The Mother And The Millionaire

‘Ways and means?’ Esme’s eyes rounded. ‘What exactly do you mean?’

‘Well, we could send a couple of heavies to persuade him to move on.’ Jack read her mind with uncanny accuracy. ‘Or, alternatively, we could offer him a generous sum to help with relocation. Personally, I prefer the latter method. Slightly more civilised,’ he finished, tongue very firmly in cheek.

He’d wrongfooted her again and Esme felt herself regressing further and further to the girl called Midge whom he’d teased so sweetly she’d ended up adoring him.

Only it didn’t feel sweet any more, just patronising, maybe even a little cruel.

‘The cottage isn’t for sale.’ She repeated what she’d first stated.

He was unimpressed. ‘Let’s see what your mother says, assuming I’m interested.’

‘You’re going to talk to my mother?’ She didn’t conceal her surprise.

He raised a brow in return. ‘Is there any reason I shouldn’t?’

Was he kidding? Esme could think of at least one but didn’t want to voice it aloud.

His eyes narrowed, scrutinising her expression. ‘Unless you think it inadvisable?’

‘Well—’ she pulled a face ‘—you didn’t…um…part on the best of terms.’

‘No, we didn’t, did we?’ He actually smiled at the recollection. ‘What was it she said, now?’

Esme remembered, but she wasn’t about to help him out.

Not that she needed to, as he ran on, ‘Ah, yes, having a degree from Oxford didn’t make the cook’s son any more eligible as a suitor to her daughters.’

Esme cringed at the memory, even though almost a decade had passed. She had sat at the long dining table, reduced to shocked silence by her mother’s careless cruelty and watched the colour come and go in Jack’s face, before pride had made him lash out.

She’d never before or since seen her mother so dumb-struck. But no one else had ever called her a dimwitted, mean-spirited, stuck-up cow.

Considering the anger that had made Jack Doyle’s mouth a tight white line and the temper that had flashed in stormy grey eyes, it had been a fairly restrained response. The slamming of doors behind him had conveyed better his temper.

Her mother had sat red-faced at the head of the table while her sister Arabella had appeared from the adjoining room, sniggering with amusement.

It had been more than Esme could bear.

A decade on, she shut her eyes, expelling the scene from her mind before the camera could roll further.

‘Still, there were consolations,’ he added under his breath.

But loud enough for Esme to hear, to open her eyes again and meet his, to see the soft amusement in them.

She held his gaze for just a moment, then looked away, unable to stop her cheeks from flushing. He probably took it for remembered pleasure rather than the deep embarrassment it was.

A night with the wrong sister. Consolation prize of sorts. His behaviour understandable enough, but hers? Too desperate for words.

She buried the memory once more and took refuge in being brusque and businesslike. ‘Talk to my mother if you choose… That’s all the rooms except the attics and kitchens. Do you wish to see those?’

‘Not particularly,’ he responded. ‘I have the attic dimensions and I probably know the kitchen layout better than you do yourself, young Miss Esme.’

He pretended to touch his forelock. It seemed like humour but Esme wasn’t fooled. There was bitterness behind it, too. And why not?

But Esme refused to go on the defensive and muttered in agreement, ‘Probably,’ before walking ahead of him out onto the galleried landing and down the once magnificent staircase, now creaking with age.

She started to walk towards the front door but his voice halted her. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to go through the kitchens to view the outbuildings?’

‘You want to see those?’ Esme frowned darkly. Surely he knew the layout of the rear yard, too.

‘The state of them,’ he confirmed. ‘The stables weren’t in great shape the last time I saw them.’

It could have been an innocent comment.

Perhaps only she remembered exact details of where and how.

But it made her both angry and embarrassed; she turned away before he could observe either emotion.

Her heels clicked on the marble floor as she stalked ahead, a tall, willowy creature with an erect back, and Jack followed, puzzling as to how he’d upset her this time.

He went over what he’d said. Nothing much. Just about the state of the stables the last time he’d seen them.

Ah! He recalled literally the last time. The night he’d woken up to Arabella and her little games and ended up spending part of it with her sister. Not his finest hour, whichever way you looked at it, so he tended not to look at it.

There wasn’t much he could say now, either, so he said nothing.

She led the way outside into the back courtyard, a large square flanked by walls and the stable blocks. It was as he remembered only in a considerably worse state of repair. Grass and weeds were growing between cobblestones and someone had left piles of garden rubbish in one corner.

An old car, seemingly abandoned but actually belonging to Esme, stood rusting in one corner, and the red paint on garage and stable doors was cracked and peeling.

Esme had grown used to the decay of what had used to be kept immaculate while her father was alive, but she saw it afresh through Jack Doyle’s eyes. She waited for him to make some derogatory remark, with every intention of snapping his head off if he did.

But he kept his thoughts to himself as he crossed the yard to the stable block. He went from stall to stall, eyes measuring, assessing, judging how much of the stone structure would have to be rebuilt.

Esme followed along, hovering at a distance, there to answer questions but wearing an expression that discouraged any. She supposed she should be trying to sell the place but she still doubted he was there to buy it.

He reached the tack room and found it locked. ‘Have you the key?’

‘No, it’s back at—’ she broke off abruptly, about to say the cottage, and switched to, ‘Back at the house,’ then added a suitably vague, ‘Somewhere,’ in case he asked her to produce it.

Not that there was anything incriminating inside the tack room. Just some odd pieces of bridle equipment. It was the mention of the cottage she’d been avoiding, although, on reflection, he might not have associated it with the cottage, originally his, now hers and Harry’s.

He shrugged and moved on to the barn adjacent where they’d kept the feed. It was empty apart from some old hay in the loft, so it had been left open.

He went inside. Esme made no attempt to follow. She heard him moving around and waited, teeth gritted once more as she prepared for any possible remark he might pass, any allusion to the interlude they’d shared—impromptu passion fuelled by a bottle of whisky.

Her face flamed for the umpteenth time that afternoon. At twenty-six, she thought she’d grown out of blushing, but it seemed this humiliating habit from younger days had returned with a vengeance.

The Beetroot, that was another of Arabella’s names for her. How she would cringe when Arabella called her that in company. In fact, she had cringed her way through a lot of her childhood and had been more than happy to grow up and grow out of these afflictions.

Now here she was, reverting at the rate of knots just because a ghost from the past had suddenly returned to haunt her.

Well, that was it. No more. She wasn’t going to stand here like a spare part, waiting for Mr Jack Doyle to make some oblique crack that would complete her journey back in time.

She retreated to the house, leaving him to his own devices. She entered the kitchen and, in pressing need of a cooling drink, opened the fridge. It was bare except for a few bottles of white wine, some tonic water and a tray of ice in the freezer compartment.

She’d been hoping for orange juice but the tonic was to be expected. It went with the gin bottle she took out of hiding from behind a food processor. She pursed her lips. Gin and tonic, her mother’s favourite tipple. At one time more than a tipple, and, even now, her mother didn’t seem to go through a day without at least a couple of stiff drinks.

Esme splashed some of the tonic in the bottom of a glass, added some ice but gave the gin a miss, having no inclination to follow her mother’s example.

She picked up the glass, resting its chill against her forehead for a moment to cool herself down, before taking a swig just as Jack Doyle reappeared.

He walked quietly for a big man, coming to a halt in the kitchen doorway; his eyes switched from her face to the gin bottle on the worktop and back again.

Esme could almost hear his thoughts as he jumped to the wrong conclusions.

She decided to brazen it out. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Bit early for me,’ he answered, ‘but don’t let me stop you.’

‘I won’t,’ Esme muttered, rather than go into a denial that probably wouldn’t be believed.

A long-drawn-out pause followed before he asked, ‘How long have you been drinking?’

Esme, who had been studying the tonic in her glass, glanced up in time to catch his expression, a condescending blend of pity and disapproval. She wouldn’t have liked it even if she’d had a drink problem.

She made a show of looking at her watch. ‘About three minutes and twenty-five seconds.’

‘I meant in the longer term.’

‘I know.’

Esme pulled a face. He ignored it, his eyes resting on her with patient forbearance.

‘Well?’

She wondered what he was expecting. A full and frank confession: My name is Esme and I’m an alcoholic.

‘For the record, this is just tonic water.’ The sheer nerve of him made her reckless. ‘However, I had my first real drink at sixteen. Whisky, it was. Can’t quite remember who supplied it.’

Except she remembered only too well who’d supplied the whisky. She wondered if he did, though.

She rather thought he did as the pitying look in his eyes became something else. Guilt? Distaste? Whichever, it served him right for coming over all sanctimonious.

But if she assumed he’d dropped the whole subject, she was mistaken.

‘You were seventeen, as I recall,’ he said instead.

For a moment she thought he was being pedantic, then she realised from his tone that her age was important to him. It had been at the time, too. That’s why she’d lied.

No need to now. No need to tell him, either, only some devil inside her wanted to. Probably something to do with him attempting to take the moral high ground.

‘A couple of weeks over sixteen, actually,’ she corrected.

His eyes met hers, trying to sort out fact and fiction. ‘You said—’

‘Does it matter?’ She saw it did to him, but the whole incident had suddenly lost its embarrassment factor—and romantic haze—for her. ‘You were drunk, I was drunk, we both wanted to stick it to my mother. End of story.’

Esme knew she sounded a little crude, but that was better than blushing like a ninny. Anyway, as a version of events, it was close enough.

Jack gave a brief laugh. Out of relief, he suspected. He’d always felt guilty about the way he’d used Arabella’s little sister but it seemed he’d underestimated her.

‘Nothing like telling it how it is,’ he commented at length. ‘Still, you were always the most honest of the bunch… So no hard feelings?’

He approached her, hand outstretched.

Esme stared at this token of—of friendship, reconciliation, what exactly? She shrank from him in obvious distaste.

Unused to this reaction from women, Jack was more puzzled than anything else. She was treating him like a pariah but nothing he remembered in their past relationship warranted that. Sure, she’d been young—too young perhaps—when they’d made love that time, but she’d been willing. Very, as he recalled now.

He dropped his hand away. ‘Isn’t it rather late to treat me as untouchable?’ he drawled with slight overtones of the American accent he’d picked up from years spent in California.

‘Better late than never,’ Esme retorted rather tritely and, almost hemmed into a corner, tried to brush past him.

He caught her bare arm, detaining her. ‘If it’s an apology you want, then you can have one. I was sorry, I am sorry, for the way I treated you.’

He sounded sincere and Esme was slightly disarmed by the fact. Easiest to reply in kind but she couldn’t. Her stomach was clenching and unclenching at the touch of his hand on her skin. She put it down to revulsion and wondered when love had turned to hate. Some time over the last ten years? Or just today, when reality had caught up with her?

‘I don’t want anything from you,’ she stated scornfully, ‘so if you let my arm go, I’ll show you out.’

Jack’s eyes narrowed on her, analytical in their intent. She’d dismissed his apology and discounted their brief liaison as a moment of drunkenness, yet she was so angry her body was shaking with it.

‘Let me go!’ An order this time as she tried to wrest her arm away.

Jack held her fast. ‘Not yet. Explain first.’

‘Explain?’ she echoed.

‘Ten years ago,’ he recalled, ‘we parted on a more intimate note. OK, possibly assisted by some rather potent whisky. In the interim we have had no communication apart from one unanswered letter yet somehow I’ve become beneath contempt in your eyes… Well, call me slow, but I feel I’ve missed something.’

So had Esme. What unanswered letter?

‘Or is it just the old class thing,’ he continued at her silence, ‘and us stable boys are fine for a quick session in the hayloft but not welcome up at the big house?’

‘That’s ridiculous!’ Esme found the voice to protest at this absurdity. She hadn’t been a snob at sixteen and she wasn’t one now.

‘Is it?’ he challenged.

‘Yes!’ she almost spat back. ‘For a start you were never a stable boy. All right, you mucked out occasionally to earn some pocket money but as often as not you got me to do it. Shovelling horse manure was far too menial for Mr Brainbox Doyle.’

‘OK, maybe I wasn’t in the literal sense,’ he conceded, ‘but I was low enough on the social ladder for you to look down your nose.’

‘I didn’t!’ she could claim with angry conviction. ‘In fact, if anything, you condescended to me. Poor, stupid, plain Midge, let’s pat her on the head once in a while, be kind to her—that’s when we’re not treating her as invisible, of course.’

‘I don’t remember it being like that.’

‘You wouldn’t!’

Jack was surprised to find himself now on the defensive. ‘I certainly never suggested you were plain or stupid.’

‘You didn’t have to,’ she accused, ‘it was bloody obvious. And, anyway, maybe I was plain and stupid!’

‘No, you weren’t.’ Jack gave her a concerned look, as if now doubting her stability. ‘You were pretty and funny and—’

‘Don’t!’ Esme cut short this list of her qualities. ‘You’re patting me on the head again and I don’t need it. I’m quite happy with myself and my life now. I am simply pointing out that any reluctance to be pawed by you at this precise moment in time has no connection with the social class into which we were born.’

‘Pawed?’ Clearly oscillating between amusement and annoyance, he lifted her arm by the wrist. ‘This comes under the category of pawing?’

‘I… Don’t change the subject!’ Esme snapped back.

‘I’m afraid I’ve kind of lost it,’ he admitted, ‘but if this is what you consider pawing, you must have one pretty tame private life. Now if I’d done this—’ an arm curved round her waist to draw her closer ‘—or this,’ the other rose so a hand could briefly cup her cheek before turning to gently trail his knuckles down the long, elegant nape of her neck, ‘Then I think you might be justified.’

He’d moved in on her so suddenly, Esme was too startled to react. By the time she did, the brief embrace was over and he’d actually let her go.

She was left with a heart racing like a train and a rage inside her that she could barely contain.

In fact, she didn’t contain it, didn’t even try. She let her hand come up, open-palmed, and slapped him as hard as she could. Slapped him so hard his head jerked backwards and her palm stung.

Esme watched as his cheek reddened, initial exhilaration giving way to horror. She’d never slapped anyone before, never felt the urge to. It was basic and primitive. Like sex.

Like his reaction. Shock quickly followed by retaliation as he grabbed her arms and, pushing them behind her back, trapped her against the kitchen cupboards. Then a hand was thrust in her hair, pulling her head back, leaving her just time to spit out a swear word before he covered her mouth with his.

It was an assault of lips and teeth that robbed her of breath but not the will to fight. She clutched at his jacket, trying to push him off, feeling fury not fear as she recognised this subjugation for what it was.

Only he was stronger and fury was dangerously akin to passion as the kiss went relentlessly on, demanding a response, forcing long-dormant feelings to the surface. There was no exact point when things changed and the hands digging into his chest began to uncurl and flatten and spread upwards to his shoulders. No dividing line between the hateful bruising of his mouth on hers and the sweet, sensual invasion that followed.

All she knew was that what she started off repudiating, she ended up silently begging for, as she slid her hands round his neck and held his mouth to hers, shifting in his arms until she could feel his heart beating against the softness of her breasts, and she moaned aloud as the hand circling her waist slipped lower, half lifting her body to his, already hard with arousal.

When he finally broke off, it was to catch breath and ask, with his deep silent gaze, for what he might merely have taken.

For a moment Esme hovered between madness and sanity, dizzy with desire yet shaken by the very force of it. So easily she could have let herself be swept away but somehow, through fear of drowning, she clawed her way back to the bank.

She didn’t hit him again or play the outraged virgin or even pretend distaste. Half-ashamed, wholly disturbed, she said simply, ‘I can’t. I just can’t. Please leave me alone.’

Quiet words, but shot with desperation, and more effective than any shouting, it seemed.

‘Very well,’ was all he muttered back as, releasing her completely, he pushed a distracted hand through his hair.

No argument. No pleading. She could have seen it as insulting how quickly he retreated, making for the hallway, his footsteps an echo on the marble, then gone, the front door closed quietly behind him.

But she saw nothing because her eyes were filling with tears at the raw, ragged pain from the scarred-over wound he’d reopened.

CHAPTER TWO

ESME didn’t cry for long. It was an indulgence she could not afford. It was now mid-afternoon and soon she would have to go to pick up Harry.

She washed her face in cold water from the kitchen tap, trying to take the heat from it, then put the tonic and ice tray back in the fridge. She pushed the offending gin bottle back in its corner, half wishing she had taken a drink. At least then she could have blamed the alcohol for her pathetic behaviour.

It wasn’t as though she was entirely unprepared for Jack Doyle’s reappearance in her life. In fact, she’d imagined just such a scenario. Only in her version he would have changed, would not be so good-looking or smart or superior to most other men. She would wonder what she’d ever seen in him and be remote and dignified. Gone would be the young girl’s infatuation with an older boy, because she was no longer a young girl.

Reality, of course, had made a mockery of all her imaginings. He hadn’t changed, still maddeningly cool and collected ninety-nine per cent of the time, and frighteningly passionate that other one. And her? Well, it seemed she was still a walk-over even if the puppy love had festered into resentment.

Or maybe it was as he’d implied: her private life was too tame. Could that be the reason? It had been a while—a long while, it seemed—since her last abortive relationship had made celibacy an attractive option.

Yes, that had to be it. Sex-starved after three years of abstinence, she might have kissed any personable man in the same circumstances.

It didn’t say much for her self-restraint but she rather liked it as an explanation. In fact, she almost managed to convince herself of its truth. She would have but for the image of Charles Bell Fox, the nearest thing she currently had to a boyfriend. She’d known him for ever, liked him always and, encouraged by her mother, had even recognised him as good husband material. Yet she had repelled all his gentle overtures.

But then Charles was a gentleman. He’d never kiss her against her will, never force physical intimacy until some base sexual urges kicked in. Perhaps if he had, they might have progressed further than their current careful friendship.

A perverse thought, she shook her head, and, checking that Jack Doyle and his undoubtedly expensive motor had disappeared from the drive, locked and bolted the front door, before keying in the burglar-alarm code on the box above the cellar steps.

She exited smartly via the kitchen to the courtyard, then beyond to the back service road through the woods, passing her current home.

Intended originally for an unmarried gamekeeper, and built in the late 1890s, it wasn’t a pretty cottage, the stone roughly hewn and with ramshackle outhouses tacked on. But Esme had done her best to improve the outside with a bright terracotta masonry paint and bold blue doors and an array of pots and baskets of flowers to distract from the random ugliness of the house. She doubted Jack Doyle would have recognised it as his old home.

She slipped inside for a moment to collect a denim jacket and change her heels to flats. Transformed instantly from fashionable woman-about-town to young practical mother, she didn’t bother locking her door as she set off along a short cut through the wood to the rear gates of the estate.

She glanced at her watch, and, though on time, she quickened her pace. It was always an anxiety—that one day the bus would arrive early and deposit Harry alone at the side of the road.

The high wrought-iron gates were locked, so she used the door in the wall, its key hidden behind loose stonework. She emerged onto the verge of the main road and only then did she observe the car parked on the far side.

It was a sleek dark green auto, built on racing lines; she didn’t recognise the make or number and, with the inside obscured by tinted glass, it was impossible to see the driver. But she knew all the same. Who else would be sitting opposite the rear gates to Highfield when there was nothing else of interest on this back road?

He had to have spotted her, too, so no point in scuttling back inside. It would smack of panic and fear, and, besides, the bus was due to arrive. She could only stand there and pray he would tire of staring at two rusting locked gates and a six-foot-high stone wall.

Under her breath she muttered the word, ‘Go,’ over and over, as if she could will him to leave, and believed the spell had worked when she heard his engine start up.

She cheered too early, however, as he pulled out onto the road and executed a 180-degree turn to bring his car alongside her.

The driver’s window slid silently downwards and Esme wasn’t certain if she would prefer it to be him or a total stranger lurking for nefarious purposes.

She opted for the total stranger at about the same second as Jack Doyle offered her one of his slightly crooked smiles.

‘Waiting for someone?’ he enquired.

A ‘no’ formed on her lips but thankfully she never got round to uttering it. Because why else would she possibly be here, standing at the roadside?

She limited herself to a nod.

‘Not very reliable, are they,’ he suggested, ‘leaving you out here on your own? Anyone could come along.’