The privacy panel was up and, grateful for it, Magenta wasted no time in ringing her great-aunt’s cell phone. It was Theo who answered, just as she’d hoped he would.
‘Hello, darling.’ She was missing him dreadfully and told him so, without revealing just how much. His childhood was to be enjoyed, not dogged by adult worries and problems as her own had been. ‘You’ll never believe the car Mummy’s sitting in,’ she enthused brightly and, knowing his passion for anything with wheels, went on to tell him all about it.
‘Be careful, my girl,’ Aunt Josie warned when she took over the conversation and Magenta told her that she was going to be working at her new boss’s home for the next few days. ‘I know you said you knew him years ago, but—well...he’s still a man...and a very good-looking and eligible one from what you’ve told me about him.’
‘You don’t have to worry about me, Aunt Josie,’ Magenta assured her, in a way in which she couldn’t reassure herself. She could visualise her mother’s aunt, her iron-grey hair slightly ruffled, wearing her ‘Home is where the Hearth is’ apron, which Magenta had bought last Christmas and which she was never without, even when she went to visit her step-daughter. ‘You’ve done enough of that over the past five years. Besides, I’m perfectly able to take care of myself nowadays.’
‘I still worry,’ her great-aunt replied. ‘Especially when my favourite girl is involved with a man who’s rich and no doubt charming enough to get anything he wants.’
Warmed by her motherly concern, Magenta laughed—although a crease was deepening between her eyes. She’d told Aunt Josie about knowing Andreas before when she’d informed her that she had got the job. She had been too fazed, however, by those almost debilitating snatches of memory and the equally weakening battle to try and make sense of images and fragments of conversation that still continued to elude her to tell her anything else. Nor was she prepared yet, with one of his staff within earshot—even if he might not be able to hear her through the transparent screen and above his softly playing radio—to let anyone who didn’t have to know in on the fact that she and Andreas had been lovers. She didn’t want to risk anyone sharing in her humiliation when he cast her off, as she knew he would sooner or later, whether he’d settled the score he felt he had to settle or not.
* * *
The suite of rooms she was shown into when she arrived at Andreas’s mansion was, like the rest of the place, luxuriously furnished, with deep-piled Turkish rugs, designer fabrics gracing the expansive bed and long, multi-paned windows. The bathroom, with its pale, exquisitely tiled floor and matching walls, displayed a huge, free-standing bathtub and a gleaming white suite in Italian marble that promised to pamper her with the highest level of indulgence.
The bedroom had three deep windowsills where she could sit and look out onto the grounds and acres of sprawling countryside beyond. The air coming in through the window where Magenta had paused to take in the view was heavy with the scent of a climbing red rose, overlaid with the occasional hint of wild honeysuckle.
She could have sat there all day, but she knew she couldn’t linger long and went down to the study. Andreas wasn’t back yet, so she went through to the smaller office and immersed herself in her work, tidying up files and handling any correspondence she could deal with in his absence.
She was just winding up a conversation with a local councillor who was clarifying a question about building regulations within the site of a new hotel when Andreas walked in.
‘How long have you been here? Since three this morning?’
He looked genuinely impressed as he came over and flipped through the tray of letters and copy e-mails she had printed off for posting or filing, his gaze taking in the pile of orderly files that were ready to be put away. It gave her a ridiculously warm glow inside.
‘Just doing my job,’ she murmured, swivelling round on her chair and whipping another page of perfectly typed, perfectly worded text out of the printing tray, trying not to let her pleasure show.
‘In that case I think you’ve done enough for one morning. It’s twenty-seven degrees out there and it’s nearly lunchtime. Time, I think, to fit in a pre-lunch swim.’
‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather finish this e-mail,’ Magenta answered, trying to ignore her body’s response to Andreas in his short-sleeved white shirt, tie and light grey hip-hugging trousers, even though she knew she was fighting a losing battle. His scent alone—a heady blend of pine coupled with warm, masculine skin—was working on her senses and making her far too aware of herself. And of him.