At His Service: Cinderella Housekeeper: Housekeeper's Happy-Ever-After / His Housekeeper Bride / What's a Housekeeper To Do?

Yet he’d surprised her with his understanding and sensitivity. Not once had she felt judged for her behaviour that afternoon. It had been so nice to sink into his strong arms and know that she wasn’t alone.

She tied the sash of her gown in a lumpy knot. With a heavy sigh she acknowledged that her relationship with Mark had changed in that moment. A boundary had been crossed as she had stood shivering against him in the lane.

She’d also noticed a change in Mark in the couple of weeks since he’d started living at Larkford again. But the way he was treating her now made her feel uncomfortable in a completely new way. Now he came home more evenings than he stayed away, even though the hour’s drive from London could double if the motorway traffic was bad. He was always witty and entertaining, and she no longer fumed at his humour, but laughed along with it. There was even the odd quip at her expense, but it was a gentle nudge rather than sarcastic teasing.

He obviously thought she was too fragile to be toyed with now. What a pity, because suddenly she was ready to find out if there was an upside to all these impulses and strong emotions she’d inherited from the accident, to see if love and joy and happiness might just be brighter and more multi-coloured than they had ever been before.

Ellie was working on a salad for lunch when she heard a car pulling up outside. That was odd. She’d assumed Mark had been sleeping late, because he’d had to attend a function the night before, but that sounded like his car. She blinked in surprise when he strode into the kitchen a few moments later.

‘You’re up early,’ she said, inspecting a bottle of rice vinegar to see how much was left—a complete cover for the fact her insides were doing the tango. He still made her catch her breath every time he walked into the room, but it was different. It wasn’t all about hormones fizzing and pure physical reactions. Somehow those sensations had grown beyond the superficial things they were, and now she sometimes felt as if there was a dull ache inside her chest that grew stronger the closer he was to her.

‘I had things to do,’ he said.

She noticed the little shopping bag he was carrying with the logo of a high-end electrical store and shook her head. ‘More gadgets?’ He was a typical man in that respect.

Instead of giving her a boyish grin and proudly showing off his latest piece of kit, he just looked a little awkward as he nodded his answer to her question.

‘Actually, I bought this for you.’

Ellie put the vinegar bottle down on the counter and stared at him. ‘For me?’

Mark handed her the bag and she pulled a small glossy box from it. A handheld computer. She stared at it, hardly knowing what to say.

‘You got me a PDA?’

He nodded again, still unusually serious and silent. ‘You can link it up to the laptop and keep all your calendars and notes with you wherever you go. It even has a voice recorder function. I thought it might be … you know … useful when you need to make a note of something in a hurry, before you forget.’

Ellie felt like crying. She hadn’t even thought of using something like this, but it was perfect. Just what she needed.

‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice wavering. ‘Why did you …? I mean, what made you think of getting me this?’

He shuffled backwards. ‘Just something I read …’

She frowned at him. Where was the normally cocky and devil-may-care Mark Wilder? Why was he looking so sheepish?

Oh, great. He’d been researching her condition—probably read up on it on the Internet. While it was still an incredibly sweet gesture, it just confirmed that his view of her had changed. Now she was just the poor brain-damaged housekeeper who couldn’t keep her facts straight without the help of a bit of technology.

She wanted to be cross with him, but she couldn’t rev up the energy. Instead she put the box back in the bag and stowed it in an empty cupboard. ‘I’ll have a look properly later.’

‘You like it? You think it’ll be useful?’

He looked so hopeful, so eager, that she couldn’t help but smile and nod. ‘It’s wonderful. It’ll be a big help.’

And it would. There was no need to be sad about a tiny computer just because it signalled what she knew already—that anything more than a professional relationship between them was a total impossibility.

Mark grinned. Suddenly he was back to his old self: cheeky, confident … impossible. Ellie picked up a cook’s knife and went back to chopping something—anything—to keep her mind occupied and her pulse even. But after a few moments he walked over to the chopping board and looked over her shoulder. Ellie fanned her face. It was very warm. Had he closed the window? She glanced over at the French doors, but the embroidered muslin panels were still billowing gently.

‘What are you cooking?’

Ellie put the knife down a little too quickly. It clattered on the worktop. Despite the fact her brain told her the crush she had on Mark was pointless, the neural pathways carrying that information to her body seemed to have gone on strike.

‘Vietnamese salad,’ she said, the words tumbling out.

‘Which is—?’ He waved his hand in a circular motion as her mouth moved soundlessly.

‘Chicken and noodles and a few vegetables, with a sweet chilli dressing,’ she replied, a wobbly finger pointing to each of the ingredients in turn.

Great! Now she was babbling like a bad TV chef.

His cheek twitched, yet his face remained a mask of cool composure. ‘Hot stuff, then?’

Under different circumstances, Ellie would have thought he was flirting with her. Heat licked at the soles of her feet. She swallowed. ‘It depends on the size of the chilli.’

The look her gave her was positively wicked. ‘And you girls try and tell us boys that size doesn’t matter.’

Ellie almost choked.

Mark picked up the half-chopped chilli from the chopping board. ‘How hot is this one?’

Ellie tried very hard to focus on the bright red chilli and not on Mark’s warm brown eyes.

‘Medium, sort of. The small ones are the hottest, funnily enough.’

Stop babbling! He already knows that. Everybody knows that!

She bit her lip and turned to peel the outer stem off a stick of lemongrass.

‘Do you want this back?’

She felt Mark’s breath warm on the back of her neck as he stood close behind her. She failed to still the tiny shiver that rippled up her spine as she turned slightly to take the chilli back from him.

‘Thank you.’

She carefully eased it from his grasp, avoiding brushing his fingers, and offered up a silent hallelujah as Mark stepped back and headed for the door.

‘I’m going for a shower.’

‘Okay. Let me know if you want any of this when you come out.’

He ran his hand through his hair and rubbed the corner of one eye with his thumb. That early-morning start must be catching up with him.

But then she realised what he was about to do. ‘Don’t put your—’

Mark yelped, screwed his eyes shut tight and slapped his hands to his face. She rushed over to him, wincing in sympathy. She peeled the hand from his face and led him over to one of the breakfast stools, where she ordered him to sit down. His right eye was squeezed shut and watering.

‘Try and open your eyes,’ she said gently.

‘Very funny!’

‘I mean it. If you can manage to open them and blink a bit, the eye can do its job and wash the chilli juice away. It works a lot faster than sitting there with your fingers pressing into your eyeballs, making it worse!’

Mark groaned again, removed his hand and attempted to prise his watery eyelids apart.

‘Wait there!’ she ordered, dashing to the sink and washing her hands vigorously with washing-up liquid and scrubbing under her nails with a little brush.

‘Here, let me see.’

She moved in close and delicately placed a thumb on the smooth skin near Mark’s eye. He flinched.

‘Sorry! Did I hurt you?’

‘Um … no, it’s okay.’

She gently pulled downwards, helping to open his eye. ‘It looks a bit pink. Is it still stinging? Try blinking a few more times.’

‘It’s fading now, thank you, Nurse. How did you know what to do?’

She blushed. ‘You think with a memory like mine that I haven’t done this to myself a million times?’

Mark’s laugh was deep and throaty. He blinked a few more times, opened his good eye, then attempted to do the same with the other, but it stayed stubbornly at half-mast.

Ellie’s partial smile evaporated as she became conscious of the warmth radiating from him. They were practically nose to nose. He was sitting on the stool, one long leg braced against the floor, the other hooked on the bottom rung. She was standing between his legs, only inches from his chest. She knew she should move. Mark was looking back at her through bleary eyes. She picked a spot on the floor between her feet and stared at it.

‘You’re lucky,’ she said, succeeding in inching backwards slightly.

Try not to look at him.

‘You only touched the chilli briefly. It would have been much worse if you’d been chopping them …’

Mark caught her hand as she attempted to shuffle back further. She made the mistake of looking up. A soft, tender look was in his eyes, despite the fact that one eyeball was still pink and watery.

‘Thank you, Ellie.’ The sincerity in his tone was making her feel all quivery.

She managed to shift her gaze to her hand, still covered by his. Static electricity lifted the hairs on her arm.

‘That’s—that’s all right,’ she stammered. Her hand jerked from his as she shook herself loose. She turned and headed for the door. ‘I’ll go and have that shower now, then,’ she added.

Perhaps a cold one.

She started to scuttle off down the passageway.

‘Ellie …?’ he called after her, a laugh underscoring his words.

The urge to keep going was powerful, but she turned and popped her head back through the open door. ‘Yes?’

Mark was grinning at her. She had the sudden sinking feeling she didn’t want to know why.

‘I was going to have a shower, remember? You were cooking.’

Ellie closed her eyes gently and darted a moist tongue over her bottom lip, trying to work out how to salvage the situation. She looked at Mark with her best matter-of-fact expression. ‘Of course.’

For some reason he looked very pleased with himself. He wasn’t going to tease her about this for months to come, was he? What if he guessed it was him who had got her all in a fluster?

Once her cotton wool legs had taken her back to the chopping board she set about peeling the garlic, trying to block Mark’s view of her shaking hands with her body. She heard the scrape of his stool across the floor as he rose from his seat. Every part of her body strained to hear his movements as he left the room. She stripped the skin off a clove of garlic, leaving it vulnerable and naked, and listened to Mark whistling something chirpy as he bounded up the stairs at least two at a time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘MARK!’

His head snapped up. Nicole, his PA, stood with hands on hips, a buff folder clutched in one hand, scowling hard. This wasn’t good news.

‘Huh?’

‘What is wrong with you this morning? That has to be the fifth time I’ve caught you admiring the London skyline while ignoring every word I say. You’re making me feel like my old maths teacher, Mrs McGill.’

Mark stopped staring through the glass wall of his office and turned to face Nicole fully. She was right. He hadn’t been paying attention. But now that he was she still wasn’t making any sense.

‘What?’

‘She was always throwing chalk at Billy Thomas for staring out the window during double algebra. I mean it, Mark! If you make me sound like Mrs McGill I’m going to do something drastic.’

He hunched over his desk and scribbled feverishly away on the pad in front of him. Nicole flopped into the chair on the other side of the desk and massaged her temple with her free hand.

‘What are you doing now? I’m feeling too grotty for your stupid games.’

When he had scrawled a handful of lines, he ripped the sheet off and thrust it in Nicole’s direction. She snatched it from his hand and started to read it out loud.

‘“I will not daydream in Mrs McGill’s class. I will not daydream in—” Very funny!’

He easily dodged her missile as she crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it back at him. He did the puppy-dog thing with his eyes he knew she could never resist.

‘Sorry, Miss.’

‘You’d better be! You were saying something about pushing the record company for a three-sixty-degree contract for the new band’s next deal, and then you just drifted off.’

‘Sorry, Nic. I promise I’m listening now.’

He rested his elbows on the desk and propped his chin on his fists, deliberately focusing on her and only her.

‘And I need to know what you want to do about this video shoot. We’ve only got five days before we leave for the Caribbean, and Kat’s in a state because Razor went AWOL. The director has changed his mind about one of the locations, and the stylist has had a strop and isn’t taking any of my calls.’

Mark did his best to listen as Nicole continued to brief him on the latest string of disasters to hit the upcoming shoot. It had been a nightmare from start to finish. He was starting to wish they’d opted for the other treatment, which had involved lots of time on a soggy moor in Scotland. When they’d set it up he’d been looking forward to going to Antigua. He’d planned on taking a few days off after the shoot—the closest thing to a holiday he was going to get this year.

But now the date was looming close he was starting to wish he could wriggle out of it. He didn’t want to leave Larkford. A week on the other side of the planet would be a week away from Ellie. Coming into London was different. He was away for the day, but in the evening he would be stranded on the M25 in the rush-hour traffic with a smile on his face, knowing he was on the way home.

Home. Ellie had made his house a home. He loved arriving back there and seeing a warm glow in the windows instead of faceless black. He would park his car, walk through the door and find Ellie pottering in the kitchen, cooking up something fabulous.

He had started to fantasise that she was there waiting for him, not because he paid her to, but because she wanted to be.

She worked so hard. Now he’d read up on brain injuries he understood how difficult it must be for her. And she never seemed to want a day off to go home. Perhaps there were too many memories waiting for her there. But it would be good if he could get her to relax now she had the household running like clockwork. He’d even cover the cost of a holiday if he thought she’d accept it from him. He almost felt guilty for jetting off to the Caribbean and leaving her behind.

Maybe there was something he could do about that …

Nicole slapped her folder down so hard that the papers on Mark’s desk lifted in the resultant breeze.

‘If you’re not going to listen, I’m going for a girlie chat with Emma at the end of the hall!’

He was only partially aware of the slam of the door and the meant-to-be-heard muttering as she click-clacked out of the office and down the hallway. He swung his chair round again and continued studying the busy city below. The Thames glinted between the mixture of glass office blocks and the pollution-stained masonry of older buildings.

The last few weeks had been both heaven and hell.

The prickly, reclusive Ellie who had arrived at Larkford in the spring was only a memory. The Ellie he returned to each night was warm and caring and funny. Clever and resourceful. He loved hanging around the kitchen watching her cook, savouring each bite of the meal and making it last as long as possible to prolong his time in her company. He always felt a little deflated when the coffee cups were cleared away and the mechanical whooshing of the dishwasher was the only sound in the kitchen.

She was still a little shy, but it added to her charm. He loved the way she was totally original—one of a kind.

Mark stood up. The afternoon sun was bouncing off the windows of the other office blocks, giving the whole city a warm yellow glow. He took a moment to process the revelation that had just hit him smack between the eyes.

He loved her.

His stomach lurched as he recognised his own vulnerability. Whether she knew it or not, that fragile woman had tremendous power over him.

But he didn’t want to push her, even if he guessed she might be feeling at least some of what he was feeling. He watched a jet puff out its white trail in the clear blue sky, the plane so high up it was only a silver speck in the air. Part of him exulted at the knowledge that she found him attractive, that he put her off-balance, but another part of him ached with the uncertainty of any deeper feelings on her part.

‘I need a sign!’ he whispered, waiting for something to happen.

But the plane kept on its course, its trail a no-nonsense line. No writing appeared in the sky saying Go for it. He scanned the horizon for a hint of divine thunderbolts, but the pale clouds refused to comment.

He continued to ponder his position as he sat behind a truck on the M25 later that evening. The crawling traffic gave him plenty of time for self-analysis. He sat for many minutes trying to predict the outcome of any romantic entanglement with Ellie and decided that prophecy was not his thing. It didn’t matter, anyway. Whether she loved him back or not wouldn’t change how he felt about her. He would just have to be patient. Wait in this horrible limbo until a sign appeared.

Butterflies wrestled in his belly as he turned the car into his driveway. His pulse quickened as he jumped from the car and bounded up the steps to the front door. As he put the key in the lock a mouthwatering aroma assaulted his nostrils. He followed the trail into the kitchen. Ellie bobbed up from behind the kitchen counter, causing his already racing heart to skip a beat.

‘That was good timing! I was just about to dish up. You’re much later than you said.’

‘Traffic jam,’ he said absently, his eyes following her every move. She reached to get a couple of plates from the cupboard and passed them to him.

‘Your PA called about an hour ago.’

Ah. He’d forgotten all about Nic, and had left the office without telling her.

‘She said she will not be coming back into work until you ring and tell her she is no longer Mrs McGill—whatever that means!’ said Ellie, searching for the oven gloves and finding them in the dishwasher.

Mark reckoned an apologetic lunch somewhere nice would probably help. And maybe a big bunch of flowers. Nicole’s bark was worse than her bite, and he didn’t know what he would do without her. His stomach complained noisily, returning him to the present.

‘What’s for dinner?’

Ellie opened the oven door and stood back from the blast of hot air before she reached inside to remove a scalding-hot earthenware dish. She looked very pink as she stood straight. If it wasn’t for the heat from the oven, he could have sworn she was blushing.

‘Shepherd’s Pie.’

Mark almost dropped the plates he was holding.

‘Thank you,’ he mouthed to the ceiling, before following her to the table.

Ellie was in the chemist’s in the village, picking up some supplies, when her mobile rang. The caller ID told her it was Mark, and she took a steadying breath before she punched the button to answer.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me. Are you busy?’

Ellie looked at the tube of toothpaste, a box of plasters and the hand soap in her shopping basket. ‘I’m in the village shopping, but I’ll be finished in a few minutes. Do you want me to come straight back?’

‘Yes. I’ve got a bit of an emergency on my hands.’

And, without explaining anything further, he rang off. Ellie stared at the phone. Very mysterious. She quickly paid for the items in her basket and hurried back along the lane to Larkford Place, cutting through the gardens to make her journey quicker.

When she reached the back door and entered the kitchen she found it all quiet. Guessing Mark must be in his study, she dumped her shopping bag on the counter, prised off her trainers and socks—it was too hot for shoes—and headed off to find him.

He was sitting behind his desk listening to someone on the other end of the phone when she poked her head round the half-open door. She coughed gently and he motioned for her to come in and sit down, still listening to whoever it was on the line.

She sat in the small but rather comfortable leather chair on the opposite side of the desk and waited, noticing as she did so that the colour of her painted toenails clashed with the rug. He finished the call without saying much but ‘mmm-hmm’ and ‘bye’, and replaced the phone carefully in its cradle before looking at her.

‘I have an idea to run past you. I hope you don’t mind?’

Ellie shook her head. Although she was a bit puzzled as to why Mark would want her help with what was obviously a business problem.

‘I’m due to fly to Antigua at the end of the week and my PA, vital to keeping me organised during what is likely to be a chaotic few days, has come down with the flu. I need someone to fill in for her.’

Ellie studied her toenails again. Tangerine really didn’t go with the aubergine shapes on the abstract rug.

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