Max's Proposal. Jane Donnelly

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СКАЧАТЬ town’s mayoress was a great one for gossip, and hearing that Max Vella was wrestling in here with the local reporter would be a juicy item.

      ‘This is crazy,’ said Sara.

      ‘You didn’t help much. You could have stood up instead of peering up from floor level.’ He was grinning again. She had leaned sideways from the footstool to look round the chair so that it might have seemed she was lying on the floor. ‘Is some man with a claim on you likely to be barging in next to get you out of my clutches?’ he asked.

      ‘There’s nobody here with a claim on me.’

      ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Which meant of course he was glad there wouldn’t be another silly scene, rather than pleased there was no man at the centre of Sara’s life right now. The idea of anybody she knew standing up to Max Vella was extremely unlikely, but perhaps she ought to be getting out of here. She badly wanted to interview him but she was not so keen about him cross-questioning her. She had her shoes on. They were still tight and she took one off again and tried flexing it.

      ‘Why come to a dance in shoes that don’t fit?’ he enquired.

      ‘They felt fine earlier. They felt all right when I bought them; I got them in a sale last week and they seemed such a bargain.’

      ‘You get what you pay for,’ he said.

      ‘That’s rich, coming from you. You were setting up a bargain just now, weren’t you, that sounded like a very dodgy deal?’

      He shrugged that off. ‘Life’s a dodgy deal. It’s a tough world.’

      She couldn’t argue there, and she looked ruefully at her ‘bargain’. ‘Mostly,’ she said, ‘you get what you can afford, or have you forgotten how that was?’

      ‘I don’t forget much.’

      For a moment she almost felt as if they could swap hard-luck stories, which was ridiculous when his luck was brilliant and he had everything, including a house that Sara had always loved. Vella had lived locally in the penthouse of a riverside block of apartments he owned, before he had moved into the Moated House. When he’d bought this place he had spent a fortune on renovations, but he was not a man Sara could imagine permanently settling anywhere, and she asked him, ‘Shall you stay here?’

      ‘Probably. I’ve been here now for—’ He paused to work out dates.

      She said promptly, ‘Five years and nearly five months.’

      ‘That’s about right.’

      ‘That’s dead right. I remember you moving in. Mid-June and blazing hot.’ She could recall it vividly and there was a far-away look in her eyes. ‘We lived at Eddlestone then. I had a horse and I used to ride over the hills and I saw the vans below. I often came this way just to look down at the house.’

      ‘You did?’ That seemed to surprise him.

      She said, ‘Well it’s a fantastic place, isn’t it, with its history and all? Some days when it’s raining or there’s dew on the grass you can imagine the moat’s still there. The buildings can’t have changed much, the towers and the bridge. You are so lucky to be living here.’

      ‘I was fourteen when I walked over the hills and saw it for the first time,’ he said. ‘And I promised myself that one day I’d have it.’

      ‘Did you believe you would?’

      ‘I always keep promises I make to myself.’ He smiled, but even if he used to be dirt poor he must always have felt that nothing was beyond him.

      ‘How about promises you make to others?’ she teased.

      ‘Now, that depends.’

      They were both smiling now, and she asked him, ‘What were you doing when you were fourteen?’

      ‘Getting an education in a tough world. What were you doing when you weren’t riding your horse?’

      Riding her horse had been part of the pampered life of her teens. ‘Getting an education that wasn’t going to be much use in a tough world,’ she said.

      ‘You seem to be coping.’

      ‘Oh, I manage well enough,’ she said airily. ‘I can even get into my bargain shoes.’ She stretched a slim ankle, although her foot felt puffy, and the rhinestone heels glittered.

      ‘They look good,’ he said.

      ‘Could be diamonds.’

      ‘Very flash. The heels alone had to be worth the money.’ For a moment they sat, saying nothing, with an antique French clock ticking softly on a rosewood side table. Then he said, ‘Ten to ten; we’d better get moving.’

      The bonfire was lit at ten, followed by the fireworks, and if Max Vella missed the highlight of the evening everybody would be looking for him. As it was most of the company must have heard by now that he and the girl from the Chronicle were carrying on behind a closed door.

      Vella pulled back a bolt on the long window and it became a door leading out onto lawns. ‘We can walk round to the courtyard from here,’ he said.

      Some of the gardens had lamps burning and coloured lights in the trees, but out here there was only moonlight. There was no one else walking, and this way they would avoid the crowds in the house. The grass was velvet-soft and her thin high heels were digging into the springy turf, so that was one reason for taking off her shoes and going barefoot.

      On the fifth of November bonfires dotted the skyline with bright orange beacons, and zooming rockets and scattering stars from other parties lit up the skies. ‘Tonight’s the night for wishing on a star,’ she said.

      ‘There are enough of them about.’

      ‘But with so many how would you know which was the right one?’

      ‘That is the problem. Knowing the right one.’

      ‘Isn’t it always?’ She sounded wistful. As a child she had wished on shooting stars. Little things had worked sometimes, such as wishing for a fine day for a picnic or a ring with a pink pearl in it. But the big wish that mummy wouldn’t cry any more had never come true so that, even when she had been very young, Sara had stopped believing in magic.

      Beyond a row of trees the lawns dipped into a grassy ditch that had once been a stretch of the moat. Coming round the house, they were reaching a gravel path, and as she leaned against a wall to put on her shoes again Max Vella swung her up off her feet into his arms as easily as if she were a child.

      Surprise took her breath away. Her instinct was to shriek, but she found she was laughing. ‘This is very obliging,’ she said. ‘Do you do this for all your guests?’

      ‘Only those who can’t get their shoes on,’ he said.

      They were both smiling now, sharing a joke that nobody else could understand. She was getting quite a buzz from that, and the clean, cold smell of his aftershave was intoxicating. She breathed it in, the tip of her nose against his cheek. His skin looked smooth but she could feel a slight prickle where a beard might grow.

      She СКАЧАТЬ