Christmas Angel for the Billionaire
‘Mr Saxon?’ she responded politely.
‘Shut the damn door!’
She blinked.
No one had ever raised their voice to her. Spoken to her in that way.
‘In your own time,’ he said when she didn’t move.
Used to having doors opened for her, stepping out of a car without so much as a backward glance, she hadn’t even thought about it.
She wanted to be ordinary, she reminded herself. To be treated like an ordinary woman. Clearly, it was going to be an education.
She walked back, closed the door, but if she’d expected the courtesy of a thank you she would have been disappointed.
Always a fast learner, she hadn’t held her breath.
‘Take no notice of George,’ Xandra said as he drove away to park the truck. ‘He doesn’t want to be here so he’s taking it out on you.’
‘Doesn’t…? Why not? Isn’t he the “and Son”?’
She laughed, but not with any real mirth. ‘Wrong generation. The “and Son” above the garage is my granddad but he’s in hospital. A heart attack.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. How is he?’
‘Not well enough to run the garage until I can take over,’ she said. Then, blinking back something that looked very much like a tear, she shrugged, lifted her head. ‘Sorry. Family business.’ She flicked a switch that activated the hoist. ‘I’ll take a look at your car.’
Annie, confused by the tensions, wishing she could do something too, but realising that she’d been dismissed—and that was new, as well—said, ‘Your father mentioned a waiting room?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. It’ll be freezing in there and the drinks machine hasn’t worked in ages.’ Xandra fished a key out of her pocket. ‘Go inside where it’s warm,’ she said, handing it to her. ‘Make yourself at home. There’s tea and coffee by the kettle, milk in the fridge.’ Xandra watched the car as it rose slowly above them, then, realising that she hadn’t moved, said, ‘Don’t worry. It won’t take long to find the problem.’
‘Are you quite sure?’ she asked.
‘I may be young but I know what I’m doing.’
‘Yes…’ Well, maybe. ‘I meant about letting myself in.’
‘Gran would invite you in herself if she were here,’ she said as her father rejoined them.
In the bright strip light his face had lost the dangerous shadows, but it still had a raw quality. There was no softness to mitigate hard bone other than a full lower lip that oozed sensuality and only served to increase her sense of danger.
‘You shouldn’t be in here,’ he said.
‘I’m going…’ She cleared her throat. ‘Can I make something for either of you?’ she offered.
He frowned.
She lifted her hand and dangled the door key. ‘Tea? Coffee?’
For a moment she thought he was going to tell her to stay on her own side of the counter—maybe she was giving him the opportunity—but after a moment he shrugged and said, ‘Coffee. If there is any.’
‘Xandra?’
‘Whatever,’ she said, as she ducked beneath the hoist, clearly more interested in the car than in anything she had to say and Annie walked quickly across the yard, through a gate and up a well-lit path to the rear of a long, low stone-built house and let herself in through the back door.
The mud room was little more than a repository for boots and working clothes, a place to wash off the workplace dirt, but as she walked into the kitchen she was wrapped in the heat being belted out by an ancient solid fuel stove.
Now this was familiar, she thought, relaxing as she crossed to the sink, filled the kettle and set it on the hob to boil.
This room, so much more than a kitchen, was typical of the farmhouses at King’s Lacey, her grandfather’s Warwickshire estate.
Her last memory of her father was being taken to visit the tenants before he’d gone away for the last time. She’d been given brightly coloured fizzy pop and mince pies while he’d talked to people he’d known since his boyhood, asking about their children and grandchildren, discussing the price of feedstuff, grain. She’d played with kittens, fed the chickens, been given fresh eggs to take home for her tea. Been a child.
She ran her hand over the large, scrubbed-top table, looked at the wide dresser, laden with crockery and piled up with paperwork. Blinked back the tear that caught her by surprise before turning to a couple of Morris armchairs, the leather seats scuffed and worn, the wooden arms rubbed with wear, one of them occupied by a large ginger cat.
A rack filled with copies of motoring magazines stood beside one, a bag stuffed with knitting beside the other. There was a dog basket by the Aga, but no sign of its owner.
She let the cat sniff her fingers before rubbing it behind the ear, starting up a deep purr. Comfortable, it was the complete opposite of the state-of-the-art kitchen in her London home. Caught in a nineteen-fifties time warp, the only concession to modernity here was a large refrigerator, its cream enamel surface chipped with age, and a small television set tucked away on a shelf unit built beside the chimney breast.
The old butler’s sink, filled with dishes that were no doubt waiting for Xandra’s attention—George Saxon didn’t look the kind of man who was familiar with a dish mop—suggested that the age of the dishwasher had not yet reached the Saxon household.
She didn’t have a lot of time to spare for basic household chores these days, but there had been a time, long ago, when she had been allowed to stand on a chair and wash dishes, help cook when she was making cakes and, even now, once in a while, when they were in the country, she escaped to the comfort of her childhood kitchen, although only at night, when the staff were gone.
She wasn’t a child any more and her presence was an intrusion on their space.
Here, though, she was no one and she peeled off the woolly hat and fluffed up her short hair, enjoying the lightness of it. Then she hung her padded jacket on one of the pegs in the mud room before hunting out a pair of rubber gloves and pitching in.
Washing up was as ordinary as it got and she was grinning by the time she’d cleared the decks. It wasn’t what she’d imagined she’d be doing this evening, but it certainly fulfilled the parameters of the adventure.
By the time she heard the back door open, the dishes were draining on the rack above the sink and she’d made a large pot of tea for herself and Xandra, and a cup of instant coffee for George.
‘Oh…’ Xandra came to an abrupt halt at the kitchen door as she saw the table on which she was laying out cups and saucers. ‘I usually just bung a teabag in a mug,’ she said. Then, glancing guiltily at the sink, her eyes widened further. ‘You’ve done the washing-up…’
‘Well, you did tell me to make myself at home,’ Annie said, deadpan.
It took Xandra a moment but then she grinned. ‘You’re a brick. I was going to do it before Gran got home.’
A brick? No one had ever called her that before.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she replied, pouring tea while Xandra washed her hands at the sink. ‘Your gran is at the hospital with your grandfather, I imagine?’
Before Xandra could answer, George Saxon followed her into the kitchen, bringing with him a metallic blast of cold air.
He came to an abrupt halt, staring at her for a moment. Or, rather, she thought, her hair, and she belatedly wished she’d kept her hat on, but it was too late for that.
‘Has she told you?’ he demanded, finally tearing his gaze away from what she knew must look an absolute fright.
‘Told me what?’ she asked him.
‘That you’ve broken your crankshaft.’
‘No,’ she said, swiftly tiring of the novelty of his rudeness. A gentleman would have ignored the fact that she was having a seriously bad hair day rather than staring at the disaster in undisguised horror. ‘I gave my ankle a bit of a jolt in that pothole but, unless things have changed since I studied anatomy, I don’t believe that I have a crankshaft.’
Xandra snorted tea down her nose as she laughed, earning herself a quelling look from her father.
‘You’ve broken the crankshaft that drives the wheels of your car,’ he said heavily, quashing any thought she might have of joining in. ‘It’ll have to be replaced.’
‘If I knew what a crankshaft was,’ she replied, ‘I suspect that I’d be worried. How long will it take?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll have to ring around in the morning and see if there’s anyone who can deal with it as an emergency.’
Annie heard what he said but even when she ran through it again it still made no sense.
‘Why?’ she asked finally.
He had the nerve to turn a pair of slate-grey eyes on her and regard her as if her wits had gone begging.
‘I assume you want it repaired?’
‘Of course I want it repaired. That’s why I called you. You’re a garage. You fix cars. So fix it.’
‘I’m sorry but that’s impossible.’
‘You don’t sound sorry.’
‘He isn’t. While Granddad’s lying helpless in hospital he’s going to shut down a garage that’s been in the family for nearly a hundred years.’
‘Are you?’ she asked, keeping her gaze fixed firmly on him. ‘That doesn’t sound very sporting.’
He looked right back and she could see a pale fan of lines around his eyes that in anyone else she’d have thought were laughter lines.
‘He flew all the way from California for that very purpose,’ his daughter said when he didn’t bother to answer.
‘California?’ Well, that certainly explained the lines around his eyes. Screwing them up against the sun rather than an excess of good humour. ‘How interesting. What do you do in California, Mr Saxon?’
Her life consisted of asking polite questions, drawing people out of their shell, showing an interest. She had responded with her ‘Lady Rose’ voice and she’d have liked to pretend that this was merely habit rather than genuine interest, but that would be a big fat fib. There was something about George Saxon that aroused a lot more than polite interest in her maidenly breast.
His raised eyebrow suggested that what he did in the US was none of her business and he was undoubtedly right, but his daughter was happy to fill the gap.
‘According to my mother,’ she said, ‘George is a beach bum.’
At this point ‘Lady Rose’ would have smiled politely and moved on. Annie didn’t have to do that.
‘Is your mother right?’ she asked.
‘He doesn’t go to work unless he feels like it. Lives on the beach. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck…’
She was looking at George, talking to him, but the replies kept coming from his daughter, stage left, and Annie shook her head just once, lifted a hand to silence the girl, waiting for him to answer her question.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I’M AFRAID it’s your bad luck that my daughter answered your call,’ George replied, not bothering to either confirm or deny it. ‘If I’d got to the phone first I’d have told you to ring someone else.’
‘I see. So why didn’t you simply call another garage and arrange for them to pick me up?’ Annie asked, genuinely puzzled.
‘It would have taken too long and, since you were on your own…’ He let it go.
She didn’t.
‘Oh, I see. You’re a gentleman beach bum?’
‘Don’t count on it,’ he replied.
No. She wouldn’t do that, but he appeared to have a conscience and she could work with that.
She’d had years of experience in parting millionaires from their money in a good cause and this seemed like a very good moment to put what she’d learned to use on her own behalf.
‘It’s a pity your concern doesn’t stretch as far as fixing my car.’ Since his only response was to remove his jacket and hang it over the back of a chair, the clearest statement that he was going nowhere, she continued. ‘So, George…’ use his name, imply that they were friends ‘…having brought me here under false pretences, what do you suggest I do now?’
‘I suggest you finish your tea, Annie…’ and the way he emphasized her name suggested he knew exactly what game she was playing ‘…then I suggest you call a taxi.’
Well, that didn’t go as well as she’d hoped.
‘I thought the deal was that you were going to run me there,’ she reminded him.
‘It’s been a long day. You’ll find a directory by the phone. It’s through there. In the hall,’ he added, just in case she was labouring under the misapprehension that he would do it for her. Then, having glanced at the cup of instant coffee and the delicate china cups she’d laid out, he took a large mug—one that she’d just washed—from the rack over the sink and filled it with tea.
Annie had been raised to be a lady and her first reaction, even under these trying circumstances, was to apologise for being a nuisance.
There had been a moment, right after that lorry had borne down on her out of the dark and she’d thought her last moment had come, when the temptation to accept defeat had very nearly got the better of her.
Shivering with shock at her close brush with eternity as much as the cold, it would have been so easy to put in the call that would bring a chauffeurdriven limousine to pick her up, return her home with nothing but a very bad haircut and a lecture on irresponsibility from her grandfather to show for her adventure.
But she’d wanted reality and that meant dealing with the rough as well as the smooth. Breaking down on a dark country road was no fun, but Lydia wouldn’t have been able to walk away, leave someone else to pick up the pieces. She’d have to deal with the mechanic who’d responded to her call, no matter how unwillingly. How lacking in the ethos of customer service.
Lydia, she was absolutely certain, wouldn’t apologise to him for expecting him to do his job, but demand he got on with it.
She could do no less.
‘I’m sorry,’ she began, but she wasn’t apologising for being a nuisance. Far from it. Instead, she picked up her tea and polite as you please, went on. ‘I’m afraid that is quite unacceptable. When you responded to my call you entered into a contract and I insist that you honour it.’
George Saxon paused in the act of spooning sugar into his tea and glanced up at her from beneath a lick of dark hair that had slid across his forehead.
‘Is that right?’ he asked.
He didn’t sound particularly impressed.
‘Under the terms of the Goods and Services Act,’ she added, with the poise of a woman for whom addressing a room full of strangers was an everyday occurrence, ‘nineteen eighty-three.’ The Act was real enough, even if she’d made up the date. The trick was to look as if you knew what you were talking about and a date—even if it was the first one that came into her head—added veracity to even the most outrageous statement.
This time he did smile and deep creases bracketed his face, his mouth, fanned out around those slate eyes. Maybe not just the sun, then…
‘You just made that up, Annie Rowland,’ he said, calling her bluff.
She pushed up the spectacles that kept sliding down her nose and smiled right back.
‘I’ll just wait here while you go to the local library and check,’ she said, lowering herself into the unoccupied Morris chair. ‘Unless you have a copy?’ Balancing the saucer in one hand, she used the other to pick up her tea and sip it. ‘Although, since you’re clearly unfamiliar with the legislation, I’m assuming that you don’t.’
‘The library is closed until tomorrow morning,’ he pointed out.
‘They don’t have late-night opening? How inconvenient for you. Never mind, I can wait.’ Then added, ‘Or you could just save time and fix my car.’
George had known the minute Annie Ro-o-owland had blundered into him, falling into his arms as if she was made to fit, that he was in trouble. Then she’d looked at him through the rearview mirror of the truck with those big blue eyes and he’d been certain of it. And here, in the light of his mother’s kitchen, they had double the impact.
They were not just large, but were the mesmerizing colour of a bluebell wood in April, framed by long dark lashes and perfectly groomed brows that were totally at odds with that appalling haircut. At odds with those horrible spectacles which continually slipped down her nose as if they were too big for her face…
As he stared at her, the certainty that he’d seen her somewhere before tugging at his memory, she used one finger to push them back up and he knew without doubt that they were nothing more than a screen for her to hide behind.
Everything about her was wrong.
Her car, bottom of range even when new, was well past its best, her hair was a nightmare and her clothes were chain-store basics but her scent, so faint that he knew she’d sprayed it on warm skin hours ago, probably after her morning shower, was the real one-thousand-dollar-an-ounce deal.
And then there was her voice.
No one spoke like that unless they were born to it. Not even twenty-five thousand pounds a year at Dower House could buy that true-blue aristocratic accent, a fact he knew to his cost.
He stirred his tea, took a sip, making her wait while he thought about his next move.
‘I’ll organise a rental for you while it’s being fixed,’ he offered finally. Experience had taught him that, where women were concerned, money was the easiest way to make a problem go away. But first he’d see how far being helpful would get him. ‘If that would make things easier for you?’
She carefully replaced the delicate bone china cup on its saucer. ‘I’m sorry, George. I’m afraid that’s out of the question.’
It was like a chess game, he thought. Move and countermove. And everything about her—the voice, the poise—suggested that she was used to playing the Queen.
Tough. He wasn’t about to be her pawn. He might be lumbered with Mike Jackson’s Bentley—he couldn’t offload a specialist job like that at short notice as his father well knew—but he wasn’t about to take on something that any reasonably competent mechanic could handle.
Maybe if she took off her glasses…
‘As a gesture of goodwill, recognising that you have been put to unnecessary inconvenience,’ he said, catching himself—this was not the moment to allow himself to be distracted by a pair of blue eyes, pale flawless skin, scent that aroused an instant go-to-hell response. He didn’t do ‘instant’. It would have to be money. ‘I would be prepared to pay any reasonable out-of-pocket expenses.’
Check.
He didn’t care how much it cost to get her and her eyes out of the garage, out of his mother’s kitchen, out of his hair. Just as long as she went.
‘That’s a most generous offer,’ she replied. ‘Unfortunately, I can’t accept. The problem isn’t money, you see, but my driving licence.’
‘Oh?’ Then, ‘You do have a valid licence?’
If she was driving without one all bets were off. He could ground his daughter for her reckless behaviour—maybe—but Annie Rowland would be out of here faster than he could call the police.
But she wasn’t in the least bit put out by his suggestion that she was breaking the law.
‘I do have a driving licence,’ she replied, cool as you like. ‘And, in case you’re wondering, it’s as clean as the day it was issued. But I’m afraid I left it at home. In my other bag.’ She shrugged. ‘You know how it is.’ Then, looking at him as if she’d only just noticed that he was a man, she smiled and said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t suppose you do. All a man has to do is pick up his wallet and he has everything he needs right there in his jacket pocket.’
He refused to indulge the little niggle that wanted to know whose wallet, what man…
‘And where, exactly, is home?’ he asked, trying not to look at her hand and failing. She wasn’t wearing a ring but that meant nothing.
‘London.’
‘London is a big place.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It is.’ Then, without indulging his curiosity about which part of London, ‘You must know that no one will rent me a car without it. My licence.’
Unfortunately, he did.
Checkmate.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Xandra, who’d been watching this exchange with growing impatience, said, ‘If you won’t fix Annie’s car, I’ll do it myself.’ She put down her cup and headed for the door. ‘I’ll make a start right now.’
‘Shouldn’t you be thinking about your grandmother?’ he snapped before she reached it. ‘I’m sure she’d appreciate a hot meal when she gets back from the hospital. Or are you so lost to selfishness that you expect her to cook for you?’
‘She doesn’t…’ Then, unexpectedly curbing her tongue, she said, ‘I’m not the selfish one around here.’
Annie, aware that in this battle of wits Xandra was her ally, cleared her throat. ‘Why don’t I get supper?’ she offered.
They both turned to stare at her.
‘Why would you do that?’ George Saxon demanded.
‘Because I want my car fixed?’
‘You won’t get a better offer,’ Xandra declared, leaping in before her father could turn down her somewhat rash offer. ‘My limit is baked beans on toast. I’m sure Annie can do better than that,’ she said, throwing a pleading glance in her direction.
‘Can you?’ he demanded.
‘Do better than baked beans on toast?’ she repeated. ‘Actually, that won’t be…’ She broke off, distracted by the wild signals Xandra was making behind her father’s back. As he turned to see what had caught her attention she went on. ‘Difficult. Not at all.’
He gave her a long look through narrowed eyes, clearly aware that he’d missed something. Then continued to look at her as if there was something about her that bothered him.
She knew just how he felt.
The way he looked at her bothered her to bits, she thought, using her forefinger to push the ‘prop’ spectacles up her nose. They would keep sliding down, making it easier to look over them than through them, which made wearing them utterly pointless.
‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ she asked, not sure who she was attempting to distract. George or herself.
He continued to stare for perhaps another ten seconds—clearly not a man to be easily distracted—before he shrugged and said, ‘It depends what else we find. Your car is not exactly in the first flush. Once something major happens it tends to have a knock-on effect. You’re touring, you say?’
She nodded. ‘That was the plan. Shropshire, Cheshire, maybe. A little sightseeing. A little shopping.’
‘There aren’t enough sights, enough shops in London?’ he enquired, an edge to his voice that suggested he wasn’t entirely convinced.
‘Oh, well…’ She matched his shrug and raised him a smile. ‘You know what they say about a change.’
‘Being as good as a rest?’ He sounded doubtful. ‘This isn’t a great time of year to break down, especially if you’re stranded miles from anywhere,’ he pointed out.
He didn’t bother to match her smile.
‘It’s never a good time for that, George.’
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