and the memories came crowding in. She could clearly see her younger self running lightly down the service stairs on that sunny, early summer day six years ago.
She’d spent the best part of the morning helping the housekeeper, Amy, to ready the guest suites. There were only four of them; by country house hotel standards Farthings Hall was small. But very, very exclusive. There was a waiting list as long as your arm both for accommodation and for the restaurant tables.
And, after all that hoovering, polishing and dusting, she’d been good and ready for a dose of that glorious sunshine she’d only so far yearned for through the spotless, glittering upstairs windows. She’d been just eighteen years old, was at the very beginning of the long summer holiday, had done her duty by helping Amy and now smelt freedom.
‘Oops!’ She skidded to an abrupt halt before she knocked her new stepmother to kingdom come. ‘Sorry—didn’t see you!’
Small and willowy with hair like spun sunlight, Helen always made Claudia feel large and clumsy and, just recently, awkward and a bit in the way. Oh, Helen had never, ever, given her an unkind word or look either before her marriage to Guy or after, but for the past few days there’d been an edginess about her, a brittleness that went hand in hand with discontent.
But thankfully not today. Claudia felt her muscles relax as Helen’s narrow green eyes gleamed at her. ‘Such energy! Oh, to be young and full of bounce again!’
‘You’re not old.’ Claudia grinned, falling in step beside her stepmother who was heading down the passage to the courtyard entrance. At eighteen, just, she regarded the thirties—even the early thirties as she knew Helen to be—as knocking on the door of middle age. But there was something timeless about Helen’s sexy little body, golden hair and perfect features.
‘Thanks.’ Helen’s voice was dry. She reached the door first and pushed it open. The sunlight streamed through and made her a dazzling, glittering figure in her lemon-yellow sheath dress and all that chunky gold jewellery she seemed to favour. ‘Coming?’
Claudia had promised herself a walk to the rocky little cove that could only be reached via the deep valley that bisected the Hall’s extensive grounds, but if Helen wanted her company she would gladly tag along. She usually fell in with other people’s wishes because she liked those around her to be happy and, perhaps just as importantly, she liked people to be pleased with her.
Like a big, exuberant puppy, she thought with wry, self-mocking humour. She could almost hear herself panting, feel her tongue hanging out!
‘Sure. Where to?’
‘To find Old Ron. He hasn’t sent the fruit and veg up to the kitchens yet. Chef’s furious. Lunches will be starting in an hour. I said I’d chase him up. Besides—’ green eyes gleamed up into the speedwell-blue of Claudia’s ‘—Guy hired a dogsbody to help Ron through the summer.’ Her sudden giggle was infectious. ‘He may be some kind of a drop-out of no fixed abode, but he sure is gorgeous! Worth the trek down to the kitchen gardens any time of the day!’ She paused significantly. ‘Or night!’
Claudia giggled right back. She knew Helen didn’t mean it; she had been married only for a couple of months or so, and she wouldn’t have eyes for any other man. ‘I didn’t know Dad had been hiring,’ she commented, striding along the raked gravel path.
She wasn’t surprised that this was the first she’d heard of a new employee. Recently she’d overheard her father and his new wife tersely arguing over Helen’s apparently sudden decision to give up her post. She had seemed to be saying that now she was married to the owner she shouldn’t have to work like a hired skivvy—though she would be happy to continue to do the flowers. Claudia had kept well out of the way of both of them, waiting until they’d sorted out their differences. She could imagine only one thing more embarrassing than overhearing them squabbling and that would be overhearing them making love.
Firmly squashing that thought, she asked, ‘So when did Adonis join the crew? Is he really a homeless drop-out?’ Claudia knew she was very lucky to have somewhere like Farthings Hall to call home. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have nowhere.
Helen shrugged slim, lightly tanned shoulders. ‘Goodness knows. He turned up on a clapped-out old motorbike a couple of days ago, looking for work. He admitted he was “just drifting” and apparently seemed happy enough to have the use of that old caravan at the back of the glasshouses for the summer, plus his food and pin money, in exchange for helping Old Rob around the grounds. His name’s Adam, by the way. Adam Weston.’
But Claudia wasn’t really listening as she followed Helen through into the walled kitchen garden, her thoughts exclusively for Old Ron now. The ancient groundsman couldn’t cope. Everyone knew it except him, which was obviously why her father had decided to hire someone to help out for the summer. How would Old Ron feel when he had to make way permanently for someone fit and young, someone who could actually walk faster than a snail?
Old Ron had worked here forever. Her grandfather had hired him initially, before Farthings Hall had been converted into the now exclusive country house hotel with what was reputed to be the best restaurant in Cornwall. He’d been here ever since, never marrying, inhabiting a flat conversion above the old stable block. Of course, Dad would never ask him to vacate his home, or pay rent, and, knowing her father, he would probably find him a token something or other to do, just so the old man wouldn’t feel entirely useless...
Then, for the second time in thirty minutes, Claudia almost ran her stepmother down. Helen had stopped without warning in the centre of the path, just inside the arched doorway in the high, ivy-clad, red-brick wall—the heated summer air was suddenly and unexpectedly thrumming with a tension so sharply intense that Claudia found herself instinctively holding her breath.
She expelled it slowly when she saw what Helen was staring at, her stepmother’s green eyes laughing, maybe even teasing just a little.
The new hired help was enough to bring a smile of glowing pleasure to any woman’s eyes.
Adam Weston was just as magnificent as Helen had implied, only more so. Leaning against a garden fork, dressed only in frayed denim cut-offs and scuffed working boots, he blew Claudia’s mind.
The breadth of his rangy shoulders was, she admitted admiringly, deeply impressive, accentuating the narrowness of his hips, the length of his leanly muscular legs. The tan of his skin was slicked with sweat and his forehead, beneath the soft fall of rumpled dark hair, was beaded with it. And his eyes, an intriguing smoky grey, narrowed now in overt male appraisal, were firmly fixed on the slender, golden figure of her stepmother.
Claudia shivered. It was a brilliant day, the hottest this summer so far. Yet she shivered right down to the soles of her grungy canvas shoes. She stepped forward, out of the shadows, uselessly regretting her faded, a-bit-baggy old jeans, the washed-out old shirt she wore for house-cleaning.
Her movement broke the spell. Whatever had been here, shimmering and stinging in the scented summer air, had gone. Helen said, her musical voice low and quite definitely husky, ‘Adam, meet your employer’s solitary offspring and pride of his life—Claudia. Dearest, say hello to Adam. And then, perhaps, he can run along and find Old Ron before Chef arrives with his cleaver!’
‘Hi there—’ Adam Weston brushed the wayward hank of soft dark hair out of his eyes and stepped forward, extending a strong, long-boned hand. And smiled.
And Claudia, for the first, and very probably the last, time in her life, fell deeply, shatteringly and quite, quite helplessly in love...
‘So
