Rival Attractions & Innocent Secretary

She chewed bitterly on her already bruised lip, ignoring the pain she was causing herself as she realised how perilously close she had come to actually worrying about the paucity of food in her fridge and cupboards to satisfy the appetite of a large healthy man.

She herself was careful about her diet, although not to the point of obsession. While not a vegetarian, she rarely touched red meat, preferring more easy to digest fish. She still missed the fresh home-grown vegetables she had enjoyed in the days when her father had employed a gardener. Mirthlessly she acknowledged that, if Oliver Tennant’s arrival as a competitor affected her business as badly as seemed possible, she could always put her spare time to good use by recultivating the old vegetable garden.

She enjoyed cooking in a modest way, and had even begun to think about trying her hand at breadmaking once her new Aga was installed. Mentally visualising the new kitchen she had planned, she caught herself up with a start, her face suddenly flushing bright pink.

Sheila, who was watching her, and who of course could not see the two dark-haired, blue-eyed children who had materialised so treacherously easily through her imagination, asked anxiously if she was all right.

‘Fine,’ Charlotte told her briskly, hurriedly escaping from the office before her mind could play any more tricks on her.

On her way over to her solicitor’s office to give him the tenancy agreement to look over, she told herself severely that she was losing her grip, and then palliated this harsh denouncement by allowing that the size of her kitchen did lend itself to visions of family rather than single life. She had always loved and wanted children…those two could have been any of the children she knew…but they hadn’t been…that dark hair, those blue eyes. She gave a small shudder and closed her mind to any more inadvertent wanderings down such dangerous byways.

Paul’s secretary told her that he was free to see her. When she explained the purpose of her call, far from looking surprised as she had expected, he, like Sheila, was full of approval.

How many more people were going to surprise her by telling her how worried they had been at the thought of her living alone? she wondered half an hour later, when Paul had given his approval to the document Oliver had produced.

‘I am an adult,’ she told him severely as she left. ‘I can look after myself, you know.’

‘No one’s doubting that,’ he assured her. ‘But these days…a woman living alone somewhere so remote… Well, it has given me one or two sleepless nights. I’ve wanted to talk to you about it, but I didn’t want to frighten you.’

Frighten her? If only he knew! She was far more frightened by the prospect of having Oliver Tennant living in her home than she was of the remote possibility of someone breaking into it.

She didn’t want to risk seeing Oliver Tennant in person again, not until she had managed to have a severe talk with herself about the stupidity of reacting so dangerously to him, and so she sent the signed tenancy agreement round to his office in Sophy’s charge and then announced to Sheila that she would be out of the office for the rest of the day, showing prospective clients round some of their properties.

‘I’m meeting a couple who are planning to relocate here from the north of England. They’re retiring and at one time they had family connections with this area. I think they’ll probably go for Cherry Tree Cottage.’

‘Mm. It needs a lot of work doing on it.’

‘Yes, but he’s taking early retirement and, as I understand it, isn’t in a desperate hurry to move down here. The house will be close enough to the village for them. It has a good-sized garden plus a paddock. Apparently they have grandchildren, who will be coming to stay, so they’ll be able to make full use of these attic bedrooms.’

‘Well, good luck,’ Sheila told her.

So far Charlotte had only spoken to the Markhams over the telephone. When she met them at the Bull, they proved to be a pleasant couple in their mid-fifties. Bill Markham had the ruddy skin of a man used to being outdoors; his wife Anne seemed a sensible, placid woman, who was plainly quite happy to go along with her husband’s plans to move them away from their present commuter-belt home to a more rural area.

They had done their homework on the area well, Charlotte discovered, as they set off in her Volvo to view the first property. They were the type of client she most enjoyed dealing with—discerning, without being obsessed with finding a property which matched some impossible dream. She was not surprised when, at the end of the day, Bill Markham asked her if they could contact her in the morning with a view to revisiting three of the five properties they had seen.