‘You aren’t going to grovel?’ Jess enquired, for his apology had been clipped.
‘I never grovel to anyone,’ he replied. ‘However, in this instance I do acknowledge that I was less tolerant than I should’ve been. So?’
She made him wait for a long moment. ‘I forgive you, Lorcan.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Now you can see the funny side?’
The green light shone and he accelerated away from the junction. ‘Don’t push it, Jess,’ he said.
‘Why would Gerard want to wind you up?’ she enquired as they motored along. ‘In my work I’ve shared all kinds of confidences with all kinds of people and I can be trusted,’ she told him. ‘I won’t blab.’
He subjected her to a discerning look, then nodded, accepting her assurance. ‘The guy’d enjoy winding me up because he resents my friendship with his father, plus he feels he should’ve been consulted about the designing of the hotel.’
‘Gerard is an architect, too?’ she said, in surprise.
‘No. He started to study architecture, but thanks to dabbling in drugs he got himself thrown out of college halfway through the course. He claims he would’ve sailed through his finals with flying colours, though whether that’s true is anyone’s guess.’
‘Your guess is no?’
‘My guess is that the guy has difficulty walking and chewing gum at the same time,’ he said succinctly. ‘However, this doesn’t stop him from thinking he should be running the show in Mauritius and not me. When he visited the site a month ago, he made that abundantly clear.’
‘Sir Peter let him run the show earlier,’ Jess observed. ‘Most of the time.’
‘That’s because he’s his only child and his weak spot. Sir Peter’s wife disappeared with some local heart-throb when Gerard was a few months old, so there’s always been just the two of them. I understand that when he was a kid he gave him everything he wanted and by the time it dawned that he could be raising a monster he was halfway there.’
‘Is Gerard still on drugs?’
He shook his head. ‘After the trouble with the college his father halved his allowance, which persuaded him to kick the habit, though now there’re rumours he gets his highs from gambling, plus he’s a heavy drinker. And he runs around with a very flaky crowd. But Sir Peter’s involving him more and more in the business in the hope that he’ll develop a taste for hard graft and take over when he retires.’
‘Gerard doesn’t come over as the hard graft type,’ Jess said.
‘Anything but. You don’t come over as a bodyguard,’ Lorcan remarked, and slid her a look. ‘Shouldn’t they have hair-trigger reflexes?’
‘My reflexes are excellent,’ she protested. ‘All right, when the champagne exploded—’
‘You screwed up.’
‘Well, maybe, but—’
‘There’s no “maybe” about it. You made a total, full-blown, unmitigated mess of things.’
Jess glared. There was a gleam in his blue eyes which said he was deliberately riling her—and enjoying himself.
‘The reason I wasn’t as alert as I should’ve been was that today nothing’s gone right,’ she informed him huffily. ‘So I was distracted, and a little slower off the mark and—’
‘You’re premenstrual?’ Lorcan suggested, when she sought around for another excuse. ‘I believe there’re some excellent remedies for PMT on the market.’
‘I am not premenstrual and that is so sexist! But maybe the reason you lost your cool earlier is because you’re in the throes of the male menopause?’ she said, in a feisty tit-for-tat.
‘Who’s being sexist now? Though I’m only thirty-seven.’
‘Fast approaching forty, which makes you ripe for it. And I was off duty,’ Jess completed, with an air of ‘so there!’.
‘When you’re on duty, you have your wits about you and are the mistress of any situation?’
Her jaw jutted. ‘I do. I am. Though you’ll never experience it.’
‘Alas and alack,’ he drawled, and turned off the main road and into a quiet tree-lined avenue.
Ahead on the left, a pair of wide wrought-iron gates stood open. Swinging the Alfa Romeo through them, he drove onto a cobbled courtyard which was edged by half a dozen cottage-style houses, each with its own flower-filled front garden. To one side stood a row of garages fronted by a parking bay and here he stopped.
‘Daddy!’ a child’s voice shouted as they climbed out of the car, and Jess saw a little girl with long chestnut curls skipping across the courtyard.
She had big blue eyes and dimpled cheeks which were a straight steal from her father, but was small-boned and delicately built. Wearing a white lace party dress and with a white satin bow tied in her hair, she looked like a miniature angel.
Jess had been on the far side of the coupé, but as she came round the child stopped skipping, stood on one leg and studied her. Her gaze was steely and suspicious. Another inherited trait, she thought wryly.
‘Who are you?’ the little girl demanded.
‘This is Miss Pallister,’ Lorcan said.
‘Jess,’ she amended, ‘and you must be Harriet.’
‘S’right,’ the child agreed, pouting.
He bent to swing her up into his arms. ‘Got a kiss for your daddy?’
The pout vanished. ‘Lots and lots,’ she declared, and began to cover his face with energetic kisses.
Watching on, Jess felt a softening around her heart. There was something poignant about a man bringing up a small child on his own and, whilst Lorcan Hunter seemed the last person to inspire her sympathy, she could not help feeling sorry for him. Sorry that he had lost his wife. Sorry he was a single parent with its accompanying strains and stresses—though perhaps, by now, he had a second Mrs Hunter lined up?
As the kisses ended, Lorcan set his daughter down on her feet and indicated one of the houses. They were walking along the garden path when an old lady in a lilac two-piece and with her fly-away white hair caught back into a bun appeared in the doorway.
‘I thought I saw a visitor and what a lovely surprise,’ she said, in a soft Irish accent. She smiled at Jess. ‘I’m Peg Hunter.’
Smiling back, Jess gave her name. Unlike her son and granddaughter, Peg Hunter displayed an easy warmth and instant friendliness. She also confirmed her hunch that a part of Lorcan’s ancestry was derived from the Celtic.
‘Do come in,’ the old lady entreated, leading the way into a cosy, rather cluttered living room where a spare, distinguished-looking old man was sitting on a sofa reading a newspaper. ‘We have a guest, Bob,’ she told him.
‘This is Jess Pallister who used to work with me long ago at Dowlings,’ Lorcan said, introducing her. ‘We bumped into each other just now and I’ve brought her to see Harriet.’
His father greeted her with a smiling hello and everyone sat down.
‘When me and Grandma went shopping I had three ice-creams,’ Harriet announced, leaning against Lorcan’s knees.
As she had idolised her brothers, so Jess recognised that the little girl idolised her father. And as she had not cared for it when her brothers had brought a strange female into the house, so Harriet’s gimlet-eyed looks along the sofa showed that she had