In the face of her stubborn vagueness, he had eventually dropped his questioning, and Amy had had no trouble in getting him to talk about himself. James enjoyed talking about himself and he was very good at it. He involved his listener. In fact, it was easy to forget that ninety per cent of the conversation, if you analysed it, was about him. What he did, the places he had been, the sights he had seen and of course what he thought about…well, just about everything. Reading between the lines hadn’t required too much effort. At the end of seven hours or so, Amy had had a pretty clear idea of what made James tick and it wasn’t a driving curiosity to discover what lay outside the confines of his own gilded life.#p#分页标题#e#
Rafael had been spot on when he had told her that she was out of James’s league, although she rather thought that they just didn’t share the same space at all.
Unlike she and Rafael…
Amy had perfected a technique when it came to thinking about Rafael. She avoided it by immediately thinking about something else. She was pretty sure it was beginning to work.
Now, she thought about how far she had come in the space of two months. Two long months during which she had paid attention to what her experiences had taught her and changed her life accordingly.
The first thing she had done was to quit working for James. Not because she didn’t want to see him. Quite frankly, she didn’t care much one way or the other. What she didn’t want was to be reminded of Rafael and James was a link to Rafael. She didn’t trust herself not to ask him, casually, in passing, how that gardener of his was doing. Her pride would never have recovered if she were to be tempted down that road because one thing she had realised pretty quickly was that she had meant nothing to Rafael. He had had no intention of pursuing their relationship. Amy told herself that the Atlantic Ocean was a pretty big obstacle anyway, and he had probably been astute enough to realise that from the word go, but in her heart she knew that he could have made a meaningless promise to keep in touch.
When she thought back to the way she had asked him about a future, she cringed in embarrassment.
She told herself that it should be easy to forget him because of the way he had casually dismissed her after the most wonderful few days of her life, but her heart struggled to listen to her head.
The radical change of lifestyle had helped, though.
Not only had she quit James’s company but she had gone back to college to specialise. She would never have Freddie’s pie-in-the-sky dreams about becoming a celebrity chef, but that didn’t mean that she should remain stuck in a groove, doing low-key catering for companies when she knew she could achieve more.
A healthy new start, she told herself.
Her mum was helping her out with the finances and she was filling the gaps by doing the occasional spot of catering for friends of friends of friends, people who were happy enough to allow her to try out some of her experimental dishes on them.
So she wasn’t too surprised when she got a call from a woman, to whom she had been recommended, asking whether she could do something on the weekend for her boss who was having a little private gathering at his house in London.
‘He’s not often over,’ she said, ‘and you’ll be paid well if you agree to the job.’ She named a figure that made Amy gasp.
‘Well…I suppose so…address?’
‘And the name…?’
‘Lee. Mr Lee.’
But not James, of course. He would have called himself had he wanted her services, which he had, once, since she had left to do her own thing, and professional discretion prohibited her from asking for more details.
She took the details, was pleased to be told that she could broadly cook what she wanted, and promptly forgot the coincidence of the name until, five days later, she was standing in front of an immensely expensive-looking Georgian town house. Claire, still working at James’s company, had offered to help her set up but Amy had refused. It was a tiny meal, just four people, something she could manage on her own with her eyes closed.
She didn’t like going to a new place on her own, but neither did she want Claire’s chatterbox company. She felt whacked.
She rang the doorbell and was inspecting her bags of goodies, doing a mental checklist to make sure nothing had been forgotten, when the door was answered. She didn’t look up. At least not immediately. She was too busy zipping up the cool bag that contained the cold ingredients that she would need for the pudding.#p#分页标题#e#
So the first things she saw were the shoes. Tan brogues. Very shiny. Very well made. Very expensive. In fact, very what you would expect to find standing on the doorstep of an immaculate Georgian house in one of the best post codes in London.