Alison Fraser - The Mother And The Millionaire

Esme coloured. She remembered. She was unlikely to forget, having her own memento from that day.

‘I always thought you were different, though, Midge.’ Dark grey eyes studied her once more.

Esme wanted to say, I was different. I am different. But it seemed so much safer to hide behind the class barrier.

‘Don’t call me Midge,’ was all she eventually muttered. ‘I’m not ten any more.’

‘No.’ Jack underlined the word as he noted once again the new Esme. Slim and long-legged but shapely where it counted, at breasts and hips. ‘I can see that.’

His eyes stopped just short of undressing her. One of life’s ironies. Ten years ago she had longed for him to look at her this way. Now it was anathema to her.

‘Papers,’ she almost barked at him, ‘I assume you have some.’

‘Papers?’

‘To prove you have a viewing appointment.’

Jack’s mouth tightened as he wondered who Miss High and Mighty Scott-Hamilton thought she was—or who he was, for that matter.

He reached a hand into the inside pocket of his suit and took out his wallet. From it he withdrew a business card.

It was extended with a thin-lipped smile and Esme didn’t need clairvoyance to know she’d annoyed him. She took the card but, without her reading glasses, the small print danced in front of her. Perhaps it would have with her glasses on, thrown back as she had been to her past.

She screwed up her eyes and the print started to come into focus, but not before he suggested, ‘I’ll read it for you if you like.’

This time his tone was milder, less sarcastic, but it still sliced through her. Midge wasn’t the only nickname bestowed on her by her big sister Arabella when they were children, only she’d confined the use of Dumbo to outside parental range.

‘I’m not that thick, you know!’ she snapped back.

He looked surprised, as if such a thought had never crossed his mind. ‘Have I ever suggested you were, Mi—Esme?’

In fairness, no. He was the one who’d suggested otherwise.

‘I just remember you wearing reading glasses,’ he added.

She cringed a little. Was she forever printed on his mind as a plump, bespectacled teen? At the time she’d longed for him to look her way, to notice. It seemed he had. She just hadn’t measured up.

She stared back down at the card until the bold lettering came into focus:

Jack Doyle

Managing Director

J.D. Net

She didn’t bother scrutinising the telephone number. She was too busy absorbing the rest. He was MD and it wasn’t Jadenet as she’d heard her mother say—but J.D. Net. As in, Jack Doyle Net?

What else had her mother said about their prospective buyer? Some American internet entrepreneur worth mega-bucks. Had her mother been in the dark or was she too proud to admit the truth?

‘Does my mother know J.D. Net is you?’ she asked bluntly.

He shrugged. ‘Possibly not. I didn’t arrange this viewing in person.’

No, he would have lackeys to do that. Go buy my childhood home, he’d probably said. Only technically it wasn’t. The cottage in the grounds where he’d lived was the one thing held back in the sale. She assumed he knew that.

‘You’d better come in,’ she said finally, and left him to follow her into the hall.

It was stark and bare. What furniture her mother hadn’t wanted had been auctioned off. She had tried to auction the house, too, but it hadn’t made its reserve price and now they were struggling to find a buyer.

The chequered marble on the floor was worn but still magnificent. Jack Doyle looked up towards the sweeping staircase and the galleried landing above.

Esme watched him assessing, measuring, perhaps trying to picture it with his own taste of decor and furniture.

Eventually he walked towards the drawing room, his footsteps echoing in the hall, and opened the double doors to glance inside. He seemed to be taking brief mental snapshots, repeating the process for each of the main rooms until he reached what had been the dining room.

There he lingered. The room was bare but Esme wondered if he remembered how it was the night he’d barged in, looking for Arabella. Esme had sat at the window end of the long table, Rosalind Scott-Hamilton at the other. No Arabella. She’d left their mother to act as go-between, a task the older woman had seemed to relish. Esme had burned with humiliation on his behalf.

She was brought back sharply to the present as he finally turned to face her, his expression neutral. ‘I’d like to look round upstairs.’

Esme shrugged her permission. She knew she should be trying to sell the house and its good points but she couldn’t bring herself to do it—not to him, anyway.

Jack started to climb the stairs and she followed automatically. When he paused at the landing window where the stairs forked into two, Esme ventured, ‘Was it always an ambition—to come back and buy this place?’

Of course, it was a silly thing to ask. He was hardly likely to confess such cupidity.

His lips twisted slightly. ‘I see your reading taste hasn’t altered.’

Esme looked blank at this non sequitur. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Jane Eyre?’ He raised a quizzical brow. ‘Or was it Wuthering Heights? The one where the uncouth stable boy returns a rich man to wreak havoc on the family.’

‘Wuthering Heights,’ she responded, although she suspected he knew the answer.

He nodded to the view outside, stone terraces and cultivated lawns leading down to disused tennis courts, the maze and a small lake beyond. ‘Not exactly Heathcliff territory, is it? Don’t think I’ll hear Cathy calling for me out there.’

He was laughing at her. What else?

Esme knew how to wipe the smile from his face and did so, saying, ‘Don’t you mean Arabella?’

‘Arabella?’ His mouth thinned slightly. ‘As the Great Love of my life, you mean?’

She hadn’t expected him to be so upfront about it. Nor had she expected it to still hurt—his preference for her big sister. But it did.

Then he added, ‘Well, sorry to disappoint but I’ve moved on from there. I’ve had at least two or three Great Loves since then,’ he informed her, very much tongue-in-cheek.

Esme answered in kind, ‘How wonderful for you—and them, of course,’ hiding her real feelings behind sarcasm.

What else could she do? Tell him what a pig of a time she’d been having while he was living the life of Reilly? It wouldn’t be true, anyway. She and Harry were happy enough.

Jack was taken aback for a moment—this new Esme really had grown claws—but found himself amused despite the fact.

‘I’ll take that as a vote of confidence,’ he said as she began leading the way to the first-floor gallery.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Esme muttered under her breath but loud enough for him to hear.

Jack chose to ignore the comment but, wanting to set the record straight, continued, ‘Anyway, it’s more a coincidence, us buying this place.’

Us? Esme picked that up and pondered over it. Us as in his business, or us as in significant other?

‘We need a base near London. Sussex is well-placed for the Continent and Highfield is one of three possibilities the location agency came up with,’ he relayed as she showed him the first of the twelve upstairs rooms. ‘Unfortunately our first choice was sold off before we were in a position to move on it and the other place has no permission for business use, so that leaves Highfield.’

He made it sound as if he might settle for the house. Her beloved home. One of the finest Georgian manors in the area.

‘Never mind,’ she rallied, striding in and out of bedrooms like a demented estate agent, ‘it has at least one point in its favour.’