Anything but Vanilla(52)

He looked down at her cream suede ballet pumps with flower trim. ‘They are very pretty feet.’

She felt her face warm, her skin tingle. Two hours...

‘Maybe he’s not a foot man.’ He looked up, his eyes full of questions.

She swallowed. ‘The subject has never come up.’ As far as she knew he’d never noticed her shoes. Floundering, she said, ‘He’s been very kind to me.’ In company he was usually as courteous to service personnel as he was to captains of industry, but she couldn’t help wondering how different his response to Alexander would have been if, instead of introducing him as Ria’s friend, she’d introduced him as ‘...one of the WPG Wests...’ ‘He just has a bit of a blind spot about Ria. He can’t see beyond the tie-dyed muslin and the bangles.’

‘And her lack of responsibility when it comes to her accounts.’

‘That, too. I keep hoping that he’ll get it, see that the advantages outweigh the problems, but you can’t change people can you?’

‘No.’

‘No,’ she repeated.

She would always need security, while Ria would always seize the day, choosing life over her accounts, and Alexander would always need to be exploring some distant jungle, searching for new—old—ways to heal the sick. As for Graeme, he would always expect her to keep her emotions in check. Which hadn’t been a problem until yesterday. Wasn’t a problem...

‘How did you get to Cranbrook?’ she asked, not wanting to go there. ‘Please tell me that you didn’t walk.’

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Would you feel really guilty?’

‘Why would I feel guilty? It’s not that far from town. I was more concerned about the catastrophic effect that you, in shorts, would have had on road safety.’

He grinned. ‘Are you suggesting that my legs are a traffic hazard, Miss Amery?’

‘Lethal. The local Highways Department would have to put up warning signs if you were planning on staying for more than a few days.’

‘Then it’s a good job that I picked up my car this morning,’ he said, sliding his hand into his pocket, producing a set of keys and unlocking the door of a muscular sports car. Apparently she wasn’t the only one with a taste for nineteen-sixties vintage.

‘This is yours?’ she asked, running her hand over the sleek gunmetal grey curve of the Aston Martin’s sun-warmed bonnet. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘It belonged to my father.’ Catching the past tense, something in his voice that warned her that his father hadn’t simply passed the car on when he’d bought a later model, she looked up. ‘He died fourteen years ago,’ he said, answering the unasked question.

‘I’m sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘He had the kind of heart attack that most people survive. He’d treated himself to a yacht for his birthday and was having a little extra-marital offshore dalliance to celebrate. The woman involved, unsurprisingly, had hysterics. By the time she’d pulled herself together, worked out how the ship-to-shore radio worked and the coastguard had arrived, it was too late.’

‘Alexander...’ She was lost for words. ‘How dreadful.’

‘Are you referring to the fact that he was cheating or her inability to do CPR?’

‘What? Neither!’ She shook her head, not hearing the cynicism, only a world of hurt buried deep behind a careless shrug. ‘Both. But to die so needlessly...’

‘I have no doubt he gave St Peter hell,’ he said, apparently unmoved by the tragedy. ‘Particularly in view of the fact that he was the CEO of a company that manufactures the best-selling heart drugs on the market, a fact the newspapers made much of at the time.’

‘I’m sure St Peter has heard it all before,’ she said. ‘I was more concerned about the effect on the woman with him. On your mother. On you.’

‘I barely knew him. Or her. My parents split up when I was eight, at which point I was sent to boarding school.’

‘But...’

‘He was cheating on his fourth wife when he died. She couldn’t have been surprised,’ he said, ‘since she’d hooked him the same way.’

He sounded distant, detached, and yet he’d kept his father’s car, and she suspected the watch he wore had been his, too.

‘My mother remarried within a year of the divorce,’ he continued, anticipating her next question. ‘Her second husband is a diplomat and they travel a lot. They were in South America the last time I heard from her.’