‘Pretty much as predicted. Although, thankfully, I was saved after about fifteen minutes of fending off Mrs Scott’s increasingly personal questions by the arrival of another customer!’
Jaz nodded, smiling. ‘At which time you gratefully beat a hasty retreat.’
‘Very hasty,’ he confirmed grimly.
‘I shouldn’t worry about it too much,’ Jaz advised lightly. ‘Once you’ve lived here twenty years or so they’ll lose interest!’
‘Oh wonderful!’ he said with feeling. ‘Somehow village life isn’t quite as I imagined it would be.’ He gave a disgusted shake of his head.
‘Birds twittering in the hedgerows, children playing happily on the village green, neighbours chatting happily to each other over the garden fences?’ Jaz guessed teasingly.
‘Something like that,’ he confirmed dryly.
‘Oh, it can be like that,’ Jaz assured him. ‘Not usually in March, though. Too cold,’ she grinned. ‘And beneath the birds twittering, the happy children playing, neighbours chatting, you’ll find there is always the underlying gossip that binds us all together.’
‘The latter I can quite well do without,’ Beau Garrett assured her hardly.
She shrugged. ‘I did try to warn you the other evening.’
‘A little late, wouldn’t you say, when I’ve obviously already purchased The Old Vicarage?’ he drawled.
‘Just a little,’ she conceded ruefully. ‘But, don’t worry, if you intend staying, you’ll soon get used to it.’
‘Oh I intend staying,’ he told her flatly. ‘But I intend living here in quiet seclusion, have no intention of doing anything that will give the villagers cause to gossip about me,’ he added grimly.
Perhaps now wasn’t the time to tell him that he wouldn’t actually need to do anything to be the subject of gossip; just his being here at all, a well-known television star, had the inhabitants of Aberton agog with speculation as to why he had bought a house here. The last Jaz had heard, from the postman this morning as he handed her her letters, Beau Garrett had come to the village to escape an unhappy love affair when the woman in his life left him following the car accident that had left his face scarred.
That may be true, Jaz really had no idea, but somehow she doubted it was any more accurate than the rumour that he was here to research a book! What sort of book, and what sort of research, she couldn’t imagine, having heard from Beau Garret himself of his desire to be left in peace and solitude, but she had no intention of adding fuel to that particular fire by confiding that knowledge with anyone else, her answers to the postman noncommittal to say the least.
‘Perhaps we should go and look at the garden now?’ she suggested briskly, deciding enough had already been said concerning the speculation about him in the village.
‘The jungle, I call it.’ He stood up. ‘Although I am hoping that one day I’ll be able to call it a garden,’ he added wryly as they walked outside.
He was right, it was more like a jungle, Jaz realized with a heavy heart, years of rubbish accumulated in grass that was thigh high, overgrown with weeds, several of the trees in need of cutting down completely, and the greenhouse, once so lovingly tended by her grandmother, almost falling down, every pane of glass broken.
Looking at it Jaz couldn’t help remembering how in previous years she had played in this garden, built dens in the bushes, eaten picnics with her grandparents on the smooth green lawn, sat on the swing beneath the apple tree dreaming of a time when she would have her own home, her own apple tree with its swing, and children laughing as they played on it.
Now, at twenty-five, she had come to believe those dreams would never be more than that…
‘A disaster, isn’t it?’ Beau Garrett rasped disgustedly.
Jaz gave herself a mental shake; she was here to do a job, not wallow in the past. ‘Not really,’ she assured him crisply. ‘I’ll need to clear all the rubbish before we can actually begin putting it in any order, but I think most of it is salvageable.’
‘You have more optimism than I do, then,’ he dismissed with a shake of his head. ‘Sometimes I wonder what on earth I thought I was doing taking on a place like this!’ he muttered almost to himself.
Jaz turned to look at him. ‘Searching for your own piece of paradise?’ she suggested huskily, knowing that being back here again, after all these years, had affected her more deeply than she cared to admit. ‘My grandfather always said that you have to find contentment inside yourself before you can appreciate any other happiness in your life.’ And she had known all about discontent…
‘Did he really?’ Beau Garrett rasped harshly, his aloofness of Friday evening returning with a vengeance as he looked down his arrogant nose at her.
Jaz turned away, her cheeks flushed as she realized she had stepped over some imaginary line. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I wasn’t necessarily referring to you,’ she finished lamely, knowing it was being at The Old Vicarage again, her own memories, that had prompted the comment. And it hadn’t been directed at Beau Garrett at all, but at herself…
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He turned away abruptly. ‘Are you still available to start on Wednesday morning?’
‘Yes, of course—’
‘Then consider yourself hired,’ he bit out curtly. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind…? I have some other things I need to do this afternoon.’
Jaz didn’t ‘mind’ at all, felt an overwhelming urge to get away herself, had reminisced quite enough for one afternoon, thank you!
‘You’ll need a quote for how much the work is going to cost—’
‘Just do it,’ he rasped, obviously impatient for this conversation to be over now. ‘And send me the bill.’
‘Er…’ She grimaced, too embarrassed now to quite be able to meet that silvery gaze. ‘I’ll need to have a skip delivered to take away all the rubbish, and then there’s—’
‘Jaz, if you need a deposit to cover those costs then why don’t you just ask for one?’ Beau Garrett cut in impatiently.
‘Because I hate asking people for money, that’s why!’ She felt stung into replying, glaring up at him, all her earlier feelings of sympathy towards him evaporating in the face of his arrogant rudeness.
‘Then it’s no wonder that the tyres on your van are so bald they develop punctures, your business is obviously falling down around your ears, and the clothes you’re wearing would make a scarecrow look well dressed!’ he came back scathingly before striding back into the kitchen.
Jaz stared after him, too stunned by the suddenness of the attack to find an immediate reply.
The fact that every word he spoke was the truth certainly didn’t help!
The van was old, left to her on her father’s death, as was the run-down garden centre. As for her clothes…she couldn’t remember when she had last been able to afford anything new.
But
