At His Service: Cinderella Housekeeper. Fiona Harper
sitting in the driver’s seat of her car, turning the key in the ignition.
Nothing.
‘Come on, old girl!’ she crooned, rubbing the dashboard. ‘Don’t let me down now. You are my ticket out of here—at least for the afternoon.’ She tried again, pumping her foot frantically on the pedal. Her old banger coughed, threatening to fire up, then thought better of it. She slapped the steering wheel with the flat of her hands.
‘Traitor.’
She collected her bag and strutted back into the kitchen, chin in the air. Mark was still sitting on the stool, finishing his coffee.
‘Problems?’
‘Car won’t start. I’ll have to go another day, after I’ve had the old heap looked at.’
Mark stood up and pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket. ‘Come on, then.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll take you.’
‘No, it’s okay. Honestly. You’re busy.’
‘No problem,’ he said with that lazy grin of his, the one straight out of a toothpaste ad. ‘I could do with getting away from my desk and letting things settle in my head, anyway.’
Ellie groaned inwardly. Now the afternoon was going to be torture rather than escape. She followed him reluctantly to his car. It was a sleek, gunmetal-grey Aston Martin. She could almost see his chest puff out in pride as he held the passenger door open for her.
Boys and their toys. What was the theory about men with flash cars? Mark didn’t need to take his eyes off the road to know that Ellie had shifted position and was now staring out of the window. He was aware of every sigh, every fidget. And her body language was yelling at him in no uncertain terms—back off!
What if she’d been right all those weeks ago when she’d shouted at him? He’d given the whole thing a lot of thought. Did he live in a ‘Mark bubble’? A self-absorbed little universe where he was the sun and all revolved around him? Did he now waltz through life—well, relationships—without a backward glance?
If he did, it hadn’t always been that way. His thoughts slid inevitably to Helena. That woman had a lot to answer for. He’d have stayed by her side until his dying day. Hadn’t he promised as much, dressed in a morning suit in front of hundreds of witnesses? Stupidly, he’d thought she’d felt the same way, but it turned out that he’d confused loyalty with neediness. She’d stuck around while he’d been useful and then, when he’d needed her to be the strong one for a change, she’d walked away.
And he hadn’t seen it coming. Before the news had broken, he’d been thinking to himself that Helena had finally reached a place where she seemed less troubled, and he’d even been thinking about broaching the subject of having kids.
But then his first management company had gone belly-up because he’d made the same mistake with Nuclear Hamster. He’d really believed in them, had remortgaged his house, emptied his savings accounts to give them a start in the business. Friends had warned him not to take a cut of the net profit in their first contract when most managers took a percentage of the gross. The album had sold well, but on tour they’d run up huge bills—having parties, chartering private jets—and at the end of the day fifteen percent of no profit whatsoever and creditors knocking at the door meant he’d had to declare himself bankrupt. It hadn’t been any comfort at all to know he’d walked into a trap of his own making because he made the mistake of trusting people he’d got close to.
He’d thought Helena’s coolness, her distance, had been because she’d been worried about money. Heck, he’d been terrified himself. He’d known how expensive it was to take a rock band to court. But what else could he have done? He couldn’t have let one bunch of freeloaders ruin his career and reputation, could he?
All at once the love and care she’d demanded from him for the previous four years had been deemed suffocating, and without the nice lifestyle there hadn’t been much incentive to stick around. Helena had declared she needed space, that it was time to stand on her own two feet. You name the cliché and she’d flung it at him.
Of course that hadn’t lasted more than two minutes. She’d soon found herself a rich TV executive to pander to her needs and the whole cycle had started all over again. Oh, she’d sniffed around again when he’d won his court case and rebuilt his company, but he hadn’t even returned her calls. If she couldn’t stand by him through the tough times—through living in a bedsit and eating beans on toast for months, through losing all his so-called friends and business associates—then she didn’t deserve even a minute of his attention. He’d surprised himself at his own hardness.
And it gave him a grim sense of satisfaction to know she’d burned her bridges too soon. Half a ton of debts was all she’d been entitled to in the divorce proceedings. If she’d waited a couple of years before she’d bailed she would have done a lot better for herself.
Light drizzle peppered the windscreen. He watched it build into a pattern of dots. A flick of a switch round the steering wheel created a blank canvas where a new and completely different design was free to form.
He turned off the main road into a narrow country lane and determined to concentrate on the road in front of him. The Aston Martin was heaven to drive. Normally he didn’t have time to sit back and enjoy it, always hurrying from A to B, always focusing on the destination instead of the journey. Ellie’s presence as his passenger made him want to savour the experience.
The trip to the supermarket had been fun, in a way. Spending time with her on neutral territory had been different. She’d relaxed a little. He felt strangely comfortable pushing the trolley along behind her as she’d browsed the aisles, squeezing avocados and reading the backs of packets. Of course he’d had no idea what she was doing half the time, or what she’d make with the assortment of ingredients she’d flung in the trolley, but the fact she knew gave her an air of wisdom.
The raindrops on the windscreen got fatter and rounder. They were going to have to get a move on if they were going to get home before it tipped down. The purr of the engine seduced him into going faster. He was pretty confident in his driving skills and was starting to become familiar with these lanes, anticipating the sweep and curve of the overgrown hedgerows as they got closer to Larkford. He glanced at Ellie. She was staring straight ahead, a grim look on her face.
He swung round a corner into a flat, fairly straight stretch of road and picked up speed. He loved the growl of satisfaction as the engine worked harder. It responded with eagerness to every nudge on the accelerator.
The sky darkened and the wild hedgerows whipped past, clawing at the car as if they were jealous. Inside the low-slung sports car the air was full of static. He could almost feel the crackles arcing from Ellie’s thigh as he changed gear, his knuckles threatening to stroke the warm denim of her jeans.
A pheasant burst from the hedge in a flurry of feathers. He heard Ellie’s sharp intake of breath, and out of the corner of his eye saw her grip the edge of her seat. After he’d braked slightly, he turned his head fully towards her, meaning to reassure her.
‘Mark …’ The trembling plea hardly escaped her lips.
‘It’s okay. We weren’t going to—’
‘Mark … please …!’
The urgency in her voice panicked him. Her face was frozen in stark horror. He looked back down the lane and his stomach lurched as he saw the farm vehicle pulling out of a concealed entrance. He squeezed the brake harder, slowing to a smooth crawl, and allowed the rust-speckled tractor to rumble past them. He pulled away and silently congratulated himself on not even leaving a skid mark on the tarmac.
‘Stop the car.’ Her voice was faint, but determined.
‘But we’re almost home.’
Her voice came in breathy gasps. ‘I said … stop the car … I want to get out.’
Mark’s