Rags To Riches: His Wish, Her Command: The Last Summer of Being Single / An Enticing Debt to Pay / A Navy SEAL's Surprise Baby

Ella kissed the top of Dan’s head, her hands on his shoulders, but the smile had faded from her mouth. ‘Don’t you remember what Aunty Nicole said? This is Seb’s work. He lives in Australia and that is a long way from here. Now. Time to check on Milou and get ready for school. Okay?’

Dan nodded furiously while sliding off his chair, a pancake clutched in one hand, but stopped to pat Seb on the arm.

‘Can I send you a mailey message on the

‘puter? Please? Can I?’

‘Sure,’ Seb replied, between mouthfuls, and then shot a glance towards Ella. ‘If it’s okay with your mum.’

Ella looked from Seb to Dan, then grinned. ‘Maybe later.’

Ella sat down opposite Seb as soon as Dan had skipped up the staircase and exhaled loudly before she poured two cups of fragrant coffee.

‘I am so sorry about that,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Dan seems to love anything to do with computers and technology. I have no idea where he gets that from.’

Then she looked up at him with a faint smile. ‘I am sorry that you have to leave so soon. I know Nicole will be very disappointed to have missed you. She was so looking forward to having you here.’

Seb took a long sip of the delicious coffee, and savoured the aroma and flavour with a satisfied sigh.

‘As am I, but I do have a question. You are clearly an excellent cook, Ella, but you are also a busy mum. I’m surprised that Nicole asked you to organise her birthday party. That’s a lot of work for one person.’

Seb reached into a pocket and pulled out his personal organiser. ‘If it helps, I could make amends for my absence by arranging for an events management company to take care of the party. I would be happy to do it.’

Ella replied with several quick shakes of the head.

‘Thank you, but no, Seb. Nicole didn’t ask me to organise her birthday. I volunteered. I asked her to give me the chance to do it.’

Just as Ella was about to tell him the long list of reasons there was a sharp knock on the kitchen door and a small dark-haired older woman with bow knees sauntered in, nodded at Seb, deposited a basket of what looked like apricots on the kitchen floor, then kissed Ella on each cheek before heading back to the breakfast table.

Ella’s friend was wearing blue dungarees and old boots set off with a jaunty wool scarf. She leant against the sink and slurped down the coffee as Ella dived into the box.

‘Oh, these are fantastic!’ Ella squealed in perfect French with enough of the local accent that Seb could not help but be impressed. Unless you had been born and raised in this area, most people did not notice the subtle differences between the dialects in the different towns of the Languedoc. But Ella seemed to have picked it up perfectly.

Then she looked up and remembered that Seb had no clue as to who their visitor was.

‘Oh, sorry. Introductions. Yvette. Do you remember the Castellano family who used to live here? This is Sebastien Castellano visiting from Sydney.’

‘Of course I remember,’ Yvette replied and nodded once. ‘You’re Helene’s son. Used to play football with my boys after school when we had the farm.’ She scanned his business clothing for a few seconds before adding, ‘I heard that you’ve done well for yourself.’ Then she slurped down what was left of the coffee, grabbed another pancake and waved one hand in the air with a friendly goodbye and was gone before Seb had a chance to reply.

‘What was that all about?’ Seb asked in a dazed voice.

‘Actually that was quite a speech for Yvette,’ Ella replied. ‘The forecast is for a mistral storm over the weekend and I need to bring in the cherries today or risk losing them.’

She stopped rummaging around inside the basket and glanced back towards the kitchen door before whispering in English, ‘Yvette is a wonderful babysitter and totally brilliant with the garden, but I am a bit worried that she’ll try to help me out from the top of a wobbly ladder in the orchard, so, would you mind doing me a huge favour?’

Ella licked her lips a couple of times. ‘Could you keep Yvette talking and away from ladders until I get back from the school run? I don’t want any accidents, but I promise that I won’t be long and you can get on your way the minute I get back.’

Then she gave him a lopsided grin. ‘I was forgetting! This is your chance to catch up with all of the gossip. Won’t that be the best fun?’

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_1119fe42-284e-599f-8164-c850719d8573)

BEING interrogated by Yvette for almost an hour about every detail of where he had been, what he had studied, what he had done and where he had travelled in the past eighteen years had not been what Seb called fun.

And she had made him work. By the time Ella wheeled her bicycle around the corner of the house, he had emptied three wheelbarrows of plant clippings, heard potted histories of most of his old schoolmates and made rash promises to welcome assorted members of Yvette’s extended family to Sydney.

So he was more than happy to hand over the reins to Ella, who vanished into the kitchen with Yvette the minute she got back, leaving him trapped outside on the patio.

At last! It was finally time to get packed and on his way back to the business world he understood.

So he had to find a way into the house that did not involve going through the kitchen. The fastest way would be to sneak in through the sitting room and what had been his mother’s salon.

Sebastien glanced through the open patio windows of the long wide room and stopped dead in his tracks—his feet frozen to the floor.

Hanging above the heavy stone mantelpiece of the original fireplace was a photograph he had never seen in his life. Of his mother.

Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, startling him with their intensity, after the shock of seeing her picture, life size, smiling back at him.

Hardly believing his eyes, he clenched his toes hard inside his made-to-measure shoes and breathed out slowly through his nose before taking a step across the threshold onto the marble tiles.

Only the fireplace was familiar in this strange mix of a room that had originally been two rooms—the formal parlour and the salon. The dividing wall was gone and the long sitting-room windows had been replaced by wide glass doors that opened out into the garden and allowed light to flood into what had been a rather dark space.

That light seemed focused like a spotlight on his mother’s image. She must have been in her twenties when the photograph was taken and the photographer had captured her in a moment when every aspect of her beauty and grace were at their height.

She looked stunning. More like a film actress or professional fashion model than the woman who had kissed him goodnight and made his favourite chocolate cake every Friday—just because she felt like it.

How had he forgotten how very beautiful she had been?

Her sparkling hazel-green and amber eyes shone out from the flat surface behind the glass, as bright as her perfect smile that could light up any room in seconds. Even now this simple colour photograph dominated the room.

She was wearing a pale pink dress with the slight shimmer of silk in the ruffles on the collar, and a single string of pearls he knew that his father still kept in a wooden box in his bedroom that Seb was not supposed to know about.

On one shoulder was a corsage of white and pale pink rosebuds chosen to match the exact same shade as her dress and she had raised her left hand towards it. She was wearing a ring with a large heart-shaped diamond-cut pink stone on the fourth finger—but it was not a ring he recognised.

Intrigued and fascinated by the maelstrom of emotions whirling around inside him, Seb moved closer to the fireplace until he was within touching distance of what was obviously an amateur photograph.

One thing was clear. She was looking straight into the lens of the camera and at the person taking the photograph with a look in her eyes that was absolutely unmistakable. It was the look of love. Because if Helene Castellano had a flaw, this was it.

She was incapable of hiding her true feelings—about anything.

She might have told him that the garden frog he had presented her with when he was seven was the best she had ever seen, but he had only had to look at her face to know the truth. And she had released the poor frog back into the river by morning.

He had loved her so very much. When she was taken ill, he had felt so powerless to do anything to help her that her last weeks were a whirlwind of kind words and fierce anger and frustration, which he took out on everyone and everything around him.

In life she had taught him about respect and hard work. Her death had taught him what it felt like to love someone so much and then have that love snatched away from you.

Her heart had been an open book.

His heart was locked tight closed and was going to stay that way. Other men might be foolish enough to risk falling in love and start a family. Not for him.