had his life utterly in control and that was the way he liked it.
He had no doubt that whatever had brought Becky to this place was a story that might tug on someone else’s heartstrings. His heartstrings would be blessedly immune to any tugging. He would be able to find out about her and persuade her to accept that this was no place for her to be. When, inevitably, the house was sold from under her feet, she would not try and put up a fight, wouldn’t try and coax her parents into letting her stay on.
He would have long disappeared from her life. He would have been nothing more than a stranger who had landed for a night and then moved on. But she would remember what he had said and she would end up thanking him.
Because, frankly, this was no place for her to be. It wasn’t healthy. She was far too young.
He looked at the rounded swell of her derrière...
Far too young and far too sexy.
‘What are you cooking?’
Becky swung round to see him lounging against the door frame. Her father was a little shorter and reedier than Theo. Theo looked as though he had been squashed into clothes a couple of sizes too small. And he was barefoot. Her eyes shot back to his face to find that he was staring right back at her with a little smile.
‘Pasta. Nothing special. And you can help.’ She turned her back on him and felt him close the distance between them until he was standing next to her, at which point she pointed to some onions and slid a small, sharp knife towards him. ‘You’ve asked me a lot of questions,’ she said, eyes sliding across to his hands and then hurriedly sliding back to focus on what she was doing. ‘But I don’t know anything about you.’
‘Ask away.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘London.’ Theo couldn’t remember the last time he’d chopped an onion. Were they always this fiddly?
‘And what were you doing in this part of the world? Aside from getting lost?’
Theo felt a passing twinge of guilt. ‘Taking my car for some exercise,’ he said smoothly. ‘And visiting one or two...familiar spots en route.’
‘Seems an odd thing to do at this time of year,’ Becky mused. ‘On your own.’
‘Does it?’ Theo dumped the half-peeled onion. ‘Is there anything to drink in this house or do vets not indulge just in case they get a midnight call and need to be in their car within minutes, tackling the dangerous country lanes in search of a sick animal somewhere?’
Becky stopped what she was doing and looked at him, and at the poor job he had made of peeling an onion.
‘I’m not really into domestic chores.’ Theo shrugged.
‘There’s wine in the fridge. I’m not on call this evening and, as it happens, I don’t get hundreds of emergency calls at night. I’m not a doctor. Most of my patients can wait a few hours and, if they can’t, everyone around here knows where the nearest animal hospital is. And you haven’t answered my question. Isn’t it a bit strange for you to be here on your own...just driving around?’
Theo took his time pouring the wine, then he handed her a glass and settled into a chair at the kitchen table.
His own penthouse was vast and ultra-modern. He didn’t care for cosy, although he had to admit that there was something to be said for it in the middle of a blizzard with the snow turning everything white outside. This was a cosy kitchen. Big cream Aga...worn pine table with mismatched chairs...flagstone floor that had obviously had underfloor heating installed at some point, possibly before the house had begun buckling under the effect of old age, because it wasn’t bloody freezing underfoot...
‘Just driving around,’ he said slowly, truthfully, ‘is a luxury I can rarely afford.’ He thought about his life—high-voltage, adrenaline-charged, pressurised, the life of someone who made millions. There was no time for standing still. ‘I seldom stop, and even when I do, I am permanently on call.’ He smiled crookedly, at odds with himself for giving in to the unheard of temptation to confide.
‘What on earth do you do?’ Becky leant against the counter and stared at him with interest.
‘I...buy things, do them up and sell them on. Some of them I keep for myself because I’m greedy.’
‘What sorts of things?’
‘Companies.’
Becky stared at him thoughtfully. The sauce was simmering nicely on the Aga. She went to sit opposite him, nursing her glass of wine.
Looking at her, Theo wondered if she had any idea of just how wealthy he was. She would now be getting the picture that he wasn’t your average two-up, two-down, one holiday a year, nine-to-five kind of guy and he wondered whether, like every other single woman he had ever met, she was doing the maths and working out how profitable it might be to get to know him better.
‘Poor you,’ Becky said at last and he frowned.
‘Come again?’
‘It must be awful never having time to yourself. I don’t have much but what I do have I really appreciate. I’d hate it if I had to get in my car and drive out into the middle of nowhere just to have some uninterrupted peace.’
She laughed, relaxed for the first time since he had landed on her doorstep. ‘Our parents always made a big thing about money not being the most important thing in life.’ Her bright turquoise eyes glinted with sudden humour. ‘Alice and I used to roll our eyes but they were right. That’s why...’ she looked around her at the kitchen, where, as a family, they had spent countless hours together ‘... I can appreciate all this quiet, which I know you don’t understand.’
The prospect of saying goodbye to the family house made her eyes mist over. ‘There’s something wonderfully peaceful about being here. I don’t need the crowds of a city. I never have or I never would have returned here after... Well, this is where I belong.’ And the thought of finding somewhere else to call home felt like such a huge mountain to climb that she blinked back a bout of severe self-pity. Her parents had moved on as had Alice. So could she.
Theo, watching her, felt a stab of alarm. A pep talk wasn’t going to get her packing her belongings and moving on and a wad of cash, by all accounts, wasn’t going to cut it with her parents.
When was the last time he had met someone who wasn’t impressed by money and what it could buy?
His mother, of course, who had never subscribed to his single-minded approach to making money, even though, as he had explained on countless occasions, making money per se was a technicality. The only point to having money was the security it afforded and that was worth its weight in gold. Surely, he had argued, she could see that—especially considering her life had been one of making ends meet whilst trying to bring up a child on her own?
He moved in circles where money talked, where people were impressed by it. The women he met enjoyed what he could give them. His was the sort of vast, bottomless wealth that opened doors, that conferred absolute freedom.
And what, he wondered, was wrong with that?
‘Touching,’ he said coolly. ‘Clearly none
