Page 12 of Watch For Me By Candlelight

‘Did you hear the clocks all chiming last night? The cuckoo clock and the grandfather clock? They went off just after midnight.’

Chris shook his head. ‘Nope. I was fast asleep. As you should have been.’ There was a wicked twinkle in his eye and she knew that he was implying his love-making skills should have worn her out considerably more than they did.

Kate didn’t like to correct him. ‘They woke me up.’

‘You like the cuckoo clock though. It’s never bothered you before.’

‘True.’ It had never gone off fifteen times in a row before either. Then: ‘Chris?’

He sighed and looked up from his phone. ‘Yes?’

‘Do you think these skates look broken?’ Kate pushed them across to him and he swept a cursory glance across them before shaking his head. ‘No. They look fine. For their age, I mean. They’re a bit battered.’

Kate was slightly stung. But, of course, he was right. They were pretty old.

‘I wonder if they came from the Hall?’ she mused. ‘Maeve would know. She’s been here longer than me.’ The word “home” from that weird dream last night was bugging her. She had come to the conclusion it had to be a dream. Anything else was preposterous, but a shiver snaked down her back just the same.

‘Is Maeve still in Outer Mongolia?’ asked Chris. She hoped he was trying to be funny; anywhere north of the M25 was foreign to him.

‘Outer Hebrides,’ she corrected him. ‘Yes. So I can’t really ask her, can I?’

‘Nope, because if she has a phone signal up there, it’s more than what you’ve got down here.’ He tossed his phone aside and scratched his head. ‘Sorry, Kate. It’s just that there’s stuff going on at work and that client causing problems. They—’

Kate looked at him and raised her eyebrows. He had the grace to laugh. ‘Yeah, you don’t want to know. Anyway, I thought I’d escape it this weekend, so I came here, but it’s still going on.’

‘On a Saturday?’ Kate was surprised his consultancy was open on a weekend.

‘We’ve gone multi-national — I told you. We’ve had to open up on a Saturday and I think a Sunday won’t be long in coming.’ He frowned. ‘That’s going to be a problem, isn’t it? With you up here working and me down there working. We won’t even have the time we’ve got now. It’ll be a rota for the staff, I expect, for weekends. I can’t see any other way around it.’

Kate couldn’t recall the multi-national conversation at all. She was pretty certain it would have been something she did listen to — working weekends would affect their relationship even more than his job did now.

‘And there’s no way you can avoid the weekends, perhaps? There’s got to be plenty of people without commitments who can cover?’ It was worth a shot.

‘It can’t be helped. They don’t have the experience. Perhaps once we’ve got it off the ground, it’ll free me up a little more?’

‘It’s not going to be great in the meantime, though, is it?’

He came over and hugged her. ‘You know what my job’s like. I promise, once it’s running smoothly and I’ve got the technology, I’ll be up here like a shot. I’m looking into it, I really am. So much is virtual now. It’s just an interim measure.’ He kissed the top of her head and nuzzled into her hair. ‘I have to go back after lunch. I’m so sorry.’

Kate hugged him back and sighed. ‘Okay. Go and sort out your client. And your staff, if it comes to that.’

Chris laughed and stood back. ‘Is it okay if I—’

‘—use the laptop,’ she finished for him. She nodded towards the staircase. ‘You know where it is.’

‘Thanks, Kate.’ He hurried off up the stairs, collecting his phone on the way.

Which just left Kate contemplating the ice-skates again. She decided that if Maeve wasn’t around, it might be policy to speak to Cassie about them. Well okay, Cassie probably wouldn’t have a clue, but Elodie would. Elodie might be the Countess of Hartsford, but she was also rather OCD about the history of Hartsford Hall. Kate knew she’d been boxing up a tonne of stuff and calling it “the archives”, so she held out some hope that Elodie could help her. She just needed to wait until her own staff came in for their shift before she high-tailed it up there.

Chapter Five

‘Jenna, thank you for joining us,’ Kate told her, somewhat sarcastically, when she eventually turned up, late.

Chris had left an hour ago — after lunch as he had planned. Kate had been manning the desk, getting more and more annoyed, as the time went on.

Jenna was wearing dark glasses and the haze of expensive perfume that hung around her failed to disguise the smell of day-old wine. Her hair was tousled in a very fetching way. She looked as if she had just crawled out of bed, where she’d had an awfully good time.

‘Got distracted,’ Jenna murmured and smiled, sultry and kitten-like as she sidled, carefully, around the reception desk, keeping her head very, very straight.