Theo was looking at her with a shuttered expression. She knew that she would be safe from any saccharine-sweet expressions of sympathy from him. He would be blunt and he would probably reduce her to grinding her teeth in anger, but he wouldn’t cluck his tongue and offer her a cup of tea. And he wouldn’t insult her father’s memory by asking how he could have been so irresponsible as to leave his only child to cope with his debts.
‘Worse than that,’ Sophie confessed.
Theo didn’t say anything. He stood up and silently fetched the bottle of wine so that he could refill her glass.
Did he need any of this? Some stranger bawling out her troubles on his shoulder? Because he could smell a financial mess a mile off and he had smelled it big time in that office. It wasn’t his problem and he didn’t have to listen to anybody’s tale of woe.
But a night spent reading through reports, updating files on his computer, downloading information on three companies he had his eye on, didn’t hold much appeal on a rainy, cold October night behind God’s back.
Theo looked at the downbent head consideringly before he handed her the glass of wine, topped up to confessional level.
He knew that the slightest hint of reluctance on his part to listen and she would be off. And she would make sure not to repeat the mistake. And, indeed, take away the fact that it was dark, rainy, cold and she had probably discovered yet one more IOU to add to the stockpile, and he knew that she would never have succumbed to any need to confide. She wasn’t a confiding kind of girl.
What harm in indulging her need to talk? A village in the middle of nowhereland was not the place where confidantes could be easily located, not unless you wanted every member of the village to know your private business. Or at least so Theo assumed.
‘Care to explain?’ he asked, retreating to his chair and feeling suitably pleased with himself for actually bothering to listen to someone else’s problems. Obeying doctor’s orders, in fact! Doing this small good deed filled him with a bracing sense of virtue. ‘You will find that I am very good at listening.’
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