Xandros froze.
CHAPTER ONE
ROSALIE SIGHED, CROUCHING down beside her bucket of soapy water, a heavy-duty scourer in her rubber-gloved hand, and poured bleach over the disgusting, greasy, trodden-in gunk on the cheap vinyl floor in front of the equally disgusting grease-splattered cooker.
The rest of the kitchen was just as disgusting. Whoever had rented this house had been a pig. The whole place was filthy, from top to bottom, and cleaning it was a pig as well. But it had to be done.
She sighed again. Her rent was due, and she also liked to eat.
She felt a familiar emotion burn in her.
One day I won’t be doing this! One day I won’t be cleaning up other people’s filth and dirt! One day I won’t be living in a total dive and paying a fortune for the privilege! One day I won’t have a wardrobe consisting of clothes from charity shops! One day I won’t be never going out and living on beans on toast...
One day she wouldn’t be poor any more.
It was a poverty she’d grown up with. Her single mother, raising her daughter on benefits, had been plagued by lifelong ill health, and Rosalie had been her carer both as a child and into her twenties. She had never been able to make a life of her own. It had just been her and her poor, frail mum, living in a shabby council flat in the East End of London.
As for her father—he didn’t even know she existed. Her mother had told her as much, sighing over the one all too brief romance in her sad life.
‘I knew him for such a short time! He was foreign—so romantic!—working here in London on a construction site. Then I found I was pregnant, but he’d already left the country. I wrote to the construction company, to tell him you were on the way, but they couldn’t have been able to trace him because I didn’t hear back...’
And she never had either. Rosalie had written him off from an early age. All she and her mother had had was each other.
Rosalie’s face shadowed. And now she did not even have her mother. Her poor unhappy mother had finally succumbed to chronic lung disease in the chill grip of last winter. With her death Rosalie had lost the council flat and lost the disability and carer’s benefits she and her mother had lived on. But she had, she knew, gained her freedom.
Grieve though she did for her mother, she knew that finally, at twenty-six, she could belatedly start to make a life of her own. Make something of herself. Get qualifications, the ability to better herself, and escape from the poverty trap and the bleak, unlovely streets of her rundown part of the East End.
She sighed once more, scouring away at the filthy floor, feeling the small of her back aching. She’d been cleaning since eight in the morning, and now it was gone four. It would be another good hour’s work on the kitchen before she could lock up, hand the key in to the agency, then get back to her poky bedsit and her crucial, all-important studies.
She’d signed up for online classes in accountancy, and getting those vital qualifications was her exit route out of poverty. To pay for them, and to pay for her dump of a bedsit and to keep body and soul together while she studied, she did cleaning work all day—however exhausting.
With a jerky movement she got to her feet, tipping the dirty water down the sink and setting it to refill, pouring in fresh bleach. She fetched the mop to clean the rest of the floor, then frowned suddenly, turning off the water as she hefted the full bucket.
What was that she’d heard?
The sound came again and she realised what it was. The doorbell was ringing.
Still frowning, and wary, for this low-rent house was not in the most salubrious area, she went into the entrance hall, setting down her bucket and opening the door cautiously. The view out to the nondescript street was almost completely blocked by the tall, male figure standing there.
Rosalie’s eyes widened totally as impressions tumbled through her head. Tall, dark hair, incredible eyes and face...
Who on earth...?
She gulped sil
ently, her gaze fastened on him helplessly. Then, abruptly, the man was speaking.
‘I’m looking for Rosalie Jones,’ he said, and his voice was deep and clipped and curt, with an accent she could not identify and had no time to think about.
Rosalie stared, still fixated on the overwhelming visual impact the man standing there was having on her. Then she realised what he’d just said.
‘Who wants to know?’ she asked sharply.
Apprehension spiked in her. No one who looked like the man standing there could possibly have the slightest business being in a rundown area like this! Everything about him was wrong here.
It wasn’t his foreignness—that was commonplace in London. She gave a silent gulp. It was that air of being from a different world altogether—smooth, urbane, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. A world of luxury and wealth...
The flash suit, the silk tie, the polished shoes, the gold pin on his tie...all wrong for this part of London...