one-off started to seem premature.
He stepped through the door frame and followed her into the room. There were cases and bags on the bed. They were lumpy enough to look as if they had been filled in a hurry. The zips weren’t done up all the way, and something silky was falling out of the holdall nearest to him. He really should stop looking at it.
Ellie followed his gaze and dived for the bag, stuffing the item back in so deep that most of her arm disappeared. Now he was just staring at a pile of cases.
Cases? He tilted his head. Oh. Right. She thought he was going to give her the sack.
Well, as tempting as the idea might be, he couldn’t afford to do that at present. Firstly because he’d never hear the end of it from Charlie, and secondly because he really did need someone here to look after the house while he was travelling. He was due on another plane in less than twenty-four hours and he simply didn’t have the luxury of finding someone else. It had been hard enough to fill the position at short notice when Mrs Timms had decided to leave.
Maybe it was time to work some of the legendary Wilder magic and put this Ellie Bond at ease. If he showed her he was laughing off the incident last night, it might help her relax.
Mark waited for her to finish fiddling with the bag, and then pulled a smile out of his arsenal—the one guaranteed to melt ice maidens at fifty paces.
‘Well, I’m glad to see you’re still in your own room, anyway.’ He threw in a wink, just to make sure she knew he was joking. ‘With your track record, we can’t be too careful.’
Hmm. Strange. Nothing happened. No thaw whatsoever.
‘There’s no need to go on about that. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be here, and I’m not familiar with the layout of the house yet, and I just…the moon went in…I counted three instead of four…’ The babbling continued.
There was one thing that was puzzling him. If she’d wanted a bathroom, why had she trekked down the hall?
‘Why didn’t you just use the en-suite?’
She stopped mid-babble. ‘En-suite?’
He walked over to a cream-coloured panelled door on the opposite wall to the bed, designed to match the wardrobe on the other side of the chimney breast. He nudged it gently with his knuckles and it clicked open. Her jaw lost all muscle tone as she walked slowly towards the compact but elegant bathroom.
She shook her head, walked in, looked around and walked out again, still blessedly silent. Actually, his new housekeeper seemed relatively normal when she stopped biting and yelling and babbling.
He had a sudden flashback to the night before—to the baggy blue and white pyjamas that hadn’t been quite baggy enough to disguise her curves—and he started to get a little flustered himself.
‘I have a…bathroom…inside my wardrobe?’
He gave a one-shouldered shrug. ‘Actually, it’s not quite as Narnia-like as it seems. The wardrobe is that side.’ He pointed to an identical cream door the other side of the chimney breast. ‘We just had the door to the en-suite built to match. Secret doors seem to suit a house like this.’
The look on her face told him she thought it was the stupidest idea ever.
‘I thought it was fun,’ he said, willing her to smile back at him, to join him in a little light banter and laugh the whole thing off as an unfortunate first meeting. She just blinked.
‘Anyway,’ he continued with a sigh, ‘let’s just see if we can get through the next twenty-four hours without something—or someone—going bump in the night.’
‘I told you before. It was an accident,’ she said, scrunching her forehead into parallel lines.
It looked as if she was tempted to bite him again. Humour was obviously not the way to go. Back to business, then. That had to be safe territory, didn’t it?
‘Okay, well take this for now.’ He placed the money on the chest of drawers while she watched him suspiciously. ‘I’m getting a credit card sorted out for the household expenses, and a laptop so we can keep in touch via e-mail. I just need you to sign a few forms, if that’s all right?’
She nodded, but her eyes never left him, as if she was expecting him to make a sudden move.
Mark wandered over to the bed, picked up the sad-looking blue bear sitting next to one of the cases and gave it a cursory inspection. He wouldn’t have expected her to be the sort who slept with a teddy, but, hey, whatever rocked her boat. He tossed it back on the bed. It bounced and landed on the floor. Ellie rushed to scoop it up, clutched it to her chest and glared at him.
He raked his fingers through his hair. It was time to beat a hasty retreat.
‘I’ll see you at dinner, then?’ He raised his hands on a non-threatening gesture. An insane image of him as a lion tamer, holding off a lioness with a rickety old chair, popped into his head. He wouldn’t be surprised if she growled at him.
‘Fine.’ It almost was a growl.
‘Would you join us? I’ve invited Charlie to dinner, to say thank you for finding me a—’
The word hellcat had been poised to fall out of his mouth and he stopped himself just in time.
Not hellcat. Housekeeper! Just try and remember that.
‘—for finding me a housekeeper at such short notice. I thought it would be a good way to break the ice before I disappear again.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. Her eyes told him she’d rather walk on hot coals.
Fine. If she wanted to keep it cool and impersonal, he could keep it cool and impersonal. Probably.
‘If you could be ready to serve up at eight o’clock…?’
Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
He backed out through the door and started walking towards the main staircase. Charlie had a lot to answer for. Her perfect-for-the-job friend was perfectly strange, for one thing! He took himself downstairs and sat on the velvet-covered sofa in front of the fire. Jet lag was making it hard to think, and he had the oddest feeling that his conversation with Ellie had just been weird enough for him still to be asleep and dreaming.
She was clearly barking mad. If the ‘lost-my-bedroom’ incident had planted a seed of suspicion in his mind, their talk just now and what he had seen early this morning had definitely added fertiliser.
His body clock was still refusing to conform to Greenwich Mean Time, and last night he’d dozed, tossed and turned, read some of a long-winded novel and eventually decided on a hot shower to clear his head. On the way to his bathroom a flash of movement outside the window had prompted him to change course and peer out of the half-open curtains.
Down in the garden he’d spotted Ellie, marching round the garden, arms waving. She’d been talking to herself! At six in the morning. In her pyjamas.
Pyjamas.
Another
