opposite. I’d really like to hear it. Unless you find it painful to talk about your parents?’ he added quickly.
To her surprise, she found she wanted to talk about them. ‘My mother was a landscape gardener. She was working in the grounds of a big property when my father arrived with his crew to do restoration work on the house. One look and that was it—for both of them.’ Sarah smiled wryly. ‘Dad said her parents were not exactly thrilled when their only child told them she’d fallen in love with a builder brought up in a children’s home. But when they met him they liked him. So much so that eventually they suggested he moved into their home with Louise after their marriage, instead of taking her away from it. Dad told me that he was only too happy to be part of a family at last, and from then on he did all the maintenance work on their sizeable North London home as a way of showing his gratitude.’
‘As a son-in-law he was a valuable asset, then?’
‘In every way,’ Sarah agreed. ‘He helped Mother care for her parents as they got older and frailer. How about you?’ she added. ‘I heard that your father’s based in London these days?’
Alex nodded soberly, and drank some of his wine. ‘Did your source tell you he’d remarried?’
‘No. My “source”, as you put it, is Harry Sollers. He’s not big on gossip. He just gave me the bare bones of the Merrick success story.’
Alex smiled wryly. ‘Then he must have mentioned Edgar, my grandfather, scrap baron extraordinaire. The old boy’s a bit of a legend in this part of the world.’
‘For turning scrap metal into gold?’
‘That’s not far off the truth. He started from nothing, which is hard to believe when you think of the group’s present level of expansion.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘God, yes. In his late eighties and still alive and kicking. My aunt—a saint by any standards—lives with him, and does her best to care for the cantankerous old devil.’ Alex grinned at the look on Sarah’s face. ‘Don’t look so shocked. I say exactly the same to his face.’
‘If your father has remarried, did you lose your mother when you were young, like me?’ she asked with sympathy.
He was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ he said at last. ‘After I graduated she divorced my father and bought a house near her sister in Warwickshire.’
‘Alex, I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known,’ Sarah said remorsefully.
‘At least it shocked you into calling me Alex at last.’
‘I could hardly do that while you were still addressing me as Miss Carver.’
‘I make it a rule never to mix business with pleasure. But,’ he said, holding her eyes, ‘we concluded the business part this morning, Sarah.’
‘So we did.’ She took his empty glass. ‘Let me give you a refill. Or I could make you some coffee.’
‘Does that mean you’d like me to stay awhile?’
She nodded. ‘I was feeling a bit lost until you came. I’ve been so busy lately it was strange to have time on my hands.’
‘You could have contacted Dan Mason to keep you company.’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said flatly.
‘Why not? You were having a good time with him last night.’
She glared at him. ‘You were watching me?’
Alex’s eyes glittered coldly. ‘From where I was sitting I had no option. You didn’t notice me when you arrived, but Danny boy did. He deliberately seated you with your back towards me, so he could catch my eye now and again to make sure I noticed what fun you were having together.’
‘Why would he do that?’ she said, astonished. ‘Besides, just between you and me, it wasn’t much fun. In fact it was boring. Whereas—’ She stopped dead.
‘Whereas?’ he repeated suavely.
‘I never feel bored with you,’ she said, and flushed, eyeing him so warily he almost threw the ‘good friends’ idea to the wind and snatched her up in his arms.
‘Then now we’ve got the business deal out of the way, there’s no reason why we can’t be friends.’ He smiled persuasively. ‘We have a lot in common, Sarah. We property developers should stick together. Which is why I offered you the services of our security men. Your crack-brained idea of sleeping at the cottages worried the hell out of me.’
‘Did it?’ she said, surprised.
He nodded grimly. ‘I would have hated the thought of anyone at risk down there on their own, but in your case