The Mother And The Millionaire. Alison Fraser

      ESME dismissed the Doyles from her thoughts and concentrated on making tea, which they ate at the kitchen table.

      Later, with Harry in bed and the cottage gravely silent, she tried to focus on her latest project. She’d been commissioned to design a master bedroom for a mock-Tudor house owned by a City dealer friend of her stepfather and his advertising-executive wife, but it was proving difficult as the two had quite conflicting ideas on what they wanted. Esme, who had fallen into interior design more by chance than planning, had come to accept the work required enormous tact and patience as well as flair and a good eye.

      She pored over colour charts now, hoping for inspiration, but her mind kept wandering. Back to that summer almost ten years ago.

      She’d come home for the holidays to find Jack there. He’d returned from Ireland to wait for the results of his finals and dispose of his mother’s things. Her mother had allowed him to remain in the cottage, paying him subsistence money for gardening duties and general repairs.

      It showed how little her mother had really known Jack. To her, he’d been the cook’s son, and therefore suited to manual work. Esme, of course, had known him a lot better. He’d tutored her, ridden with her and babysat on more than one occasion. Undoubtedly strong and fit, he, nevertheless, had not been handyman material. Give him the intricacies of a computer to fathom, and he’d be your man. Give him a stable door off its hinges and he’d be resolutely uninterested.

      He’d put in the hours—mowing the lawns on the ride-on tractor, feeding the two horses left in the stables, washing down cars and the yard—but no more.

      Esme had watched from a distance, wishing she could keep him company as she had so many times before. But something had changed. Him or her or the situation.

      It wasn’t that she’d had nothing to say to him. On the contrary, she had longed to go up and ask him how he was and tell him how much she, too, missed his mother. It had just seemed that the gap between them—social, age, intelligence—had grown into a chasm since the Christmas when they’d last talked.

      Or maybe it had been Arabella. She’d been home, too, from the Swiss finishing-school that had been meant to teach her to be a lady but had, to Esme’s mind, failed miserably. Bored and kicking her heels while a socially acceptable job was being found for her in London, she had looked for a way to kill time and settled on Jack.

      At first Esme hadn’t worried. Jack had always been offhand to Arabella and at times obliquely rude.

      Esme wondered sometimes if that was why she’d become infatuated. All her life she’d played second fiddle to Arabella, with Jack the only one seeming to prefer her.

      Until that summer, of course, when August brought a heat-wave and with it a kind of madness.

      Or maybe it had just been sex.

      She’d felt it, too. Weak at the knees every time Jack had come near. Tongue-tied and pathetic whenever he’d smiled her way. Morose with her awkwardness. Shot through with jealousy as his thing with Arabella had developed.

      She would have borne it better if Arabella had been discreet. But that had been the whole point. Arabella had wanted her to know she was sleeping with ‘the stable boy,’ as she’d referred to Jack, and, in doing so, had made it plain she was just amusing herself.

      Even then it had been Jack Esme bled for, so much so that she’d felt compelled to tell him the truth.

      ‘I know about you and Arabella,’ she declared, only to be fixed by one of his emotionless stares. ‘I don’t want to interfere or anything.’

      ‘Then don’t,’ he advised, almost curtly.

      It hurt. Jack never talked to her like that. Not normally.

      She couldn’t stop. She didn’t want to see him hurt in turn. ‘I just wondered if you realised,’ she ran on determinedly, ‘that she’s not serious about…well, about you and her.’

      He looked annoyed, more than annoyed, although he responded in a kind of joke. ‘So don’t go buying any engagement rings, is that it?’

      ‘Something like that.’ She nodded.

      His eyes narrowed further on her grave face, assessing her motives, before he chose to laugh back. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve still got the receipt.’

      ‘What?’ It took Esme a moment to understand. ‘Oh, right.’

      Another joke…or was it?

      ‘The question is, who’s put you up to this pep talk?’ he considered aloud. ‘Your lovely sister or the family matriarch?’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Your mother.’

      ‘Oh.’ Esme was made to feel dense. ‘No, nobody. I just thought… Never mind.’

      She decided it would be impossible to explain why she was concerned without exposing her own feelings.

      He was already looking at her in a funny way, and she could feel colour ebb and flow in her cheeks.

      ‘Forget I said anything,’ she urged instead.

      ‘OK, I will.’ He echoed her tone but a suspicion of a smile was lurking at the corners of his mouth.

      No longer cross with her. Just amused. Was that better or worse?

      Worse, maybe. It certainly added to her mortification and, turning, she walked away.

      He called to her, ‘Midge, wait up.’ But, in response, she quickened her footsteps until she’d broken into a run, fleeing back to the house and the sanctuary of her bedroom.

      After that, she couldn’t bear to face him or Arabella—she imagined him relaying the conversation to her—and became a virtual recluse, skulking in her room apart from at mealtimes.

      The incident at dinner happened a week later. To Esme, it came out of the blue. Not, it seemed, to her mother or Arabella.

      When Jack called at the front door—a first—the new cook was instructed to show him into the dining room.

      Arabella disappeared through an interconnecting door and her mother instructed Esme, ‘Stay silent.’

      So she did, silent and forgotten at one end of the table.

      Jack barely glanced her way. ‘You changed the lock,’ he directed at their mother. ‘What did you think I was going to do? Smash the place up?’

      ‘For all I know,’ Rosalind Scott-Hamilton sniffed back, ‘you’re capable of it… Now you’ve been thwarted.’

      ‘Thwarted?’ Jack echoed. ‘Meaning what exactly?’

      ‘Meaning, young man—’ from her sitting position her mother still managed to look down her nose ‘—your attempts to compromise my daughter have come to naught.’

      ‘Compromise?’ A ridiculously old-fashioned word, it was clear Jack thought so, too.

      ‘But in case you’ve failed to get the message—’ her mother paused briefly before launching into a vituperative speech, making it crystal clear that Jack wasn’t fit to court her eldest daughter.

      As Arabella was listening in the next room—and Arabella was quite capable of defying their mother and interrupting— Esme assumed this tirade had her approval.

      Esme watched the anger darkening Jack’s brow, heard his intake of breath, then cheered silently as he finally retaliated to her mother’s snobbery with a few well-chosen words.

      When he turned on his heel and slammed the door behind him, her mother still had her mouth hanging open.

      Esme pushed back her chair to follow.

      ‘And where are you going?’ Her mother turned on her.

      ‘To my room.’ She could hardly say, After Jack.

      Her