Annie West - Rags To Riches - His Wish, Her Command - The Last Summer of Being Single / An Enticing Debt to Pay / A Navy SEAL's Surprise Baby

Her fingers clenched around the paper. What choice did she have? They knew that she did not have the money to give Dan the things they could. Playing the piano at Sandrine’s at the weekends was not going to be enough to even buy a new computer. She was lucky to have Sandrine’s old machine so that she could keep in touch with her own parents and they were in no position to help her financially.

In their eyes she had made a total mess of her life. A wandering musician without a stable home. She had no investments or resources to provide her son with the type of education that his father had enjoyed. She had never even been to university!

The beam of sunshine focused through the skylight on her hand and she watched tiny motes of dust float in and out of the narrow cone of intense light. Dust particles going where the breeze took them. Without direction.

Then the sound of a dog barking echoed up from the garden and the old house creaked around her. Solid and reassuring.

‘Stupid girl,’ she said out loud, wiped her eyes with a not-so-clean finger and sniffed loudly. She was not without direction or friends. ‘Let’s get this show on the road. Things to do and people to see.’

‘Do you have a saying for everything, Mrs Martinez?’ a man’s voice asked, and Ella practically jumped off the trunk in shock.

Seb watched Ella stuff a letter into her trouser pocket. He had seen enough for him to know that something had upset her very badly.

‘I’m sorry if I startled you,’ he added, then glanced around the attic room and blinked several times as his eyes became more accustomed to the dim light in that part of the attic. ‘Although I am surprised that you can see anything at all.’

He turned sideways and stumbled over a box of tools as he reached for the light switch but Ella was already on her feet and faster, and as their hands connected his mind and senses were filled with the image of the girl with her hair down he had seen in the garden that morning. The girl whose touch made the hairs on the back of his arm prickle to attention.

A hard fluorescent strip light crackled into life above his head creating hard shadows and dark corners. Ella instantly snatched her hand away as though she had been stung, but her pale blue eyes were still locked onto his. In this light the planes of her face were in hard contrast to her plump, soft-looking skin.

He was the first one to break eye contact and glance around the long narrow room where he had spent many happy hours exploring as a child.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Well, this is going to be rather more of a challenge than I expected. It never used to be this messy.’

Ella found her voice. ‘The roof was repaired last autumn. And then the designer needed somewhere to store all the bits and pieces he moved from downstairs. There are several families of mice living in the barn, and…’

She left the end of that sentence unsaid with a simple tilt of her head and Seb picked up on it. ‘Everything ended up in here instead. Got it.’

Ella pointed to a large wooden crate with the name of a well-known champagne house on the side. ‘That was the box where I found your mum’s photo. There are a couple of photo albums in there mixed in with the other paperwork. It’s too heavy for me to lug down those narrow stairs. I know there are more, but they’ve been pushed right to the back by the furniture.’

‘Here. Let me pull them forward.’

‘Are you sure?’ Ella choked, flapping away the dust she was stirring up, which only seemed to make it worse. ‘It’s going to make a horrible mess on your clothes.’

Seb glanced down at his outfit and frowned. A designer-suit-and-bespoke-shoes combo was not perhaps the best choice for scrambling around in dirty attics, but seeing as he had not packed any casual clothes he didn’t have a lot of options.

And he was on a mission.

A few items of damaged clothing were a small price to pay to find some clues to his personal history.

‘I’ll live,’ he replied, trying to squeeze his way between unrecognisable lumps of old chairs and bookcases to reach the stack of boxes in the dark corner of the attic.

‘Oh, no,’ Ella exclaimed, reaching into the first box she had pulled forward. ‘The frame is cracked. What a shame. I’ve often wondered why you didn’t take these photos with you. I mean, if you didn’t want them any more, you could have given them away to the rest of your family instead of leaving them here for the mice.’

Seb took the photograph from her and pressed his fingers onto the glass for a moment.

‘When we left for Australia,’ he replied in a low voice, ‘I was allowed one suitcase and whatever I could carry in my rucksack. That was it.’

He tried to keep the hard reality of his dad’s decision out of his tone but failed.

‘I was twelve and leaving the only home I had ever known.’ He looked up from the photograph and shrugged like the Frenchman that he always would be in his heart. ‘I was far more worried about leaving my dogs and my pals behind to even think about the personal stuff, but…that was a long time ago.’

He carefully lowered the broken picture onto the pile of paperwork and photos and old birthday cards and goodness knew what else inside the wooden wine box.

‘I’m actually surprised that this much has survived all of the tenants who lived here over the years. They mustn’t have been very curious. Or there was nothing worth selling.’

When Ella didn’t answer immediately he turned back to find her looking at him with a confused expression on her face.

‘Actually there was only ever one tenant. A retired couple from Marseilles who only ever used the house during August. The house had been empty for over a year when Nicole and I moved in. Didn’t you know? ‘

He stared at her hard, the words resonating inside his head before words burst out of his mouth from a place of anger and resentment. ‘That can’t be right. There was a family living here right until the day the divorce papers were signed.’

The hard words echoed around the small space, and the temperature seemed to drop several degrees.

Ella licked her lips, squeezed them hard together, crossed her arms and stretched up almost onto tiptoe so that she could stare Seb straight in the eye.

‘Mr Castellano,’ she said in a calm low voice, and her chin lifted another couple of inches. ‘I may only be the housekeeper here, but I do not appreciate being called a liar.’ She paused, took a breath then carried on, her shoulders lifting and falling as she spoke. ‘So. Make your mind up. Do you want me to help you? Or not? Because if you do, you’re going to have to change your tone. And fast. Have I made myself perfectly clear?’

Her lips formed a single line, her arms wrapped tighter across her chest and she just stood there, covered in dust and grubby marks, holding her ground and waiting for him to say something.

Seb responded by sitting down on the next box. Not caring about the damage to the fine fabric of his trousers or the indentations being poked into his skin.

It had been a very long time since anyone had dared to confront him face to face and ask—no, demand—that he change his tone.

His tone! His tone was just fine. It was his temper that was the problem.

She did not know what he had gone through. How could she? How could anyone understand when the only person who knew the truth was his dad? Luc Castellano was the person he should be challenging.

As for Ella Martinez? Ella Martinez was simply magnificent.

He had misjudged her. She had clearly been upset about a letter he had seen when he came into the attic, and perhaps that had made her oversensitive. The laid-back serene woman he had seen singing that morning had her own issues to deal with and he had no right to make them any worse by shifting his hot temper onto her shoulders.