Carver as a friend was actually very appealing. His old schoolfriends, and others of both sexes he’d made in his Cambridge days, were either married or working in all four corners of the globe. Except for Stephen Hicks. And none of them had as much in common with him as Sarah from a career point of view.
When he pressed her bell Sarah buzzed him in and stood barefoot at her open door. She smiled as Alex crossed the hall towards her, unaware that she was backlit by the light streaming through her thin skirt, giving him an X-ray view of legs and curving hips that struck him dumb. ‘Hi. Do come in.’
‘Thank you for seeing me,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘I thought you might be out celebrating.’
‘Not twice in one day,’ she assured him as she closed the door. ‘Besides, Oliver wouldn’t have risked driving here again.’
‘You could have been celebrating with someone other than your godfather.’ Like Dan Mason, perish the thought.
‘True, but as you see I’m not, so can I offer you a glass of wine?’
Alex eyed her hopefully. ‘I don’t suppose you’d have a beer?’
‘Sorry. The only other thing on offer is coffee.’
‘Good as yours is, I’ll take the wine on an evening like this.’ He badly needed something to lubricate the mouth that had dried at the sight of her in silhouette. ‘But only if you’ll join me.’
Knowing she could depend on the quality of the wine Oliver sometimes brought her to keep in her fridge, Sarah filled two of her mother’s best glasses and handed one to Alex. ‘Do sit down,’ she invited.
He waited for her to take her usual perch on the windowseat, then sat on the sofa, trying not to stare at her pink toenails. Her untidy curls framed a face bare of even lipstick, he noted with amusement. As usual she’d made no attempt to tidy herself up to meet him. But, polished and perfect though she’d been for their meeting this morning, he liked the barefoot dishevelled look far more. So much more it was taking all his will-power to stay on the sofa instead of snatching her up in his arms to kiss her senseless. Whoa! Where had that come from? He swallowed some wine hastily. The first step, Merrick, is to get her used to the idea of you as a friend.
Sarah waited patiently for Alex to speak. His lean, clever face looked very brown in the light above his open white collar, and for once she considered him solely on the merit of his looks—which, she had to admit, were considerable. She had always been attracted to brains rather than muscles, but Alex had both. He had a degree, so he obviously had brains, and if the muscles came from playing cricket rather than hard, physical work, at least he had some.
‘What did you want to discuss?’ she asked, after an interval where he seemed inclined just to sit and look at her rather than talk.
With effort, Alex removed his gaze from the hair curling on her bare shoulders. ‘Have you forgotten about the furniture, Sarah?’
Not Miss Carver any more, then. She frowned. ‘What furniture?’
‘The first Medlar Farm cottage in the row is full of your belongings,’ he reminded her.
Sarah’s eyes widened. ‘Good heavens!’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe I’d forgotten that. No more champagne at lunchtime for me!’
He shook his head. ‘You were merely enjoying your first triumph too much to remember.’
‘Which is pretty stupid of me, because it’s my mother’s furniture!’
‘You think of it as hers rather than belonging to both your parents?’ Alex gave her the benefit of his crooked smile. ‘Forgive my curiosity.’
Sarah was pretty sure most people forgave him anything when he smiled like that. But she wasn’t most people. ‘I was speaking literally. It actually was my mother’s. She inherited it from her parents, along with the house—but I mustn’t bore you with my life history.’
‘It wouldn’t bore me—quite the opposite. I’d really like to hear it. Unless you find it painful to talk about your parents?’ he added quickly.
To her surprise, she found she wanted to talk about them. ‘My mother was a landscape gardener. She was working in the grounds of a big property when my father arrived with his crew to do restoration work on the house. One look and that was it—for both of them.’ Sarah smiled wryly. ‘Dad said her parents were not exactly thrilled when their only child told them she’d fallen in love with a builder brought up in a children’s home. But when they met him they liked him. So much so that eventually they suggested he moved into their home with Louise after their marriage, instead of taking her away from it. Dad told me that he was only too happy to be part of a family at last, and from then on he did all the maintenance work on their sizeable North London home as a way of showing his gratitude.’
‘As a son-in-law he was a valuable asset, then?’
‘In every way,’ Sarah agreed. ‘He helped Mother care for her parents as they got older and frailer. How about you?’ she added. ‘I heard that your father’s based in London these days?’
Alex nodded soberly, and drank some of his wine. ‘Did your source tell you he’d remarried?’
‘No. My “source”, as you put it, is Harry Sollers. He’s not big on gossip. He just gave me the bare bones of the Merrick success story.’
Alex smiled wryly. ‘Then he must have mentioned Edgar, my grandfather, scrap baron extraordinaire. The old boy’s a bit of a legend in this part of the world.’
‘For turning scrap metal into gold?’
‘That’s not far off the truth. He started from nothing, which is hard to believe when you think of the group’s present level of expansion.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘God, yes. In his late eighties and still alive and kicking. My aunt—a saint by any standards—lives with him, and does her best to care for the cantankerous old devil.’ Alex grinned at the look on Sarah’s face. ‘Don’t look so shocked. I say exactly the same to his face.’
‘If your father has remarried, did you lose your mother when you were young, like me?’ she asked with sympathy.
He was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ he said at last. ‘After I graduated she divorced my father and bought a house near her sister in Warwickshire.’
‘Alex, I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known,’ Sarah said remorsefully.
‘At least it shocked you into calling me Alex at last.’
‘I could hardly do that while you were still addressing me as Miss Carver.’
‘I make it a rule never to mix business with pleasure. But,’ he said, holding her eyes, ‘we concluded the business part this morning, Sarah.’
‘So we did.’ She took his empty glass. ‘Let me give you a refill. Or I could make you some coffee.’
‘Does that mean you’d like me to stay awhile?’
She
