by Julia James
Despite her unprepossessing appearance, not for a moment did Max neglect his manners.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said smoothly. ‘I was seeking to enquire whether I might leave my car here.’ He paused. ‘I am expected. Max Vasilikos to see Mrs Mountford.’
The reddening female dragged her eyes from him and stared at his car, then back at him. Her cheeks flushed redder than ever. She shifted the weight of the basket on her hip but did not answer him.
‘So, is it all right to leave my car here?’ Max prompted.
With visible effort the woman nodded. She might have mumbled something as well, but whatever it was it was indistinct.
He gave a swift, courtesy-only smile. ‘Good,’ he said, dismissing her from his notice, and turned away to head around the house to the front entrance, his gaze sweeping out over the gardens as he walked. Even this early in the spring he could see that they would be beautiful as summer arrived.
Again he felt that unexpected sense of approval that was nothing to do with whether or not this place would be a profitable investment to make. He walked up to the front door—a massive, studded oak construction—hoping the interior of the house would match the charms of the exterior.
The door opened in front of him—clearly his arrival had been communicated. The female standing there could not, Max thought, have been more different from the one who’d cannoned into him at the kitchen door. She was petite, ultra-slender and immaculately styled, from her chic ash-blonde hair and perfect make-up to her well-tailored outfit whose pale blue hue matched the colour of her eyes. The fragrance of an expensive perfume wafted from her as she smiled warmly at him.
‘Mr Vasilikos—do come in!’
She stood back as Max walked in, taking in a large hall with a flagged stone floor, a cavernous fireplace, and a broad flight of stairs leading upwards. It suited the house, Max thought.
‘I’m Chloe Mountford. I’m so glad you could come.’ The daughter of the house—as he assumed she must be—was gliding towards one of the sets of double doors opening off the hall, and she threw them open with a dramatic gesture as he followed after her.
‘Mummy, it’s Mr Vasilikos,’ she announced.
Mummy? Max reminded himself that it was common in English upper crust circles for adult children to use such a juvenile form of address for their parents. Then he walked into the room. It was a double aspect drawing room, with another large but more ornate marble fireplace and a lot of furniture. The decor was pale grey and light blue, and it was clear to his experienced eyes that a top-class interior designer had been let loose in there.
He found himself conscious of a feeling of disappointment—it was all just too perfect and calculatedly tasteful—and wondered what the original decor would have looked like. The effect now was like something out of a highly glossy upmarket magazine.
I couldn’t live in this. It’s far too overdone. I’d have to change it—
The thought was in his head automatically, and he frowned slightly. He was getting ahead of himself again.
‘Mr Vasilikos, how lovely to meet you.’
The slim, elegant woman greeting him from one of the upholstered sofas by the fire, holding out a diamond-ringed hand to him, was extremely well preserved and, like her daughter, had clearly lavished money on her clothes and her appearance. A double rope of pearls adorned her neck which, Max suspected, had benefitted from the attentions of a plastic surgeon at some time.
‘Mrs Mountford.’ Max greeted the widowed owner, his handshake firm and brief, then sat himself down where she indicated, at the far end of the sofa opposite, away from the fire. Chloe Mountford settled herself prettily on a third sofa, facing the fire, at the end closest to Max.
‘I’m delighted to welcome you to Haughton,’ Mrs Mountford was saying now, in a smiling, gracious tone.
Max smiled politely in response as her daughter took up the conversational baton.
‘Thank you for taking the time from what I’m sure must be a dreadfully busy schedule. Are you in England long this visit, Mr Vasilikos?’ she asked brightly.
‘My plans are fluid at the moment,’ Max returned evenly. He found himself wondering whether Chloe Mountford was likely to make a play for him. He hoped not. The current fashion might be for ultra-thin figures, but they were not to his taste. Nor, of course, were women at the other extreme.
His mind flickered back to the female who’d cannoned into him at the back door. Being overweight wasn’t a good look either—especially when a woman was badly dressed and plain to boot. A flicker of pity went through him for any woman so sadly unattractive. Then Chloe Mountford was speaking again.
‘There speaks the globetrotting tycoon!’ she said with a light laugh.
She turned her head expectantly as a door set almost invisibly into the papered wall opened abruptly and a bulky frame carrying a loaded coffee tray reversed into the room. It belonged, Max could see instantly, to the very female he’d just been mentally pitying for her lack of physical appeal.
The unlovely tracksuit had been swapped for a grey skirt and a white blouse, the trainers replaced with sturdy lace-up flats, but her hair was still caught back in a style-less bush, and the spectacles were still perched on her nose. She made her way heavily into the room, looking decidedly awkward, Max could see.
‘Ah, Ellen, there you are!’ exclaimed Pauline Mountford as the coffee tray was set down on the low table by the fireside. Then his hostess was addressing him directly. ‘Mr Vasilikos, this is my stepdaughter, Ellen.’
Max found his assumptions that the hefty female was some kind of maid rearranging themselves. Stepdaughter? He’d been unaware of that—but then, of course, knowing the details of the family who owned Haughton was hardly relevant to his decision whether to purchase it or not.
‘How do you do?’ he murmured as he politely got to his feet.
He saw her face redden as she sat herself down heavily on the sofa beside Chloe Mountford. Max’s glance, as he seated himself again, went between the two young women sitting on the same sofa, took in the difference between the two females graphically. They could hardly be a greater contrast to each other—one so petite and beautifully groomed, the other so large and badly presented. Clearly nothing more than stepsisters, indeed.
‘Mr Vasilikos,’ the stepdaughter returned briefly, with the slightest nod of her head. Then she looked across at her stepmother. ‘Would you like me to pour? Or do you want to be mother?’ she said.
Max heard the bite in her voice as she addressed the owner of the house and found himself sharpening his scrutiny.
‘Please do pour, Ellen, dear,’ said Mrs Mountford, ignoring the distinctly baiting note in her stepdaughter’s tone of voice.
‘Cream and sugar, Mr Vasilikos?’ she asked, looking straight at him.
There was a gritty quality to her voice, as if she found the exchange difficult. Her colour was still heightened, but subsiding. Her skin tone, distinctly less pale than her stepsister’s carefully made up features, definitely looked better when she wasn’t colouring up, Max decided. In fact, now he came to realise it, she had what might almost be described as a healthy glow about her—as if she spent most of her time outside. Not like the delicate hothouse plant her stepsister looked to be.
‘Just black, please,’ he answered. He didn’t particularly want coffee, let alone polite chit-chat, but it was a ritual to be got through, he acknowledged, before he could expect a tour of the property that he was interested in.
He watched Pauline Mountford’s sadly unlovely stepdaughter pour the coffee from a silver jug into a porcelain cup and hand it to him. He took it with a murmur of thanks, his fingers inadvertently making contact with hers, and she grabbed her hand back as if the slight touch had been an unpleasant electric shock. Then she ferociously busied herself pouring the other three cups of coffee, handing them to her stepmother and sister, before sitting back with her own and stirring it rapidly.
Max sat back, crossing one leg over the oth
er, and took a contemplative sip of his coffee. Time to get the conversation going where he wanted it to go.
‘So,’ he opened, with a courteous smile of interest at Pauline Mountford, ‘what makes you wish to part with such a beautiful property?’
Personally, he might think the decor too overdone, but it was obviously to his hostess’s taste, and there was no point in alienating her. Decor could easily be changed—it was the house itself he was interested in.
And he was interested—most decidedly so. That same feeling that had struck him from the first was strengthening all the time. Again, he wondered why.
Maybe it’s coming from the house itself?
The fanciful idea was in his head before he could stop it, making its mark.
As he’d spoken he’d seen Pauline Mountford’s stepdaughter’s coffee cup jerk in her grip and her expression darken. But his hostess was replying.
‘Oh, sadly there are too many memories here! Since my husband died I find them too painful. I know I must be brave and make a new life for myself now.’ She gave a resigned sigh, a catch audible in her voice. ‘It will be a wrench, though...’ She shook her head sadly.
‘Poor Mummy.’ Her daughter reached her hand across and patted her mother’s arm, her voice warm with sympathy. Chloe Mountford looked at him. ‘This last year’s been just dreadful,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Max murmured. ‘But I can understand your reasons for wishing to sell.’
A sharp clunk came from the sofa opposite, and his eyes flicked to see his hostess’s stepdaughter had dropped her coffee cup on to its saucer. Her expression, he could tell, was tight. His focus sharpened. Beneath his swift glance in her direction he saw her cheeks redden again. Then she reached for the silver coffee pot and busied herself pouring another cup. She did not speak, but the tightness in her face was unabated, even as the colour started to ebb. She took a single gulp from the refilled cup, then abruptly got to her feet.
‘I must go and see about lunch,’ she said brusquely, pushing past the furniture to get to the service door.
As she left Pauline Mountford leant towards him slightly. ‘Poor Ellen took my husband’s death very hard,’ she confided in a low voice. ‘She was quite devoted to him.’ A little frown formed on her well-preserved and, he suspected, well-Botoxed forehead. ‘Possibly too much so...’ She sighed.
Then her expression changed and she brightened.
‘I’m sure you would like to see the rest of the house before lunch. Chloe will be delighted to take you on the grand tour!’ she gave a light laugh.
Her daughter got to her feet and Max did likewise. He was keen to see the house—and not keen to hear any more about the personal circumstances of the Mountford family, which were of no interest to him whatsoever. Chloe Mountford might be too thin, and her stepsister just the opposite, but he found neither attractive. All that attracted him here was the house itself.
It was an attraction that the ‘grand tour’ only intensified. By the time he reached the upper floor, with its array of bedrooms opening off a long, spacious landing, and stood in the window embrasure of the master bedroom, gazing with satisfaction over the gardens to let his gaze rest on the reed-edged lake beyond, its glassy waters flanked by sheltering woodland, his mind was made up.
Haughton Court would be his. He was determined on it.
CHAPTER TWO
ELLEN MADE IT to the kitchen, her heart knocking. Having anyone arrive to look over her home, thinking he was going to buy it, was bad enough—but...oh, dear Lord...that it was such a man as Max Vasilikos! She felt her cheeks flame again, just as they’d flamed—horribly, hideously—in that first punishingly embarrassing moment of all but sending him flying at the back door.
She had been gawping like an idiot at the devastating male standing in front of her. Six foot plus, broad-shouldered, muscled, and just ludicrously good-looking, with classic ‘tall dark stranger’ looks and olive skin tones. Sable hair and charcoal eyes, a sculpted mouth, incised cheekbones and a jaw cut from the smoothest marble...
The impact he’d made had hit her all over again when she’d taken in the coffee. At least by then she’d been a fraction more prepared—prepared, too, for what she’d known would be the inevitable pitying glance he’d cast at her as she took her place beside Chloe.
She felt her throat tighten painfully. She knew exactly what he’d seen, and why he’d pitied her. She and Chloe couldn’t have made a bigger contrast, sitting beside each other. Hadn’t she seen that same expression countless times over the years, whenever male eyes had looked between the two of them? Chloe the svelte, lovely blonde—she the heavy, ungainly frump.
She wrenched her mind away from the image. She had more to concern her than her lack of looks. Somehow she was going to have to find an opportunity to lay it on the line for Max Vasilikos about his buying her home. Oh, Pauline and Chloe might trot out all that sickeningly hypocritical garbage about ‘painful memories’, but the truth was they couldn’t wait to cash in on the sale of the last asset they could get their greedy hands on.
Well, she would defy them to the last.
They’ll have to force it from me in a court of law, and I’ll fight them every inch of the way. I’ll make it the most protracted and expensive legal wrangle I can.
A man like Max Vasilikos—an investment purchaser who just wanted a quick sale and a quick profit—wouldn’t want that kind of delay. So long as she insisted that she wouldn’t sell, that he’d have to wait out a legal battle with Pauline and Chloe, she would be able to fend him off. He’d find somewhere else to buy—leave Haughton alone.
As she checked the chicken that was roasting, and started to chop up vegetables, that was the only hope she could hang on to.
He’ll never persuade me to agree to sell to him. Never!
There was nothing Max could say or do that would make her change her mind. Oh, he might be the kind of man who could turn females to jelly with a single glance of his dark, dark eyes, but—her mouth twisted—with looks like hers she knew only too painfully she was the last female on the planet that a man like Max Vasilikos would bother to turn the charm on for.
* * *
‘Sherry, Mr Vasilikos? Or would you prefer something stronger?’ Pauline’s light voice enquired.
‘Dry sherry, thank you,’ he replied.
He was back in the drawing room, his tour of the house complete, his mind made up. This was a house he wanted to own.
And to keep for his own use.
That was the most insistent aspect of his decision to purchase this place. Its prominence in his mind still surprised him, but he was increasingly getting used to its presence. The idea of having this place for himself—to himself. Mentally he let the prospect play inside his head, and it continued to play as he sipped at the proffered sherry, his eyes working around the elegant drawing room.
All the other rooms that Chloe had shown him bore the same mark of a top interior designer. Beautiful, but to his mind not authentic. Only the masculine preserve of the library had given any sense of the house as it must once have been, before it had been expensively made over. The worn leather chairs, the old-fashioned patterned carpets and the book-lined walls had a charm that the oh-so-tasteful other rooms lacked. Clearly the late Edward Mountford had prevented his wife from letting the designer into his domain, and Max could not but agree with that decision.
He realised his hostess was murmuring something to him and forced his attention back from the pleasurable meanderings of the way he would decorate this room, and all the others, once the house was his to do with as he pleased.
He was not kept making anodyne conversation with his hostess and her daughter for long, however. After a few minutes the service door opened again and Pauline Mountford’s stepdaughter walked in with her solid tread.
‘Lunch is ready,’ she announced bluntly.
She crossed to the double doors, throwing them open to the hall beyond. Despite her solidity she held her
self well, Max noticed—shoulders back, straight spine, as if she were strong beneath the excess weight she must be carrying, if the way the sleeves of her ill-fitting blouse were straining over her arms was anything to go by. He frowned. It seemed wrong to him that his hostess and her daughter should be so elegantly attired, and yet Ellen Mountford—presumably, he realised, the daughter of the late owner—looked so very inelegant.
But then, sadly, he knew that so many women who felt themselves to be overweight virtually gave up on trying to make anything of what looks they had.
His gaze assessed her as he followed her into the dining room, her stepsister and stepmother coming in behind him.
She’s got good legs, he found himself thinking. Shapely calves, at any rate. Well, that was something, at least! His eyes went to her thick mop of hair, whose style did nothing for her—it wouldn’t have done anything for Helen of Troy, to his mind! A decent haircut would surely improve her?
As he took his seat at the end of the table, where she indicated, his eyes flicked over her face. The glasses, he decided, were too small for her, making her jaw look big and her eyes look small. And that was a shame, he realised, because her eyes were a warm sherry colour, with amber lights. He frowned again. Her lashes might be long—what he could see of them through her spectacle lenses—but that overgrown monobrow was hideous! Why on earth didn’t she do something about it? Do something about the rest of her?
It wouldn’t take that much, surely, to make her look better? Plus, of course, decent clothes that concealed her excess weight as much as possible. Best of all, however, would be for her to shift that weight. She should take more exercise, maybe.