who do you think you are talking to?’ Rosie raked back at him, losing her own temper with a speed that left her dizzy. ‘Some brain-dead bimbo you can abuse? Well, let me tell you, you overgrown creep, it takes more than a big loud mouth and a flashy suit to impress me and this is one trashy little tart who has no plans ever to cross your path again!’
Shaking with temper and mortification, Rosie crashed the phone back down on the cradle and grabbed up her case again, furious that she had put herself out to phone him. Talk about wasting the price of a call! She had got too soft. Anton had done that to her. He had mown down her prickly defences and challenged her to meet his trusting generosity with her own.
But now that her father was gone she could not afford that kind of weakness. This was the real world she was back in, not that sentimental, forever sunny place which Anton had cheerfully and somewhat naively inhabited. And being soft was only an open invitation to getting kicked in the teeth...
CHAPTER TWO
MAURICE strolled wearily into the kitchen. Well over six feet in height, he had shoulders like axe handles and a massive chest, but hard physical work had taxed even his impressive resources. His thick mane of long blond hair hung in a limp damp tangle round his rough-hewn features. ‘Any chance you bought some beer while you were out shopping?’
Barely lifting her head from the grimy cooker she was scrubbing, Rosie threw him an incredulous glance. ‘You’ve just got to be joking!’
‘You can’t still be mad at me.’ Maurice treated her to a look of pained male incomprehension. ‘You should have phoned. If I’d had some warning that you were coming back, I’d have brought Loma in to clean up—’
Scorn flashed in Rosie’s eyes. ‘Your sister has a full-time job of her own. You should be ashamed of yourself, Maurice. When we moved in here, you promised you’d pull your weight. And the minute my back’s turned, what do you do?’ she demanded with fiery resentment. ‘You turn the cottage into a dirty, messy hovel and my garden into a junkyard!’
Maurice shifted his size thirteen feet uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t clean up because I wasn’t expecting you—’
‘Stop trying to shift the blame. Put those bulging muscles into shifting those hideous old baths off the lawn and into the barn!’
Maurice grimaced. ‘The barn’s full:
‘Then sell them on and get rid of them! They make this place look like a rubbish tip!’
‘Sell them on? Are you nuts? They’re worth a packet!’ Maurice was openly appalled by the suggestion. ‘I make more flogging one bath than you make in a week of selling knick-knacks on your market stall!’
Involuntary amusement filled Rosie, defusing her exasperation. Her conscience stabbed her too. Maurice had been her best friend since she was thirteen. She sighed. ‘Look... why don’t you go and have a shower? I’ll help you clear the garden later.’
But Maurice hovered and cleared his throat. ‘I should have said it yesterday but I couldn’t find the words... I’m really sorry you lost your dad so soon after him finding you.’
A lump ballooned in Rosie’s tight throat. ‘He was a nice bloke,’ she mumbled, and swallowed hard. ‘I was lucky I had the chance to get to know him.’
‘Yeah...’ A frown darkening his brow, Maurice hesitated before plunging in with two big feet. ‘But why leave London in such a rush when he seems to have left you a share of his worldly goods?’
‘I don’t want to talk about that—’
‘Rosie...you can’t keep on running away from people and situations that upset you.’
A fierce flush lit her cheeks. In self-defence she turned her head away. The reminder that that had been a habit of hers when she was younger was not welcome.
‘And you can’t leave a legacy hanging in legal limbo either. The executor will be forced to track you down. That’s his job.’
‘He’ll find it difficult. I left no forwarding address’
‘Collect what’s coming to you and I bet you could say goodbye to market trading and start up an antique shop here, just the way you always planned,’ Maurice pointed out levelly. ‘Then between us we could make an offer to buy this place from my uncle instead of renting it.’
Maurice’s fatal flaw, Rosie reflected wryly. A complete inability to miss out on any opportunity to make or attract money. And because of it he would probably be a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five. His architectural salvage business was booming.
‘You could make a better life for yourself. That’s obviously what your father wanted,’ Maurice continued with conviction. ‘And why do you act so flippin’ guilty about his widow? I’m quite sure he hasn’t left her destitute!’
Rosie spun round, pale and furious, but, having said his piece, Maurice took himself safely upstairs before she even reached the hall. Baulked of the chance to tell him to mind his own business, she scowled on the threshold of the tiny lounge, surveying the all-male debris of abandoned take-aways, squashed beer cans and car magazines. Her nose wrinkled. It was going to take her days to restore the cottage to its former cleanliness. With a rebellious groan, she rubbed at her aching back with a grimy hand and wandered out into the pale spring sunshine.
A silver limousine was in the act of turning in off the road. The impressive vehicle drew to a purring halt behind Maurice’s lorry. As Rosie watched with raised brows, a uniformed chauffeur climbed out and opened the rear passenger door. She started to walk towards the barn. It might be the one day of the week that Maurice didn’t open for business but he never turned away a customer. However, when a very tall, dark male sheathed in a breathtakingly elegant dove-grey suit emerged from the limo, Rosie stopped dead in her tracks, shock and dismay freezing her fragile features.
Sunlight arrowed over Constantine Voulos’s blue-black hair, gilding his tanned skin to gold and accentuating the hard-boned hawk-like masculinity of his superb bone structure. He strode across the yard towards her, his long, powerful legs eating up the distance with a natural grace of movement as eye-catching as that of a lion on the prowl. Rosie connected with glittering dark golden eyes set between dense black lashes. Her stomach clenched, her heart hammering thunderously against her breastbone.
“All women find Constantine irresistible,” Anton had told her ruefully. “I don’t think he’s ever met with a refusal. Unfortunately that has made him rather cynical about your sex.”
Rosie surfaced abruptly from that irrelevant memory to find herself being regarded much as she herself might have regarded a cockroach. She flushed, suddenly embarrassingly aware of the soiled sweatshirt and worn jeans she wore and then as quickly infuriated that she should even consider his opinion as being of any importance!
‘We’ll talk inside,’ Constantine informed her grimly.
‘How the heck did you find me?’
He elevated a sardonic winged ebony brow. ‘It wasn’t difficult. Anton’s desk diary contained this address.’
‘Well, I don’t want you here,’ Rosie retorted with angry heat. ‘So you can just take yourself off again!’
‘I’m not leaving until we have reached an agreement.’
