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‘I usually take Dottie her supper in bed. Would you excuse us?’
For the first time, he actually took in the long Chinese robe the older woman was wearing. Had she been settled in bed when he’d arrived and thrown them both into confusion?
‘Can I be of assistance?’ he offered, and was rewarded with a ferocious scowl from the woman he’d come so far to meet.
‘You’ve caused quite enough drama for one day, thank you very much. You’d best be getting back to the village and we can discuss your visit in the morning.’
‘The tide, Dottie,’ Jo said gently. ‘He won’t be able to get back to the village now. He’ll have to stay the night.’
‘Then put him in the front room,’ Dottie said, with such malicious glee Charles knew it was either haunted or, more prosaically, lay beneath the worst of the roof damage.
Left on his own, Charles prowled around the room, aware through all his senses that his mother had once walked here, sat here, maybe helped decorate the ragged imitation tree that stood forlornly in one corner. The need to know more about her had brought him all this way.
He tried to imagine her living in this house, but his thoughts turned to Jo, and it was she he pictured in his mind, maybe on a ladder, laughing as she tried to fix a star to the pathetic tree.
He closed his eyes, replacing Jo’s image with one of his mother that he had only formed from pictures, and the stories his father would tell. Would Dottie tell him more stories, the ones he’d come so far to hear? Stories of his mother as a child, her likes and dislikes, anything at all to turn her into a living person instead of a picture by his bed.
It had been close to Christmas back then, too, some annual event having brought his father to the tiny seaside town, and he knew it was a degree of silly sentimentality to have come now, to find out what he could before he married and settled down, taking some of the burden of official duties from his father.
Had his mother prowled the room as he now prowled, arguing with herself—or her parents—about leaving with the lying vagabond?
He knew that had to be his father, because neither of them had ever loved another. And a vagabond he might have been, only even then, Charles was sure, he’d have been called a backpacker. Travel had been something his father had been determined to do, the only time he’d ever argued with his parents. But although it had disturbed his relationship with them, he’d known he had to see something of the world, to mix with ordinary people, the kind of people he would one day rule.
He himself had done much the same, he realised, when he’d insisted on studying medicine in Edinburgh, with men and women from all layers of society. Eton had been all very well for an education, but he knew how his fellow students had thought and how that layer of society worked. He’d needed to know everyday people.
Even back home for holidays, he’d worked in bars and cafés in the summer, and been a ski instructor in the winter.
But getting back to his father...
A lying vagabond?
Jo returned before he had time to consider the word Dottie had used, bringing light into the gloomy room with her smile.
‘Been looking for memories of your mother?’ she said. ‘I’ve done the same, but sadly never found a thing.’
She paused, then added, ‘Though I don’t pry to the extent of going through drawers. I wouldn’t take advantage of Dottie that way, but I do shake out the books I borrow to read, just in case there’s a photo been left to mark a page.’
Charles looked at the wall of books at the back of the room and shook his head. It would take for ever...
‘Has she not spoken of her to you?’ he asked.
Jo shook her head.
‘Not a word, and apparently there’s enough solidarity in the village that no one else ever talks about her. I know there has to be a reason because although Dottie’s a bit eccentric—well, pretty eccentric—she’s not irrational.’
She sighed, shook her head, and bent over to pick up a glass bauble from a box of decorations that stood by the tree, hanging it on a low branch before turning back to Charles.
‘Dottie and I usually have grilled cheese on toast for supper, but if you haven’t had dinner and would like something more substantial, there are lamb cutlets and plenty of salad things.’
Charles shook his head.
‘Grilled cheese on toast sounds fantastic. Takes me back to student days when it was one of the few things I could cook—cheese on toast, beans on toast, eggs on toast!’
That won another smile, which was so open and honest and full of good humour that it caught at something in his chest—just a hitch, nothing more...
You cannot be attracted to a very pregnant stranger, he told himself as he followed her to the kitchen, narrowly missing the bucket in the entry.
But the sway of her hips mesmerised him...
It had to be abstinence. How long since he’d been with a woman? The experience of the match his father had promoted, with a young woman who had a very dubious family connection to the old Russian royalty, had been enough to put him off women for life.
Well, for several months at least!
She’d been nice enough, attractive enough, but her conversation began and ended with horses and although he quite liked horses and rode occasionally himself, as a conversational topic, they were way down his list of favourites.
He doubted the woman with the swaying hips would talk horses.
‘There’s the toaster, and the bread’s in the cupboard underneath it. You can do the toast while I grate the cheese. I think it melts better grated. Do you like relish or chutney under the cheese? My dad used to slice up pickles under his.’
Jo only just stopped herself from explaining how her mother had liked Vegemite, and she herself didn’t mind the pickles. After all, there was only so much conversational mileage you could get out of grilled cheese on toast. And it had all been a very long time ago.
The memory of that time made her shudder—so much sadness, so much despair and emptiness and loss.
Don’t think about it now—concentrate on toast but don’t babble on.
She was embarrassed, that was why she’d been talking so much and there were no points for guessing why!
This man’s presence—or perhaps her own hyper-awareness of him—was embarrassing her. For some peculiar reason, she’d felt his eyes on her as she’d walked to the kitchen. Not casually on her, but studying her, although that was ridiculous. She’d been imagining things. Why would a man like him be studying a slightly damp, very untidy, very pregnant woman like her?
For a start, being thirty-eight weeks pregnant would announce her as unavailable!
She hauled butter and cheese out of the refrigerator, then milk for Dottie’s cocoa, relish in case Charles wanted it, the bottle of pickled gherkins to slice for under her cheese, set it all on the scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the big kitchen, then turned to their guest.
He was waggling the handles on the doors of the toaster.
‘You realise I’m touching something my mother probably touched. This toaster has to be at least fifty years old.’
Jo grinned at him.
‘At least,’ she agreed, ‘and it doesn’t flip open when the toast is done so you have to stand there and watch it and open it before it burns then turn it to do the other side.’
He gave her a ‘can you believe it’ look and a shake of his head before turning to watch his toast.
Setting the grill in the oven—which was probably older than the toaster—to high, Jo grabbed the grater and a wooden board and began her job.
And if she glanced at their visitor from time to time it was only to see he wasn’t burning the toast.
Wasn’t it?
He’d found plates and soon delivered a pile of perfectly browned toast to the table.
Toast done, she set him to buttering it—although that meant he was standing close to her, and the discomfort that caused had to be because he was a stranger...
Surely!
She was slicing gherkins when her belly tightened.
Braxton-Hicks! Her body’s practice contractions. She moved a little, knowing that usually stopped them, and kept grating. Charles was now piling grated cheese on the toast he’d buttered.
‘I’ve done two slices each, will that be enough?’ he said.
Jo turned to face him, saw a smile lurking in his dark-enough-to-drown-in eyes, and hesitated, her mouth suddenly so dry she couldn’t speak.
She had to be imagining whatever it was that was zapping between them.
Had to be!
‘You might want more than two slices,’ she finally managed, ‘and I have sliced pickles under my cheese.’
‘Like father, like daughter,’ he teased, and she blessed the distraction of another twinge in her belly.
She would hate to think she was anything like her father...
Although maybe that was unfair. He’d been a good and loving father up until her mother had died and it probably hadn’t been his fault he’d gone to pieces then...
Charles had turned away to put more bread in the toaster, apparently deciding he might need more than two slices, and Jo used the respite from his presence to slide the cheese-laden slices under the grill.
The extra hormones that pregnancy had sent spinning through her body—they must surely be the cause of her...
Her what?
Distraction, she decided, and said it firmly enough in her head to pretend she meant it.
Well, it could hardly be anything more than that, now, could it? She’d seen tall, dark and handsome men before and had never felt the slightest attraction, and so what if his broad shoulders curved in to a neat waist, and his jeans clung to neat buttocks?
She heated milk on the stove for Dottie’s cocoa, vowing for the fiftieth time she’d buy a microwave for the house next time she was in town. She put on the kettle for tea and turned to Charles.
‘Would you like tea or coffee?’
He smiled—she wished he wouldn’t—and said, ‘Could I please have cocoa? This has taken me back to student days and it seems right I should be drinking cocoa.’
Jo tore her eyes away from his face. What had she been waiting for, another smile? She poured more milk into the pot on the stove, told the visitor to watch the toast under the grill while she found mugs for the three of them. Even Dottie, to whom tea must be served in fine china cups, drank her cocoa from a mug, and a mug of tea was far more satisfying as far as Jo was concerned.
Charles, who was proving quite proficient in the kitchen, had found more plates and was cutting a couple of bubbling, lightly browned cheese toasts into fingers.
‘Two for Dottie, two with pickles for the pregnant lady, and I’ll look like a pig eating four, but it seems a very long time since breakfast.’
‘You haven’t eaten since breakfast?’ Jo said in disbelief, but the milk was close to boiling, and she had cocoa to make, so she could hardly pursue the conversation.
Not that Charles—the name was coming more easily into her head—had replied. Instead, he was moving around the kitchen, poking into nooks and crannies, finally finding the trays, hiding in the space beside the ancient refrigerator.
‘I’m assuming Dottie has the silver one,’ he said, smiling so broadly Jo had to smile back.
‘Yes, and slightly better china than you’ve found there.’
She opened a high kitchen cupboard and produced a fine china plate, bedecked with flowers and edged with gold.
‘Just because she’s old, she says, she doesn’t have to lower her standards,’ Jo quoted in explanation.
‘Bless her heart!’ Charles said, and the phrase must have startled him for he added, very quickly, ‘As my nanny would have said.’
Bless her heart indeed!
And a nanny?
No wonder he spoke like an English toff.
Only it wasn’t really like that—just beautifully pronounced words that seemed to fill the air with music.
What would it have been like to have been raised like that?
Or even in a normal household.
Another twinge reminded Jo she shouldn’t be thinking about the past and definitely not about a man she’d barely met, no matter how pleasant his voice might be.
And weren’t Braxton-Hicks contractions supposed to be irregular?
Still, she couldn’t think about that now. She’d get the tray up to Dottie, and then...
She didn’t know what.
She usually took her tray up and ate in Dottie’s bedroom, but would Dottie want the stranger in her bedroom, related though he might be?
And could she, Jo, leave him alone in the kitchen no matter how inhospitable that would seem?
She’d take Dottie’s tray up and see what transpired.
Dottie was sitting, propped up on pillows, in the middle of the big bed, the ornately carved bedhead a spectacular backdrop to the minute occupant. Resplendent in her colourful Chinese robe, she was every inch an empress, ready to receive her subjects.
As Jo settled the tray on the small table over Dottie’s legs, she said, ‘You can bring that man up here to eat his supper. You’ll come, of course, so he might as well. We’ll grill him, find out what he’s up to!’
The last sentence would have startled Jo if she hadn’t known Dottie’s passion for mystery and detective fiction. Perhaps she’d always nurtured a secret desire to grill someone.
Possibly literally!
‘We’ve been summoned,’ she told Charles when she returned to the kitchen, where she found him cutting his extra toast into fingers. He’d also made a pot of tea, though where he’d found the pot she didn’t know. ‘Do you want sugar in your cocoa?’
‘I’ve already helped myself, but left it to you to pour your own tea how you like it.’
