Their Christmas Family Miracle

What harm? She felt rising panic just thinking about it. ‘I couldn’t—’

‘Don’t be daft. Where else are you going to go? Besides, with the weather so cold it’ll be much better for the house to have the heating on full and the fire lit. He’ll be grateful when he finds out, and besides, Jake’s generous to a fault. He’d want you to have it. Truly.’

Amelia hesitated. Kate seemed so convinced he wouldn’t mind. ‘You’d better ring him, then,’ she said in the end. ‘But tell him I’ll give him money for rent just as soon as I can—’

Kate shook her head. ‘No. I can’t. I don’t have the number, but I know he’d say yes,’ she said, and Amelia’s heart sank.

‘Well, then, we can’t stay there. Not without asking—’

‘Millie, really. It’ll be all right. He’d die before he’d let you be homeless over Christmas and there’s no way he’d take money off you. Believe me, he’d want you to have the house.’

Still she hesitated, searching Kate’s face for any sign of uncertainty, but if she felt any, Kate was keeping it to herself, and besides, Amelia was so out of options she couldn’t afford the luxury of scruples, and in the end she gave in.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely. There won’t be any food there, his housekeeper will have emptied the fridge, but I’ve got some basics I can let you have and bread and stuff, and there’s bound to be something in the freezer and the cupboards to tide you over until you can replace it. We’ll go over there the minute we’ve had lunch and settle you in. It’ll be great—fantastic! You’ll love it.’

‘Love what?’ Kitty asked, sidling up with chocolate all round her mouth and a doubtful expression on her face.

‘My boss’s house. He’s gone away, and he’s going to let you borrow it.’

‘Let?’ Millie said softly under her breath, but Kate just flashed her a smile and shrugged.

‘Well, he would if he knew…OK, lunch first, and then let’s go!’

It was, as Kate had said, the most fabulous house.

A beautiful old Tudor manor house, it had been in its time a farm and then a small hotel and country club, she explained, and then Jake had bought it and moved his offices out here into the Berkshire countryside. He lived in the house, and there was an office suite housing Jake’s centre of operations in the former country club buildings on the far side of the old walled kitchen garden. There was a swimming pool, a sauna and steam room and a squash court over there, Kate told her as they pulled up outside on the broad gravel sweep, and all the facilities were available to the staff and their families.

Further evidence of his apparent generosity.

But it was the house which drew Amelia—old mellow red brick, with a beautiful Dutch gabled porch set in the centre, and as Kate opened the huge, heavy oak door that bore the scars of countless generations and ushered them into the great entrance hall, even the children fell silent.

‘Wow,’ Edward said after a long, breathless moment.

Wow, indeed. Amelia stared around her, dumbstruck. There was a beautiful, ancient oak staircase on her left, and across the wide hall which ran from side to side were several lovely old doors which must lead to the principal rooms.

She ran her hand over the top of the newel post, once heavily carved, the carving now almost worn away by the passage of generations of hands. She could feel them all, stretching back four hundred years, the young, the old, the children who’d been born and grown old and died here, sheltered and protected by this beautiful, magnificent old house, and ridiculous though it was, as the front door closed behind them, she felt as if the house was gathering them up into its heart.

‘Come on, I’ll give you a quick tour,’ Kate said, going down the corridor to the left, and they all trooped after her, the children still in a state of awe. The carpet under her feet must be a good inch thick, she thought numbly. Just how rich was this guy?

As Kate opened the door in front of her and they went into a vast and beautifully furnished sitting room with a huge bay window at the side overlooking what must surely be acres of parkland, she got her answer, and she felt her jaw drop.

Very rich. Fabulously, spectacularly rich, without a shadow of a doubt.

And yet he was gone, abandoning this beautiful house in which he lived alone to spend Christmas on a ski slope.

She felt tears prick her eyes, strangely sorry for a man she’d never met, who’d furnished his house with such love and attention to detail, and yet didn’t apparently want to stay in it at the time of year when it must surely be at its most welcoming.

‘Why?’ she asked, turning to Kate in confusion. ‘Why does he go?’

Kate shrugged. ‘Nobody really knows. Or nobody talks about it. There aren’t very many people who’ve worked for him that long. I’ve been his PA for a little over three years, since he moved the business here from London, and he doesn’t talk about himself.’

‘How sad.’

‘Sad? No. Not Jake. He’s not sad. He’s crazy, he has some pretty wacky ideas and they nearly always work, and he’s an amazingly thoughtful boss, but he’s intensely private. Nobody knows anything about him, really, although he always makes a point of asking about Megan, for instance. But I don’t think he’s sad. I think he’s just a loner and he likes to ski. Come and see the rest.’

They went back down the hall, along the squishy pile carpet that absorbed all the sound of their feet, past all the lovely old doors while Kate opened them one by one and showed them the rooms in turn.

A dining room with a huge table and oakpanelled walls; another sitting room, much smaller than the first, with a plasma TV in the corner, book-lined walls, battered leather sofas and all the evidence that this was his very personal retreat. There was a study at the front of the house which they didn’t enter; and then finally the room Kate called the breakfast room—huge again, but with the same informality as the little sitting room, with foot-wide oak boards on the floor and a great big old refectory table covered in the scars of generations and just made for family living.

And the kitchen off it was, as she might have expected, also designed for a family—or entertaining on an epic scale. Vast, with duck-egg blue painted cabinets under thick, oiled wood worktops, a gleaming white four-oven Aga in the inglenook, and in the middle a granite-topped island with stools pulled up to it. It was a kitchen to die for, the kitchen of her dreams and fantasies, and it took her breath away. It took all their breaths away.

The children stared round it in stunned silence, Edward motionless, Kitty running her fingers reverently over the highly polished black granite, lingering over the tiny gold sparkles trapped deep inside the stone. Edward was the first to recover.

‘Are we really going to stay here?’ he asked, finally finding his voice, and she shook her head in disbelief.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Of course you are!’

‘Kate, we can’t—’

‘Rubbish! Of course you can. It’s only for a week or two. Come and see the bedrooms.’

Amelia shifted Thomas to her other hip and followed Kate up the gently creaking stairs, the children trailing awestruck in her wake, listening to Megan chattering about when they’d stayed there earlier in the year.

‘That’s Jake’s room,’ Kate said, turning away from it, and Amelia felt a prickle of curiosity. What would his room be like? Opulent? Austere? Monastic?

No, not monastic. This man was a sensualist, she realised, fingering the curtains in the bedroom Kate led them into. Pure silk, lined with padding for warmth and that feeling of luxury that pervaded the entire house. Definitely not monastic.

‘All the rooms are like this—except for some in the attic, which are a bit simpler,’ Kate told her. ‘You could take your pick but I’d have the ones upstairs. They’re nicer.’

‘How many are there?’ she asked, amazed.

‘Ten. Seven en suite, five on this floor and two above, and three more in the attic which share a bathroom. Those are the simpler ones. He entertains business clients here quite often, and they love it. So many people have offered to buy it, but he just laughs and says no.’

‘I should think so. Oh, Kate—what if we ruin something?’

‘You won’t ruin it. The last person to stay here knocked a pot of coffee over on the bedroom carpet. He just had it cleaned.’

Millie didn’t bother to point out that the last person to stay here had been invited—not to mention an adult who presumably was either a friend or of some commercial interest to their unknowing host.

‘Can we see the attic? The simple rooms? It sounds more like our thing.’

‘Sure. Megan, why don’t you show Kitty and Edward your favourite room?’

The children ran upstairs after Megan, freed from their trance now and getting excited as the reality of it began to sink in, and she turned to Kate and took her arm. ‘Kate, we can’t possibly stay here without asking him,’ she said urgently, her voice low. ‘It would be so rude—and I just know something’ll get damaged.’