to wait long.
‘Are you just?’ Dottie retorted. ‘And I’m supposed to believe you, am I? You turn up here with your fancy voice and good shoes and expect what? That I’ll leave you my house?’
Trust Dottie to have checked his shoes, Jo thought. Dottie was a firm believer that you could judge a person by his or her shoes...
‘No,’ Charles was saying politely. ‘I wanted to know more about my mother and her family—my family—and you seemed like the best person to tell me.’
‘You can’t ask her?’
Not a demand this time, but a question asked through quivering lips, as if the answer was already known.
The stranger hesitated, frowning as if trying to make sense of the question, or perhaps trying to frame an answer.
Maybe the latter, for he leant a little closer.
‘I’m so very sorry but I thought you’d been told. She died when I was born.’
The words were softly spoken, the stranger bowing his head as he said them, but Jo was more concerned with Dottie, who was as white as the lace collar on her dress.
But even as Jo reached her side, Dottie rallied.
‘So, who’s your father? No doubt that lying vagabond she ran away with. I suppose you’ve proof of this!’
If the man was disturbed by having his father labelled this way, he didn’t show it.
‘My father is Prince Edouard Alesandro Cinzetti. We are from a tiny principality in Europe, a place even many Europeans do not know. It is called—’
‘Don’t tell me!’ Dottie held up her hand. ‘I’ve heard it all before. Some place with liver in the name, or maybe the vagabond’s name had liver in it.’
‘Liver?’ Jo repeated faintly, totally gobsmacked by what was going on before her eyes.
The stranger glanced up and smiled.
‘Livaroche,’ he said, imbuing the word with all the magic of a fairy-tale.
But Jo’s attention was back on Dottie, who seemed to have shrunk back into the chair.
‘Go away, I don’t want you here,’ she said, so feebly that Jo bent to take her arm, feeling for a pulse that fluttered beneath her fingertips.
‘Perhaps if you could wait in the kitchen. This has been a shock for Dottie. I’ll settle her back in bed and make us all some supper.’
Dottie flung off Jo’s hand and glared at the visitor.
‘You can’t stay here!’ she said. ‘If you are the vagabond’s son, next thing I know you’ll be making sheep’s eyes at my Jo, and whispering sweet nothings to her.’
Dark eyes turned towards Jo, his gaze taking in her bloated figure, and the man had the hide to smile before he answered Dottie.
‘Oh, I think someone’s already whispered sweet nothings to Jo, don’t you?’
The rogue!
But he’d turned her way again, serious now, frowning.
‘That’s if you are Jo! I’m sorry, we didn’t meet—not properly. You know I’m Charles, and you are?’
His aunt? Charles wondered, though why that thought upset him he didn’t want to consider.
No, Dottie had said ‘my Jo’, but it was impossible she could be Dottie’s daughter. Dottie must be touching ninety, and if Jo was much over thirty he’d eat his hat.
Maybe a cousin...
But the statuesque beauty was talking.
‘I’m Jo Wainwright, local GP in Port Anooka. I took over the practice a couple of years ago, but I have a locum there at present.’
‘Then why are you here? Is D—my grandmother ill?’
Somehow saying Dottie seemed far too informal—inappropriate really.
Jo was shaking her head, the red in her hair glinting in the lamplight.
‘Dottie is probably the fittest eighty-five-year-old it’s ever been my pleasure to meet. She’s also the stubbornest—’ She broke off to smile at the old woman. ‘And she’s not entirely steady on her feet, while as for the stair lift—you’d swear she was taking off for Mars, the speed she roars up the stairs on it.’
‘Fiddle-faddle!’
Charles ignored the interruption.
‘So?’
But again it was Dottie who answered.
‘Oh, she thinks I’m not safe to be out here on my own, and she knows darned well I won’t move to one of those nasty places where old people rot away and die, so now she spends all her spare time here, eating me out of house and home, and leaving spies here during the week to report back to her.’
As the words were warmed by fondness, and Dottie was clinging to Jo’s hand as she spoke, Charles knew it was only bluster, and understood there was a special bond between the pair.
‘Dottie’s right,’ Jo told him. ‘I don’t like her being out here on her own, but I’ve grown to love the place almost as much as she does, so staying out here when I can is no hardship.’
She paused, looking a little rueful as she added, ‘Mind you, I didn’t know about the roof. I keep asking Dottie what needs maintenance and although we’ve done a bit, there’s been a long dry spell so the roof didn’t get a mention.’
She had such an animated face the words seemed to come alive as she spoke them, but he could hardly keep staring at her, any more than he could ask her what her husband thought of this arrangement.
So he watched as she spoke quietly to Dottie, helping her to her feet.
‘I usually take Dottie her supper in bed. Would you excuse us?’
For the first time, he actually took in the long Chinese robe the older woman was wearing. Had she been settled in bed when he’d arrived and thrown them both into confusion?
‘Can I be of assistance?’ he offered, and was rewarded with a ferocious scowl from the woman he’d come so far to meet.
‘You’ve caused quite enough drama for one day, thank you very much. You’d best be getting back to the village and we can discuss your visit in the morning.’
‘The tide, Dottie,’ Jo said gently. ‘He won’t be able to get back to the village now. He’ll have to stay the night.’
‘Then put him in the front room,’ Dottie said, with such malicious glee Charles knew it was either haunted or, more prosaically, lay beneath the worst of the roof damage.
Left on his own,
