There was only Janet in the house now—and a young girl from the village who came in to help on a daily basis—but she could still tell tales of how grand it had all been forty years ago, with six household staff and a veritable army of gardeners to keep the grounds in immaculate condition. Those grounds were now kept in a similar condition by a contract gardener who came in two days a week. Almost sixty now, Janet had seen a lot of changes in the Carlyle fortunes during those forty years.
She was obviously pleased to see Liam in his old home, if a little confused. ‘Why did no one tell me you were coming?’ She frowned slightly reprovingly at Juliet. ‘I could have got your old room ready,’ she said, with a shake of her head.
Liam grimaced. ‘I’m not sure whether or not I’m staying yet,’ he bit out tautly as he released the elderly housekeeper. ‘And, if I do, I certainly don’t want my old room!’
Janet looked hurt. ‘But—’
‘Could we have some tea, Janet?’ Juliet took over calmly, knowing by that stubborn set to Liam’s mouth that he wasn’t about to be pressurised into doing anything he didn’t want to do—not even by the woman he must have known since his birth thirty-eight years ago. ‘It’s been a tiring day,’ she exaggerated—the journey had been achieved so smoothly that it was difficult to realise that they were actually back in England. But Liam looked as if he had taken enough for one day; returning to Carlyle Manor was obviously a strain for him.
‘I’ll bring it through in just a couple of minutes.’ Janet was obviously glad of something useful to do. ‘It is lovely to see you back, Mr Liam,’ she paused at the door to tell him.
Liam shook his head once the housekeeper had gone through to the kitchen. ‘I had forgotten all about Janet,’ he said, frowning.
Juliet doubted that he had actually forgotten; he had just chosen to put all memory of his family, and everything to do with them, firmly from his mind during the last ten years. Whatever the family rift had been about, and she doubted if she would ever know, it had certainly been something major.
‘Thank you.’
She looked across at Liam enquiringly, not understanding the quiet comment.
‘The request for tea,’ he explained ruefully. ‘Janet might have been hurt by my next comment,’ he accepted self-deprecatingly. ‘You’re quite an astute little thing, aren’t you?’ he remarked as he strode through to the sitting-room.
‘Will you stop being patronising about my size?’ Juliet snapped as she almost had to run to keep up with his long strides. She had heard it all during the last few days, from ‘midget’ right through to ‘pint-size’, and quite frankly she was getting tired of it.
He turned to her with a genuinely surprised expression on his face. ‘I didn’t mean to be patronising.’ He frowned. ‘It’s just—well, you can’t deny you’re a bit on the small side, can you?’ He grimaced lamely. ‘You are a bit tetchy after our journey, aren’t you?’ His frown returned as he looked down at her. ‘Maybe we should have left it a couple more days before coming back.’
A couple more days of this man telling her what to do all the time and she would have thrown one of his trays of food at him! ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you,’ she told him sharply. ‘I would just appreciate your treating me like a grown woman for a change!’
‘I thought I did,’ he said quietly.
Juliet looked across at him as she stood near the fire; there had been something altogether too intimate in his tone of voice. And since that first morning, as she had lain in bed in her underwear, there had been no further indication that he had even realised that she was a woman—certainly no apparent return of the intensity of feeling that had been between them so fleetingly.
She swallowed hard. ‘Your business partner, then,’ she corrected herself awkwardly, aware that, even if there had been no further physical awareness between them during the rest of their stay in Majorca, it was certainly there now. And it was the last thing she wanted with this particular man— with any man!
‘For the moment.’ He nodded abruptly. ‘We’ll know just how viable that is once I’ve looked over Carlyle Properties,’ he explained at her questioning look.
Juliet could only begin to guess what he meant by looking over Carlyle Properties, and, if he found it wasn’t viable, exactly what he would do about it!
‘You—’ She broke off abruptly as Janet entered with the tea-tray, appetising-looking sandwiches also there with the tea things. ‘Thank you, Janet.’ She smiled her dismissal of the older woman.
‘I’ll get a room ready for you just in case, Mr Liam,’ the housekeeper told him before she left.
Liam gave a wry smile. ‘She always was a tenacious woman. My father probably should have married her years ago,’ he added with a frown.
Juliet looked up from pouring the tea, the pot held poised in her hand. ‘I beg your pardon?’
He steadily returned her gaze. ‘Janet loved my father for years, surely you knew that?’ he said derisively.
She most certainly had not, had never picked up even so much of a hint that the other woman had felt that way towards William. Although she had always thought it strange that a lovely woman like Janet, obviously a once very beautiful woman, should never have married.
‘Obviously not,’ Liam drawled at Juliet’s stunned silence. ‘Well, they do say there’s none so blind…’ he dismissed drily. ‘Probably you just didn’t want to see it. After all, it might have interfered with your own relationship with my father if you had.’
Juliet felt the colour in her cheeks. ‘I have told you, repeatedly,’ she said emphatically, ‘that my relationship with your father was completely platonic!’
‘I know.’ Liam nodded mockingly. ‘And I have tried, repeatedly,’ he added just as emphatically, ‘to believe that you really lived here, for several years, it seems, as his assistant and platonic companion.’
And he obviously still didn’t believe it for one minute! Well, she wasn’t about to keep saying it; after all, there was another saying, ‘The lady doth protest too much, me thinks’; the more she kept denying it, the more likely Liam Carlyle was to believe it was true!
‘I always assumed my father didn’t return Janet’s feelings because he didn’t want any woman permanently in his life after my mother died,’ Liam frowned. ‘But as you’ve been here for some time that apparently wasn’t the case.’
Juliet had to bite her lip to stop herself once again answering defensively. No matter what she said, Liam wasn’t going to be convinced that she hadn’t been involved with his father. And really, at the end of the day, she didn’t care what he thought, as long as he helped her salvage Carlyle Properties.
‘Poor Janet,’ he added goadingly, taking his cup of tea out of Juliet’s slightly shaking hand.
The housekeeper had been extremely distraught at William’s death. In fact, she had been with him when he died, had taken his cup of tea up to his bedroom in the morning only to find that he had had a heart attack some time during the night. There hadn’t been time to call a doctor or anything else, as William had died almost immediately. It had almost been as if he had
