cottage isn’t for sale.’ She repeated what she’d first stated.
He was unimpressed. ‘Let’s see what your mother says, assuming I’m interested.’
‘You’re going to talk to my mother?’ She didn’t conceal her surprise.
He raised a brow in return. ‘Is there any reason I shouldn’t?’
Was he kidding? Esme could think of at least one but didn’t want to voice it aloud.
His eyes narrowed, scrutinising her expression. ‘Unless you think it inadvisable?’
‘Well—’ she pulled a face ‘—you didn’t…um…part on the best of terms.’
‘No, we didn’t, did we?’ He actually smiled at the recollection. ‘What was it she said, now?’
Esme remembered, but she wasn’t about to help him out.
Not that she needed to, as he ran on, ‘Ah, yes, having a degree from Oxford didn’t make the cook’s son any more eligible as a suitor to her daughters.’
Esme cringed at the memory, even though almost a decade had passed. She had sat at the long dining table, reduced to shocked silence by her mother’s careless cruelty and watched the colour come and go in Jack’s face, before pride had made him lash out.
She’d never before or since seen her mother so dumb-struck. But no one else had ever called her a dimwitted, mean-spirited, stuck-up cow.
Considering the anger that had made Jack Doyle’s mouth a tight white line and the temper that had flashed in stormy grey eyes, it had been a fairly restrained response. The slamming of doors behind him had conveyed better his temper.
Her mother had sat red-faced at the head of the table while her sister Arabella had appeared from the adjoining room, sniggering with amusement.
It had been more than Esme could bear.
A decade on, she shut her eyes, expelling the scene from her mind before the camera could roll further.
‘Still, there were consolations,’ he added under his breath.
But loud enough for Esme to hear, to open her eyes again and meet his, to see the soft amusement in them.
She held his gaze for just a moment, then looked away, unable to stop her cheeks from flushing. He probably took it for remembered pleasure rather than the deep embarrassment it was.
A night with the wrong sister. Consolation prize of sorts. His behaviour understandable enough, but hers? Too desperate for words.
She buried the memory once more and took refuge in being brusque and businesslike. ‘Talk to my mother if you choose… That’s all the rooms except the attics and kitchens. Do you wish to see those?’
‘Not particularly,’ he responded. ‘I have the attic dimensions and I probably know the kitchen layout better than you do yourself, young Miss Esme.’
He pretended to touch his forelock. It seemed like humour but Esme wasn’t fooled. There was bitterness behind it, too. And why not?
But Esme refused to go on the defensive and muttered in agreement, ‘Probably,’ before walking ahead of him out onto the galleried landing and down the once magnificent staircase, now creaking with age.
She started to walk towards the front door but his voice halted her. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to go through the kitchens to view the outbuildings?’
‘You want to see those?’ Esme frowned darkly. Surely he knew the layout of the rear yard, too.
‘The state of them,’ he confirmed. ‘The stables weren’t in great shape the last time I saw them.’
It could have been an innocent comment.
Perhaps only she remembered exact details of where and how.
But it made her both angry and embarrassed; she turned away before he could observe either emotion.
Her heels clicked on the marble floor as she stalked ahead, a tall, willowy creature with an erect back, and Jack followed, puzzling as to how he’d upset her this time.
He went over what he’d said. Nothing much. Just about the state of the stables the last time he’d seen them.
Ah! He recalled literally the last time. The night he’d woken up to Arabella and her little games and ended up spending part of it with her sister. Not his finest hour, whichever way you looked at it, so he tended not to look at it.
There wasn’t much he could say now, either, so he said nothing.
She led the way outside into the back courtyard, a large square flanked by walls and the stable blocks. It was as he remembered only in a considerably worse state of repair. Grass and weeds were growing between cobblestones and someone had left piles of garden rubbish in one corner.
An old car, seemingly abandoned but actually belonging to Esme, stood rusting in one corner, and the red paint on garage and stable doors was cracked and peeling.
Esme had grown used to the decay of what had used to be kept immaculate while her father was alive, but she saw it afresh through Jack Doyle’s eyes. She waited for him to make some derogatory remark, with every intention of snapping his head off if he did.
But he kept his thoughts to himself as he crossed the yard to the stable block. He went from stall to stall, eyes measuring, assessing, judging how much of the stone structure would have to be rebuilt.
Esme followed along, hovering at a distance, there to answer questions but wearing an expression that discouraged any. She supposed she should be trying to sell the place but she still doubted he was there to buy it.
He reached the tack room and found it locked. ‘Have you the key?’
‘No, it’s back at—’ she broke off abruptly, about to say the cottage, and switched to, ‘Back at the house,’ then added a suitably vague, ‘Somewhere,’ in case he asked her to produce it.
Not that there was anything incriminating inside the tack room. Just some odd pieces of bridle equipment. It was the mention of the cottage she’d been avoiding, although, on reflection, he might not have associated it with the cottage, originally his, now hers and Harry’s.
He shrugged and moved on to the barn adjacent where they’d kept the feed. It was empty apart from some old hay in the loft, so it had been left open.
He went inside. Esme made no attempt to follow. She heard him moving around and waited, teeth gritted once more as she prepared for any possible remark he might pass, any allusion to the interlude they’d shared—impromptu passion fuelled by a bottle of whisky.
Her face flamed for the umpteenth time that afternoon. At twenty-six, she thought she’d grown out of blushing, but it seemed this humiliating habit from younger days had returned with a vengeance.
The Beetroot, that was another of Arabella’s names for her. How she would cringe when Arabella called her that in company. In fact, she had cringed her way through
