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

They said that bad things came in threes. Well, her Friday was certainly turning out to be a lot more challenging than she had expected. First was the news about the mistral. A summer storm was the last thing this garden needed a few days before a garden party. And it could last for days!

As for the second? It was obvious to her now that Sebastien Castellano never had any intention of staying around long enough to attend Nicole’s birthday party. And that was just cruel.

How could he do that? How could he promise to be here then change his mind?

She simply did not understand that at all. He had travelled halfway around the world for a business trip, only to take off again without seeing Nicole!

How could he be so selfish? Surely he could put Nicole’s needs in front of his own for once? And what was so urgent back in Sydney that he could not stay for a few more days?

And then there was the killer. The thick letter stuffed into her trouser pocket that had been waiting for her when she got back from the school run.

The very sight of the Spanish stamps made her heart sink into her deck shoes.

To a six-year-old, Barcelona might just as well have been next to India and not just a few hours’ drive away. Not that Christobal’s parents came to see them very often. They hated staying at Sandrine’s clean but simple hotel and made repeated comparisons with their luxury villa complete with indoor heated swimming pool and every possible item of the latest technology.

They truly could not tolerate the fact that their grandson was being brought up in a tiny French village while their daughter-in-law worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy woman.

She did not even drive any more.

7Christmas had been a nightmare. As soon as Dan had gone to bed they had bombarded her with their elaborate plans for his education—all the time making her feel like a completely selfish mother by not providing personal tutors and modern computer games and the like so that Dan would not feel left out at the expensive private schools he would soon be attending.

Yeah. Boarding schools. Right. Like she was going to let that happen! Except of course by selfishly keeping Dan here with her she was ruining his chance of a good education and a career. Guilt. Guilt. Guilt.

Ella groaned, then shrugged and sat down on the curved cover of an old trunk and opened the letter under the light beaming in through the dirty glass-covered skylight in the attic roof.

Then hot tears burned the corners of her eyes, blurring her vision.

Two return train tickets to Barcelona. First class. For Monday next week! Two days. She only had two days before she had to hand her baby boy over to his grandparents.

Oh, no. Of course she had known that they wanted to see Dan during his summer school holidays, but the first week! The Martinez family took their holiday in August, not July! And Dan had been so looking forward to Nicole’s party. If she used these tickets, she would be forced to leave him there on his own while she scurried back here to work every hour she could to create this very special birthday party for Nicole.

So what if she had been putting on a brave face in front of Sebastien Castellano? He didn’t have to know that she was secretly panicking. Swan on the water did not come close.

No. She would simply reschedule the dates and… Ella scan-read the letter that came with the tickets. His grandparents had already booked more tickets for a whole programme of special trips and wonderful treats for Dan, which she knew that he would adore.

The energy and the fight drained out of her.

She couldn’t reschedule the trip without throwing all of those plans away.

They were Christobal’s parents! Of course they wanted to see Dan and give him a wonderful time. Dan was all they had left of their son. Chris would have wanted this. Of course, Chris would also have liked them to welcome her as well. But that was a lot more difficult.

Her fingers clenched around the paper. What choice did she have? They knew that she did not have the money to give Dan the things they could. Playing the piano at Sandrine’s at the weekends was not going to be enough to even buy a new computer. She was lucky to have Sandrine’s old machine so that she could keep in touch with her own parents and they were in no position to help her financially.

In their eyes she had made a total mess of her life. A wandering musician without a stable home. She had no investments or resources to provide her son with the type of education that his father had enjoyed. She had never even been to university!

The beam of sunshine focused through the skylight on her hand and she watched tiny motes of dust float in and out of the narrow cone of intense light. Dust particles going where the breeze took them. Without direction.

Then the sound of a dog barking echoed up from the garden and the old house creaked around her. Solid and reassuring.

‘Stupid girl,’ she said out loud, wiped her eyes with a not-so-clean finger and sniffed loudly. She was not without direction or friends. ‘Let’s get this show on the road. Things to do and people to see.’

‘Do you have a saying for everything, Mrs Martinez?’ a man’s voice asked, and Ella practically jumped off the trunk in shock.

Seb watched Ella stuff a letter into her trouser pocket. He had seen enough for him to know that something had upset her very badly.

‘I’m sorry if I startled you,’ he added, then glanced around the attic room and blinked several times as his eyes became more accustomed to the dim light in that part of the attic. ‘Although I am surprised that you can see anything at all.’

He turned sideways and stumbled over a box of tools as he reached for the light switch but Ella was already on her feet and faster, and as their hands connected his mind and senses were filled with the image of the girl with her hair down he had seen in the garden that morning. The girl whose touch made the hairs on the back of his arm prickle to attention.

A hard fluorescent strip light crackled into life above his head creating hard shadows and dark corners. Ella instantly snatched her hand away as though she had been stung, but her pale blue eyes were still locked onto his. In this light the planes of her face were in hard contrast to her plump, soft-looking skin.

He was the first one to break eye contact and glance around the long narrow room where he had spent many happy hours exploring as a child.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Well, this is going to be rather more of a challenge than I expected. It never used to be this messy.’

Ella found her voice. ‘The roof was repaired last autumn. And then the designer needed somewhere to store all the bits and pieces he moved from downstairs. There are several families of mice living in the barn, and…’

She left the end of that sentence unsaid with a simple tilt of her head and Seb picked up on it. ‘Everything ended up in here instead. Got it.’

Ella pointed to a large wooden crate with the name of a well-known champagne house on the side. ‘That was the box where I found your mum’s photo. There are a couple of photo albums in there mixed in with the other paperwork. It’s too heavy for me to lug down those narrow stairs. I know there are more, but they’ve been pushed right to the back by the furniture.’

‘Here. Let me pull them forward.’

‘Are you sure?’ Ella choked, flapping away the dust she was stirring up, which only seemed to make it worse. ‘It’s going to make a horrible mess on your clothes.’

Seb glanced down at his outfit and frowned. A designer-suit-and-bespoke-shoes combo was not perhaps the best choice for scrambling around in dirty attics, but seeing as he had not packed any casual clothes he didn’t have a lot of options.

And he was on a mission.

A few items of damaged clothing were a small price to pay to find some clues to his personal history.

‘I’ll live,’ he replied, trying to squeeze his way between unrecognisable lumps of old chairs and bookcases to reach the stack of boxes in the dark corner of the attic.

‘Oh, no,’ Ella exclaimed, reaching into the first box she had pulled forward. ‘The frame is cracked. What a shame. I’ve often wondered why you didn’t take these photos with you. I mean, if you didn’t want them any more, you could have given them away to the rest of your family instead of leaving them here for the mice.’

Seb took the photograph from her and pressed his fingers onto the glass for a moment.

‘When we left for Australia,’ he replied in a low voice, ‘I was allowed one suitcase and whatever I could carry in my rucksack. That was it.’

He tried to keep the hard reality of his dad’s decision out of his tone but failed.

‘I was twelve and leaving the only home I had ever known.’ He looked up from the photograph and shrugged like the Frenchman that he always would be in his heart. ‘I was far more worried about leaving my dogs and my pals behind to even think about the personal stuff, but…that was a long time ago.’

He carefully lowered the broken picture onto the pile of paperwork and photos and old birthday cards and goodness knew what else inside the wooden wine box.

‘I’m actually surprised that this much has survived all of the tenants who lived here over the years. They mustn’t have been very curious. Or there was nothing worth selling.’

When Ella didn’t answer immediately he turned back to find her looking at him with a confused expression on her face.