Lee Wilkinson - Running From the Storm

The painful three years she had just lived through had made a great deal of difference. Now, to all intents and purposes, she was a self-possessed, successful businesswoman in her own right.

If the assurance—the air of confidence, the polish—was only a veneer, these days she didn’t allow anyone to get close enough to even scratch the surface, so who was to know?

To outsiders, she was what she appeared to be.

Partly reassured by this restored vision of a calm, secure, well-ordered life, Caris made her way to the bathroom to brush her teeth and shower.

When she was dried and dressed for the day—in a grey, lightweight business suit, discreetly made-up, her long dark hair taken up into a knot, small gold studs in her ears—she went through to the kitchen to make herself some toast and coffee.

It was the Saturday morning of a bank holiday weekend, a busy, working Saturday as far as Caris was concerned, in spite of the weather.

After a cold, wet spring and almost a week of heavy and prolonged rain, everyone had been hoping that, with the prospect of a warm front moving in, the bank holiday would stay dry.

But it was raining yet again, and the latest forecast had been for continuing heavy rain and severe thunderstorms.

In spite of the inclement weather and the continuing recession, Carlton Lees, the estate agency Caris now owned, was doing quite well.

After the death of her aunt, finding it almost impossible to run the agency single-handed, she had taken on a local girl, a cheerful eighteen-year-old named Julie Dawson.

Julie, who did the secretarial work and held the fort while Caris was out with clients, had proved to be an absolute godsend.

Sensible and mature for her years, when sales had started to pick up she had been quite willing to come in early and work late whenever it had proved to be necessary.

Properties in and around the quiet market town of Spitewinter, though moving relatively slowly, were at least moving, and just at present there was no lack of interested clients.

This was due partly to the only other estate agent in town closing down, and partly to the fact that several of the more sought-after properties had recently come on to the market.

The most notable of these was a small manor house dating from the fifteen-hundreds. It had been owned by a famous writer who, at ninety-eight, had recently died and left it to a distant cousin.

The cousin, who lived in Australia, had no desire to keep it. Wanting a speedy sale so he could buy his own ranch, he had put Gracedieu onto the market, causing a buzz of excitement and interest in the property world.

An article about the sale—lavishly accompanied by pictures of the house, estate and the ‘sole agent, Miss Caris Belmont’—had appeared in one of the most prestigious magazines:

Gracedieu, a unique example of a small, sixteenth-century manor house, is an absolute gem. It stands in its own delightful estate which is complete with an old water-mill and a hamlet of picturesque, period cottages,especially built in the late seventeen-hundreds to house the estate workers …

This coverage had caused even more interest and, despite the astronomical asking price and the fact that it had been somewhat neglected by its previous owner, there were several potential buyers waiting to view the place.

The first of these had an appointment for that afternoon, and Caris knew her attention should be focused on getting a quick sale at the asking price.

But, though she tried her hardest to banish all thoughts of Zander, she found it impossible to get him out of her mind.

The Old Vicarage, bequeathed to her by her aunt, along with what had then been a struggling estate agency, all at once seemed too big and too empty, with nothing but regrets and ghosts from the past to keep her company.

Impatient with herself, anxious to get away, she jumped to her feet, grabbed her bag and mac and headed for the door.

Beaded with raindrops, her modest car was waiting on the driveway, and in a moment or two she had left the house behind and, with wipers clicking rhythmically, was heading into town.

Passing the library, she joined the light stream of traffic flowing through Spitewinter’s High Street and across the old humpbacked bridge that spanned the willow-hung river, brown and swollen now because of all the recent rain.

When she reached Carlton Lees, which was at the end of a row of Dickensian shops situated in a wide, cobbled street by the river, she parked in her usual spot beneath the trees and ran to let herself in, her mac around her shoulders.

Julie hadn’t yet arrived, and everywhere was quiet. After attending to the messages and emails, Caris found her client for that morning had been forced to cancel and had requested an appointment for the following week.

That dealt with, she tried to concentrate on the routine work, but tenuous threads of the dream still clung, sticky and inescapable as a spider’s web, and in spite of all her efforts she found her thoughts going back three years.

Back to when her home had been in Upstate New York, and she had joined Belmont and Belmont, her father’s well-respected law firm in Albany. It was there she had first met and fallen in love with Zander …

She had been sitting behind her desk one Friday evening, checking some legal documents before she went home, when her father had looked in to wish her a good vacation. ‘You’ve earned it,’ he’d added.

Austin Belmont, a clever, not to say brilliant lawyer, was a cold, unapproachable, irascible man who rarely handed out praise.

For as long as she could remember she had done her best to please him—with scant success. Now, his spoken approval left her open-mouthed and gasping.

Some half an hour later, she had just filed away the documents she’d been working on, and was about to go home, when the internal phone had rung.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Miss Belmont …’ The firm’s usually unflappable secretary sounded a little flustered. ‘But I have a Mr Devereux here. I wonder if you could possibly see him?’

Devereux … The name rang a bell, though Caris couldn’t immediately think why. ‘Does he have an appointment?’

‘He was supposed to see Mr David, but I’m afraid there’s been a mix-up. We have the wrong date down, and both Mr Austin and Mr David have already left. I was on the point of leaving myself.’

Knowing Kate Bradshaw would need to pick up her daughter from the child minder, Caris said quickly, ‘That’s quite all right, Kate. If you would like to show Mr Devereux through before you go, I’ll do what I can to help him.’

She heard a slight but unmistakable sigh of relief before the receiver was replaced, and guessed that their disgruntled client had been giving the poor woman a hard time.

A moment later there was a tap at the door and he was ushered in.

For some reason Caris had pictured him as being short and portly with grey, thinning hair and jowls, wearing a stuffy suit and tie.

The man who strode in, however, was attractive and self-assured, and carried with him an aura of power and authority.

He was somewhere in the region of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, she judged, blond and broad-shouldered, well over six-feet tall, dressed in smart casuals and looking anything but stuffy.

Beneath the thick, sun-streaked hair his handsome face was lean and tanned, with strong, clear-cut features and long, heavy-lidded eyes beneath curved brows several shades darker than his hair. His mouth, at first glance austere, held a hint of passion that sent shivers running up and down her spine.

Rising to her feet, she held out her hand. ‘I’m Caris Belmont, Mr Devereux.’

She was vexed to find that, instead of being composed and businesslike, her voice sounded very slightly breathless.