One Summer At The Lake: Maid for Montero / Still the One / Hot-Shot Doc Comes to Town

‘I hope you all have a great night, I wish I could come but…’ She lifted her slender shoulders in a regretful shrug; her babysitting arrangements had fallen through that morning.

‘You can…I know, just call me fairy godmother. You know how John’s mum is having Hannah? Well, she’s offered to have your two as well. John will pick up the twins on his way home and he’ll fetch them back in the morning.’

‘Oh, Chloe, that’s really kind but I couldn’t impose…’

‘It’s not imposing. Maud offered and they’ll have a great time, you know they will.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Yes but nothing, Cinders, you’re going to the ball and don’t forget the invite includes your utterly gorgeous boss…I tell you, if I was a few years younger I’d give you a bit of competition there.’

Zoe struggled to smile at the joke. ‘He’s not here, I’m afraid.’ She felt a guilty tug as her friend’s face fell.

‘I thought he was due back today. John’s going to be so disappointed—he wanted to thank him personally and return his hospitality. Half the people there only came because they wanted to take a look at the hall.’

Zoe’s unease increased. Short of admitting that the hospitality they wanted to return had not been given freely, she had no way of preventing the decision to treat the new lord of the manor as a community-minded philanthropist.

‘He was…is…due today,’ she admitted. ‘But when I left he hadn’t arrived.’

‘But he might do.’

‘Anything’s possible,’ Zoe admitted, but the thought of Isandro coming to a party where the glasses were borrowed and the food was provided by guests! Possible but not very likely, thank goodness!

‘Well, promise you’ll remind him if he does turn up? Tell him that we’d love to see him and he seemed very keen to come. He’s obviously making an effort to be part of the community.’

Zoe didn’t have the heart to shatter this illusion and explain that the man had only said yes to cut the scene short and get rid of them as quickly as possible.

‘If he does I will,’ Zoe promised, imagining with horror the admittedly unlikely scenario of Isandro putting in an appearance at the party. Him spending the entire evening with his lips curled contemptuously would suck the joy out of any occasion and Zoe wanted to save her friends that. On a less unselfish note she wanted to save herself from spending her precious off-duty time with a man who made her skin prickle with antagonism even before he opened his mouth and said something vile and unpleasant. The fact that half the vile things he said were actually the truth was neither here nor…Losing track of her train of thought, she shook her head slightly to banish the image of the lips that combined overt sensuality with an underlying hint of cruelty.

She was getting fixated on the man’s mouth when it was the things that came out if it that she ought to worry about.

‘John will be by around six to pick up the twins.’

Isandro did not get involved in other people’s lives. His charitable donations to selected good causes were made anonymously, and he never responded to any form of moral blackmail or sentimental sob stories, but the story of the little girl and her ‘last chance to walk’ trip to America continued to play in his mind.

Admit it, Isandro, the kid got to you.

This perceived weakness was responsible for putting the indent between his sable brows. His father had been a sentimental man, a kind, trusting man who was moved by the suffering of others. A man who taught his son the importance of charity, and led by example.

And where had that got him?

Universally liked and admired certainly—but at the end he had been a broken and disillusioned man.

Isandro had been forced to stand by helplessly and watch while the woman his father had married and her daughter had systematically robbed the family business, stealing not just from his father but from major clients. He had no intention of emulating his parent, had no room for sentimentality in his life, expected the worst from others and was rarely disappointed.

Experience had taught him that everyone had an angle and the most innocent of faces could hide a devious heart, like his stepmother and her daughter. Forced to brake hard to avoid a cat that shot across the road out of nowhere, he shook his head, banishing the thoughts of the pair of con artists who had with clinical efficiency isolated his father, alienating him not just from trusted friends and colleagues but his family, ensuring that when Isandro had passed on the concerns expressed by senior staff it had been treated as jealous spite.

Isandro would never be the man his father had been; he’d make sure of that. The possibility that his name was synonymous with cold and heartless was to his way of thinking infinitely preferable to being considered a mug.

A faint smile flickered across his face. According to the lovely Zara he was both cold and heartless among other things. She had lost it big time and reverted to her native Russian, a language Isandro had only a smattering of, so some of the choicer insults had been lost on him, before she swept majestically out of the restaurant on her designer heels.

He exhaled, feeling a fleeting spasm of regret. The woman looked magnificent even when she was spitting fury, and the sex had been excellent.

Great sex had been about the only thing they had going for them, and it had been pretty much the perfect relationship while Zara’s demands had stayed in the bedroom, but recently…He shook his head. He was not into post-mortems but if he’d lived last night again he might not have replied so honestly when Zara had pouted and asked, ‘Have you listened to a word I’ve been saying all night?’

If he’d contented himself with an honest, no frills ‘no’ he might have cajoled her out of her sulks and things might not have escalated so noisily, but he hadn’t. He’d irritably gone into more detail, rather unwisely revealing that he had minimal interest in shoes, the latest way to remove a skin blemish, or minor royals.

To Zara’s frigid, ‘I’m so sorry if I’m keeping you awake,’ he had responded with an inflammatory:

‘Barely.’

Zara’s wrathful intake of breath had caused heads to turn and half the room had heard her hissing, ‘Do you want to split up?’

The ensuing scene could have been avoided. His error of judgement had been assuming she expected to hear him say yes.

He still wasn’t sure why he’d said it. It wasn’t as if Zara had ever been anything but shallow, but that had never been a problem. In fact it had always suited him. It wasn’t her fault that her beauty budget for a month could have paid for a disabled child’s medical treatment.

Dios, but the child had really got to him, he thought, seeing not the child’s face but the disapproval and contempt etched on the beautiful face of his new housekeeper.

There were no balloons along the driveway, just a peacock who sauntered across the road at a leisurely pace, forcing him to wait, then one of the team of gardeners at the wheel of a lawnmower on the now empty lawn as he drove past. Superficially at least everything was back to normal.

It wasn’t until he drove into the courtyard that he realised how hard he had been searching for a legitimate cause for complaint. Frowning as much at the flash of insight as at the beat-up Transit van parked beside one of the estate Land Rovers, he opened the door and peeled out of the low-slung sports car he was driving.

He had taken a couple of steps across the cobbles when he saw a denim-clad bearded figure he assumed was the driver of the eyesore vehicle, who up to that point had been concealed from Isandro by his van.

He wasn’t alone. He held in his arms a tall slender figure. Isandro stopped dead at the sight. The woman wrapped in the circle of another man’s arms had her face hidden from him but the slim body was that of his housekeeper.

Anger flooded into his body, the speed and strength of the flood of emotion leaching the colour from the sculpted bones of his strong features. For the space of several heartbeats his ability to think was obliterated by pure fury as he stood with his hands clenched into fists at his sides.

As the woman emerged from the embrace, pulling away from the man’s chest, he kept hold of her upper arms, saying something that made her laugh before jumping into the van and closing the door behind him with a bang.

It was the musical sound of her laughter and not the reverberating sound of the door being slammed that shook him from his fugue.

Isandro inhaled and loosened his clenched fingers. His temper had been a problem when he was a boy but he was no longer a boy—he was a man who was known for his control and objectivity.

And he had objectively wanted to drag that guy off her. It wasn’t an overreaction, but a perfectly legitimate response to having his trust abused. This wasn’t about a public kiss—though you had to wonder at the woman’s taste. The point was this was not only his home, it was her workplace. This little scene represented a total lack of professionalism. He had given her a second chance, hoping that she would blow it, and she had not disappointed.

Feeling more comfortable having a satisfactory explanation for his moment of visceral rage, he began to walk towards her, the sound of his footsteps drowned out by the van’s engine as it vanished through the arch. He knew for a fact that he did not do jealousy, especially when the woman concerned was his employee. A jealous man would not have been amused rather than angry when his lover of the moment had been caught on camera by the paparazzi being as friendly as a person could be in public without being arrested.

Waving as John’s van drove away, Zoe held up her hand even after the van had vanished. Then taking a deep sustaining breath, she dropped it and turned around to face the figure she had been aware of in the periphery of her vision as John had given her a goodbye hug.

Before reaching him, her gaze swept over the low-slung powerful car parked the opposite side of the courtyard. It was a monster, low, silver and sleek. She hadn’t heard it arrive but then the noise of the running engine of John’s van had presumably drowned out the sound of the Spanish billionaire’s arrival. It had been the prickling of the hairs on the nape of her neck that had alerted her to the presence of the tall dynamic figure as she stood there saying goodbye to John.

If she’d acknowledged him then she’d have had no choice but to introduce him to John, which was something she wanted to avoid if possible.

She had promised Chloe she’d ask him about tonight and she would. This way she could sugar-coat his response—that it would be no was a given, that he wouldn’t go out of his way to frame his refusal nicely was an equally safe bet.

‘Good evening. I hope you had a good journey—’