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‘This isn’t London,’ Jennifer told him with a superior sniff. ‘We’re a small community; we prefer to trust people to behave decently rather than to live in a perpetual state of siege against potential muggers and burglars.’
‘I’d like to trust people too, but experience has taught me that it’s painfully unwise.’
Jennifer would have liked to argue against his cynicism, but she was hardly in a position to talk to him about trust.
‘Of course, in the season, when there’s a big influx of tourists, we do get an increase in petty crime and vandalism, that kind of thing,’ Paula chipped in. ‘But being a little off the beaten track, as we are here, we don’t worry about it. Why, when we first moved in we didn’t even have a lock on the door!’
That led to a discussion about the origins of Beech House, a blessedly safe topic as far as Jennifer was concerned, and she happily left the three of them talking as she cleared away the plates and went to fetch the rhubarb pie from the oven.
But when she came back the conversation had turned to the renovations that had been carried out over the past three years, and how Jennifer had been so clever at handling the business side of things that she had recently been able to pay off the substantial mortgage and medical bills, and take out medical insurance that covered one hundred per cent of any care that Paula might require, so that she wouldn’t have to be reliant on the badly overstretched public hospital system.
Jennifer pushed rhubarb pie and cream at her mother to try and stop her singing her paean to the wonderful, supportive daughter she had, but Paula refused to be diverted.
‘She probably didn’t tell you because she tends to hide her light under a bushel, but after the accident life was such a struggle for the two of us. We had managed to scrape enough to put a deposit on this house, but there was nothing left over and Jenny had to give up her nurse’s training to care for me. Once I was a bit more mobile she got several part-time home-caring jobs, then decided to start the bed and breakfast for the extra income. But I think that was mostly for me at first, wasn’t it, Jenny? She was desperate to jolt me out of my depression and get me interested and involved in life again. Pain does tend to turn one in on oneself terribly...
‘Anyway, then Dot came along and decided she wanted to more or less have her room permanently, and she started doing the grounds—’ she gave her friend a beam ‘—and I started giving some cooking classes, and soon we had so many regular guests that Jenny was able to give up her other jobs and run Beech House in a more businesslike way, so that she could borrow the money to invest in the renovations. I insisted one of the first things she do was expand that attic of hers so she had some more space for herself, and somewhere to do her paperwork. She’s so meticulous about her records and files, she spends hours up there most nights, tapping away at that computer...’
‘Girl’s a genius with money—seems to be able to stretch it like rubber,’ said Dot, cutting herself another fat slice of rhubarb pie. ‘Of course, thrift is a forgotten art to most people these days, and someone like you probably never had to learn it—’
‘Oh, I know the value of a pound,’ said Rafe drily. He also knew something about business and building costs, and his shrewd eye had estimated that tens of thousands of dollars must have gone into the remodelling of Beech House... a great deal more money than any bank would have been justified in loaning to such a small-scale business. Jennifer wasn’t just a genius, she was a magician, and Rafe had a burning ambition to discover the source of her mysterious magic.
‘I may have had what you would class as a privileged childhood, but I worked for my own living from the time I was seventeen,’ he told Paula and Dot, bemused by his nagging desire to make a good impression, even though he knew that by the time he left the two women would probably have every reason to despise him. ‘My father offered to pay me an allowance if I went to medical school, but I chose art school instead and dropped out of that when modelling turned out to be so lucrative. Apart from what I inherited a few months ago, everything I have I earned through my own blood, sweat and fears!’
‘You mean tears.’ Jennifer was unable to resist correcting the misquoted cliché.
He turned his head, the skin slanting over his high cheekbones as he smiled. ‘I mean that without any business training, every time I expanded into some new venture it was hands-on, trial and error stuff that had a huge potential for disaster—I take on small failing enterprises and turn them around; that’s nail-biting stuff.’
‘So you’re an entrepreneur,’ said Dot, pleased to have discovered where he fitted in the scheme of things. ‘You take the initiative, you take the risk, and then you sell and take the profit.’
‘Oh, I don’t sell,’ said Rafe. ‘I keep. When I make a success of something, I’m possessive. I do what I do for me, and I pick and choose my targets because they interest me, not just for their profit potential. Maybe I should hire you to work for me,’ he aimed across Jennifer’s bows. ‘Then you could teach my accountants some of that incredible thrift...’
‘You’re the last person I’d ever work for,’ she said hotly, before remembering their audience.
‘You don’t believe in husbands and wives working together?’ Rafe smoothly covered her gaffe.
‘Uh, n-no, I think it’s asking for t-trouble,’ she stammered.
‘God forbid we do that!’ he murmured, his green eyes declaring that they had plenty enough of that already.
‘Your father and I worked together for twenty-five years in perfect harmony,’ protested Paula. ‘Though I admit we weren’t shut up in an office together, and of course he was the one with the real job while I was an unpaid accessory, but still, I was pretty essential to his ministry.’
‘I should imagine you made a wonderful vicar’s wife,’ said Rafe, with a frank sincerity that made Paula pinken in pleasure. ‘I don’t really work in an office, either. It’s more a case of have laptop will travel, because I like to keep a close eye on my favourite projects. I have a company that handles personal management for celebrities, several art galleries, a theatre production company, a few publishing ventures—’
‘Publishing?’ Dot’s broad forehead creased with interest.
‘Oh, Jenny, you made Rafe sound like a boring businessman when you said what he did, but now I know why you two felt such an instant affinity. Jenny is an inveterate reader and loves to write!’ Her mother clapped her hands together.
‘The reading I know about—but, writing?’ Rafe’s golden eyebrows rose at Jennifer’s trapped expression.
‘Just a hobby,’ she said quickly, aghast. ‘Dot’s the one who’s the writer...’
After a thoughtful hesitation, Rafe’s gaze was reluctantly diverted. ‘Oh, what are you doing, Dot?’
The older woman waved a dismissive hand. ‘Been doing it for years. Travel book...all the places I’ve been...personal journey, that kind of thing. I’m not in any hurry to finish it, though—I haven’t done all my travelling yet!’
‘There’s a big market for travel books,’ Rafe said, and he and Dot proceeded to pick apart some of the offerings they had read in common.
Rafe cleverly lured Jennifer into the discussion as the talk broadened into books and writing in general, and by the time they moved into the living room with their tea and coffee she had forgotten her agonised self-consciousness, forgotten to guard and examine every word before she uttered it and was arguing as warmly as the other two, her body relaxed yet simmering with vitality, her brown eyes glowing with passion, her capable hands darting to illustrate her words.
