she was realising why he had thought it might be a good idea. For in no time, ignoring her suggestion that he take a seat at the kitchen table while she set the kettle to boil, Jake Nash, standing and leaning his tall length against one of the kitchen units, was in there straight away, with one question after another.
‘You are my uncle’s housekeeper?’ was the first of many.
‘Temporary—and ready to go as soon as his permanent housekeeper’s daughter is well enough to be left, and her mother returns,’ Taryn answered.
‘That’s a definite?’
‘What does it have to do with you?’ she asked snappily, starting to feel more than a touch niggled at his sauce, and giving up all pretence of making this man a pot of tea. ‘You’re not my employer,’ she stated, when she could see from the raised eyebrows that he was a man who just wasn’t used to being answered back.
‘It seems you’ve been making yourself more than useful in the short time you’ve been here?’ he said curtly.
‘It’s what I’m employed to do!’
‘To the extent of going on long walks with your employer?’
‘Not so very long.’
‘To the extent of taking him to the pub?’
‘He took me!’ she exclaimed, unsure how she suddenly came to be defending herself. ‘Excepting for once, when it was pouring with rain and he was getting a little fed up being stuck indoors. Anyway—’
‘From what I hear, you’ve even introduced him to the iniquities of playing darts?’ he cut in.
Taryn almost laughed at that. In fact, had she not known better, she would have said that there was a twinkle of laughter in Jake Nash’s eyes. But she didn’t believe that for a second. ‘Just what is this—?’ she began. But suddenly, and with shock, what he had said about the phone lines between here and New York being full of her began to take on a startling meaning. ‘His daughter—Beryl—she’s been in touch with you, hasn’t she?’
Jake Nash studied her, and seemed, she thought for one absurd moment, to be a little taken with her dainty features and dark blue eyes. ‘She rang my mother,’ he agreed.
‘She wanted you to come and check me out?’ Taryn couldn’t quite believe what her intelligence had brought her.
‘It’s Taryn this, Taryn that. Can you blame her?’
‘She thinks I’m after his money!’ Taryn exclaimed, aghast. ‘That—that he’s somehow sm-smitten with me!’ Appalled, she could hardly get the words out.
‘Beryl has met Mrs Ellington,’ he responded evenly. ‘She has never met you. You can’t blame her for having a daughter’s natural concern.’
‘So the minute she rang, you hared down here to make sure I—’
‘I had business this way today,’ he cut in. ‘It was no problem to make a detour.
‘Jake!’ A glad cry from the doorway rent the air. Taryn looked over to where her refreshed temporary employer had just come in, and was grateful in this instance that he was slightly hard of hearing. ‘How good to see you!’ he exclaimed, as the two men met in the middle of the kitchen and shook hands. She did not want him upset by the unpleasantness of Beryl keeping her eye on her. ‘You’ve obviously introduced yourself to Taryn,’ he went on beaming. ‘I just can’t believe that I’ve been so lucky with not one housekeeper but two.’
‘Would you like tea now?’ Taryn asked, feeling Jake Nash’s eyes on her, but deciding to ignore him.
‘Shall we have it out in the garden?’ Osgood Compton asked.
‘Perhaps you’d like to carry this tray out?’ she addressed Jake pleasantly without looking at him, not seeing why he shouldn’t make himself useful. Picking up the tray she had laid earlier, she took it to him, and was glad to have the kitchen to herself when, Mr Compton chatting away, they departed.
Taryn busied herself making a pot of tea, and as she did so began to see that perhaps, in all fairness, Beryl-nee-Compton—she had no idea what her last name was—was only acting as any daughter worthy of the name should. What with her father by the sound of it singing the praises of his temporary housekeeper with every phone call, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising she should want to know that he wasn’t, as it were, being taken for a ride—offensive to her father though that might be.
‘You’ve forgotten the extra cup,’ Mr Compton reminded her when she carried a tray of tea and extra hot water out to them.
That he intended she should join them was kind, and had his great-nephew not been there she would have been pleased to have kept him company. But his nephew was there and, while she didn’t give a button that he might report back on how the housekeeper had joined them for tea, she thought Osgood Compton might enjoy some male company for a change.
‘I’ve got something in the oven I want to keep my eye on,’ she stated, though the casserole in the oven she was making ready for the freezer was able to cook quite well on its own, without her watching it.
‘If you’re sure?’ he answered, and then, as she paused a moment to check cake, cake knives, napkins, and that they had everything they would need, ‘Taryn’s normally in engineering too,’ he informed his nephew. ‘It was my good fortune that she wanted a break from it when Mrs Ellington had to go…’
‘You’re an engineer?’ Jake Nash asked, every bit as if he was interested.
This time she could not avoid meeting his grey eyes. ‘PA,’ she replied briefly, and left it at that.
She was on her way back across the lawn when she heard Osgood Compton informing his great-nephew, ‘Taryn was a PA at Mellor Engineering. You know them, of course?’
He would know from that too, Taryn realised as she sipped her own tea, why she had been in the building that day. It would not explain, though, why she had given him such short shrift in the lift when he had seen that she was upset. But, from his uncle’s comment just now that she had wanted a break from her more normal line of work, it was something of a whopping clue to anyone with a degree of intelligence that the reason she had been upset was because her employment had just been terminated.
It was fairly obvious to her that Jake Nash had much more than a degree of intelligence, but she cared not that he might think she had been dismissed from her post. And she saw no reason whatsoever to tell him that, when it came to terminating her employment, she had been the one to do it.
Taryn all at once realised that she was feeling quite anti. Quite worked up. Quite, quite…Words failed her. She did not like the man. Life here with Mr Compton had been tranquil. This man—Jake Nash—had strode in and shattered that tranquillity—and she did not like that either.
She made herself scarce when from the window she saw that her temporary employer and his nephew, carrying the heaviest tray, were heading for the kitchen. In her view he was Mr Compton’s visitor. There was no need at all for the housekeeper to be there to bid him farewell. She escaped to her room.
She left it a few minutes after she had seen his car go down the drive before she went down the stairs again, and was in the kitchen scraping new potatoes
