A Scandalous Engagement

She also noted, in passing, that he was not dressed in plumber’s overalls. Not unless plumber’s garb in London ran along the lines of a trench coat with cream-coloured wool jumper and khaki trousers. Good grief. She only hoped that he hadn’t come out to inspect the site and was considering sending in one of his chaps at a later date. Last seen, the leak in Andy’s bedroom had been dripping slowly but persistently into a saucepan which they had strategically placed underneath and had shown no signs of letting up.

‘Good of you to answer the door,’ the man said coldly. ‘Didn’t you hear the doorbell first time around?’

Jade was almost too angry to speak coherently. She stuck her hand on one slim hip and gave him a withering look which failed to do the trick.

‘You’re early,’ she said, through gritted teeth. ‘And I was busy in the kitchen.’

‘I’m early?’ For a second the scowl disappeared, replaced by a look of astonishment which only managed to make him look more aggressively good-looking, then he was scowling again, this time with somewhat more insolence, allowing his eyes to rake over her and making no attempt to conceal the fact.

Jade abruptly turned away. This was the last thing she was in line for. A lecherous plumber with the manners of a warthog and enough of an over-sized ego to consider himself above overalls and tool kit.

‘You’d better come in,’ she said, not that he was standing on ceremony by waiting outside. Oh, no, he was stepping right through the front door, wet shoes and all. ‘And wipe your feet,’ she ordered. ‘You’re not dripping mud into this house. In fact, you might as well take your shoes off and leave them by the door.’ She gave his shoes a scathing look and was frustrated but not surprised to see that they were as out of character as the rest of his outfit. She was no connoisseur of men’s shoes, but these didn’t look as though they had spent their lifetime being dragged through mud.

‘Just exactly who are you?’ he asked, looking at her narrowly and not, she noticed, removing his shoes.

‘Jade Summers,’ Jade replied, bristling. ‘And in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, I’m the person you’ve come to see about this plumbing job.’ She looked him squarely in the face, which necessitated her straining her neck upwards because frankly, to her five foot six, the man was a hulking giant.

‘Plumbing job.’ He continued to stare at her, then he stroked his chin thoughtfully with one finger.

‘Ah! So you remember, do you?’ she said sarcastically. ‘Andy, Mr Greene, got in touch with you last night to come and mend a leak?’

‘A leak…’

‘Would you mind not repeating everything I say?’ She flashed him another of her specialty cold, quenching smiles which, again, had no effect. ‘And I’m beginning to doubt whether you’re competent to handle the job, Mr…’ He inclined his head to one side while she tried to rack her brains for the name Andy had tossed at her at eleven-thirty the night before. ‘Mr Wilkins. You’re hardly dressed appropriately, and you don’t seem to know anything about leaks. Shouldn’t you be asking a few pertinent questions by now? Like Where exactly is your leak, madam? Or Perhaps you’d care to wait while I just fetch my tools?’ She folded her arms and looked at him with narrow-eyed suspicion. ‘I take it you are a qualified plumber…?’

‘I have lots of qualifications,’ the man replied coolly, outstaring her so that she was forced to look away.

‘Good.’ She knew he had. Andy had randomly picked one from the Yellow Pages with the biggest advertising space and she vaguely recalled seeing a few letters here and there after his name. ‘In that case…’ She eyed the trench coat. ‘Maybe you’d like to divest yourself of your coat and follow me upstairs.’

‘Divest? That’s a complicated word for… I beg your pardon. I got the name, but not what your position is here…’

He didn’t sound like a plumber either. Not that she had any idea what plumbers sounded like, since she had never, fortunately, had to cross paths with one. This specimen was obviously a university-educated one, hence the arrogance.

‘That’s because I didn’t mention it, and it’s none of your business anyway. You just need to know that I’m in charge.’ She couldn’t believe she had just said that. Firm she could be, and had had to be for years, working as personal assistant, first of all, then upward bound until she had virtually been all but running the small company she had worked for ever since she’d moved to London two and a half years previously. But tyrannical? Never in a million years.

But what other way to go was there in this situation? Whether this Wilkins man was the boss of his own company or merely an employee with an over-inflated sense of himself, he needed a bit of discipline.

‘Follow me,’ she ordered, looking at his stylish and, more ominously, clean clothes in a jaundiced way. She would give him the benefit of the doubt, but if he had come prepared to fix a leaking ceiling, then she would eat her hat. If she’d possessed one. And there was no point asking her to lead him to the nearest spanner, or whatever tools he needed, because she had no idea where she would find any in the house, and she was pretty certain that Andy would be as clueless as herself.

‘The leak’s in one of the bedrooms,’ she explained, ahead of him, uneasily aware of his presence behind her. She hoped to high heaven that she wouldn’t be subjected to another of his all-over inspections or worse. She shivered, and mentally called up his face, all brooding, dark sensuality. The sort of face that women swooned over. Was straightforward plumbing all he did when he went to houses to mend leaks, or was he accustomed to women giving him the come-on?

She decided to let him go ahead of her. It paid to be careful.

‘The bedroom’s just down there,’ she told him, standing back and pointing along the corridor.

‘Just down where?’

‘Last door on the left. You can’t miss it. We had to pull the bed out and stick a container under the leak to catch the water.’ She watched him warily as he sauntered along the corridor, looking through the open doors, in no visible hurry to get to his destination.

‘And would you mind hurrying up?’ she called after him impatiently. ‘I have a lot of chores to be going on with.’

‘So you work here, do you?’ he called back casually, taking his time, as though she hadn’t spoken. He paused outside the bedroom door to look at her, hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers. ‘Don’t you want to come and hear what I’ve got to report about your leak?’ he asked loudly. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, madam. I’m a perfectly well-behaved member of the human race.’

She didn’t like the way he had called her madam. It reeked of disrespect. She pursed her lips together and walked towards him.

The man was wasted in his business, she thought absent-mindedly. He was just too predatorial-looking to spend his life peering down broken drains and inspecting faulty washing machines. He should be out in a jungle somewhere, exploring the depths of the Amazon and slaying man-eating snakes with his bare hands. Or something like that.

‘It’s over the bed. There.’ She pointed to the ceiling and the patch of wallpaper underneath which had been unravelled by the dripping water.

‘I see.’ He walked into the room, side-stepping various articles of clothing which were lying on the ground.

‘Andy’s room,’ she found herself saying, just in case he thought that this mess belonged to her. At the age of twenty-two, and four years her junior, Andy still hadn’t developed any noticeable talent for clearing up behind him. Twice a week a cleaner came and purged the house, but in the intervening days he allowed his bedroom to develop the sort of teenage chaos that would have driven most mothers round the twist. She supposed that his untidiness was simply a reflection of the fact that he had never had the need to be tidy. There had always been someone else clearing up behind him, making sure that everything was neatly folded and put away. Even when he cooked, which he did with flourish, the kitchen afterwards resembled a badly bombed site.

She edged over the wrought-iron bedframe and snatched a pair of boxer shorts off it, dropping them to the ground and then kicking them under the bed. When she raised her eyes, it was to find the plumber looking at her with an unreadable expression.

‘You were saying about the leak?’ she reminded him weakly, staring in concentration at the damp patch on the ceiling.

‘Could be serious.’

Jade’s face blanched. ‘Serious? How serious?’ She didn’t like the sound of that. It didn’t look like much from where she was standing, but then again she wasn’t a plumber, and who knew what build-up of water could be lurking above the ceiling? She imagined Niagara Falls pouring down the wall, destroying everything in its wake, including the vastly expensive carpeting.

‘Can’t be sure.’ He stroked his chin again and continued to stare at her, which she failed to notice with the onset of the horrific, water-filled scenario that was now running through her head. ‘You say you…what?…spotted the water…?’

‘We were watching television and I felt a drip on my head,’ Jade explained, dragging her eyes away from the ceiling and meeting his, which were now glacial. ‘Andy got on the phone immediately,’ she said defensively, primed to contradict any accusations of irresponsibility, not that it should be any concern of the man in front of her. ‘I was here when he made the call, and I know that he stressed the importance of getting it seen to as soon as possible.’

‘And what time would that have been?’

‘A little after eleven in the night,’ Jade said impatiently. ‘Don’t you people keep a log book or something for incoming calls? Look, can you fix it or not?’

‘Not at the moment.’

Jade groaned in despair. ‘But we—Andy explained to you the importance of getting this sorted out. Yet you come here without so much as a screwdriver in sight and tell me that you can’t fix it at the moment.’ She sat on the edge of the bed. ’Well, when can you fix it?’

‘Why don’t we go downstairs to discuss this?’

‘What’s there to discuss?’ It seemed perfectly clear-cut to her.

‘What needs to be done.’ He shrugged and continued to look at her with relentless concentration. She could almost hear his brain ticking away in his head. Probably working out the vast charges he would make at the end of this little job.

‘Oh, all right.’ She stood up wearily, threw one last disgusted look at the leak, which appeared so inoffensive, or had done until the Wilkins man had said otherwise, and headed out of the room.

‘Perhaps we could discuss the situation over a cup of coffee,’ he suggested to her, halfway down the stairs, and she paused to look at him over her shoulder.

‘Haven’t you got other jobs you need to get to?’

‘Not at the moment.’ He had stopped when she had turned to address him. Now he took another step down, and for some reason the thought of being cooped up on the staircase with this man towering over her was enough to get her legs moving again. She swung around, trailing her hand along the banister, and skipped lightly down the remainder of the stairs.

‘Well, I happen to be quite busy,’ she said pointedly, leading the way to the kitchen.