Swept off Her Feet (13 page)

He made frantic shoving gestures, then paused and looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry about last night, by the way. I didn’t mean to sound so negative about the place. It was a combination of stress about this ball, and work, and Dad’s revolting carrot schnapps.”

“Don’t worry. You couldn’t put me off Kettlesheer if you tried,” I said. “And if I can find some things to sell, won’t that
make you
and
your dad happy? Cash
and
some clear space?”

“That’ll be the first thing we’ll have agreed on since he moved up here,” he said.

I picked up my tea and peered at him over the edge of the mug. “Are you not running the place together? I thought that was how these things worked. Father and son, working side by side at the country-house coalface.”

“Maybe a hundred years ago.” Robert squeezed his tea bag meticulously in his cup. “Dad and I are too different. He’s a teacher, I’m a businessman. We can’t even agree on how to get the accounts sorted out, even though I’ve got a bookkeeping qualification! Basically, he thinks I should still be going back to law school, despite the fact that I’ve run my own companies since I was twenty-two.”

I raised an eyebrow at the sharp edge in his voice. “Well, perhaps that’s why he wants you to take an interest in the castle.”

“Sorry?”

“Because this is something you
have
got in common: your family. It’s not something money can buy, belonging to a house like this.” I realized I’d probably overstepped the mark, so I added quickly, “My dad’s a bit like that—not understanding why I do what I do, I mean. He’s always on at me to get a proper job, with a career ladder. He and Mum aren’t into antiques. Alice and I are officially the oldest things they possess. Even our house is newer than me.”

Robert’s tense forehead uncreased slightly. “My dad can’t get his head around the fact that ParkIt also stores computer data. He wants to know what sorts of boxes it goes in.”

“Have you tried showing him?” I asked. “I once took Dad to Christie’s, thinking some of the excitement might rub off. He got into a row with the auctioneer when he grabbed the phone off a
proxy bidder and told them not to waste space on the Duchess of Gloucester’s old Meissen tea service when they could put the same money into a savings account and get a guaranteed return and not have to dust it.” I sighed. “Sometimes I think there must have been a mix-up at the hospital. Somewhere out there, there’s a rock star with a daughter desperate to be a dental nurse.”

“Can’t be. You look just like Alice,” said Robert, and I felt quite flattered.

“Is that how you know Alice, through Simplify?” I asked. Some things were falling into place. Robert wasn’t really my type, but he was much more Alice’s frequent-flyer ideal. He even wore the sort of expensive but fashionable clothes she was forever buying for poor Fraser and his rugby-playing neck.

“I’m how Alice knows Fraser, actually. I handled Simplify’s storage account for a while. I invited her to a party where she met Fraser, whom I’ve known since we were kids, and the rest is, as they say, history.”

“But you don’t deal with Simplify anymore?” The more I looked at Robert’s cheekbones, the more baffled I was as to why she hadn’t mentioned him when she sent me up here. Unless she didn’t
want
me to meet him. …

“Alas, no.” He opened and closed some cupboards, then turned round with a sardonic look. “Well, I say ‘Alas.’ Alice nearly broke the sales director with her negotiations. Should we be braced for some paint-strippingly honest plain talk from you too? Does it run in the family?”

“No.” I sighed. “I wish something interesting
did
run in our family, but the only thing we all have in common is freakishly long feet.”

“Well, I envy you,” said Robert. “There’s nothing worse than going out for a pint round here, and having total strangers
coming up to you and saying, ‘You must be the McAndrew lad’ just because of the way you look.”

The tension had returned to his face, so I thought it best to change the subject.

“How long have you been here?” Judging from the sparse furnishings, Robert was either very tidy or had everything still packed up in cases somewhere.

“A year, on and off. I’ve been tied up in London with work. My idea was to renovate this place, then rent it out to provide some income, then maybe do other cottages on the estate as holiday rentals.” He paused. “And, of course, it gets me out of the main house.”

“The clutter must have been driving you mad up there,” I said. “You’ve got a very distinctive style. Very . . . tidy. Very chic.”

“Oh, I can’t take credit for this, Catriona did it all.” He waved a vague hand around. “She gutted the place, pulled out the old range, the hooks in the beams, stuck in new floors. But that’s her job, interior design, so it was a weekend project for her.”

“Right.” I hesitated, not wanting to sound nosy but at the same time burning with curiosity. “And . . . she doesn’t live here?”

“No,” said Robert. “She lives with her parents. They’ve got a similar sort of country pile, about twenty miles north. Her dad’s a property developer. They’ve got a helipad where the old tennis court used to be.”

He said it in a way that put a stop to any more Catriona questions.

I looked round the kitchen, trying to picture what it had looked like before the makeover. It was hard to imagine any
scullery maids here now, with the halogen strip lights and chrome fittings. It was smaller than the kitchen in Kettlesheer, but nowhere near as cozy, somehow. “Who lived here before you?”

“My great-grandmother. She was shunted in when Carlisle took over the main house—with his
wife
, of course.”

“Was that Violet?” I asked eagerly. “The blonde in the drawing-room portrait? The American heiress who married the army officer?”

Robert looked slightly unsure. “Er . . . yes?”

“Robert,” I said, pretending to be reproachful. Well, sort of pretending. “Haven’t you
studied
the family tree in the hall?”

To give him his due, he only rolled his eyes, and didn’t bite my head off. “You’ve probably noticed, there’s a lot of McAndrews to get my head round.”

“Poor Violet, though,” I said with sympathy. “Being pushed out of that wonderful house! After she’d lived her whole married life there!”

“Well, that’s the way it goes. Son inherits, mum’s booted out. She seems to have brought most of its contents with her, anyway. I’ve got
three
livable rooms.” He gestured toward the open-plan sitting room, cream-colored and empty apart from two low sofas and some Art. “Kitchen, the sitting room, and a bedroom. The others are packed—and I mean
packed
—with boxes. Carlisle never let anyone in to sort it out after she died, and I’ve never had time. Someone really needs to go through all that stuff.”

“Ooh!” I couldn’t help it. My imagination rippled at the tantalizing prospect of a whole life in boxes. “What sort of stuff?”

Robert saw my eyes gleam and raised a hand in warning. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “Just stuff, okay? Clutter. Photographs. Clothes. Old newspapers. No mysterious cases
containing priceless diamond tiaras—anything valuable stayed up in the big house.”

I would have
fallen
on anything belonging to any member of my family pre-1960. Fallen like a ravenous
beast
.

“But that
is
the really valuable stuff!” I protested. “Especially since you don’t know anything about her. You’re not curious to get to know your great-grandmother, see if she left any letters, any secrets about her own family? You’ve got a whole other side of the family in America, haven’t you?”

“I guess so,” Robert sighed. “I’m not into all that research-your-ancestors stuff. All I really care about is what I do now, not what someone else did a hundred years ago. I find it quite tedious.”

His eyes had gone guarded, his mouth a tight line. But seeing my face fall, he batted the question back to me. “Don’t tell me—you’ve researched your whole family back to Merlin the wizard.”

“I wish,” I said ruefully. “I started, but we peter out mysteriously in Pickering just after the Boer War. Dad reckons there must have been some name-changing shenanigans, refused to let me research any further in case we were career criminals and it got out round the bowls club.”

“But what’s so interesting about other people’s marriages and lives and divorces?” Robert looked at me, genuinely bemused. “It’s like Kettlesheer, full of other people’s stuff. Wouldn’t you rather have your own things?”

“No! I
love
holding little bits of other people’s lives. It’s almost as if they haven’t died if their locket or their tea set’s still being touched and used.” I closed my mouth, surprised by the way that thought had just popped into my head out of nowhere.

“Well, I find it absolutely suffocating,” he admitted. “Can’t
get that through to Dad in the right way—it’s not a criticism, it’s just the way I’ve lived my life, doing my own thing.” Robert paused, as if he were actually considering what I’d said. “But I can see what you’re saying. It’s a nice sentiment.”

I wanted to say something witty, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop looking at his extraordinary brown eyes. They were huge, and they seemed to look right inside my mind.

Luckily, Robert pulled a face and ruined the moment. “Good job for me that there’s money to be made from people’s inability to have a good clear-out.”

At that, my breath rushed out in an embarrassing half-gasp, half-laugh. I hadn’t been aware that I was holding it.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I nodded and pretended to cough.

Robert’s old phone rang in the hall—it sounded weird in the modern kitchen, like history calling to reprimand him for what he’d just said.

“That’ll be the original owner of the phone,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “Calling to check up on me.”

“And that was . . . Violet?” I shivered.

Robert nodded. Then frowned and shook his head. “I mean, no. That’s either someone from work, or Janet Lear-mont.
Again.
Would you excuse me?”

As he left the room, my own phone rang: Max, calling back, I hoped, with a comprehensive list of cocktail party gossip about the McAndrews and their valuables, plus his considered opinion on the photos of the George III console table I’d just e-mailed to him.

I grabbed my pen and notebook, keen to get my brain back into professional gear. My hands, I noticed, were shaking.

“Hello?”

“Good work on the table,” said Max. It was incredible how quickly he could drop the louche act when money was involved. “That’s the bobby. Worth about ten, twelve grand on a good day. I know a lady in Altrincham very keen for a table like that. Was there a second one?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Check for a pair. Bumps up the price.” He paused. “Table? Found it?”

“Which one? There are about a million!” I said. “I don’t know where to start. Give me a clue.”

I heard the click of a lighter and a tense exhalation at the other end. My stomach clenched. Max only smoked when coffee wasn’t getting his heart rate high enough.

“I’m not in the mood for games. I’ve just had that penny-pinching weasel Daniel Finch round.”

My heart sank. Daniel Finch was Max’s accountant. They had the sort of love/hate/fear relationship normally found in Meat Loaf duets.

“What did he want?” I asked warily.

“Blood,” groaned Max. “My liver. My firstborn son. I mean, he’s
welcome
to Jasper. Please. It would get me out of paying for his driving lessons—”

“What did Daniel
want
?” I repeated.

“Let’s just say that we seem to have slipped behind with our rent, as well as some other payments on account, and friend Daniel seems to think that an assistant is one of life’s luxuries I should be casting by the wayside, along with decent wine and soft loo paper.”

I grimaced and looked for something to crush, silently. This was a worrying echo of last year, right down to the buck-passing syntax.

When Max’s business was failing, it was “we,” up to the point where “Daniel” insisted that Max sack me. He’d spared me at the last moment, thanks to Alice getting him into some old dowagers’ bridge club in Chelsea; but last year Max’s turnover had been three times what it was so far this year,
and
I owed him money. Times were hard, and I didn’t doubt Max would cut me loose without much of a backward glance, especially if I couldn’t pull in a big deal from a house apparently full of saleable items.

“Fine, I get it,” I said. “How much would we pay for a herd of escritoires? Because that’s all Duncan’s steered me toward so far.”

Max made a rather fruity comment about the escritoires. “Find this bloody mystery table! It can’t be that hard, even for you. Have you tried the dining room? It could be a dining set—ow!”

“What?” I stopped writing.

“My head,” said Max in his pathetic “hurt bear” voice. “Daniel has induced a migraine. Where’ve you put those super-strength headache tablets your most obliging sister acquired for us?”

“They’re in the tea caddy in the kitchen. Don’t take more than one at a time—they’re illegal in the EU.”

I could hear Robert talking on the phone in the hall. His voice was rising, and I strained my ears to hear what he was saying over the sound of Max’s whining.

“And that’s another thing, when are you planning to come back?” Max demanded. “I’ve got a shop full of your tatty flotsam and jetsam staring me in the face, and I honestly cannot bring myself to sell it. I have a reputation to consider. I do not want to be seen flogging grotesque wedding photos like some antimarriage counselor.”

“I’ll be back by Friday,” I said, hearing the old-fashioned jingle of Robert hanging up the receiver. “If you’re really not feeling well, see a doctor. And don’t forget it’s Valentine’s Day on Saturday.”

“You sound like my ex-wife.”

“I am nothing
like
your ex-wife, Max,” I replied, then turned round just in time to see Robert standing at the door. One eyebrow shot up, and it occurred to me that it might sound a bit wrong, out of context. “Put all the teddies out, throw some confetti over them, and I’ll see you on Friday,” I added, and hung up.