Saving Grace

The challenge had no sooner been offered than it was taken up, the smaller boy turning—luckily in the opposite direction to where Jordan still stood!—and running off towards the village.

Jordan watched as his brother deliberately gave him a good head start before giving chase.

Jordan was finally able to emerge from his hiding-place, well aware that in London his behaviour would have been looked upon with suspicion. Who would understand the explanation that he had been gazing upon a stolen childhood?

Was that really what he was looking for? Of course not, he chided himself. That time had gone and could never be given back to him.

As the two boys had gone by the time he looked in the direction they had run off to. Except for their footprints in the snow, the disturbed snow from their snowball fight, they might never have been here at all.

Except that seeing them had had an effect on Jordan that couldn't be dismissed as easily. That aching emptiness inside him was becoming so vast it was starting to control him rather than the other way around.

The last thing he felt like doing was going on with the business of visiting, and being charming to, the aged spinster Miss Grace Brown. She was sure to be a fluffy old dear who couldn't even begin to deal with a businessman of his calibre, and the idea of talking her into selling the ‘ancient pile’ that had probably been in her family for generations, so that he might make it into a leisure complex, somehow now left a nasty taste in his mouth. Most of the people who knew him—or thought they did—wouldn't recognise this emotion in him at all, would think he had gone soft. And maybe he had.

He gave one last wistful glance in the direction the two boys had taken, before turning on his heel and walking purposefully back towards his parked car, the mantle of Jordan Somerville-Smythe firmly back in place.

Or almost …

CHAPTER ONE (#u46d31959-7544-5884-8132-a04ce6692a48)

MISS GRACE BROWN, when she came in answer to the jingling bell that could be heard in the depths of the house after he had pulled the bell-rope outside, was exactly as Jordan had imagined her to be from the letters she had sent to his solicitors in reply to their correspondence concerning selling her home: small and delicate, with fluffy white hair caught back in an untidy bun at her nape, sparkling—but faded in colour—blue eyes in a face that had once been beautiful, the pink twin-set accompanied by the customary string of pearls about her throat, her skirt the expected tweed, as her shoes were the expected brown brogues.

The house was as he had imagined too from the reports—huge, old, and dilapidated. But it did have extensive grounds, and a house could be renovated, made to be what you wanted it to be. As in a leisure complex …

At the moment this elderly lady ran it as a sort of boarding house, although she seemed to have only two permanent guests, with the occasional casual visitor during the summer months. There was hardly enough income there, his sources reported, to keep the place ticking over on a day-to-day basis. By the look of the threadbare carpet in the hallway behind Grace Brown, and the emulsioned rather than papered walls, that income didn't keep things ‘ticking over’ very well.

‘Good afternoon.’ She smiled up at him brightly, her movements birdlike, even her voice light and a little girlish. ‘Come in.’ She opened the door wider, turning to walk down the hallway where a light already glowed in the gloomy interior despite the efforts of the bright emulsion. ‘We've been expecting you, of course.’ She shot him another smile over her shoulder.

‘You have?’ Jordan frowned; David, his personal assistant, had already made the blunder of misplacing their main file on Charlton House and its inhabitants—if he had now also warned them of Jordan's arrival here, then Jordan had seriously misjudged him. Arriving here unannounced had been his only advantage without the benefit of that file!

‘Do come in.’ She turned at the end of the hallway to reveal a little reprovingly, ‘You're letting in a draught!'

Suitably chastened, Jordan entered the house and quickly closed the door behind him. It wasn't much warmer inside than it had been out!

Miss Brown waited for him to reach her before turning into a sitting-room, a room that was shabbily welcoming, the worn sofa and four armchairs of differing patterned brocade, the carpet in here even more threadbare than the one in the hallway, in a pattern of faded pink and cream flowers.

There was too much furniture in the room, several tables, one with a chess-set on top of it, the pieces left about the board, as if the two players had been disturbed mid-game. And yet there was no one else in the room.

A tall old-fashioned standard-lamp stood beside the chair nearest the fireplace, alight, but really adding little to the illumination of the room. An old piano, its dark brown wood scourged with scratches, stood against one wall, the lid raised above the keys, a music sheet open on its stand, again giving the impression that someone had been playing it recently but been disturbed.

A fire gleamed in the darkened fireplace, logs crackling warmly.

It was a room totally unlike any Jordan had ever been in before, and yet just being here gave him a warm feeling inside, as if he had finally come home …

Miss Brown was looking up at him curiously. ‘You're very late, you know.’ She made it a statement rather than a reprimand, smiling sweetly.

Jordan was still dazed at the strange feeling that had enveloped him as soon as he entered the house, the cut-throat world he existed in in London fading into the background as if it had never been.

‘I am?’ he said uninterestedly.

‘Very.’ She frowned. ‘Nick was sure you weren't coming,’ she added sadly.

Jordan drew his attention from the yellow flames in the fireplace with effort, resisting, for the moment at least, the sudden urge he had to stretch out in one of the armchairs and fall asleep. ‘Nick?’ he prompted, fighting to control these feelings of lethargy that was such anathema to his usual character; he hadn't taken a holiday in years, let alone felt lethargic!

She nodded, giving him a coy smile. ‘He boards here,’ she explained trilly. ‘But he's a little shy about meeting new people. He was playing the piano until you rang the doorbell. And he plays so well too,’ she added wistfully.

Jordan instantly felt as if he had deprived this sweet little woman of a special treat, realising now that Nick must be one of the permanent boarders here. ‘I'm sorry—–'

‘Don't be.’ She dismissed the mood of melancholy that had swept over her as quickly as it had first appeared, smiling again now, her emotions erratic, to say the least, Jordan decided.

His solicitors hadn't mentioned that Miss Grace Brown, as well as owning Charlton House, was also a little strange!

‘Nick will soon get used to you,’ she told him confidently, squeezing his arm reassuringly.

Jordan gave a frown; he didn't think he was going to be here long enough for anyone to ‘get used’ to him.

Which was a pity …

Even Rhea-Jane, who, as sisters went, was one of the best, couldn't help but be surprised at the unexpected feelings of homecoming he felt in this house, wouldn't understand his feelings at all. He wasn't altogether sure he did!

He straightened his shoulders beneath the navy blue overcoat that was accepted wear among his contemporaries in town, but which, he realised, looked far too formal here. ‘If we could get down to business—–'

‘Oh, you don't want to talk to me about that,’ the tiny birdlike woman told him teasingly.

Jordan's frown deepened. No one had told him that Grace Brown had a business adviser. According to the last report he had, she had flatly refused to consider any offer for her home; in fact she hadn't even wanted to hear about it.

It seemed that someone had been a little remiss all round concerning Miss Grace Brown and Charlton House!

She picked up some letters from one of the coffee-tables. ‘You'll need to talk to Grace about that,’ she smiled. ‘I have to take down the post that arrived today, so if she's in the kitchen I'll tell her you're here.'

Only one thing in that twittering speech really mattered to Jordan. ‘You aren't Grace Brown?’ He hadn't spent the last ten minutes talking to a complete stranger, had he—a stranger, moreover, who was ‘strange', in the nicest possible way, of course, but definitely a little odd, if harmless enough?

‘Goodness, no!’ She laughingly dismissed the very thought of that. ‘Although it's nice of you to think so, Mr Gregory.'

Mr Gregory? Who the hell was—–?

‘I'm Jessica Amery.’ She held out one tiny hand to be shaken. ‘But everyone calls me Jessie.'

The other permanent boarder here, Jordan realised frustratedly, deliberately keeping the grip light, afraid he might crush her fragile bones in his much stronger hand. He shook his head. ‘I think there must be—–'

‘You know,’ she gave him a rather piercing look from beneath silvery brows, releasing her hand slowly, ‘I always tend to judge a man by his handshake.'

Oh, dear, and his rather limp grasp hadn't found favour, he was sure.

But once again she had interrupted him when he had been about to correct her mistake concerning his own identity; he didn't know who this Mr Gregory was, but he certainly wasn't him. Although the mistake in identity at least explained a lot of her earlier remarks; they hadn't been meant for him at all, but for the absent Mr Gregory. The other man would probably find himself being addressed as Mr Somerville-Smythe when he did at last arrive, just to add to the confusion!

And no one deserved to be saddled with that name unless they had to be, Jordan thought with bitterness.

‘Everyone calls me Jordan,’ he invited dully, wondering how long before, or indeed if, he was going to be reconciled to the past.