‘Wondering what?’ Liza unwrapped a packet of fruit pastilles.
He grinned. ‘The look on your face. Total giveaway.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she protested, but it was half-hearted.
‘Five years ago, the father of my best friend from school remarried,’ said Kit. ‘The reception was held at Egerton Hall and I was invited along. As soon as I saw the hotel I knew this was the place for me. When I met the right girl I’d bring her here.’ He paused, concentrating on the road ahead.
When they had navigated round a swaying horsebox, he added casually, ‘And now it’s happened.
You are that girl.’
‘I’m thirty-two. Hardly a girl.’
Kit shrugged.
‘Okay, you are that ancient old battleaxe.’
‘Oh God.’ Fearfully she pulled down the sun visor, studying her face in the mirror. ‘What if the chambermaids think I’m your mother?’
They were approaching a lay-by. Kit braked hard and pulled in. As the trundling horsebox overtook them, he took Liza in his arms.
‘Stop it,’ he said firmly. ‘I love you. I don’t care that you’re older than me. And if it bothers anyone else, then they’re theones with the problem. We’re talking nine years’ difference here, not ninety. I mean, so what? Big deal.’
He was still kissing her when the phone rang in the car. ‘Bugger,’ said Kit, then he grinned and flicked a switch. ‘Hooray for hands-free.’
But Leo Berenger’s autocratic voice, booming through the car, stopped them in their tracks.
‘Kit, you’ve gone off with the bloody keys to the safe.’
‘Shit.’ Kit’s hand went to his jacket pocket. He pulled out the keys and gazed at them in disgust.
‘You’ll have to bring them back,’ ordered Leo Berenger. ‘Lucky we stopped before the motorway.’ Kit winked at Liza. To his father he said, ‘Forty minutes, okay?’
‘We’re waiting for them now,’ roared Leo. ‘Make it twenty.’
‘Looks like it’s meet-the- folks time,’ Kit said cheerfully as he swung the Bentley into the gravelled drive. There, waiting for them on the front steps of Rowan House, was Leo Berenger.
Tall, burly and ominous-looking, even from this distance. Liza wondered about hiding herself under a blanket on the back seat – except there was no blanket to hide under. There was no anything. It was an incredibly clean car.
‘You should have dropped me off first.’ She shivered, unable to help herself.
Kit gave her thigh a reassuring squeeze.
‘Come on, he’s only my father. No need to be scared, just because he can’t stand the sight of you.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Liza, because Kit was grinning. She was glad someone found it funny.
Leo Berenger clearly didn’t, when they reached him at last. ‘Keys,’ Kit announced, sliding open the driver’s window and holding them out to his father. ‘Sorry about that.’
But although Leo Berenger took the keys, he appeared not to hear his son’s apology. He was too busy, instead, looking at Liza. Having rather hoped he would opt for ignoring her completely, Liza now found herself forced to return his gaze.
She tried to look friendly but not totally grovelly.
Leo Berenger’s expression, by way of contrast, was on a par with slicing open a peach and finding a nest of squirming maggots inside.
Rapidly, because he couldn’t very well not, Kit performed the introductions.
‘I already know who you are,’ Leo Berenger told Liza. ‘And I daresay my son’s told you how I feel about this ... relationship.’ His eyebrows were like caterpillars, his tone Yorkshire-blunt.
‘But I’ll say it again, just so you get the point. You all but wrecked my niece’s business, and you’re certainly the wrong sort for my son. I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, but the sooner he comes to his senses and finds himself a girl his own age—’
‘Thanks, Dad, that’s fine, we’ve got the message.’
‘Because believe me, the sight of you sitting there in that car where my late wife used to sit—’
‘Right,’ Kit said wearily, ‘I wondered when we’d get to that.’
He switched off the ignition, opened the driver’s door and climbed out. Within seconds, the boot was unloaded. Carrying four cases, Kit somehow managed to open the passenger door.
‘Come on,’ he told Liza without emotion, ‘we’ll go in mine.’
It made a change, anyway. Instead of feeling old, Liza now felt about fifteen. The last time she’d been told off by a boyfriend’s enraged father was when they’d been caught smoking in his garden shed.
‘She might not want to go in yours.’ Leo Berenger’s taunting voice followed them around the side of the vast Georgian house. ‘After all, it’s no Bentley.’
At the back of the house, across a cobbled courtyard, an old stable block had been converted into garages. They loaded the suitcases into Kit’s battered – and spectacularly untidy – slate-grey Peugeot.
‘He thinks I’m a gold-digger,’ Liza marvelled.
