She felt like a schoolgirl caught ogling him, and her face burned dark red.
‘What’s wrong?’ Sheila asked her.
‘That’s Oliver Tennant,’ she told her friend tensely.
‘Ah.’
The short word held a wealth of expression.
‘I wonder why he’s coming here,’ Sophy murmured.
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Charlotte told them briskly. ’Sheila, you’d better go down and find out. Sophy, perhaps you should go with Sheila and get some experience of dealing with the public.’
She saw the look her two companions exchanged, but pretended not to. There was no way she was going to go down to the reception desk and face him—not after she had seen the slow, almost boyish smile which had curved his mouth when he’d looked up and found her watching him.
It was a very dangerous thing, that smile, inviting her to share in some special secret kind of magic, when in reality he had been laughing at her. A very deceptive smile. A very deceptive man, she reminded herself, grimly forcing her attention back to her post.
When ten minutes had passed without Sheila’s and Sophy’s returning she began to feel distinctly twitchy. She imagined him walking round their downstairs office, studying the brochures on display, reading the details which she herself wrote, meticulously trying to show each property to its advantage, without any embroidery that might lead a prospective purchaser to claim that they had been misled.
Where a property had a fault, she always made a point of listing it on the final page of her brochures, where she always placed the property’s good and bad points under the headings ‘Advantages’ and ‘Disadvantages’. To be fair, which she always was, one man’s flaws were another’s attractions.
A house served not by mains drainage but by septic tank would be anathema to some, while others would consider this to be no problem at all. For purchasers with children, proximity to schools must come higher on their list of priorities than, say, being within walking distance of village shops, which might be a prime requirement of an older couple.
Remembering her own working life in London, Charlotte was well aware that this was not normal city practice, where competition forced agents to be far more ruthless, far more elastic with the truth.
She abhorred that kind of selling, and dreaded discovering that Oliver Tennant intended to introduce it into their quiet country life, thus forcing her to either yield the major share of the market to him, or compete with him on the same footing.
Nervously she looked at her watch. There was no sign of him leaving. What on earth was he doing? Curious though she was, she was not going to give in to the temptation to go downstairs and find out.
In the end it was twenty minutes before she saw him striding back across the street in the direction he had come. Maddeningly, before Sheila and Sophy could report back to her, there was a small flurry of business, and it was almost half an hour after he had left before Sheila came back upstairs to tell her breathlessly and triumphantly, ‘You’ll never guess what…I’ve found you your lodger!’
As she stared at Sheila in silence, a horrid suspicion struck Charlotte.
‘Not…not Oliver Tennant,’ she protested in dismay.
‘The very same,’ Sheila told her cheerfully, apparently oblivious to the fact that, far from sharing her delight in the news, Charlotte was looking decidedly unhappy.
‘Don’t worry,’ Sheila added. ‘I’ve warned him about the alterations et cetera and he says they won’t bother him. Apparently he eats out a good deal. In fact, he says you’ll hardly see him. He came in looking for a small property to rent, but I explained how seldom we get rented stuff, especially in the tourist season when everyone with a spare room to let is looking to make a bit extra from B and B.
‘He was just about to leave when I remembered what we’d been saying earlier, so I told him about your place. I explained all the disadvantages, don’t worry,’ Sheila went on, before Charlotte could interrupt and inform her that it wasn’t Oliver Tennant’s reaction to the disadvantages of becoming her lodger that worried her, but the fact that Sheila had actually made such a suggestion in the first place.
‘As a lodger he’ll be ideal,’ Sheila enthused. ‘He’s prepared to pay well above the norm. He did ask if it would be possible for him to have the use of a room to work in, and I immediately thought of your dad’s old rooms. Remember when he was first ill, how he insisted on trying to work at home, and we kitted out the adjoining bedroom with a desk for him?’
Charlotte’s hissed indrawn breath must have registered what she was feeling, although Sheila misinterpreted the reason for it, as she turned to her and said gently, ‘Yes, I know how you must feel, but your dad’s gone, Charlotte. I’ll bet you haven’t even been in those rooms since he died. I know when I lost my mother I couldn’t bring myself to go near her bedroom for months, but once I did… Well, once I’d sorted through her things and turned the room back into a guest room, I felt as though I’d finally come to terms with her death. I know it will be difficult for you having someone else in those rooms—’