Читать книгу At His Service: Cinderella Housekeeper: Housekeeper's Happy-Ever-After / His Housekeeper Bride / What's a Housekeeper To Do? - Фиона Харпер - Страница 11

MARK stumbled downstairs some time after ten. He’d intended to get up earlier, but he hadn’t dropped off until dawn and then his sleep had been heavy, full of dreams where he was running from unseen predators. He’d wanted to be fresh and calm this morning, to deal with the aftermath of last night’s events with just a little panache.

He didn’t have to search hard for Ellie, though; he could smell something delicious wafting from the kitchen, and he followed the mouthwatering smell like a zombie.

Well, almost like a zombie. His heart rate was pattering along too fast for him to be considered officially dead. Was he … was he nervous?

He’d spent hours last night in his study, going over and over it all in his head. Not that he’d come to any earth-shattering conclusions. He had a housekeeper. She kissed like a dream. That was about the sum total of it.

All he’d done was kiss her. It was hardly a big deal.

All he’d done … He should listen to himself.

If it had just been a kiss, his heart wouldn’t be flapping around inside his chest like a fish out of water.

He liked Ellie. And not in the let’s-have-dinner-at-the-Ivy kind of way he normally liked women. It felt different. As if this kind of liking had a different shape, was a different kind of entity all together.

Now, that was a scary thought.

Like Helena, Ellie was one of those delicate beings, beautiful in their frailty like an orchid or a butterfly. And that made her even more dangerous. He knew he couldn’t resist getting drawn in by women like that, finding himself wanting to protect them, to care for them until they were whole again. It was a weakness, he knew, but one that he channelled into his clients these days, by being the best manager in the business. At least they paid him for his devotion.

That kind of woman sucked everything out of a man until he had nothing left to give. And then she took what he’d done, all the tender, loving care he’d given, and bestowed it on someone else, someone who didn’t remind her of the pain. Someone who didn’t remind her of who she used to be when she was just a shell, empty and hurting.

He couldn’t do that again. He couldn’t be that for anyone again.

So he would just have to deflect Ellie, dazzle her, and move things back to where they should be—on a purely professional level.

If he could talk a highly strung diva down from demanding three-hundred-pound-a-bottle mineral water that had been blessed by a Tibetan priest in her dressing room, he could surely manage this. And then he would invent a reason to go and stay at his flat in London for a few days. It wasn’t running away; it was self-preservation.

‘Morning,’ he said, overcompensating a little and sounding much too relaxed as he entered the kitchen. Ellie had her back turned to him. She was stirring something in a saucepan on the hob and returned his greeting in a cool, clipped voice, not looking up from the pan.

‘What are you doing?’

Ah, yes. This is the smooth wit and banter you are famous for … This will charm the socks off her and sort everything out.

Ellie didn’t say anything, just stirred harder.

‘It smells great. What is it?’

‘I decided to make a big batch of bolognaise and freeze it in smaller portions for quick suppers,’ she said in a starchy voice. ‘Would you like me to stop and fetch you breakfast?’

That was the last thing he wanted. Far too awkward.

‘It’s okay. I’m more than capable of getting my own coffee.’

He grabbed himself a mug of coffee and sat down at the circular wooden table near the French windows that led to the garden. Ellie was pushing what he now recognised as beef mince round the pan with a wooden spoon. It spat and hissed, the only sound in the rapidly thickening atmosphere.

He cleared his throat. ‘Ellie, listen …’

‘Look, Mark, I know where this is going.’

‘You do?’ He rubbed his nose with the heel of his hand.

‘I do. And let’s not go there.’

Good. They were reading off the same page. Why, then, had his stomach bottomed out like a plummeting lift?

‘Okay,’ he said, not trusting himself with anything more complicated. It seemed as if Ellie was doing fine on her own, anyway. She took a deep breath in readiness for another speech.

‘You’re my boss. You spend your time flitting around the globe and living the high life. And I’m …’ She looked at the ceiling, searching for the right word.

‘I know I’m your boss—of course I know that—and you’re …’

Surprising? Appealing? Unforgettable? Those were the words that filled his head. None of them were the right ones to come out of his mouth, though.

‘You’re …’

Ellie’s gaze wandered down from the heavens and settled on him. ‘I’m your housekeeper.’

‘Right.’ That was correct. But it didn’t feel like the right answer.

She shook her head, her curls bouncing slightly. ‘To be honest, you and me, it’s just—’

‘Complicated?’

She shrugged one shoulder. ‘I was going for tacky or predictable, but your word works too.’

Ouch.

‘I’m your employee, and I think we should keep our relationship on a professional basis,’ she said, turning to face him fully.

‘I agree with you one hundred percent.’

He looked hard at her, trying to work out what she was thinking. Her words were telling him she was fine, but her tone said something entirely different.

‘You seem upset …’

She waved the wooden spoon in dismissal.

‘Upset? I’m not upset!’

‘Good.’

She gave him a blatantly fake smile, and returned her attention to the meat in the pan.

‘Annoyed, then?’

More frantic stirring.

‘Nope. Not at all.’ She started jabbing the wooden spoon at the remaining lumps.

Ellie might be different from a lot of women he knew in a lot of ways, but the whole pretending to be fine when she clearly was not was horribly familiar.

‘Ellie, I know I may have been a bit impulsive last night, but I don’t think we … I did anything wrong.’

‘Oh, you don’t?’ she said through clenched teeth.

‘No. Do you?’

Now he was totally lost. Why did women have this secret agenda that read like code to normal human beings—men, in other words?

The pan spat ferociously as Ellie added a jar of tomatoey gloopy stuff and mixed it in. She turned to face him and took a step away from the counter, still holding the dripping spoon.

‘You’re unbelievable, do you know that? You live in a lovely little Mark bubble where everything is perfect. You haven’t got a clue what real life is like!’

He thought he did a pretty good job of living life, thank you very much, and he didn’t much care for someone he hardly knew judging him for it.

‘I don’t?’

‘No! You don’t. Real people have real feelings, and you can’t just go messing around with them. You live in this rarefied world where you do whatever you want, get whatever you want and everything goes right for you. Not everybody has that luxury. And you waste it, you know? You really do.’

Something in her stare made him hold back the smart retort poised on his lips. Through the film of tears gathering in her eyes he saw determination and an honesty that was surprising—and not a little unnerving.

Something was very wrong, but as usual he was totally mystified as to what was going on inside her head. Why was she blaming him? He hadn’t been the one to start it last night. She had kissed him, remember? And he certainly hadn’t meant to mess around with her feelings, but perhaps he had … without realising it.

Maybe he was clueless. He needed to consider her accusation a little more fully before he gave a real answer.

Ellie made use of the silence to ram her point home. ‘I think it’s best for both of us if we just put that … you know, the …’

A crack in her anger showed as she desperately tried to avoid using the word ‘kiss’. It would have been funny if she hadn’t been giving him the brush-off.

‘Let’s just put what happened last night down to champagne and temporary insanity, okay? I don’t want to lose this job.’

He nodded just once. ‘And I need to start looking for a new housekeeper like I need a hole in the head.’

Finally she breathed out and her shoulders relaxed a little. ‘I’m glad we understand each other,’ she said with a small jut of her chin, and turned her attention back to the bolognaise sauce.

She was right. He knew she was right. It was just …

Aw, forget it. He’d spent the last decade fooling everyone—even himself—that he was ‘living the dream’. He might just as well return to that happy, alpha-wave state and forget that he’d ever yearned for anything more.

If you can, a little voice whispered in his ear. If you can …

Mark disappeared back to London the next day, much to Ellie’s relief. But it didn’t stop him coming back to Larkford again the following weekend. Or the one after that. During the week she could relax, enjoy her surroundings, but the weekends were something else. Stiff. Awkward. And, although she’d never expected anything more than a professional relationship with the man, now they were operating on that level it just seemed, well … weird.

And that was how it continued for the next month or so.

So, there she was on a Saturday afternoon, hiding out in the kitchen, preparing the evening meal, even though she needn’t start for hours yet. But it was good to keep herself busy and out of a certain person’s way. Not that it had been hard today. He might be at home, but he was obviously working; he’d hardly left the study all day. They were keeping to their separate territories as boxers did their corners of the ring.

She was still cross with herself for being too weak to control her brain’s fried electrical signals. They still all short-circuited every time he appeared. It was as if her neurons had rewired themselves with a specialised radar that picked up only him as he breezed around the house, as calm as you like, while her fingernails were bitten so low she’d practically reached her knuckles.

Blip. Blip. Blip.

There it went again. Her core temperature rose a couple of notches. He was on the move; she just knew it. She stopped chopping an onion and listened. After about ten seconds she heard what she’d been waiting for—footsteps in the hall, getting louder.

She kept her eyes on her work as Mark entered the kitchen. The coffee machine sputtered. Liquid sloshed into a cup. The rubber heel of a stool squeaked on the floor. Silence. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck bristled.

Just carry on as if he’s not there.

The knife came down hard on the chopping board—thunk, thunk, thunk—so close she almost trimmed her non-existent nails. She threw the onion pieces into a hot frying pan where they hissed back at her. According to the recipe they should be finely chopped. The asymmetrical lumps looked more like the shapes Chloe had produced as a toddler when left to her own devices with paper and safety scissors.

She sliced the next onion with exaggerated care and flipped the switch for the extractor hood above the hob. It was too still in the kitchen. Too hot. She plucked a papery clove of garlic from a nearby pot.

Only one more left.

That gave her an idea, stunning in its simplicity. She turned to face Mark with what she hoped was a cool stare. He sat looking straight back at her, waiting.

‘I need to go out—to get some things I can’t find at the local shops from the big supermarket. Is there anything you’d like me to get you that’s not on the shopping list?’ She nodded to indicate a long pad hanging on a nail where she always listed store cupboard items as soon as they’d run out. She even managed a smile on the last few words, so delighted was she at the thought of getting out of the house and into fresh, uncomplicated air.

He just lifted his shoulders and let them drop again. ‘Nope. Nothing in particular.’

Most housekeepers would be glad of having a boss with such an easygoing nature, but the contrast with her own jangled emotions just made her want to club him over the head with his large wooden pepper mill. She strode to the other side of the room and snatched her handbag from where it hung on the back of a chair.

It wasn’t more than a minute later that she was sitting in the driver’s seat of her car, turning the key in the ignition.

Nothing.

‘Come on, old girl!’ she crooned, rubbing the dashboard. ‘Don’t let me down now. You are my ticket out of here—at least for the afternoon.’ She tried again, pumping her foot frantically on the pedal. Her old banger coughed, threatening to fire up, then thought better of it. She slapped the steering wheel with the flat of her hands.

‘Traitor.’

She collected her bag and strutted back into the kitchen, chin in the air. Mark was still sitting on the stool, finishing his coffee.

‘Problems?’

‘Car won’t start. I’ll have to go another day, after I’ve had the old heap looked at.’

Mark stood up and pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket. ‘Come on, then.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll take you.’

‘No, it’s okay. Honestly. You’re busy.’

‘No problem,’ he said with that lazy grin of his, the one straight out of a toothpaste ad. ‘I could do with getting away from my desk and letting things settle in my head, anyway.’

Ellie groaned inwardly. Now the afternoon was going to be torture rather than escape. She followed him reluctantly to his car. It was a sleek, gunmetal-grey Aston Martin. She could almost see his chest puff out in pride as he held the passenger door open for her.

Boys and their toys. What was the theory about men with flash cars? Mark didn’t need to take his eyes off the road to know that Ellie had shifted position and was now staring out of the window. He was aware of every sigh, every fidget. And her body language was yelling at him in no uncertain terms—back off!

What if she’d been right all those weeks ago when she’d shouted at him? He’d given the whole thing a lot of thought. Did he live in a ‘Mark bubble’? A self-absorbed little universe where he was the sun and all revolved around him? Did he now waltz through life—well, relationships—without a backward glance?

If he did, it hadn’t always been that way. His thoughts slid inevitably to Helena. That woman had a lot to answer for. He’d have stayed by her side until his dying day. Hadn’t he promised as much, dressed in a morning suit in front of hundreds of witnesses? Stupidly, he’d thought she’d felt the same way, but it turned out that he’d confused loyalty with neediness. She’d stuck around while he’d been useful and then, when he’d needed her to be the strong one for a change, she’d walked away.

And he hadn’t seen it coming. Before the news had broken, he’d been thinking to himself that Helena had finally reached a place where she seemed less troubled, and he’d even been thinking about broaching the subject of having kids.

But then his first management company had gone belly-up because he’d made the same mistake with Nuclear Hamster. He’d really believed in them, had remortgaged his house, emptied his savings accounts to give them a start in the business. Friends had warned him not to take a cut of the net profit in their first contract when most managers took a percentage of the gross. The album had sold well, but on tour they’d run up huge bills—having parties, chartering private jets—and at the end of the day fifteen percent of no profit whatsoever and creditors knocking at the door meant he’d had to declare himself bankrupt. It hadn’t been any comfort at all to know he’d walked into a trap of his own making because he made the mistake of trusting people he’d got close to.

He’d thought Helena’s coolness, her distance, had been because she’d been worried about money. Heck, he’d been terrified himself. He’d known how expensive it was to take a rock band to court. But what else could he have done? He couldn’t have let one bunch of freeloaders ruin his career and reputation, could he?

All at once the love and care she’d demanded from him for the previous four years had been deemed suffocating, and without the nice lifestyle there hadn’t been much incentive to stick around. Helena had declared she needed space, that it was time to stand on her own two feet. You name the cliché and she’d flung it at him.

Of course that hadn’t lasted more than two minutes. She’d soon found herself a rich TV executive to pander to her needs and the whole cycle had started all over again. Oh, she’d sniffed around again when he’d won his court case and rebuilt his company, but he hadn’t even returned her calls. If she couldn’t stand by him through the tough times—through living in a bedsit and eating beans on toast for months, through losing all his so-called friends and business associates—then she didn’t deserve even a minute of his attention. He’d surprised himself at his own hardness.

And it gave him a grim sense of satisfaction to know she’d burned her bridges too soon. Half a ton of debts was all she’d been entitled to in the divorce proceedings. If she’d waited a couple of years before she’d bailed she would have done a lot better for herself.

Light drizzle peppered the windscreen. He watched it build into a pattern of dots. A flick of a switch round the steering wheel created a blank canvas where a new and completely different design was free to form.

He turned off the main road into a narrow country lane and determined to concentrate on the road in front of him. The Aston Martin was heaven to drive. Normally he didn’t have time to sit back and enjoy it, always hurrying from A to B, always focusing on the destination instead of the journey. Ellie’s presence as his passenger made him want to savour the experience.

The trip to the supermarket had been fun, in a way. Spending time with her on neutral territory had been different. She’d relaxed a little. He felt strangely comfortable pushing the trolley along behind her as she’d browsed the aisles, squeezing avocados and reading the backs of packets. Of course he’d had no idea what she was doing half the time, or what she’d make with the assortment of ingredients she’d flung in the trolley, but the fact she knew gave her an air of wisdom.

The raindrops on the windscreen got fatter and rounder. They were going to have to get a move on if they were going to get home before it tipped down. The purr of the engine seduced him into going faster. He was pretty confident in his driving skills and was starting to become familiar with these lanes, anticipating the sweep and curve of the overgrown hedgerows as they got closer to Larkford. He glanced at Ellie. She was staring straight ahead, a grim look on her face.

He swung round a corner into a flat, fairly straight stretch of road and picked up speed. He loved the growl of satisfaction as the engine worked harder. It responded with eagerness to every nudge on the accelerator.

The sky darkened and the wild hedgerows whipped past, clawing at the car as if they were jealous. Inside the low-slung sports car the air was full of static. He could almost feel the crackles arcing from Ellie’s thigh as he changed gear, his knuckles threatening to stroke the warm denim of her jeans.

A pheasant burst from the hedge in a flurry of feathers. He heard Ellie’s sharp intake of breath, and out of the corner of his eye saw her grip the edge of her seat. After he’d braked slightly, he turned his head fully towards her, meaning to reassure her.

‘Mark …’ The trembling plea hardly escaped her lips.

‘It’s okay. We weren’t going to—’

‘Mark … please …!’

The urgency in her voice panicked him. Her face was frozen in stark horror. He looked back down the lane and his stomach lurched as he saw the farm vehicle pulling out of a concealed entrance. He squeezed the brake harder, slowing to a smooth crawl, and allowed the rust-speckled tractor to rumble past them. He pulled away and silently congratulated himself on not even leaving a skid mark on the tarmac.

‘Stop the car.’ Her voice was faint, but determined.

‘But we’re almost home.’

Her voice came in breathy gasps. ‘I said … stop the car … I want to get out.’

Mark’s faced creased into a scowl of disbelief as Ellie scrabbled at the door lever, desperate to free the lock. He pulled deftly into a passing place. Before the car had fully stopped Ellie had popped her seat belt and staggered out of the car, stumbling forward, gulping in damp country air. She was shaking, her whole body quivering.

Mark sat paralysed in the driver’s seat, too stunned to move. Then, coming to his senses, he unbuckled himself and ran after her. It didn’t take long to catch her as she straggled up the lane, half in a dream state.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her firmly to him. Her head lodged just under his chin, and for a split second she moulded against him before pushing him away again.

He should have remembered she was surprisingly strong for a woman so soft and rounded-looking. He managed to grab one of her wrists before she darted off again down the middle of the road.

She turned to face him, fury in her eyes. ‘I asked you to stop the car!’

Her free arm waved around wildly and she pulled and tugged the other, trying to twist it out of his grasp.

Mark stared at her. What on earth was wrong with her? Why such angst over a stupid tractor? Puzzled as he was, he held on to her as gently as he could without letting her run down the lane into oncoming traffic. Ellie swung towards the middle of the road as she attempted to wrench her arm away from him again, all the while pressing a flattened palm to her chest and breathing in shallow gasps.

The nasal blast of a horn pierced the air and Mark grabbed her back out of the path of an approaching car. He stumbled backwards with her until his feet were on the grassy verge, the gnarled twigs of the ancient hedgerow piercing his back.

Ellie’s mouth worked against his chest. He could feel her jaw moving, feel the moist warmth of her breath through his pullover. She might have been trying to shout at him, but nothing remotely resembling a word was included in the few noises tumbling out of her mouth. Her tiny hands balled into fists and she punched him on the chest. Twice.

He might not know what was going on here—clueless, as always—but one thing was certain: whether she knew it or not, Ellie needed him in this moment. She needed someone to be angry with, someone to fall apart on. And, hey, wasn’t he the most likely candidate to light her fuse at the moment, anyway? He might as well take the brunt of whatever this was.

No way was he about to brush this situation off with a joke. It was time to face the challenge he’d walked away from so many times over the last decade. No amount of sequins or cash would defuse the situation. He was just going to have to be ‘real’ too. He hoped to God he still had it in him.

She was still trying to push away from him, but now the tears came. She gulped and cried and sobbed as if she’d never stop. He swallowed rising fear at such intense emotion, whispered words of comfort in her ear and waited for the squall to wear itself out. Eventually the sobbing became shallower and she surrendered to it, burying her face in his jumper. All those crying sessions with Kat now just seemed like practice sessions leading up to this moment—and he was thoroughly glad of the training.

How he wished he could do something to ease her pain. It was so raw. Perhaps if he held her long enough, tight enough, something of him she needed would seep through the damp layers between them in a kind of osmosis. He wanted to make up the missing parts of her. Loan her his uncanny ability to shield himself from everything, to feel nothing he didn’t want to.

His fingers stilled in her curls as he thought what a poor exchange it would be. He had nothing to give her, really. She could teach him so much more. Her determination, her ability to say what she felt whether she wanted to or not. She knew how to live, while he only knew how to dazzle.

The sky turned to lavender-grey as afternoon retreated. Mark let the thump of his heart beat away the minutes as Ellie became motionless against him, pulling in deep breaths. She peeled her face from his chest, the ridge marks of the wool knit embedded on her hot cheek, half blinded by the thick tears clogging her eyelashes. Mark held her face tenderly in his palms and looked deep into her pink-rimmed eyes, desperate to soothe away the tempest he didn’t understand.

Ellie stared back at him.

He could see weariness, despair, the ragged depths of her soul, but also a glimmer of something else. Her eyes were pleading with him, asking him to give her hope.

His voice was soft and low. ‘Tell me.’

It was not a demand, but a request. Ellie’s lips quivered and a tear splashed onto his hand. Never taking his gaze from her, he led her to the passenger door and sat her on the edge of the leather seat, crouching to stay on her level, keeping her hands tight between his.

Ellie let out a shuddering sigh as she closed her eyes. Her top lip tucked under her bottom teeth. He could see she was searching for words. Her pale green eyes flipped open and looked straight into his.

Her voice was low and husky from crying. ‘It was just a panic attack. I get them sometimes … Sorry.’

He wasn’t sure he was buying this. A forgotten voice inside his head—his conscience, maybe?—poked and prodded him and dared him not to let this slide. Whatever she needed to say was important. And it was important she said it now. So he did the only thing he could do. He waited.

For a few minutes no one spoke, no one moved, and then she dipped her head and spoke in a low, hoarse voice. ‘My husband and daughter were killed in a car accident on a wet day like this,’ she said, looking down at their intertwined fingers.

‘I’m so sorry.’

Well, that was probably the most inadequate sentence he’d ever uttered in his life, but it was all he could come up with. Lame or not, it was the truth. He was sorry for her. Sorry for the lives that had been cut off too early. Sorry he hadn’t even known she’d been married. He squeezed her hands tighter.

‘It was almost four years ago now. We were driving home from a day out shopping. I’d bought Chloe a pair of sparkly pink party shoes. She never even got to wear them …’

There was nothing he could say. Nothing he could do but let her talk.

‘The police said it was joyriders. They’d been daring each other to go faster and faster … There was a head-on collision at a sharp bend on a country lane. Nobody could stop in time—the road was too wet.’

How awful. Such a tragedy. He wondered how she’d found out. Had the police come knocking at her door? A word she’d muttered earlier came back to haunt him.

We?

He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. ‘You were in the car too?’

She sniffed and hiccupped at the same time, then looked at him, a deep gnawing ache in her eyes. ‘I was driving.’

Mark pulled her back into his arms. He could feel her salty tears on his own cheek, smell her shampoo as she laid her head on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and drank in her gentle fragrance. Her soft ringlets cushioned his face, a corkscrew curl tickling his nose.

‘Feel,’ she said. At first he didn’t understand, but she pulled his hand away from her back and placed it on the right side of her head. Where there should have been smooth bone beneath skin and hair there was a deep groove in her scalp. Mark stroked the hair there too. Gently. So gently.

‘The police told me there wasn’t anything I could have done,’ she said quietly. ‘But I don’t remember. And it’s like having a huge question mark hanging over my life. I’m never going to know that for sure. What if I could have reacted a split second faster or turned the wheel another way?’

She drifted off into silence again.

His voice left him. He’d never imagined …

And he realised how stupid he’d been now. He should have curbed the adolescent urge to show off around her, racing his car down the winding lanes. All this was his fault.

Ellie sighed and relaxed into him. It felt perfect, as if she’d been carved to fit there. In recent weeks he’d not been able to stop himself fantasising about holding her close like this, kissing her brow, her nose, her lips. Well, not exactly like this. But he knew if he gave in to the fierce pull of his own desire now he would desecrate the moment, and he knew it would never come again.

She stirred, pulling back from him slightly to drag her hands across her face in an effort to mop up the congealed tears.

‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice was so faint it was barely a whisper.

‘No. I’m sorry. For starting all this in the first place …’

‘You couldn’t have known.’ All the fizzing, spitting irritation she’d held in her eyes every time she’d looked at him since the night of the party was gone.

‘Well, I know now. And I am sorry. For anything—everything—I did to upset you. You must know I would never do that on purpose, however much of an idiot I may seem sometimes.’

Her mouth curved imperceptibly and her eyes never left his. He felt a banging in his chest just as hard as when she’d been thumping on it with her fist. He stood up and rested his hand on the door to steady himself.

‘Let’s go home.’