Anything but Vanilla(41)

‘Possibly. It’s been a long day...’

‘You’re tired?’

Actually she wasn’t tired, she was stimulated, elated, excited and didn’t want to have cold water thrown over her idea.

‘...and it’s going to be a long day tomorrow. To be honest all I want to do right now is have a long soak and an early night.’

‘Really? That’s not like you,’ he said, disapprovingly. Definitely not perfect... Clearly women who wanted to be world-class businesswomen didn’t indulge themselves in a long soak in the bath when there were decisions to be made, ice-cream empires to conquer. But then most of them wouldn’t have been on their feet all day producing the goods. And she did her best thinking in the bath. ‘Very well. We’ll have dinner tomorrow night. We can talk about it then.’

Uh-oh. She recognised that tone of voice. It was the ‘must do better’ voice. Talking about it meant talking her out of whatever silly idea she’d come up with.

‘I’d prefer to leave it until the beginning of next week, Graeme. I’ll have a better idea of the situation by then.’

‘The situation seems clear enough...’ He stepped back as the latest canine addition to the menagerie that had crept back into the kitchen began sniffing around his shoes.

‘Midge! Out!’ she said sharply and Midge, affronted, shook herself thoroughly, sending a cloud of white hair floating up to cling to Graeme’s immaculate charcoal suit before she retreated to the step where she flopped down, blocking the door.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ he exclaimed, irritably brushing at his legs. ‘Your sister needs to grow up, Sorrel. This is your home, not an animal sanctuary.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said—she’d been apologising for Geli’s waifs and strays for so long that it had become an automatic response—but honestly, any man with a particle of common sense would have changed into something casual before coming to call on a household with a large floating dog and cat population.

Alexander, in soft jeans and an old T-shirt, wouldn’t have been twitchy about a few dog hairs. The thought crept, unbidden, into her head and she slapped it away. She was not going to compare them. Not to Graeme’s disadvantage.

He might not be prepared to come and mix ice cream with her but he’d been there when she’d needed someone with experience to hold her hand as she’d launched Scoop! out of the shallow little pond of Rosie-based parties and into the deeper, more dangerous waters of major events.

While Elle and Geli had been happy to carry on as they were, he had understood her drive, her need to become a market leader, and encouraged her.

He’d been a guest lecturer on start-up finance during the final year of her degree, and she’d known, the minute he’d stepped up to the lectern, that he fulfilled everything she sought in a man.

Tall, slim, his hair cut by a famed London barber, his shirts and shoes handmade, his bespoke suits cut in classic English style, he passed the ‘well groomed’ and ‘well dressed’ test with a starred A.

His reputation as a financial wizard was already established, so that was his career sorted, and his property portfolio included a riverside apartment in London, a cottage in Cornwall to which he’d added the Georgian vicarage in Longbourne, when it came on the market.

‘I’ll find you a clothes brush,’ she said, in an attempt to make up for her momentary irritation.

‘Don’t bother, it’ll have to be cleaned.’ And not looking up, said, ‘Who’s Alexander?’

‘Alexander...?’ Could he read her thoughts? For a woman who never blushed, her cheeks felt decidedly warm, but she had been bending over the oven. ‘No one,’ she said. ‘Just a friend of Ria’s.’

‘One of those hippie types, no doubt.’

‘Is Alexander a hippie? Does he wear beads?’ Her grandmother smiled at some long-ago recollection. Then, with a little shake of her head, she said, ‘I need some parsley.’

‘I’ll go and cut you some.’ Welcoming the chance to step back from a loaded atmosphere, Sorrel took the scissors from the hook, stepped over Midge and cut some from the pot near the back door.

‘Well?’ Graeme asked, staying safely on the other side of the dog. ‘Is he?’

‘A hippie?’ She made herself smile, less pleased with his slightly possessive tone than she should have been. Less pleased to see him than she should have been. She needed time to distance herself from Alexander, from the feelings he’d aroused, from some tantalising vision of what she was missing... ‘Having only seen them in old news clips, Graeme, I have no idea,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you mean New Age?’