the truth?
‘Does my mother know J.D. Net is you?’ she asked bluntly.
He shrugged. ‘Possibly not. I didn’t arrange this viewing in person.’
No, he would have lackeys to do that. Go buy my childhood home, he’d probably said. Only technically it wasn’t. The cottage in the grounds where he’d lived was the one thing held back in the sale. She assumed he knew that.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said finally, and left him to follow her into the hall.
It was stark and bare. What furniture her mother hadn’t wanted had been auctioned off. She had tried to auction the house, too, but it hadn’t made its reserve price and now they were struggling to find a buyer.
The chequered marble on the floor was worn but still magnificent. Jack Doyle looked up towards the sweeping staircase and the galleried landing above.
Esme watched him assessing, measuring, perhaps trying to picture it with his own taste of decor and furniture.
Eventually he walked towards the drawing room, his footsteps echoing in the hall, and opened the double doors to glance inside. He seemed to be taking brief mental snapshots, repeating the process for each of the main rooms until he reached what had been the dining room.
There he lingered. The room was bare but Esme wondered if he remembered how it was the night he’d barged in, looking for Arabella. Esme had sat at the window end of the long table, Rosalind Scott-Hamilton at the other. No Arabella. She’d left their mother to act as go-between, a task the older woman had seemed to relish. Esme had burned with humiliation on his behalf.
She was brought back sharply to the present as he finally turned to face her, his expression neutral. ‘I’d like to look round upstairs.’
Esme shrugged her permission. She knew she should be trying to sell the house and its good points but she couldn’t bring herself to do it—not to him, anyway.
Jack started to climb the stairs and she followed automatically. When he paused at the landing window where the stairs forked into two, Esme ventured, ‘Was it always an ambition—to come back and buy this place?’
Of course, it was a silly thing to ask. He was hardly likely to confess such cupidity.
His lips twisted slightly. ‘I see your reading taste hasn’t altered.’
Esme looked blank at this non sequitur. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Jane Eyre?’ He raised a quizzical brow. ‘Or was it Wuthering Heights? The one where the uncouth stable boy returns a rich man to wreak havoc on the family.’
‘Wuthering Heights,’ she responded, although she suspected he knew the answer.
He nodded to the view outside, stone terraces and cultivated lawns leading down to disused tennis courts, the maze and a small lake beyond. ‘Not exactly Heathcliff territory, is it? Don’t think I’ll hear Cathy calling for me out there.’
He was laughing at her. What else?
Esme knew how to wipe the smile from his face and did so, saying, ‘Don’t you mean Arabella?’
‘Arabella?’ His mouth thinned slightly. ‘As the Great Love of my life, you mean?’
She hadn’t expected him to be so upfront about it. Nor had she expected it to still hurt—his preference for her big sister. But it did.
Then he added, ‘Well, sorry to disappoint but I’ve moved on from there. I’ve had at least two or three Great Loves since then,’ he informed her, very much tongue-in-cheek.
Esme answered in kind, ‘How wonderful for you—and them, of course,’ hiding her real feelings behind sarcasm.
What else could she do? Tell him what a pig of a time she’d been having while he was living the life of Reilly? It wouldn’t be true, anyway. She and Harry were happy enough.
Jack was taken aback for a moment—this new Esme really had grown claws—but found himself amused despite the fact.
‘I’ll take that as a vote of confidence,’ he said as she began leading the way to the first-floor gallery.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Esme muttered under her breath but loud enough for him to hear.
Jack chose to ignore the comment but, wanting to set the record straight, continued, ‘Anyway, it’s more a coincidence, us buying this place.’
Us? Esme picked that up and pondered over it. Us as in his business, or us as in significant other?
‘We need a base near London. Sussex is well-placed for the Continent and Highfield is one of three possibilities the location agency came up with,’ he relayed as she showed him the first of the twelve upstairs rooms. ‘Unfortunately our first choice was sold off before we were in a position to move on it and the other place has no permission for business use, so that leaves Highfield.’
He made it sound as if he might settle for the house. Her beloved home. One of the finest Georgian manors in the area.
‘Never mind,’ she rallied, striding in and out of bedrooms like a demented estate agent, ‘it has at least one point in its favour.’
‘Which is?’ Jack followed in her wake and, leaning against a door jamb, forced her to come to rest.
‘Well, you could always claim it’s your family seat,’ Esme volunteered recklessly, resentfully. ‘Impress your other nouveau riche friends.’
She knew she’d gone too far even before she said it. She just didn’t care.
She wanted to pierce that seamless confidence. Hurt him as he’d hurt her, however unknowingly. Because suddenly it seemed worse that he didn’t know, had never known, hadn’t the first idea of the tears she’d cried for him, the pain she’d endured.
For a moment Jack didn’t react at all. The truth was he wasn’t sure how to. It was as if the family terrier, cute and loveable, had suddenly turned into a teeth-baring Rottweiler, guarding her territory.
Only it wasn’t hers for much longer, whether he bought it or someone else did. He’d gathered that much from the location agent. And, yes, though it held some appeal—the idea that Rosalind Scott-Hamilton would eventually discover it was the cook’s son who had bought her stately pile—it wasn’t part of some grand master plan. He would pass on it if it proved unsuitable.
‘You may have something there,’ he replied in dry tones. ‘Crest of arms on the door and my portrait above the mantelpiece—what do you think?’
Esme thought he was laughing at her again.
‘I’ll give you the commission if you like,’ he added.
‘Me?’
‘You were something of an artist, as I recall.’
‘That was in the past.’
‘But you went to art college?’
That had been Esme’s intention but reality had intruded.
‘No, I did other things,’ she dismissed.
Jack waited for her to expand on that statement but she remained tight-lipped. He guessed she’d probably gone down the finishing school-debutante route that her sister her taken. Was that what had changed her?
‘Do you want to see the other rooms?’ she asked offhandedly.
It drew the response, ‘Do you want to sell the house?’
She flushed. Did she want to sell the house? No. Did they have to? Yes.
‘I’m sorry.’ Somehow she gritted out the words. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were still interested.’
‘Well, I won’t be if I don’t see it all,’ he pointed out.
‘Right.’ Teeth clenched, Esme continued the guided tour.
At each room, she became increasingly conscious of how bare and decaying the whole house looked. Only her old sanctuary still had furniture. A bed, washstand, bookcase and chest of drawers were earmarked for her new home but she had been slow in arranging for the pieces to be moved.
‘Your room?’ Jack guessed, seeing the book titles on a shelf.
She nodded.
‘Are you still living here?’ he added, frowning a little.
‘No,’ she replied shortly. ‘Everything will be gone by the time the house is sold on.’
‘Where are you based now?’ It was a natural enough question.
She gave a deliberately vague, ‘Locally.’
‘Are you married?’ he added with mild curiosity.
The question made her inexplicably cross. ‘Who would I be married to?’
She recognised the oddity of her answer, even before he gave her a quizzical look.
‘Well, there was that boy,’ he replied with a slight smile, ‘from one of the neighbouring estates. You used to go riding with him. Sandy-haired. One of a few brothers?’
Esme knew who he meant but didn’t help him out. There had been no real romance with Henry Fairfax.
Instead she said, ‘Jack, you’ve been away almost ten years. Do you imagine everyone else’s life has stood still?’
‘Fair comment.’ He pulled an apologetic face. ‘But people do get frozen in time if you haven’t seen them for a while.’
Esme supposed he was right. Up until today—until just this hour—Jack Doyle had stayed in her head as her first love, a love tainted by anguish for a young man she’d idolised.
Now here he was, far too real, and bringing with him feelings of resentment that had somehow never properly surfaced till now.
‘So what is it that the new Esme does?’ he enquired with a smile.
The interest could have been genuine but Esme didn’t think so. Had he ever really noticed her with Arabella around?
‘I do people’s houses,’ she replied shortly.
‘Do?’ he echoed. ‘As in…what exactly?’
He sounded hesitant, unusual for him.
Esme glanced at him briefly. Something in his expression helped her read his mind. God, he really did think the family had fallen on hard times!
She was almost amused. Certainly amused enough to play along. ‘How do people normally do houses?’
‘You clean them?’ he said with lingering incredulity.
No, she actually decorated them, but she was enjoying his confusion too much to say so.
‘Have you a problem with that?’ she rejoined.
‘No, of course not.’ His own mother, though officially cook, had cleaned up after the Scott-Hamiltons. ‘It just isn’t something I pictured you doing.’
