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‘Have a dark green one,’ Sophy suggested temptingly. ‘It will look wonderful with your cherrywood.’
She had never realised that redecorating could be such fun, Charlotte admitted as she firm-mindedly tidied away her brochures and turned her attention to the post on her desk.
‘Fun, yes, but expensive too,’ Sheila said shrewdly, and then added, ‘Has all this work you’re having done mean you’ve decided to keep the house rather than sell it?’
Charlotte grimaced. ‘I’d like to keep it. I think in the past it’s been a case of the shoemaker’s chil
d going unshod as far as home has been concerned, and I hadn’t honestly realised what potential the place had.’ She wrinkled her nose and admitted, ‘I think while Dad was alive I was too busy looking after him and running the business to notice our surroundings very much. Besides, he’d have had forty fits if I’d ever suggested changing anything. I thought when he died that the best thing I could do was to put the place on the market and have a fresh start somewhere else, somewhere that I felt was completely my own, but now…’ She gave a faint sigh. ‘I am tempted to keep it, but it’s far too large for one person, and too expensive to run, especially if we lose a lot of business to Oliver Tennant.’
‘Well, you know the answer to that one,’ Sheila told her promptly, grinning as she exclaimed, ‘You’ll either have to get married or find yourself a lodger!’
She ducked as Charlotte threateningly threw a heavy brochure at her.
‘Of the two,’ Charlotte said loftily, ‘I think your second suggestion was the more feasible.’
‘Well, I should think seriously about it if I were you,’ Sheila advised her. ‘I must admit I wouldn’t like living in that huge place all alone. It is rather remote.’
‘It’s two hundred yards off the main road,’ Charlotte scoffed.
‘Yes, down a narrow, rhododendron-lined drive that doesn’t have any kind of lighting. Now that is something you should think about while you’re having all this work done,’ Sheila advised her firmly. ‘If I were you, I’d see about getting some good security lights installed outside the house, and proper illuminations down the drive, plus a burglar alarm.’
‘Heavens, the place will look like the Blackpool illuminations,’ Charlotte complained, but Sophy shook her head.
‘I agree with Sheila, you can’t be too careful these days,’ she said quietly. ‘You read such dreadful things in the papers.’
For a moment all of them were quiet, soberly reflecting on the truth of what Sophy was saying, and then Charlotte said thoughtfully, ‘Well, maybe I should make enquiries about having some kind of lighting on the drive.’
‘And about looking round for a suitable tenant to share the running expenses of the house with you,’ Sheila told her firmly.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Charlotte promised, having no intention of doing any such thing. She liked her privacy too much, for one thing, and for another… Well, much as she liked Sheila, she had to acknowledge that the older woman had a decided tendency towards matchmaking. She was pretty sure that the kind of tenant Sheila had in mind for her would be male, and eligible.
‘I drove past the new agency’s offices this morning,’ Sheila informed her, changing the subject. ‘Very glitzy and modern, but I felt that it was a little too streamlined, if you know what I mean. It might appeal to the local high-fliers, but I think the older people would find it rather intimidating. I didn’t see the new man there, though.’
‘I’ve seen him,’ Sophy told her, before Charlotte could speak. She grinned enthusiastically. ‘He’s a real hunk.’ She laughed at the disgusted sound Charlotte made in her throat and insisted, ‘Well, he is. He seemed nice too…as though he knew exactly how women were going to react to him.’
Charlotte snorted again and muttered under her breath.
‘Vain.’
‘No, that wasn’t what I meant,’ Sophy complained. ‘It was almost as though he was asking you to look beyond his looks. I can’t explain properly what I mean. It’s just that he made me think that he was basically nice.’
‘Nice?’ Charlotte protested. ‘Of course he wants you to think he’s nice. That’s all part of the act he uses to secure business.’
But, even as she spoke, she knew she wasn’t being entirely fair. Like Sophy, she had been struck by an essential lack of vanity and conceit in Oliver Tennant.
Despite Vanessa’s attempts to depict her as some kind of man-hating anti-male campaigner, he had treated her with the same degree of politeness he had shown to Sophy. At first glance he had seemed so essentially male that she had expected him to respond immediately to Vanessa’s derogatory comments about her, by challenging her in some way, or trying to make her look even more stupid than Vanessa had done, but instead he had ignored it…had looked at her in a way which had suggested that he preferred to make his own judgements rather than to rely on those of other people. A tiny wistful thought crept into her mind…an odd weakening sensation that made her wonder how he would have reacted to her had she been sexually desirable.
Immediately she clamped down on the thought, horrified that it should have formed at all. So powerful was her sense of anger against herself that her skin lost colour, causing Sheila to frown and ask quietly, ‘Charlotte, are you all right? You’ve gone quite pale.’
Privately Sheila thought that, after the trauma of her father’s death, and the strain of nursing him for so long plus running the business, it was a wonder that Charlotte hadn’t cracked up completely.
If it weren’t for the opening of this new agency, she would have been urging Charlotte to take a proper holiday—something she hadn’t done since she returned home. Much as she herself had liked Henry, there was no doubt that he had been something of a tyrant, and privately she considered that he had never valued Charlotte as he ought.
She was well aware of Charlotte’s lack of confidence in herself as a woman, and longed to tell her that, if only she could learn to project an image of sexual confidence, she would soon discover how very attractive the opposite sex could find her, but for all her independence Charlotte had a very vulnerable side to her nature, and Sheila knew she would hate her mentioning a subject she thought completely hidden from anyone else.
She was such an attractive young woman, and many many times Sheila had longed to shake Henry for the damage he had done to his daughter’s personality with his constant put-downs. The trouble with Henry had been that he was one of the old-fashioned chauvinists who could never accept a daughter in place of a son.
Over the years Sheila had done her best to introduce Charlotte to a variety of young men, but invariably she would clam up with them, holding them so stiffly and determinedly at a distance that Sheila had shaken her head in despair.
