you’ll live here with me. By the sea. In this house which is going to be the most wonderful place on God’s earth.’
Then she set Gabbie firmly down, fixed her with a grin, hauled up her sleeves and turned to eye Luke with a speculative gleam.
‘All it needs is work.’
‘Hey, I’m a futures broker,’ Luke said in an alarmed voice, seeing the thoughts running riot behind the gleam. ‘I’m not a cleaner.’
‘And I’m a social worker, and Gabbie is a five-year-old ward of the state. But, as of now, we’re all of us cleaners. Needs must, Mr Grey. Gabbie, let’s choose you a bedroom first, and we’ll clean that out from stem to stern. Because Gabbie’s bedroom is the most important room in this house.’
‘Hey!’
‘Yes?’ Wendy raised her eyebrows politely at Luke. ‘You don’t agree?’
‘We can hire cleaners.’
‘Not tonight we can’t. We’re the cleaners. If you want us to make this a home, then you need to put some effort into it. Like now!’
‘I’m not dressed for it.’ He stared down at his leather jacket and immaculate trousers and Wendy grinned.
‘And you have lesser clothes at home? Go on, Luke Grey. Surprise me. Tell me you have old, paint-stained overalls in your garage—from all that odd jobbing you do at weekends.’
He had the grace to give a half-hearted smile. ‘Well, maybe not.’
‘So these clothes maybe aren’t your best clothes?’
He thought of his designer suits. ‘Hell, no.’
‘See, it could have been worse,’ she said cheerfully, arranging Grace’s carry-cot carefully in a dust-sheeted armchair and covering it with a shawl. ‘There you go. Your baby’s safe and sleeping, and it’s time for the rest of us to work. Gabbie’s room first.’
‘I thought…’ he was so stunned he could hardly get his voice to work ‘…the kitchen, maybe.’
‘We have children, Luke Grey,’ she said softly. ‘Get your priorities right. We need a fire—outside I think, because it’s my bet the chimney’s blocked and we need hot water. It’ll take a brave person to tackle that fire stove, and maybe I’m not the person to do it. At least not tonight. And if I’m not brave enough, I’m darned sure that you’re not. Bailing out to a hotel! Goodness, what a wimp! Right, Luke. Right, Gabbie. Let’s get this house habitable.’
If anyone had told Luke when he’d woken that morning that instead of flying to New York he’d spend the afternoon and evening on his knees with a scrubbing brush and a nose full of dust and cobwebs, he’d have told them they were dreaming.
But that’s just what was happening. Wendy didn’t let him off the hook for a minute. While Grace snoozed, she set them to work like there was no tomorrow and, with the wimp label ringing in his ears, he gritted his teeth and did it.
The room Gabbie chose was miniscule—a tiny boxroom added on to the end of the house. Its windows looked out over the ocean almost all the way to Hawaii, but that wasn’t why she’d chosen it.
‘You tell me where you’re sleeping,’ she’d demanded of Wendy, and Wendy had nodded and had carefully chosen the room with an adjoining door. To the boxroom…
‘We’ll be able to sleep with our doors open and talk,’ Gabbie had whispered and Luke had wondered not for the first time what was behind this little girl’s terror.
Not that he’d had time for much wondering. ‘We’re not going to bed until we have Gabbie’s room perfect,’ Wendy decreed, and while he scrubbed she was marching outside with linen and blankets and rugs and curtains to hang over the ancient clothes line. She armed Gabbie with a broom, she used a bigger one herself, and together they thumped them free of generations of dust.
They aired them in the sea breeze, they inspected Luke’s handiwork and then Wendy graciously approved the return of her cleaned soft furnishings. She had Gabbie marching in and out with pillows on her head—and giggling. She had Luke scrubbing as if his life depended on it. Even Grace slept as if she’d been ordered to.
This wasn’t a boss-employee kind of relationship, Luke thought grimly as he scrubbed. Or if it was, he knew who was the boss. And it wasn’t him!
Finally, however, Wendy called a halt.
‘Okay. We have one bedroom and one living room sorted. Kind of. Now, it’s dinnertime.’
‘Dinner…’ Luke sat back on his heels—he’d been scrubbing skirting-boards and wiping out a spider’s nest—and regarded his handiwork with a kind of detached pride. Gabbie’s bedroom did look good. They’d unboarded the two unbroken windows—it’d look a whole heap better when they’d had a glazier in—but you could see the sea, and in every other way it looked just as it had twenty years back.
He’d slept in here sometimes, he remembered. His official bedroom had been one of the bigger front ones, but the room adjoining this had been his mother’s and sometimes he’d crept in here to sleep when he’d been ill, or when his mother had been ill and he’d worried, or in the days before he’d had to leave again for boarding school…
He’d chosen this room because he loved it, and he’d lain here at night while he and his mother had talked until he’d slept. This was the best…
Oh, for heaven’s sake! He shook his train of thought away with anger. How long since he’d been sentimental like this?
But the bed was made up again with a patchwork quilt he remembered his mother and grandmother making, and there was a painting on the faded yellow wall that he remembered his grandfather buying…
Grandpa would like Gabbie sleeping under that painting, Luke decided, and then caught Wendy looking at him with a strange expression on her face. It was as if she could see what he was thinking.
She didn’t let on. Instead she teased him with a smile. ‘Resting on your laurels, Mr Grey?’
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t,’ he retorted, stung. ‘I certainly deserve to.’ He held up his hands. ‘Look. Blisters! I have housemaid’s hands, lady. And—’
‘And?’
‘I’m hungry.’
He was, too, he realised. Starving. But there was no food in the house.
‘That’s all fixed.’ Her smile intensified, and he gazed up at her in astonishment. She really was the most extraordinary woman! ‘I’ve taken the liberty—’
‘Another liberty!’ He groaned, struggled to his feet and held up his hands in mock horror. Hell, he had housemaid’s knees, too. ‘Woman, if you take one more liberty—’
‘The taxi cab who brought our luggage is coming back at seven-thirty,’ she told him, unperturbed. She glanced at her watch. ‘That’s in ten minutes. He’s bringing a heap of groceries—I gave him a list—including baby food, nappies—and pizza!’
‘Pizza!’ Not for nothing was Luke a giant on Wall Street. He focused on the important thing here straight away. ‘Pizza’s arriving here in ten minutes?’
‘Wash first, then we eat,’ she told him. ‘I even found soap. It looks handmade and it’s gorgeous. There’s a pile in the bathroom cupboard. And I’ve dusted off some towels. Dinner’s outside by the fire in ten minutes, Mr Grey. Get yourself washed and you’re welcome to join us.’
How could he resist an invitation like that?
Luke headed for the bathroom, which, even though the years had made their ravages here as well, still smelt strangely of his mother and his grandmother. He washed under the cold water—tomorrow he’d have to see what was happening with the hot water service—and then he stood for a long time staring