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The rest of the weekend was an anticlimax with Gianni stamping and snorting like a bull and glaring balefully across the kitchen at Miranda. One of the girls must have told him what Callum had said, and he hadn’t liked it.
Thankfully, when Miranda finally got home late in the rainy cold of Sunday night there were no flowers to welcome her and remind her of her disturbing nemesis that she couldn’t seem to keep out of her life.
With Adrian still out, the little terrace house seemed empty. Entering the dining room, Miranda saw Flo hurriedly sliding a window envelope under a file.
“Another bill?” she asked, picking up her pace as she crossed to where her mother sat at the table. “I thought I’d paid everything.”
“No, no, don’t you worry about this, darling.”
The vagueness in her mother’s tone sharpened Miranda’s interest. “Let me see—I might have paid it already.”
“This is mine.”
“Yours?” She looked at her mother in surprise.
Flo normally gave all her bills to Miranda to pay—she was hopeless at organizing her finances. Though it tended to require the conjuring up of money from nowhere—often hard-worked overtime—to meet them.
Miranda felt sick. “Please, not more overdue bills that I don’t know about.”
Snagging up the corner of the file, Miranda caught sight of the name of an exclusive department store on the bill under the envelope. “Hemingway’s?”
Guilt glinted in Flo’s dark eyes. “I needed a new coat.”
Miranda pulled out the piece of paper and then blanched. “What was it? Mink?”
“Don’t be silly, darling.” Her mother whipped the bill out from between her nerveless fingers. “There were also a few fripperies for my winter wardrobe. Your father wouldn’t have wanted to see me dressed in rags.”
“Dad isn’t here anymore—and we don’t have his income.” She spied another bill from the same store, dated the previous month. “Pans? You told me your friend Sorrell gave those to you.”
Her mother flushed, an ugly stain on her pale skin. “I’ll deal with the bills, Miranda.”
“How?”
Putting her hands on her hips, Miranda considered her mother. Apart from the allowance Callum paid her mother—the amount Miranda had been led to believe came from the carefully invested residue of her father’s estate—Flo had no income.
“I’ll make arrangements, darling. Don’t worry about it. I’m not useless.”
Arrangements? Dread curled in Miranda’s stomach. “What kind of arrangements?”
“I’ll call up Hemingway’s and have them grant me an indulgence—they’ve done it before.”
“Done it before?” asked Miranda, trying to make sense of why the store would grant her mother an extension on her accounts.
“Yes—last time they even gave me a bigger credit limit.”
Miranda stared at her vague, sweet mother with mounting horror. “Increased your credit limit when you aren’t paying your bills? Why would they do that?”
Flo looked abashed. “Because of Callum, of course.”
“Because of Callum?” She must sound like the village idiot the way she kept repeating her mother. “What does Callum Ironstone have to do with your accounts?”
“He originally settled all our accounts after your father died. It was part of our agreement,” Flo said defensively. “Everyone knows who the Ironstones are. Things were so difficult at the time—don’t you remember? He used to pay the accounts I sent him until you took over.”
Her mother fluttered her hands like a delicate butterfly but Miranda refused to be diverted. “I don’t remember. It must have been in that agreement you never showed me,” she said grimly. “Are you telling me you’ve extended your credit on the basis of Callum’s name?” It was too horrible to contemplate.
“Well, it’s not costing him anything,” Flo said defiantly.
“But it will if you don’t pay. I can’t believe these stores have let the balances run on for so long.”
“I call them regularly—I’m hardly some debtor they think is about to abscond. They know Callum will look after me.”
