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‘Well, that’s life,’ Esme concluded philosophically. ‘I never pictured you a big-shot wheeler-dealer businessman.’
‘Hardly that,’ he denied. ‘I design and market websites. That just happens to be where the money is now.’
It wasn’t false modesty. Esme knew that much. Even as a young man, Jack Doyle had never underplayed or overstated his achievements. He’d sailed through school and college, a straight ‘A’ student, but, being totally secure about his intellectual gifts, had felt no need to advertise them.
It was Esme’s father who had noticed and come up with the idea of him tutoring Esme. Up till then the cook’s son had done work in the stables or on the home farm or thinning out the wood. But, with his brains, surely he would be better employed doing something about Esme?
Looking back it was a mad idea. Why should a seventeen-year-old boy, however clever, manage to help eleven-year-old Esme when her expensive prep school had failed miserably?
But he had. That was the even crazier thing. He’d been the one to notice Esme could remember perfectly anything she was taught verbally, could talk with intelligence on most subjects and only descended into gibberish when committing to paper. Remarkably, he’d been the first to suggest dyslexia as a possibility, and tests had proved him right.
Esme found herself treading down memory lane once more and pulled herself back sharply.
‘And money is important?’ she remarked for something to say.
‘It is if you haven’t got any,’ he responded quite equably.
Esme didn’t argue. She knew he was talking from experience. His mother had died from cancer just after his finals, keeping her illness secret almost to the end. Accompanied by Jack, she had gone home to her native Ireland for a holiday and passed away there. She had left nothing but the money for her funeral. If Jack had grieved, he’d done it alone.
She watched him now, gazing through her bedroom window. It faced the back of the house and offered a view of the stable block and woods beyond. In autumn, when the trees were bare, it was just possible to see the chimney of the gamekeeper’s cottage where Jack had lived with his mother. But it was currently spring and greenery obscured it.
It was in his mind, however, as he said, ‘I understand the cottage is rented out.’
Esme’s stomach tightened a little but she kept her cool. ‘Yes, it is. You know it’s not part of the sale?’
He turned. ‘No, I didn’t. There’s no mention in the particulars.’
Esme glanced towards the folder in his hand. She’d not perused the estate agent’s details. She’d trusted her mother’s word instead.
‘I don’t really see how it could be excluded,’ he continued, ‘considering it’s in the middle of the estate.’
‘Well, it is!’ Esme snapped with a certainty she was far from feeling.
Jack shrugged, unwilling to argue, commenting instead, ‘Perhaps that’s why you’re having difficulty selling—people buy these estates for privacy.’
Esme wondered if he was going out of his way to upset. ‘Who says we’re having difficulty selling?’
‘The fact,’ he replied, ‘that the estate has been on the market over a year, perhaps… Is it a sitting tenant, the person in the cottage?’
‘Why?’ Esme had no idea what she was.
‘Just that if you’re worried about getting them to vacate,’ he relayed, ‘there are ways and means.’
‘Ways and means?’ Esme’s eyes rounded. ‘What exactly do you mean?’
‘Well, we could send a couple of heavies to persuade him to move on.’ Jack read her mind with uncanny accuracy. ‘Or, alternatively, we could offer him a generous sum to help with relocation. Personally, I prefer the latter method. Slightly more civilised,’ he finished, tongue very firmly in cheek.
He’d wrongfooted her again and Esme felt herself regressing further and further to the girl called Midge whom he’d teased so sweetly she’d ended up adoring him.
Only it didn’t feel sweet any more, just patronising, maybe even a little cruel.
‘The cottage isn’t for sale.’ She repeated what she’d first stated.
He was unimpressed. ‘Let’s see what your mother says, assuming I’m interested.’
‘You’re going to talk to my mother?’ She didn’t conceal her surprise.
He raised a brow in return. ‘Is there any reason I shouldn’t?’
Was he kidding? Esme could think of at least one but didn’t want to voice it aloud.
His eyes narrowed, scrutinising her expression. ‘Unless you think it inadvisable?’
‘Well—’ she pulled a face ‘—you didn’t…um…part on the best of terms.’
‘No, we didn’t, did we?’ He actually smiled at the recollection. ‘What was it she said, now?’
Esme remembered, but she wasn’t about to help him out.
Not that she needed to, as he ran on, ‘Ah, yes, having a degree from Oxford didn’t make the cook’s son any more eligible as a suitor to her daughters.’
Esme cringed at the memory, even though almost a decade had passed. She had sat at the long dining table, reduced to shocked silence by her mother’s careless cruelty and watched the colour come and go in Jack’s face, before pride had made him lash out.
She’d never before or since seen her mother so dumb-struck. But no one else had ever called her a dimwitted, mean-spirited, stuck-up cow.
Considering the anger that had made Jack Doyle’s mouth a tight white line and the temper that had flashed in stormy grey eyes, it had been a fairly restrained response. The slamming of doors behind him had conveyed better his temper.
Her mother had sat red-faced at the head of the table while her sister Arabella had appeared from the adjoining room, sniggering with amusement.
It had been more than Esme could bear.
A decade on, she shut her eyes, expelling the scene from her mind before the camera could roll further.
‘Still, there were consolations,’ he added under his breath.
But loud enough for Esme to hear, to open her eyes again and meet his, to see the soft amusement in them.
She held his gaze for just a moment, then looked away, unable to stop her cheeks from flushing. He probably took it for remembered pleasure rather than the deep embarrassment it was.
A night with the wrong sister. Consolation prize of sorts. His behaviour understandable enough, but hers? Too desperate for words.
She buried the memory once more and took refuge in being brusque and businesslike. ‘Talk to my mother if you choose… That’s all the rooms except the attics and kitchens. Do you wish to see those?’
‘Not particularly,’ he responded. ‘I have the attic dimensions and I probably know the kitchen layout better than you do yourself, young Miss Esme.’
He pretended to touch his forelock. It seemed like humour but Esme wasn’t fooled. There was bitterness behind it, too. And why not?
But Esme refused to go on the defensive and muttered in agreement, ‘Probably,’ before walking ahead of him out onto the galleried landing and down the once magnificent staircase, now creaking with age.
She started to walk towards the front door but his voice halted her. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to go through the kitchens to view the outbuildings?’
‘You want to see those?’ Esme frowned darkly. Surely he knew the layout of the rear yard, too.
‘The state of them,’ he confirmed. ‘The stables weren’t in great shape the last time I saw them.’
It could have been an innocent comment.
Perhaps only she remembered exact details of where and how.
But it made her both angry and embarrassed; she turned away before he could observe either emotion.
Her heels clicked on the marble floor as she stalked ahead, a tall, willowy creature with an erect back, and Jack followed, puzzling as to how he’d upset her this time.
He went over what he’d said. Nothing much. Just about the state of the stables the last time he’d seen them.
Ah! He recalled literally the last time. The night he’d woken up to Arabella and her little games and ended up spending part of it with her sister. Not his finest hour, whichever way you looked at it, so he tended not to look at it.
There wasn’t much he could say now, either, so he said nothing.
She led the way outside into the back courtyard, a large square flanked by walls and the stable blocks. It was as he remembered only in a considerably worse state of repair. Grass and weeds were growing between cobblestones and someone had left piles of garden rubbish in one corner.
An old car, seemingly abandoned but actually belonging to Esme, stood rusting in one corner, and the red paint on garage and stable doors was cracked and peeling.
Esme had grown used to the decay of what had used to be kept immaculate while her father was alive, but she saw it afresh through Jack Doyle’s eyes. She waited for him to make some derogatory remark, with every intention of snapping his head off if he did.
But he kept his thoughts to himself as he crossed the yard to the stable block. He went from stall to stall, eyes measuring, assessing, judging how much of the stone structure would have to be rebuilt.
Esme followed along, hovering at a distance, there to answer questions but wearing an expression that discouraged any. She supposed she should be trying to sell the place but she still doubted he was there to buy it.
He reached the tack room and found it locked. ‘Have you the key?’
‘No, it’s back at—’ she broke off abruptly, about to say the cottage, and switched to, ‘Back at the house,’ then added a suitably vague, ‘Somewhere,’ in case he asked her to produce it.
Not that there was anything incriminating inside the tack room. Just some odd pieces of bridle equipment. It was the mention of the cottage she’d been avoiding, although, on reflection, he might not have associated it with the cottage, originally his, now hers and Harry’s.
He shrugged and moved on to the barn adjacent where they’d kept the feed. It was empty apart from some old hay in the loft, so it had been left open.
He went inside. Esme made no attempt to follow. She heard him moving around and waited, teeth gritted once more as she prepared for any possible remark he might pass, any allusion to the interlude they’d shared—impromptu passion fuelled by a bottle of whisky.
Her face flamed for the umpteenth time that afternoon. At twenty-six, she thought she’d grown out of blushing, but it seemed this humiliating habit from younger days had returned with a vengeance.
The Beetroot, that was another of Arabella’s names for her. How she would cringe when Arabella called her that in company. In fact, she had cringed her way through a lot of her childhood and had been more than happy to grow up and grow out of these afflictions.
Now here she was, reverting at the rate of knots just because a ghost from the past had suddenly returned to haunt her.
Well, that was it. No more. She wasn’t going to stand here like a spare part, waiting for Mr Jack Doyle to make some oblique crack that would complete her journey back in time.
She retreated to the house, leaving him to his own devices. She entered the kitchen and, in pressing need of a cooling drink, opened the fridge. It was bare except for a few bottles of white wine, some tonic water and a tray of ice in the freezer compartment.
She’d been hoping for orange juice but the tonic was to be expected. It went with the gin bottle she took out of hiding from behind a food processor. She pursed her lips. Gin and tonic, her mother’s favourite tipple. At one time more than a tipple, and, even now, her mother didn’t seem to go through a day without at least a couple of stiff drinks.
Esme splashed some of the tonic in the bottom of a glass, added some ice but gave the gin a miss, having no inclination to follow her mother’s example.
She picked up the glass, resting its chill against her forehead for a moment to cool herself down, before taking a swig just as Jack Doyle reappeared.
He walked quietly for a big man, coming to a halt in the kitchen doorway; his eyes switched from her face to the gin bottle on the worktop and back again.
Esme could almost hear his thoughts as he jumped to the wrong conclusions.
She decided to brazen it out. ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Bit early for me,’ he answered, ‘but don’t let me stop you.’
‘I won’t,’ Esme muttered, rather than go into a denial that probably wouldn’t be believed.
A long-drawn-out pause followed before he asked, ‘How long have you been drinking?’
Esme, who had been studying the tonic in her glass, glanced up in time to catch his expression, a condescending blend of pity and disapproval. She wouldn’t have liked it even if she’d had a drink problem.
She made a show of looking at her watch. ‘About three minutes and twenty-five seconds.’
‘I meant in the longer term.’
‘I know.’
Esme pulled a face. He ignored it, his eyes resting on her with patient forbearance.
‘Well?’
She wondered what he was expecting. A full and frank confession: My name is Esme and I’m an alcoholic.
‘For the record, this is just tonic water.’ The sheer nerve of him made her reckless. ‘However, I had my first real drink at sixteen. Whisky, it was. Can’t quite remember who supplied it.’
Except she remembered only too well who’d supplied the whisky. She wondered if he did, though.
She rather thought he did as the pitying look in his eyes became something else. Guilt? Distaste? Whichever, it served him right for coming over all sanctimonious.
But if she assumed he’d dropped the whole subject, she was mistaken.
‘You were seventeen, as I recall,’ he said instead.
For a moment she thought he was being pedantic, then she realised from his tone that her age was important to him. It had been at the time, too. That’s why she’d lied.
No need to now. No need to tell him, either, only some devil inside her wanted to. Probably something to do with him attempting to take the moral high ground.
‘A couple of weeks over sixteen, actually,’ she corrected.
His eyes met hers, trying to sort out fact and fiction. ‘You said—’
