a ritual she and Libby had fallen into of late. But tonight there was an oppressive charge in the air that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the man now taking a seat beside her.
He was so impossibly good-looking, she thought with a twinge of exasperation, so much so that she kept finding herself watching him with slightly detached disbelief instead of preparing herself for the moment when he would pounce. And pounce he most certainly would, she warned herself nervously, because, apart from the anger that had briefly flashed across his features when she had first told him, he had taken the news of Libby’s phone call, and the lack of any mention of her return, with barely a comment. But over dinner his cloak of restrained urbanity had begun slipping, to an extent that he had begun reminding her of her aunt Irene in the manner he had of looking down his decidedly patrician nose at her as he delivered his carefully chosen barbs.
‘Let’s see if I have this right,’ he murmured ominously, as they drank their coffee. ‘You’re my gardener,’ he stated, giving slight, but none the less calculated emphasis to the possessive pronoun.
Ginny felt her heart plummet as she wondered if he was aware that he was paying the top rate for both a gardener and a housekeeper.
‘And you also keep house for me,’ he continued.
Ginny remained silent, battling against rising to the deliberate edge of offensiveness in his tone as she waited for her worst fears to be confirmed.
‘But then, I’ve been paying you pretty well for both these jobs,’ he murmured silkily. ‘I don’t have any beef about the housekeeping—your excellent cooking’s worth every cent of that. It’s the keeping up the grounds——’
‘Keeping up the grounds?’ exploded Ginny as she lost the battle with herself. ‘Either your memory doesn’t serve you in the least well, Mr Grant, or you know nothing about gardens. This place was a wilderness when I took it on! Nobody had touched the place since your last gardener retired.’
‘He’d only been gone a couple of months when you started,’ he retorted. ‘Hardly enough time for the place to deteriorate into the wilderness you’re claiming it was.’
Ginny took a gulp of her drink, simply to prevent herself retaliating. If what he said was true, the garden had been neglected for several months before her predecessor had retired, not that she saw anything to be gained by pointing that out to him.
‘And, even though I am technically your employer, you don’t have to call me Mr Grant—Michael will do.’
‘And you may call me Ginny,’ she retorted, incensed by his patronising tone.
‘I hadn’t intended calling you anything else,’ he informed her with a hint of a chuckle. ‘Tell me, Ginny, what brought you to France?’
‘Several things, really,’ she parried, unsettled by the sheer unexpectedness of the question and the mishmash of unpleasant memories it evoked. ‘I felt like a change of scenery.’ And that, she supposed grimly, was one way of putting it; except that with a married boss who couldn’t keep his hands to himself and an aunt who had literally shown her the door once her problems at work had become the subject of speculative gossip, a change of scenery had become a vital necessity. Libby’s coinciding cry for help had been one she had responded to by cashing in her savings and taking off for France without a moment’s hesitation.
‘What—you decided you’d like to try gardening here instead of back home in England?’
‘No, I…Yes.’ She broke off, furious with herself for having become so visibly flustered. ‘I wasn’t doing gardening in England…but it’s what I’ve always wanted to do.’ It would have been safer to lie, she thought exasperatedly, and it would have given her a bit of practice for all the lies she would have to start coming up with in the very near future.
‘So, you decided you’d cut your teeth on my property, did you?’ he enquired with chilling softness.
‘Of course I didn’t,’ she exclaimed, reliving all the misgivings she had felt when Libby had airily informed her that, apart from billing the villa accounts for the services of a housekeeper to augment their income, they would also claim for a gardener. ‘I did an introductory gardening and landscaping course——’
‘Introductory?’
‘I had hoped to go on to do the full course, but wasn’t able to.’ And probably never would, since her savings towards that course had been what she and Libby had lived on at first. ‘But I haven’t had any complaints about my work yet—unless, that is, you intend making one now.’
‘If I find anything to complain about, you’ll hear me loud and clear,’ he replied, draining his cup and rising.
Ginny watched in mounting disbelief as his tall figure strode to the terrace steps—surely he didn’t intend checking out her work here and now—in the dark!
‘I’d almost forgotten what made me fall in love with this place,’ he announced as he gazed around him.
Ginny gave a start of surprise, remembering how she too had fallen in love at her first sight of the villa, and her inability to accept the idea of such a place not being lived in to the hilt, but instead being merely one of several rarely used retreats owned by a family to whom money was plainly not a consideration.
‘One of the reasons I decided to come here was to see for myself what sort of shape the place is in and what, if anything, needs doing to it,’ he said as he returned to the table.
‘But it’s perfect,’ protested Ginny before she could bite back the words.
‘Even perfection starts fraying at the edges if it’s not properly maintained,’ he mocked, pouring them both more coffee—the first time he had lifted so much as a finger since his arrival, Ginny noted caustically. ‘And those agents of mine don’t exactly break their backs earning their fees.’ He sat down. ‘So, tell me about yourself, Ginny,’ he said conversationally. ‘I’m interested in your connection with my niece.’
‘We went to school together in England,’ she replied, striving to remain calm in the face of his aptitude for making even the most harmless of statements sound faintly derogatory.
‘Oh, the English stepmother—she didn’t last any longer than the rest of them,’ he muttered almost to himself. ‘Libby could only have been a kid then.’
‘We were both twelve.’
‘That must be one hell of a friendship the two of you struck up, to have survived that long,’ he observed sceptically. ‘She couldn’t have been in England more than five minutes.’
‘We were at school together for almost a year,’ corrected Ginny, trying in vain to mask her growing resentment. ‘And not only did we write to one another, we also managed to meet once or twice over the years. Of all her ex-stepmothers, Jane’s the one Libby is closest to and still sees whenever she can.’
‘From what I’ve heard, it was always handy for Libby to have England to escape to from whatever mess she got herself into in the States,’ he stated, his heavy-lidded eyes coolly watchful. ‘Though it seems she’s now traded in England for France…Or will she end up running back to England from here this time, instead of from the States?’
‘I suppose it’s never occurred to you that it might be her family she’s always running from?’ exploded Ginny, and instantly regretted her outburst. ‘Look, I’m sorry—I had no right to say that,’ she apologised, certain she had, but even more certain that if she didn’t get her temper in hand she would end up giving something away.
‘No, you hadn’t,’ he agreed, his eyes blazing. ‘So Libby’s still running, is she? If that’s the case, I think it’s time we cut the pussy-footing and got on to what it is you and she are up to here!’
‘Up to?’ croaked Ginny. ‘We’re not up to anything! And you misunderstood me—I didn’t mean to imply Libby was actually running from you now!’