Rags To Riches: His Wish, Her Command: The Last Summer of Being Single / An Enticing Debt to Pay / A Navy SEAL's Surprise Baby. Annie West
narrow room where he had spent many happy hours exploring as a child.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Well, this is going to be rather more of a challenge than I expected. It never used to be this messy.’
Ella found her voice. ‘The roof was repaired last autumn. And then the designer needed somewhere to store all the bits and pieces he moved from downstairs. There are several families of mice living in the barn, and…’
She left the end of that sentence unsaid with a simple tilt of her head and Seb picked up on it. ‘Everything ended up in here instead. Got it.’
Ella pointed to a large wooden crate with the name of a well-known champagne house on the side. ‘That was the box where I found your mum’s photo. There are a couple of photo albums in there mixed in with the other paperwork. It’s too heavy for me to lug down those narrow stairs. I know there are more, but they’ve been pushed right to the back by the furniture.’
‘Here. Let me pull them forward.’
‘Are you sure?’ Ella choked, flapping away the dust she was stirring up, which only seemed to make it worse. ‘It’s going to make a horrible mess on your clothes.’
Seb glanced down at his outfit and frowned. A designer-suit-and-bespoke-shoes combo was not perhaps the best choice for scrambling around in dirty attics, but seeing as he had not packed any casual clothes he didn’t have a lot of options.
And he was on a mission.
A few items of damaged clothing were a small price to pay to find some clues to his personal history.
‘I’ll live,’ he replied, trying to squeeze his way between unrecognisable lumps of old chairs and bookcases to reach the stack of boxes in the dark corner of the attic.
‘Oh, no,’ Ella exclaimed, reaching into the first box she had pulled forward. ‘The frame is cracked. What a shame. I’ve often wondered why you didn’t take these photos with you. I mean, if you didn’t want them any more, you could have given them away to the rest of your family instead of leaving them here for the mice.’
Seb took the photograph from her and pressed his fingers onto the glass for a moment.
‘When we left for Australia,’ he replied in a low voice, ‘I was allowed one suitcase and whatever I could carry in my rucksack. That was it.’
He tried to keep the hard reality of his dad’s decision out of his tone but failed.
‘I was twelve and leaving the only home I had ever known.’ He looked up from the photograph and shrugged like the Frenchman that he always would be in his heart. ‘I was far more worried about leaving my dogs and my pals behind to even think about the personal stuff, but…that was a long time ago.’
He carefully lowered the broken picture onto the pile of paperwork and photos and old birthday cards and goodness knew what else inside the wooden wine box.
‘I’m actually surprised that this much has survived all of the tenants who lived here over the years. They mustn’t have been very curious. Or there was nothing worth selling.’
When Ella didn’t answer immediately he turned back to find her looking at him with a confused expression on her face.
‘Actually there was only ever one tenant. A retired couple from Marseilles who only ever used the house during August. The house had been empty for over a year when Nicole and I moved in. Didn’t you know? ‘
He stared at her hard, the words resonating inside his head before words burst out of his mouth from a place of anger and resentment. ‘That can’t be right. There was a family living here right until the day the divorce papers were signed.’
The hard words echoed around the small space, and the temperature seemed to drop several degrees.
Ella licked her lips, squeezed them hard together, crossed her arms and stretched up almost onto tiptoe so that she could stare Seb straight in the eye.
‘Mr Castellano,’ she said in a calm low voice, and her chin lifted another couple of inches. ‘I may only be the housekeeper here, but I do not appreciate being called a liar.’ She paused, took a breath then carried on, her shoulders lifting and falling as she spoke. ‘So. Make your mind up. Do you want me to help you? Or not? Because if you do, you’re going to have to change your tone. And fast. Have I made myself perfectly clear?’
Her lips formed a single line, her arms wrapped tighter across her chest and she just stood there, covered in dust and grubby marks, holding her ground and waiting for him to say something.
Seb responded by sitting down on the next box. Not caring about the damage to the fine fabric of his trousers or the indentations being poked into his skin.
It had been a very long time since anyone had dared to confront him face to face and ask—no, demand—that he change his tone.
His tone! His tone was just fine. It was his temper that was the problem.
She did not know what he had gone through. How could she? How could anyone understand when the only person who knew the truth was his dad? Luc Castellano was the person he should be challenging.
As for Ella Martinez? Ella Martinez was simply magnificent.
He had misjudged her. She had clearly been upset about a letter he had seen when he came into the attic, and perhaps that had made her oversensitive. The laid-back serene woman he had seen singing that morning had her own issues to deal with and he had no right to make them any worse by shifting his hot temper onto her shoulders.
Seb inhaled a deep breath, formed a thin-lipped and restrained smile and saw the tension in her jaw relax just a little.
‘Quite right. You have made yourself very clear and I can assure you that I won’t use that tone with you again.’ He gave her a closed-mouth smile. ‘I am pond scum. Please accept my sincere apology.’
Her lips twitched slightly, but he had already guessed that she was not going to let him off the hook that easily. ‘What kind of pond scum?’ ‘Green slime.’
‘Um. Okay.’ She released her arms and leant back on one of the chairs so that she was at about the same height as Seb. ‘But I’ll only accept your apology if you tell me why it was so hard for you to accept that this house had been standing empty. Because it really was. I know because I had to clean it!’
The power of her simple words combined with a steady and trusting gaze bored into his skull. She was telling the truth and he was the biggest idiot in the world. He had believed his dad. Suddenly he was tired of all the lies.
She deserved an explanation. No. More than that. She deserved the truth.
It had been years since he had felt the need to explain himself to anyone and Seb sniffed away the apprehension that came with finding himself in such an unusual position. Perhaps it was this house? The challenges just kept coming.
He had two choices. Stand up, walk out and jump into his car. Or stay and see it through.
Which was probably why he stretched out his long arms in front of him, hands palms together.
‘I will tell you what I do know. I know that a few years ago I offered my dad a very large sum of money in exchange for this house at a time when he needed the cash to pay for his divorce and early retirement. I know that he refused to sell it to me at any price. When I asked him why, he told me that he had a sitting tenant who he had no intention of throwing out onto the street.’
Hot anger flushed at the back of his neck and his breathing raced. Pulling himself back, he added, ‘So you can see that I was rather confused when Nicole was given the Mas as part of the divorce settlement a few weeks later. So, yes, I am somewhat annoyed.’
Then he twisted his mouth into a quirky grin. ‘But that is my personal problem and I have to live with it. You do not. Hence my apology, Mrs Martinez.’
‘Oh. Well, I find the direct approach works best.’