doors to offices on either side of the long corridor. Lydie ignored them and at the bottom of that corridor turned round a corner which opened out to show two doors blocking her way. Lydie hesitated, but only for a moment. She was by then starting to feel certain she had got it all wrong. Somehow, churned up, anxious, worried, she had got it all wrong, all muddled; she knew that she had. She went forward and, placing a hand on the handle to the door to the right, she paused for about half a second, then turned the handle.
Shock as the door swung inwards and she saw a man seated at a desk in front of her kept her speechless and motionless. He looked up, and as colour surged to her face so, his glance still on her face, he rose from his chair and began to come round his desk and over to her.
She was five feet nine inches tall, he looked down at her and—to her utter astonishment—commented, ‘Still blushing, Lydie?’ He remembered her, her blushes, from seven years ago?
‘I’m L-Lydie Pearson,’ she heard herself say inanely from somewhere far off.
‘I know who you are,’ he answered smoothly. ‘Come in and take a seat,’ he invited, and as she took a couple of steps into the room he closed the door behind her and touched a hand to her elbow.
In something of a daze she found she was seated on a chair some way to the side of his desk before she had got herself anywhere near of one piece.
‘Haven’t I changed at all in seven years?’ she asked, her head still a little woolly that he had so instantly recognised her.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Jonah replied pleasantly, his eyes flicking a glance over her still slender, but now curving deliciously in all the right places, shape. ‘Elaine, my PA, made a note that a Lydie Pearson phoned last Tuesday. I recalled one black-haired, green-eyed Lydie Pearson with one hell of a superb complexion. It had to be you.’ He paused, and then, while she was feeling a touch swamped that he thought she had a superb complexion, ‘You’re still Lydie Pearson?’ he enquired.
Having thought she had her head more together, Lydie wasn’t with him for a moment or two. ‘Um…’ she mumbled, then realised what he was asking. ‘I’m not married,’ she answered, and, with a quick glance to his ringless left hand, ‘It doesn’t look as if anybody’s caught you either.’
His rather splendid mouth quirked upwards at the corners slightly. ‘I have very long legs,’ he confided.
‘You sprint pretty fast at the word marriage?’
He did not answer. He didn’t need to. ‘So, how’s the world treating you?’ he asked.
Lydie looked away from his fantastic blue eyes and over to his laden desk. He had not been expecting this visit and from the look of his desk was extremely busy catching up on a backlog of work. Yet he seemed to have all the time in the world to idly converse with someone he barely knew, someone he had only ever clapped eyes on once—and that was seven years ago.
‘Er—this isn’t a social call,’ Lydie stated abruptly.
‘It isn’t?’ he questioned mildly—when she was sure he must know that it wasn’t.
She experienced an unexpected urge to thump him that surprised her. She swallowed down that small burst of anger, but only when she felt marginally calmer was she able to coldly state, ‘My father seems not to have fared as well, financially, over the last seven years as you yourself appear to have done.’
Jonah nodded, every bit as if he already knew that—and that annoyed her—before he coolly commented, ‘That’s what comes from constantly bailing out that brother of yours.’
How dared he blame Oliver? ‘Oliver no longer has his own business!’
‘That should make things easier for your father,’ Jonah Marriott shot back at her, cool still.
Honestly! Again she wanted to hit him. ‘My father’s own business has gone too!’ she retorted pithily, and saw that at last Jonah Marriott was taking her seriously.
‘I’m very sorry to hear that. Wilmot is a first-class—’
‘So you should be sorry!’ she interrupted hotly. ‘If you’d had the decency to honour that debt…’
‘Honour that debt?’ Jonah queried toughly, just as if he had not the first clue what she was talking about.
‘You’re trying to say that you have totally forgotten coming to my home seven years ago and borrowing fifty thousand pounds from my father?’
‘I’m hardly likely to do that. If it wasn’t for your father—’
‘Then it’s about time you paid that loan back!’ she interrupted his flow hotly. And, suddenly too het-up to sit still, she jumped to her feet—to find Jonah Marriott was on his feet too, and was standing looking down on her. She saw him swiftly masking a look of surprise—at her nerve, no doubt. But she cared not if he thought she had an outrageous sauce to burst in on his busy morning without so much as a by your leave and demand the return of her father’s money. Her father’s peace of mind was at stake here. ‘If my father doesn’t have that fifty thousand pounds by the end of today’s banking,’ she hurtled on, ‘we, that is my mother and father, will lose Beamhurst Court!’
‘Lose…’
But Lydie was too angry to let him in. ‘Beamhurst Court has been in my family for hundreds of years and my father has until only today to see that it stays in the family!’ she charged on.
‘You’re exaggerating, surely?’ Jonah Marriott managed to get in evenly, his eyes on her angry face, her sparking green eyes.
‘I love Beamhurst! Does it look as if I’m exaggerating?’ she erupted. But calmed down a little to concur, ‘It’s true my father invested heavily in Oliver’s company, but my father didn’t know his own firm was going to suffer a downturn.’
‘So he borrowed as much as he could from the banks, putting Beamhurst Court up as collateral,’ Jonah took up. ‘And when your brother’s firm went belly-up, and your father settled his son’s creditors, there was nothing left in the kitty to settle his own debts.’
‘You know this?’ she asked, starting to feel her anger on the rise again that he should be aware of the situation and still refuse to repay her father.
‘I didn’t,’ Jonah replied, defusing her anger somewhat. ‘From what you’ve said, that seems the most likely way it went.’ And disconcertingly he asked, ‘And what’s your brother doing in all of this?’
Lydie did not care for his question. It weakened her argument. Her father was distraught—while Oliver did nothing. ‘He…I haven’t seen Oliver. I only came home on Tuesday,’ she excused, and defended her elder brother. ‘Oliver’s getting married a week tomorrow. There’s a lot to arrange. He’s staying with his fiancée’s people to help with any last-minute problems they…’ Her voice trailed away.
‘Let’s hope he makes a better job of it than he made of his business,’ Jonah commented, but, before she could take exception, ‘Big do, is it?’
Lydie could have done without that remark too. In the instance of her family being on their uppers—and she was coming to realise more and more that her father constantly financing her brother’s business was largely responsible for
