'Well, you soon will be if you carry on knocking it back like that.'
'Da-da!' squealed Ellie, and tugged at a stray lock of dark hair.
'Ouch!' he protested, unlocking the plump little fingers from their vice-like grip. 'And I'm not your daddy, kitten!'
'It's just a thing they say,' said Jennie, coming into the room and holding her arms wide open to her daughter. 'Just a sound they make-it doesn't mean anything!' She held her nose closer to Ellie's posterior. 'Think I might have to go and freshen this child up! Help yourself to wine and sandwiches, Drew!' She spotted the empty bottle and grinned over her shoulder as she carried Ellie out. 'Open some more, if you like!'
'No, thanks,' he drawled. 'I've got things to do.'
'Like spinning another elaborate pretence, I suppose?' questioned Shelley maliciously. 'Like making out you're still a simple jobbing carpenter when you've obviously joined the ranks of the super-rich?'
'I'm not quite in that league yet,' he offered drily. 'I meant like getting your electricity and water connected, actually. Jennie said that you're going to have to wait until the end of the week.'
'That's what they said.' She glared at him suspiciously. 'And I don't see how you're going to change their minds when they told me most definitely that it was non-negotiable.'
'Well, why don't I give it a go?' he queried calmly. 'Come on-let's walk next door and we can tell them what it says on the meters.'
'But I haven't got a phone connected next door,' she said in an irritated voice. In fact she felt very irritated indeed-surely far more than was reasonable? 'Remember?'
'Well, it's your lucky day, Shelley-because I've got one right here.'
With a lazy smile he inched his hand slowly down from the waistband of his jeans and Shelley's eyes widened with horrified anticipation as she wondered just what he was going to do next.
Until she suddenly realised that he was sliding his fingers deep down into the front pocket of his jeans to extract a slim mobile phone.
He held it up like a trophy. 'See?' He plucked the wine glass from her hand and deposited it on the table. 'Leave that. You don't need any more.'
Infuriatingly, he was right. Not only didn't she need any more-she didn't want any more, either. In fact, she was beginning to feel quite sick.
Determined not to betray even the slightest wooziness, Shelley rose to her feet, as upright as a toy soldier.
'Shelley and I are just going next door!' he called upstairs to Jennie.
Outside, the sky was a clear bright blue, the air all crisp and fresh-while the sun gilded the small suburban houses into doll's-house palaces. Once they used to have the run of each other's houses-and Shelley found it achingly evocative as she remembered how their twin lives used to merge into one.
'Key!' He held his hand out like a surgeon and Shelley found herself obediently handing it over, and he unlocked the house.
He held the door open for her, and she had to pass with breathtaking closeness to him. She found that she couldn't look him in the face. The house screamed out its silence, and its emptiness made Shelley gulpingly aware that they were all alone …
She dared to raise her eyes at last, to discover that he wasn't watching her at all, but was already poking around in the hall cupboard to find the meter and was punching out numbers on his mobile phone.
She listened with fascination, disbelief and finally incredulity as Drew managed to get himself put through to people further and further up the system-first at the Water Board and then at the Electricity Board. And when he'd finished he slid the phone back into his jeans and grinned.
'Sorted! They'll be here by the end of the afternoon.'
Shelley was aware of a great, gaping hole of insecurity which made her pathetically ungrateful for his help. So that instead of thanking him she found herself sniping, 'You think you're so clever, don't you?'
He shrugged, half modestly. 'Well, you don't have to be clever to beat the system, Shelley-just have persistence and confidence with a little gift of the gab thrown in for good measure.'
'And you've certainly got those three in abundance, haven't you?' she snapped, trailing into the sitting room, her heart beating even faster when she heard his footsteps behind her. 'You'd have to be amazingly confident to go to the trouble of telling your staff to pretend that you didn't own the Westward! And you must have told Jennie to join in with all the subterfuge, too-'
'She didn't want to,' he confessed. 'But I made her promise.'
She narrowed her eyes at him. 'And what prompted all this intrigue, I wonder, Drew? Not modesty, surely?'
He leaned negligently against a piano which had not been played for years. 'Not modesty, no. Just a desire to see whether you'd changed.'
'Whilst maintaining the pretence that you hadn't?'
'To be honest, I rather enjoyed being patronised by you, Shelley-it made a refreshing change. Women can be so obvious once they know you have money.'
Now why did it feel as though he was twisting the knife when he said something like that? Something told her that she was walking straight into a trap, but the wine had made her reckless. 'How obvious?' she asked. 'A throwing-their-knickers-at-you sort of obvious?'
She saw the fractional darkening of his eyes, the crooked grin which made him look like a roguish kind of pirate, and again felt the dull ache of regret.
'Mmm,' he purred. 'Unfortunately that hasn't happened yet.' He lifted his eyebrows in a kind of mocking question. 'Of course, I live in hope, Shelley.'
His murmured words tugged at her with stealthy sorcery, and desire unfurled inside her like a bud in spring. She folded her arms across her chest, which didn't really help at all. It was supposed to be a gesture of self-protection and defiance, but all it succeeded in doing was making her painfully aware of the tingling fullness of her breasts.
She thought about Marco's gallery in Milan-the must-see place of the fashionable city. So what interested little question would she ask a man in whom she had no emotional interest? She would curve her lips into a polite half-smile. She did so. 'And how did you manage to acquire the Westward in the first place, Drew? Did your Premium Bonds come up, or something?'
'There's that superior little voice again,' he mocked. 'How it does a man good to eat a little humble pie now and again-particularly when it comes from such a delectable source!'
'No, seriously. I'm interested.'
'Oh, well, if you're interested … ' His mouth curved into a lazy smile. 'Who told you, by the way?'
'Told me what?' she enquired innocently.
'So you've learnt to play the tease?' He gave a half-smile of rueful acknowledgement. 'That I owned the Westward?'
Shelley kept her promise to the blonde. 'Oh, come off it-how long did you honestly think you could keep something like that a secret for? I was bound to find out sooner rather than later!'
'Which neatly answers the question, while not answering the question at all,' he mused. 'Very loyal of you, Shelley. Funny, that; I didn't think that loyalty was a quality you rated very highly.'
'I asked you a question which you were in the process of answering,' she pointed out testily. 'If you could just put your character assassination of me on hold!'
Still half sitting on the piano, he stretched his legs out in front of him, completely distracting her, in spite of her determination to remain unmoved. It would take a woman of steel not to be affected by that endless dazzle of faded denim, stretched tautly over his thighs.
The slight smile which hovered around his lips indicated that her ogling hadn't gone unnoticed. 'You want to know how I made my money?' he mused. 'There's no secret. Just plain hard work with an added bit of luck-the usual way.'
'You make it sound so easy?'
'No, not easy. Simple, yes-but not easy.' He smiled. 'It may surprise you to know that all the day-release and night-school classes which took me away from you so much finally paid off. I realised that people paid a hell of a lot more for having their houses designed rather than for having them built. And the thing that set me apart from my competitors was that I could do both.'
Her eyes dilated. 'You mean you actually design houses now?'
'Well, I can. I have done. Sometimes I still do. But I do other things, too.'
'Such as?'
He suddenly looked rather pleased with himself. 'I call it reinvention. It started when I bought a repossession on a mortgage. Got the house dirt-cheap and I thought I'd just do it up and sell it on. But it occupied a vast plot of land-so I applied for planning permission and built another house at the bottom end of the garden. The challenge was in making both houses look wonderful and complete and not as though someone had just lopped the garden in half-'