The Beautiful Widow - By Helen Brooks Page 0,37
make a good life for her and her daughters. It wasn’t what she’d imagined in her teens—living life without a partner, a husband, someone to love and laugh and grow old with—but she had her girls and that was a lot more than some women had.
No more self-pity. She touched each of the girls’ faces before leaving the room. She was back on track again.
This resolution was severely tested over the next weeks and months. Working with Steel proved to be exhilarating and stimulating and exhausting, but never, ever dull. Within the first month she could understand why once someone worked for him they rarely left unless they had to. Although a fiercely hardworking and exacting employer, he never asked one of his staff to do something he wouldn’t do himself. In fact it was fair to say he worked harder and longer than anyone. And he was immensely generous when it came to holidays and time off and helping the families of those he employed. Bill’s wife was by no means an isolated case. He actually seemed to care about his employees as people and not just efficient working machines. Although they definitely had to be that too. He simply didn’t understand less than one hundred per cent commitment and loyalty.
Joy’s replacement worked out well. Fiona was a very capable and friendly woman in her mid-forties who had been the breadwinner in her family most of her married life, due to her husband being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when their two children were very young. Her boys were away at university now and the fact that they were twins provided an immediate bond between the two women.
Amelia and Daisy had sailed into big school life although Toni still received tales of the terrible Tyler most days, and as Toni paid for the girls to attend an after-school facility, where they were cared for until six o’clock when she picked them up, the load on her parents had lessened considerably.
So, everything in the garden was coming up roses, or it would have been but for the persistent and ridiculous feelings regarding Steel, which were a daily battle. Maybe if he hadn’t kissed her that night, if he hadn’t aroused all sorts of dormant sexual desires she had never been aware of, maybe then she would have been able to learn to disregard her magnetic boss as a man. But he had kissed her, breathing life into a side of her that had the power to shock and agitate her in the cold clear light of day. Some mornings she had difficulty looking him in the face.
If only he didn’t have such a—such a physical effect on her, she thought early one cold morning at the beginning of December. It had been six months she’d worked with him now, but every time she caught sight of him in the morning her heart beat rapidly and her mouth went dry. And it didn’t help that, the more she’d got to know him, the more she appreciated his dry, slightly wicked sense of humour, his ability to laugh at himself, his cynical but definitely amusing take on life.
Toni pushed her hair back from her forehead as she stood gazing out of the kitchen window into the tiny garden dusted with white from a heavy frost the night before. Spider webs on her mother’s pots and bushes surrounding the patio glinted and sparkled in the weak morning sunlight, and a carpet of diamond dust coated the stone slabs.
She took a sip of the coffee she’d made for herself before the rest of the household awoke, and contemplated the day ahead. The apartments having been finished the week before and immediately snapped up, Steel now had a list of rich and influential would-be buyers for the new project that had been started while the apartments were still being worked on. This was the conversion of an enormous old riverside inn sitting in a quarter of an acre of ground into four three-bedroom apartments, complete with a new garage block over which was planned a caretaker’s flat. The whole would be surrounded by an eight-foot brick wall and electric gates, with enough security to match Fort Knox.
But it wasn’t the inn on the agenda today. Before she had left the office the night before, Steel had told her they’d be visiting a property outside London this morning, midway between the capital and Oxford. She had nodded interestedly. ‘Another conversion?’
‘Not exactly, no. Just come and see the