Sammy.’ Ellie frowned and swivelled around to look at the screens on the desk behind her. There were cameras in the front of the shop, in the bakery and in the storeroom, and they fed live footage into the monitors.
Ellie’s brows rose as she spotted him, standing off to the side of a long display of glass-fronted fridges, a rucksack hanging off his very broad shoulders. Week-long stubble covered his jaw and his auburn hair was tousled from finger raking.
Jack Chapman. Okay, she was officially surprised. Any woman who watched any one of the premier news channels would recognise that strong face under the shaggy hair. Ellie wasn’t sure whether he was more famous for his superlative and insightful war reporting or for being the definition of eye candy.
Grubby low-slung jeans and even grubbier boots. A dark untucked T-shirt. He ran a hand through his hair and, seeing a clasp undone on the side pocket of his rucksack, bent down to fix it. Ellie watched the long muscles bunching under his thin shirt, the curve of a very nice butt, the strength of his brown neck.
Oh, yum—oh, stop it now! Get a grip! The important questions were: why was he here, what did he want and what on earth was her father thinking?
Ellie lifted her head as Samantha tapped on the doorframe again and stood there, shuffling on her feet and biting her lip. She recognised that look. ‘What’s up, Sammy?’
Samantha looked at her with big brown eyes. ‘I know that I promised to work for you tomorrow night to help with the petits fours for that fashion show—’
‘But?’
‘But I’ve been offered a ticket to see Linkin Park and they are my favourite band...it’s a free ticket and you know how much I love them.’
Ellie considered giving her a lecture on responsibility and keeping your word, on how promises shouldn’t be broken, but the kid was nineteen and it was Linkin Park. She remembered being that age and the thrill of a kick-ass concert.
And Samantha, battling to put herself through university, couldn’t afford to pay for a ticket herself. She’d remember it for for ever...so what if it meant that Ellie had to work a couple of hours longer? It wasn’t as if she had a life or anything.
‘Okay, I’ll let you off the hook.’ Ellie winced at Samantha’s high-pitched squeal. ‘This time. Now, get out of here.’
Ellie grinned as she heard her whooping down the stairs, but the grin faded when she glanced at the monitor again. Scowling, she reached for her mobile, hastily scrolling through her address book before pushing the green button.
‘Ellie—hello.’ Her father’s deep voice crooned across the miles.
‘Dad, why is Jack Chapman in my bakery?’
Ellie heard her father’s sharp intake of breath. ‘He’s there already? Good. I was worried.’
Of course you were, Ellie silently agreed. For the past ten years, since her eighteenth birthday, she’d listened to her father rumble on and on about Jack Chapman—the son he’d always wanted and never got. ‘He’s the poster-boy for a new generation of war correspondents,’ he’d said. ‘Unbiased, tough. Willing to dive into a story without thinking about his safety, looking for the story behind the story, yet able to push aside emotion to look for the truth...’ Yada, yada, yada...
‘So, again, why is he here?’ Ellie asked.
And, by the way, why do you only call when you want something from me? Oh, wait, you didn’t call. I did! You just sent your boy along, expecting me to accommodate your every whim.
Some things never changed.
‘He was doing an interview with a Somalian warlord who flipped. He was stripped of his cash and credit cards, delivered at gunpoint to a United Nations aid plane leaving for Cape Town and bundled onto it,’ Mitchell Evans said in a clipped voice. ‘I need you to give him a bed.’
Jeez, Dad, do I have a B&B sign tattooed on my forehead?
Ellie, desperate to move beyond her default habit of trying to please her father, tried to say no, but a totally different set of words came out of her mouth. ‘For how long?’
God, she was such a wimp.
‘Well, here’s the thing, sugar-pie...’
Oh, good grief. Her father had a thing. A lifetime with her father had taught her that a thing never worked out in her favour. ‘Jack is helping me write a book on the intimate lives of war reporters—mine included.’
Interesting—but she had no idea what any of this had to do with her. But Mitchell didn’t like being interrupted, so Ellie waited for him to finish.
‘He needs to talk to my family members. I thought he could stay a little while, talk to you about life with me...’
Sorry...life with him? What life with him? During her parents’ on-off marriage their home had been a place for her mum to do his laundry rather than to live. He’d lived his life in all the countries people were trying to get out of: Iraq, Gaza, Bosnia. Home was a place he’d dropped in and out of. Work had always been his passion, his muse, his lifelong love affair.
Resentment nibbled at the wall of her stomach. Depending on what story had been consuming him at the time, Mitchell had missed every single important event of her childhood. Christmas concerts and ballet recitals, swimming galas and father-daughter days. How could he be expected to be involved in his daughter’s life when there were bigger issues in the world to write about, analyse, study?
What he’d never realised was that he was her biggest issue...the creator of her angst, the source of her abandonment issues, the spring that fed the fountain of her self-doubt.
Ellie winced at her melodramatic thoughts. Her childhood with Mitchell had been fraught with drama but it was over. However, in situations like these, old resentments bubbled up and over.
Her father had been yakking on for a while and Ellie refocused on what he was saying.
‘The editors and I want Jack to include his story—he is the brightest of today’s bunch—but getting Jack to talk about himself is like trying to find water in the Gobi Desert. He’s not interested. He’s as much an enigma to me as he was when we first met. So will you talk to him?’ Mitchell asked. ‘About me?’
Oh, good grief. Did she have to? Really?
‘Maybe.’ Which they both knew meant that she would. ‘But, Dad, seriously? You can’t just dump your waifs and strays on me.’ He could—of course he could. He was Mitchell Evans and she was a push-over.
‘Waif and stray? Jack is anything but!’
Ellie rubbed her temple. Could this day throw anything else at her head? The bottom line was that another of Mitchell’s colleagues was on her doorstep and she could either take him in or turn him away. Which she wouldn’t do...because then her father wouldn’t be pleased and he’d sulk, and in twenty years’ time he’d remind her that she’d let him down. Really, it was just easier to give the guy a bed for the night and bask in Mitchell’s approval for twenty seconds. If that.
If only they were normal people, Ellie thought. The last colleague of her
