For His Eyes Only(16)

                Now the word on the street was that she’d lost it. She was on her own with nothing to offer except her wits, her knowledge of the market and the kind of motivation that would move mountains if she could persuade Darius Hadley to give her a chance.

                She was going to have to face him: this man who’d turned her into a blushing, jelly-boned cliché with no more than a look.

                In the normal course of events it wouldn’t have been more than a momentary wobble. It had been made clear to her by the estate’s executor that the vendor wanted nothing to do with the actual sale of his house and if he’d let her just get on with it she would never have seen him again. Apparently her luck had hit the deck on all fronts that morning.

                At the time she hadn’t given the reason why Darius Hadley was keeping his distance any thought—it had taken all her concentration not to melt into a puddle at his feet—but the more she’d thought about him, the more she understood how it must hurt to be the Hadley to let the house go. To lose four centuries of his family history.

                If there was no cash to go with the property, he would have no choice—death meant taxes—but it was easy to see why he’d been furious with them, with her, for messing up and forcing him to confront the situation head-on. Maybe, though, now he’d had time to calm down, he’d be glad of someone offering to help.

                Selling a country estate was an expensive business. Printing, advertising, travel, and she doubted that, in these cash-strapped days, he’d be inundated with estate agents eager to invest in a house that had been publicly declared a money pit.

                Hopefully she’d be all he’d got. And he, collywobbles notwithstanding, was almost certainly her only hope.

                Fortunately she had all the details of Hadley Chase on her laptop.

                What she didn’t have were the contact details for Darius Hadley.

                She’d had no success when she’d searched Hadley Chase on Google hoping for some family gossip to get the property page editors salivating. She assumed it would have thrown up anything newsworthy about Darius Hadley, but she typed his name into the search engine anyway.

                A whole load of links came up, including images, and she clicked on the only one of him. It had been taken, ironically, from one of those high society functions featured in the Country Chronicle and the caption read: ‘Award-winning sculptor Darius Hadley at the Serpentine Gallery...’

                He was a sculptor? Well, that would explain the steel toecaps, the grey smears on his jeans. That earthy scent had been clay...

                His tie was loose, his collar open and he’d been caught unawares, laughing at something or someone out of the picture and she was right. A smile was all it took to lift the shadows. He still had the look of the devil, but one who was having a good day, and she reached out and touched the screen, her fingertips against his mouth.

                ‘Oh...’ she breathed. ‘Collywollydoodah...’





                                      THREE

                The narrow cobbled backstreet was a jumble of buildings that had been endlessly converted and added to over the centuries. All Tash had was the street name, but she had been confident that a prize-winning sculptor’s studio would be easy enough to find.

                She was wrong.

                She’d reached a dead end and found no sign, no indication that art of any kind happened behind any of the doors but as she turned she found herself face-to-face with a woman who was regarding her through narrowed eyes.