‘Don’t get too excited,’ he warned her. ‘This is only the first step. Now we’ve got to keep our fingers crossed that they can find the right place.’
He was frowning now with the seriousness which had initially attracted her to him and which sometimes she found heartachingly hard to fathom.
Why did he always seem to fear that life was waiting to deliver a blow? Why couldn’t he simply share her exultation? But she was being unfair; she knew that in his own way he did, and that, although he would die rather than admit it, this first step down the road they had plotted out for themselves was intensely important to him.
‘Benedict Fraser, Restaurateur of the Year,’ Zoe crowed, refusing to allow him to suppress her exhilaration. ‘I can see it now. “Benedict Fraser, ably aided by his ravishingly attractive and capable business manager, Ms Zoe Clinton, at their country house restaurant… quite definitely the success story of the year…"’
‘Hang on. We still have to find our country house,’ Benedict warned her. ‘Or at least our backer has to…’
‘Our backer… I still can’t believe it’s all happening. And all through you stepping in at the last minute and doing the catering for the Hargreaveses’ wedding.’
‘I’d never have done it if you hadn’t pushed me into it. Wedding breakfasts aren’t really my thing, and having to step in at the last minute like that… It’s all down to you.’
‘It’s not down to either of us,’ Zoe corrected him firmly. ‘We did it together. Both of us. We make a good team, Ben.’ She darted him a brief look and added softly, ‘In bed and out of it…’
As she had known it would, her reference to the sexual aspect of their relationship made him slightly embarrassed. For a man who was such a skilled and sensitive lover, he was oddly shy and uneasy about discussing sex. His upbringing, perhaps?
She shook her head, pushing the thought aside, not wanting it to spoil her own pleasure in their day.
‘How long do you think it will take Clive Hargreaves to find a suitable property?’
‘I don’t know. But he’s obviously already looking. I saw a pile of brochures on his desk when we were signing the contract.’
Zoe gave an ecstatic sigh. ‘We’re finally on our way. Nothing can stop us now… nothing. It’s all there waiting for us… everything we’ve wanted. Our own restaurant and the option of developing it into a small country hotel. You as the chef—the chef—and me managing the administration side of things. Just the way we dreamed.’
‘The way you dreamed. I would never have let myself imagine…’ He broke off, shaking his head. ‘I still can’t believe it’s all actually happening. This chance means so much to me, Zoe.’ He stopped walking and looked at her. ‘I don’t think you realise…’
‘Yes, I do,’ she interrupted him softly. ‘I know just what it means to you to have your own place, Ben. I know how important it is to you.’
‘Providing nothing goes wrong…’
‘Nothing will go wrong. What could go wrong? The contracts are signed, and we’re on our way. Stop worrying… Nothing will go wrong—I promise you.’
CHAPTER ONE
ELEANOR suppressed a small exclamation of impatience, glancing at her watch as the traffic came to another halt. London was impossible at this time in the morning. Especially when the streets were still grey and wet, the sky sullenly threatening and what blossom there was beginning to show on the trees battered by the sharp east wind.
The traffic moved—inches rather than yards, and she counted slowly to ten, trying to relax her tense muscles. She was going to be late arriving at her office, and she had an appointment at nine-thirty. A potential new client. She gnawed anxiously at her bottom lip, recalling the interview she had had recently with her accountant.
They were still making a profit, he had told her, but their costs were rising; the rent on their offices had doubled in the last eighteen months and was set to rise again. All over the city, peripheral businesses such as theirs were beginning to suffer from the cutbacks made by the conglomerates and multinationals which used them.
The tidal flood of extra and extremely profitable business she and Louise had seen in the last years of the Eighties was now ebbing away very fast and the anticipated upsurge in business they had expected from the new ties with Europe had been a trickle rather than a flood.
The office, which had been so convenient when she still lived in the flat, before she and Marcus had married and she and the boys had moved into his elegant Chelsea house, was now an increasingly tension-inducing drive across London.
Why was it that wet weather always made the traffic slower? she wondered irritably, frowning. She had intended to make an early start this morning, but then Tom had overslept and come down late to breakfast and Gavin had ‘lost’ his football kit, so that by the time she had actually managed to chivvy them plus their belongings into the car she had already been running behind schedule.
Marcus had already had his breakfast and started work in his study. He had frowned up at her as she opened the door, putting down the brief he had been working on. Even now, after three years of being together plus almost a year of marriage, her heart still turned over when she saw him. A ridiculous reaction in a woman of thirty-eight going on thirty-nine, surely? And to think that until she had met him she had been a woman who prided herself on her common-sense approach to life, on her awareness of the errors of judgements and the misplaced romantic ideals which had led to the break-up of her first marriage.
Until she had seen the brief in Marcus’s hand, she had almost been tempted to ask him if he could run the boys to school; the school was closer to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn than it was to her office. But, despite the intensity of their love, a part of her remained brittly conscious that Tom and Gavin were her responsibility, just as Vanessa was his.
Vanessa… She could feel her stomach muscles tensing as she thought about Marcus’s daughter.
It troubled her that she was finding it so difficult to establish a good relationship with her. She was after all Marcus’s child… his daughter. Vanessa’s parents had been divorced for several years before she, Eleanor, had become involved in Marcus’s life. But whenever Vanessa came to stay with them Eleanor felt uncomfortable and on edge. She had even begun to feel ill-at-ease when she and Marcus made love when Vanessa was there.
Part of the trouble was that the Chelsea house had never been designed for two adults and three children. Marcus had bought it after his first marriage broke down; for a single or even a married couple without children it was the ideal London home, small
but elegant with its downstairs kitchen-cum-living-room and Marcus’s study plus the dining-room, its first-floor drawing-room, which was spacious enough for the kind of parties a highly successful barrister might need to give. There was nothing wrong either with the two good-sized bedrooms, each with its own private bathroom, unless of course you happened to have three children to squash into that one spare double bedroom.