by Penny Jordan
She was bitterly, furiously angry, and shockingly mingled with that anger was something almost close to pain…as though something inside her hurt at finding this incontrovertible evidence that Oliver Tennant was every bit as bad and unscrupulous in business as she had feared he would be. Pain…what a ridiculous idea. She ought to be feeling triumph, not pain.
‘I could argue the point that sales people are exactly what we are,’ Oliver told her, so obviously unperturbed that she was silenced. ‘However, in this instance I’m afraid you have rather jumped to conclusions. I haven’t come out here to persuade Mrs Williams to give me her business. I simply want to discuss with her the possibility of my buying her house. I need somewhere to live…something short-term and convenient while I look around for a more suitable property. If all goes well down here I may sell out the London end of the business and work exclusively from here.’
If all goes well… If he managed to steal virtually all her business, he meant, Charlotte acknowledged, hating him for putting her in the wrong, and hating herself even more for making such a fool of herself…
‘I presume that that little bit of play-acting about the house not being for sale was directed at me as a fellow agent rather than as a prospective purchaser and, that being the case, I have no objection to going through you. If I could make an appointment to view…’
He was laughing at her, Charlotte was sure of it. Well, she knew how to stop him doing so.
‘Those might be your business methods, Mr Tennant,’ she told him crisply. ‘They aren’t mine. The reason Sophy told you the house wasn’t for sale was quite simply because it isn’t.’
‘But I’d heard…’ He was frowning now, looking more irritated than remorseful.
‘She was considering selling it…but…circumstances have changed, and she’s decided not to.’
‘So it looks as if we’ve both lost out,’ Oliver told her. ‘Pity…I can’t stay at the Bull forever, and I’m not having any luck at all in finding rented accommodation.’
Charlotte bared her teeth at him and said saccharinely, ‘Why don’t you ask Vanessa to help you? She has at least three guest bedrooms empty…I’m sure she’d be delighted to offer you one.’
The look he gave her wasn’t amused.
‘I’m sure she would,’ he agreed coolly.
He was blocking her path to her car, inadvertently she was sure, but suddenly, looking up at him—and she had quite a long way to look up, Charlotte realised warily—for the first time in her life she suddenly felt very, very vulnerable and fragile.
How ridiculous. He wasn’t threatening her in any way. Any fool could see that he was a totally non-violent man, for all the powerful strength of his body. Whatever else she might consider him capable of doing, she couldn’t deny that there was something about him that suggested he was the kind of man who would always be protective of those weaker than himself. There was almost a gentleness about him…
As she stared up at him, confused by her own feelings, by her awareness that in other circumstances this was a man she would very much have liked to have as a friend…or a lover…she felt her skin grow hot and, without thinking, heard herself saying breathlessly, ‘I’m sorry if I misjudged your…your motives. I expect I did rather over-react, but things haven’t been easy for Sophy. She was widowed some months ago. She desperately wants to keep her house and her independence. She was considering selling, but it wasn’t something she wanted to do.’
She saw that he was frowning.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Is there no one who can help her…family?’
‘She has parents, but—’ Realising suddenly just how far she had dropped her guard, she said quickly, ‘This is what happens, you see, when you get a property boom. Those at the lowest end of the market lose out. If Sophy sold her house, what chance would she have of ever rebuying, once the influx of London yuppies had pushed up local prices? Those with properties think only of the profit they’re going to make. They don’t think of the people who haven’t yet got their feet on the first rung of the ladder…young couples, often with very low wages.’
‘That isn’t the fault of the agents,’ Oliver told her quietly.
‘No,’ Charlotte agreed. ‘It’s the effect of market forces. We all know that, but you can’t deny that there are unscrupulous, greedy agents.’
‘Just as there are unscrupulous and greedy buyers and sellers,’ Oliver agreed evenly, and then almost abruptly he added, ‘Look, I know you don’t like the fact that I’m opening up here, but I honestly believe that there is enough business for both of us. It isn’t my intention to force your agency to close.’
His assumption that should it be his intention he could do so infuriated Charlotte, her anger overwhelming her earlier softening awareness of the man behind the image she had mentally created for him.
Not trusting herself to speak, she wheeled round sharply on her heel and unlocked her car door.
Mercifully this time it started at the first turn of the key, although Charlotte knew that her hands were shaking when she drove carefully away, her body intensely aware of the man standing on the pavement watching her, although she didn’t betray by a single sideways glance her knowledge that he was there.
Why was this happening? she wondered miserably as she drove back to her office. She didn’t want to feel like this about any man; she had got to an age where she had believed that she never would. She liked her placid, safe life; the fear of being hurt, of being found wanting, of being rejected had successfully protected her from the dangers of any potential involvement.
So why on earth now, when she should be safely past all this kind of nonsense, was she suffering these pangs of emotion and sensation, and for Oliver Tennant of all men?
It was a question she couldn’t answer.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘WELL, I think this shade would be perfect, especially with the wood you’ve chosen for the units.’
‘Mm. I like this brighter yellow,’ Sheila argued.
Sophy had started work with them on Monday morning, and now the three of them were sitting round the desk in the upper room studying paint-shade charts.
As good as her word, Sheila had produced the names and addresses of three painters and a couple of joiners. Choosing the wood for the kitchen units had been relatively easy. Charlotte had fallen immediately and heavily in love with the satin sheen of a pretty cherrywood, but choosing the paint for the walls was proving to be more of a problem.
Now, rather hesitantly, she produced a magazine and said quietly, ‘I was wondering about this wallpaper…but I’m not sure.’
When she showed them the photograph the other two women instantly approved.
‘It’s perfect,’ Sheila pronounced, ‘and fun too. What is it?’
‘It’s Kaffe Fassett-style,’ Charlotte told her. ‘I’ve read about his work, and I saw this article mentioning the wallpapers he’s designed. I thought this yellow one, with the pottery motifs.’
‘It will be perfect,’ Sophy agreed. ‘And with some of those lovely old terracotta floor tiles. You’ve got to have an Aga, of course.’
Charlotte laughed. ‘Well, as a matter of fact I am rather tempted. Vanessa has one, but she doesn’t use it for cooking.’
Sheila clucked disapprovingly. ‘What a waste. My mother had one years ago. She swore by it.’
‘Well, most of the local farms still have them.’
‘Have a dark green one,’ Sophy suggested temptingly. ‘It will look wonderful with your cherrywood.’
She had never realised that redecorating could be such fun, Charlotte admitted as she firm-mindedly tidied away her brochures and turned her attention to the post on her desk.
‘Fun, yes, but expensive too,’ Sheila said shrewdly, and then added, ‘Has all this work you’re having done mean you’ve decided to keep the house rather than sell it?’
Charlotte grimaced. ‘I’d like to keep it. I think in the past it’s been a case of the shoemaker’s chil
d going unshod as far as home has been concerned, and I hadn’t honestly realised what potential the place had.’ She wrinkled her nose and admitted, ‘I think while Dad was alive I was too busy looking after him and running the business to notice our surroundings very much. Besides, he’d have had forty fits if I’d ever suggested changing anything. I thought when he died that the best thing I could do was to put the place on the market and have a fresh start somewhere else, somewhere that I felt was completely my own, but now…’ She gave a faint sigh. ‘I am tempted to keep it, but it’s far too large for one person, and too expensive to run, especially if we lose a lot of business to Oliver Tennant.’
‘Well, you know the answer to that one,’ Sheila told her promptly, grinning as she exclaimed, ‘You’ll either have to get married or find yourself a lodger!’
She ducked as Charlotte threateningly threw a heavy brochure at her.
‘Of the two,’ Charlotte said loftily, ‘I think your second suggestion was the more feasible.’
‘Well, I should think seriously about it if I were you,’ Sheila advised her. ‘I must admit I wouldn’t like living in that huge place all alone. It is rather remote.’
‘It’s two hundred yards off the main road,’ Charlotte scoffed.
‘Yes, down a narrow, rhododendron-lined drive that doesn’t have any kind of lighting. Now that is something you should think about while you’re having all this work done,’ Sheila advised her firmly. ‘If I were you, I’d see about getting some good security lights installed outside the house, and proper illuminations down the drive, plus a burglar alarm.’
‘Heavens, the place will look like the Blackpool illuminations,’ Charlotte complained, but Sophy shook her head.
‘I agree with Sheila, you can’t be too careful these days,’ she said quietly. ‘You read such dreadful things in the papers.’
For a moment all of them were quiet, soberly reflecting on the truth of what Sophy was saying, and then Charlotte said thoughtfully, ‘Well, maybe I should make enquiries about having some kind of lighting on the drive.’
‘And about looking round for a suitable tenant to share the running expenses of the house with you,’ Sheila told her firmly.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Charlotte promised, having no intention of doing any such thing. She liked her privacy too much, for one thing, and for another… Well, much as she liked Sheila, she had to acknowledge that the older woman had a decided tendency towards matchmaking. She was pretty sure that the kind of tenant Sheila had in mind for her would be male, and eligible.
‘I drove past the new agency’s offices this morning,’ Sheila informed her, changing the subject. ‘Very glitzy and modern, but I felt that it was a little too streamlined, if you know what I mean. It might appeal to the local high-fliers, but I think the older people would find it rather intimidating. I didn’t see the new man there, though.’
‘I’ve seen him,’ Sophy told her, before Charlotte could speak. She grinned enthusiastically. ‘He’s a real hunk.’ She laughed at the disgusted sound Charlotte made in her throat and insisted, ‘Well, he is. He seemed nice too…as though he knew exactly how women were going to react to him.’
Charlotte snorted again and muttered under her breath.
‘Vain.’
‘No, that wasn’t what I meant,’ Sophy complained. ‘It was almost as though he was asking you to look beyond his looks. I can’t explain properly what I mean. It’s just that he made me think that he was basically nice.’
‘Nice?’ Charlotte protested. ‘Of course he wants you to think he’s nice. That’s all part of the act he uses to secure business.’
But, even as she spoke, she knew she wasn’t being entirely fair. Like Sophy, she had been struck by an essential lack of vanity and conceit in Oliver Tennant.
Despite Vanessa’s attempts to depict her as some kind of man-hating anti-male campaigner, he had treated her with the same degree of politeness he had shown to Sophy. At first glance he had seemed so essentially male that she had expected him to respond immediately to Vanessa’s derogatory comments about her, by challenging her in some way, or trying to make her look even more stupid than Vanessa had done, but instead he had ignored it…had looked at her in a way which had suggested that he preferred to make his own judgements rather than to rely on those of other people. A tiny wistful thought crept into her mind…an odd weakening sensation that made her wonder how he would have reacted to her had she been sexually desirable.
Immediately she clamped down on the thought, horrified that it should have formed at all. So powerful was her sense of anger against herself that her skin lost colour, causing Sheila to frown and ask quietly, ‘Charlotte, are you all right? You’ve gone quite pale.’
Privately Sheila thought that, after the trauma of her father’s death, and the strain of nursing him for so long plus running the business, it was a wonder that Charlotte hadn’t cracked up completely.
If it weren’t for the opening of this new agency, she would have been urging Charlotte to take a proper holiday—something she hadn’t done since she returned home. Much as she herself had liked Henry, there was no doubt that he had been something of a tyrant, and privately she considered that he had never valued Charlotte as he ought.
She was well aware of Charlotte’s lack of confidence in herself as a woman, and longed to tell her that, if only she could learn to project an image of sexual confidence, she would soon discover how very attractive the opposite sex could find her, but for all her independence Charlotte had a very vulnerable side to her nature, and Sheila knew she would hate her mentioning a subject she thought completely hidden from anyone else.
She was such an attractive young woman, and many many times Sheila had longed to shake Henry for the damage he had done to his daughter’s personality with his constant put-downs. The trouble with Henry had been that he was one of the old-fashioned chauvinists who could never accept a daughter in place of a son.
Over the years Sheila had done her best to introduce Charlotte to a variety of young men, but invariably she would clam up with them, holding them so stiffly and determinedly at a distance that Sheila had shaken her head in despair.
Now, as she opened the post alongside Charlotte, she glanced idly out of the window and then whistled softly under her breath.
‘What’s wrong?’ Charlotte asked, without lifting her head, absorbed in the letter she was reading.
‘It looks as if we’ve got our first client of the week…and what a client!’
The awe in Sheila’s voice was enough to make Charlotte put down the letter she was studying and walk across the room, to stand behind Sheila looking curiously through the window.
She saw him immediately, and, as though by some machiavellian instinct, he paused and stood still looking directly at her, so that she had no opportunity to move out of his view.
She felt like a schoolgirl caught ogling him, and her face burned dark red.
‘What’s wrong?’ Sheila asked her.
‘That’s Oliver Tennant,’ she told her friend tensely.
‘Ah.’
The short word held a wealth of expression.
‘I wonder why he’s coming here,’ Sophy murmured.
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Charlotte told them briskly. ’Sheila, you’d better go down and find out. Sophy, perhaps you should go with Sheila and get some experience of dealing with the public.’
She saw the look her two companions exchanged, but pretended not to. There was no way she was going to go down to the reception desk and face him—not after she had seen the slow, almost boyish smile which had curved his mouth when he’d looked up and found her watching him.
It was a very dangerous thing, that smile, inviting her to share in some special secret kind of magic, when in reality he had been laughing at her. A very deceptive smile. A very deceptive man, she reminded herself, grimly forcing her attention back to her post.
When ten minutes had passed without Sheila’s and Soph
y’s returning she began to feel distinctly twitchy. She imagined him walking round their downstairs office, studying the brochures on display, reading the details which she herself wrote, meticulously trying to show each property to its advantage, without any embroidery that might lead a prospective purchaser to claim that they had been misled.
Where a property had a fault, she always made a point of listing it on the final page of her brochures, where she always placed the property’s good and bad points under the headings ‘Advantages’ and ‘Disadvantages’. To be fair, which she always was, one man’s flaws were another’s attractions.
A house served not by mains drainage but by septic tank would be anathema to some, while others would consider this to be no problem at all. For purchasers with children, proximity to schools must come higher on their list of priorities than, say, being within walking distance of village shops, which might be a prime requirement of an older couple.
Remembering her own working life in London, Charlotte was well aware that this was not normal city practice, where competition forced agents to be far more ruthless, far more elastic with the truth.
She abhorred that kind of selling, and dreaded discovering that Oliver Tennant intended to introduce it into their quiet country life, thus forcing her to either yield the major share of the market to him, or compete with him on the same footing.
Nervously she looked at her watch. There was no sign of him leaving. What on earth was he doing? Curious though she was, she was not going to give in to the temptation to go downstairs and find out.
In the end it was twenty minutes before she saw him striding back across the street in the direction he had come. Maddeningly, before Sheila and Sophy could report back to her, there was a small flurry of business, and it was almost half an hour after he had left before Sheila came back upstairs to tell her breathlessly and triumphantly, ‘You’ll never guess what…I’ve found you your lodger!’
As she stared at Sheila in silence, a horrid suspicion struck Charlotte.
‘Not…not Oliver Tennant,’ she protested in dismay.