staircase to the upper floor. What on earth is he doing? she thought with a little flutter of panic.
He reached a door, stretching his hand out for the knob, and she thought again of that Fate Worse Than Death. Oh, my God, he’s going to take me into his bedroom and seduce me while his housekeeper looks after my children! she thought with a hysterical giggle bubbling in the back of her throat.
Then he threw open the door and led her into the remains of an elegant drawing room, shabby now and tired but once glorious, and paused in front of a great mullioned window overlooking the garden.
‘That’s the problem,’ he said thoughtfully.
Georgia marshalled her hysterical and somewhat crazy brain, and peered down into—nothing.
A walled garden, almost square, with an area of flat and tatty grass interrupted by molehills and thistles, and around the edges the straggling remains of a rose garden almost totally submerged in weeds.
‘That,’ he said deadpan, ‘is a formal parterre.’
She lost it. The giggle fought its way up, battling all the way, and erupted in a shower of sound that echoed round the room and left her feeling silly.
Until she saw his smile. ‘You see my problem? You see why I needed you? Especially when I found out that the restoration of historic gardens was your forte.’
Georgia looked again, and in her mind’s eye she could see the outline of an old knot garden, neat little hedges arranged in complicated and stylised knots with spaces filled with scented herbs. Designed to be viewed from above, the intricate and lovely garden had been long stripped out and destroyed.
She stared again at the unkempt grass. ‘Restoration?’ she said weakly.
He shrugged and smiled. ‘Perhaps recreation would be a more appropriate word. Come on—I’m going to take you a bit higher, so you get a better look.’
And he turned and retraced his steps.
‘You’re going down,’ she said, confused.
He threw a grin back over his shoulder. ‘Only for a moment. Then we go right up.’
Even more confused, she followed him. He went via the kitchen, putting his mug down on the draining board. There was no sign of the children or Mrs Hodges or the dog, she thought absently, trailing after him into the sunshine and across a courtyard to a cluster of farm buildings.
Perhaps they were going to climb a grain hopper, she thought, but there wasn’t one, and he was heading for a barn—just an ordinary, big black Suffolk barn. She was more puzzled than ever. Whatever was he doing?
Then he flicked a catch, dropped his shoulder against the edge of a huge sliding door in the side of the barn and pushed, and Georgia, who absolutely definitely didn’t like heights, felt suddenly terribly uneasy…
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