‘Well, I’d really love to chat—’ she curled her hand round the doorknob ‘—but I’m expecting someone.’
‘Yes, I know.’ The amused look was back on his face.
It was a moment or so before Esme caught on. ‘You’re it—the man from Jadenet?’
He gave a nod. ‘I’m it—or he, to be more precise.’
Jack watched her changing expression, but found he couldn’t interpret it. Initially he’d been pleased when Esme had been the one to appear at the door. He had always liked her. The best of the Scott-Hamiltons. Now she was so much prettier—beautiful, even—but had also grown disappointingly similar to her mother.
‘Phone the estate agent,’ he suggested, ‘check my credentials if you like.’
He proffered her his mobile phone.
Esme ignored it, her uncertain look turning into a positive scowl. She believed him but his whole attitude riled her.
‘You have no idea, have you?’ she accused.
Doyle frowned. He imagined he’d been trying to help her. ‘Obviously not.’
‘Do you know how many years there’s been Scott-Hamiltons in this house?’ she demanded with atypical arrogance.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he drawled back, ‘since the Magna Carta?’
Having never been a great history student, Esme hadn’t the first idea when that was, but it was scarcely relevant, as he was laughing at her.
He always had, only in the past there had been a degree of fondness in it.
‘What’s the point?’ she dismissed at length. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Being of simple peasant stock, you mean?’ he concluded, an edge behind the banter now.
Esme was left wishing she hadn’t started this. She was coming over as the snob of the century, and that wasn’t really her at all. Jack Doyle had just thrown her off balance.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You didn’t have to. I know what your family thought of me. I heard it from the horse’s mouth, remember?’
Esme coloured. She remembered. She was unlikely to forget, having her own memento from that day.
‘I always thought you were different, though, Midge.’ Dark grey eyes studied her once more.
Esme wanted to say, I was different. I am different. But it seemed so much safer to hide behind the class barrier.
‘Don’t call me Midge,’ was all she eventually muttered. ‘I’m not ten any more.’
‘No.’ Jack underlined the word as he noted once again the new Esme. Slim and long-legged but shapely where it counted, at breasts and hips. ‘I can see that.’
His eyes stopped just short of undressing her. One of life’s ironies. Ten years ago she had longed for him to look at her this way. Now it was anathema to her.
‘Papers,’ she almost barked at him, ‘I assume you have some.’
‘Papers?’
‘To prove you have a viewing appointment.’
Jack’s mouth tightened as he wondered who Miss High and Mighty Scott-Hamilton thought she was—or who he was, for that matter.
He reached a hand into the inside pocket of his suit and took out his wallet. From it he withdrew a business card.
It was extended with a thin-lipped smile and Esme didn’t need clairvoyance to know she’d annoyed him. She took the card but, without her reading glasses, the small print danced in front of her. Perhaps it would have with her glasses on, thrown back as she had been to her past.
She screwed up her eyes and the print started to come into focus, but not before he suggested, ‘I’ll read it for you if you like.’
This time his tone was milder, less sarcastic, but it still sliced through her. Midge wasn’t the only nickname bestowed on her by her big sister Arabella when they were children, only she’d confined the use of Dumbo to outside parental range.
‘I’m not that thick, you know!’ she snapped back.
He looked surprised, as if such a thought had never crossed his mind. ‘Have I ever suggested you were, Mi—Esme?’
In fairness, no. He was the one who’d suggested otherwise.
‘I just remember you wearing reading glasses,’ he added.
She cringed a little. Was she forever printed on his mind as a plump, bespectacled teen? At the time she’d longed for him to look her way, to notice. It seemed he had. She just hadn’t measured up.
She stared back down at the card until the bold lettering came into focus:
Jack Doyle
Managing Director
J.D. Net
She didn’t bother scrutinising the telephone number. She was too busy absorbing the rest. He was MD and it wasn’t Jadenet as she’d heard her mother say—but J.D. Net. As in, Jack Doyle Net?
What else had her mother said about their prospective buyer? Some American internet entrepreneur worth mega-bucks. Had her mother been in the dark or was she too proud to admit the truth?
‘Does my mother know J.D. Net is you?’ she asked bluntly.
He shrugged. ‘Possibly not. I didn’t arrange this viewing in person.’
No, he would have lackeys to do that. Go buy my childhood home, he’d probably said. Only technically it wasn’t. The cottage in the grounds where he’d lived was the one thing held back in the sale. She assumed he knew that.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said finally, and left him to follow her into the hall.
It was stark and bare. What furniture her mother hadn’t wanted had been auctioned off. She had tried to auction the house, too, but it hadn’t made its reserve price and now they were struggling to find a buyer.
The chequered marble on the floor was worn but still magnificent. Jack Doyle looked up towards the sweeping staircase and the galleried landing above.
Esme watched him assessing, measuring, perhaps trying to picture it with his own taste of decor and furniture.
Eventually he walked towards the drawing room, his footsteps echoing in the hall, and opened the double doors to glance inside. He seemed to be taking brief mental snapshots, repeating the process for each of the main rooms until he reached what had been the dining room.
There he lingered. The room was bare but Esme wondered if he remembered how it was the night he’d barged in, looking for Arabella. Esme had sat at the window end of the long table, Rosalind Scott-Hamilton at the other. No Arabella. She’d left their mother to act as go-between, a task the older woman had seemed to relish. Esme had burned with humiliation on his behalf.
She was brought back sharply to the present as he finally turned to face her, his expression neutral. ‘I’d like to look round upstairs.’
Esme shrugged her permission. She knew she should be trying to sell the house and its good points but she couldn’t bring herself to do it—not to him, anyway.
Jack started to climb the stairs and she followed automatically. When he paused at the landing window where the stairs forked into two, Esme ventured, ‘Was it always an ambition—to come back and buy this place?’
Of course, it was a silly thing to ask. He was hardly likely to confess such cupidity.
His lips twisted slightly. ‘I see your reading taste hasn’t altered.’