AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She nodded almost immediately. ‘Yes, thank you. That would be very nice.’
Chapter Five
MEGAN WAS ONE of a kind. Capable and firm, and yet she saw what other people needed and responded to that. Honest to a fault, but her warmth and wry smile took the sharp edges from her observations.
And if he hadn’t met a woman like her before, then maybe the rules he’d set himself didn’t apply. Jaye decided to think about that when he wasn’t so intoxicated with her scent.
The lights were out in the main part of the house, and he drove to the west side, stopping the car on the hard standing outside his apartment. Megan got out of the car, and he switched on the light in the porch so she could see her way.
She was looking around, always interested in the things around her. ‘What’s this...?’ Her gaze was fixed on the doorframe. ‘A mouse!’
‘That’s Henry.’ Jaye smiled. He’d named the tiny carved mouse when he’d been a boy, and this side of the house was closed up. Now it welcomed him home every time he stepped through the front door, but suddenly it felt as if he was seeing it for the first time again.
‘Henry the mouse.’ She bent to get a better view of him, running her fingers over the wood, smoothed and hardened by time. ‘Hello, Henry. What have you seen, in all the years you’ve been here?’
‘Quite a few things, I imagine...’ Jaye opened the door and ushered her inside. ‘This is the oldest part of the house. It dates back to Tudor times.’
‘It doesn’t seem...’ Megan turned around full circle, looking at the wooden staircase and the gallery running around the top storey of the hallway. ‘It’s much lighter than I’d have imagined. I always think of Tudor houses as very small and cramped.’
‘This was the entrance to the old manor house. It was designed to make an impression.’ Megan looked and commented on things, just as most other people did, but Jaye didn’t mind that. She somehow didn’t make him feel that he was an insignificant part of a greater whole.
‘Well, it works. I’m impressed.’ She turned to him, and it seemed that the world lurched under his feet. As if he were about to trip and fall right into her beautiful blue eyes.
He tore himself away from that precipice, taking her coat and hanging it up, allowing himself just a moment to appreciate her scent before he withdrew from that dizzying experience.
‘Would you like some cocoa, or something a bit stronger? Or a guided tour...?’ Jaye could take or leave the first two options, but badly wanted Megan to choose the third.
‘Cocoa would be nice. And the guided tour?’
Jaye turned away from her, hiding his smile, and led her through to the kitchen. While he heated the milk, Megan gave his kitchen a thorough once-over.
‘The kitchen’s newly built?’ She ran her hand across the worktop. The fact that she seemed unable to look without touching sent a shiver down Jaye’s spine.
‘Yes, I had the extension built when I took over this wing as my own apartment. I wanted something modern, but didn’t want to change what was already here.’
‘You dug these foundations?’ There was a trace of mischief in her smile.
‘No. I’m to be trusted with a spade but not a mechanical digger.’ Jaye suddenly wished that he had, if it would make him any more acceptable in Megan’s eyes. If it would chase away the feeling that his own privilege was exactly the kind of thing that her father had offered, and she had rejected.
She nodded. ‘Probably wise. You’d have been sorry if you’d knocked a few walls down by mistake.’
‘Yes, I would. I’m supposed to be a caretaker here.’
‘For future generations?’
‘For whatever comes next.’ Jaye didn’t think a lot about future generations, and if he did it was his brothers’ children, not his own.
He made the cocoa and then took her upstairs to the gallery, the old floorboards creaking under their feet. She leaned over the bannister, looking down, and wondered aloud whether fine ladies had done the same, to inspect the tops of young men’s heads for bald patches. In the spare bedroom she exclaimed at the four-poster bed, and downstairs in the living room she turned the corners of her mouth down when she found that the flowers in the old brick fireplace weren’t real.
‘They last longer...’ Jaye hadn’t really thought about it before.
‘But they have no scent.’
Next time he’d make sure that there was a vase full of fresh-picked flowers there. Jaye made the resolution, despite the fact that next time wasn’t all that likely.
But Megan had moved on. ‘The windows... Some of this is new glass and some old?’
Jaye joined her at the mullioned window. Looking into the darkness beyond, feeling the cold under his fingertips as he touched the glass, gave him an odd feeling of craving. To see what she saw, and feel what she felt.
