At The Greek Tycoon's Pleasure. Cathy Williams
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creative profession.
But, right now, the world seemed to be on top of her shoulders. There seemed to be no end to the invoices and bills she was discovering by the minute and her father’s cavalier approach to filing meant that there was the looming spectre of yet more debts waiting in the wings. She couldn’t bring herself to discuss the situation with anyone she knew. Her friends from college would sympathise but really their heads would be somewhere else and, anyway, she hadn’t seen them for ages.
And confiding in anyone in the village, even some of the people she had grown up with, would have been a huge mistake. She was determined to protect her father’s reputation and not reveal the extent of his financial troubles.
Of course there was Robert. Sophie frowned at the thought of him. Theoretically he presented the perfect shoulder on which to cry, but for some reason she fought shy of confiding in him. To his credit, he didn’t try and force her and a couple of times had even made it clear that he would be there for her, that however great the financial mess, he had savings and would bail her out.
It almost felt treacherous to be staring into Theo’s enigmatic green eyes now, insanely tempted to pour her heart out. Robert would feel utterly betrayed.
But then Robert was too much of a fixture in her life. The advantage with Theo was that he would be gone in a matter of weeks and with him anything she said. There wouldn’t even be a temptation to keep in touch with him because she didn’t particularly care for him. In a sense, that, too, made it easier.
‘You’ve listened to a lot of other people’s problems, have you?’ Sophie asked with a wry smile.
‘It’s not usually something I encourage.’
‘I thought you said that you were a good listener.’
‘I am. Which isn’t to say that I encourage people to pour out their problems to me.’
‘Thank you for telling me that. It’s just the right thing to make me feel at ease.’ Extraordinarily, she did feel stupidly relaxed. ‘Why don’t you like people pouring out their problems to you?’
‘Because most people like advice, they like solutions. They want to be told what their next difficult step might be and no one can advise anyone else on what they should do to sort themselves out. So, to avoid being called upon to do that, I prefer to refrain from putting myself in the firing line, so to speak.’
‘Sometimes it just helps to talk,’ Sophie said slowly.
‘And, as I said, I’m willing to listen.’ He had never talked about Elena. At her funeral, he had been surrounded by sympathetic well-wishers. He had been positively drowning under the torrent of well-meaning compassion. But at no point had he felt inclined to talk to anyone about what he was going through. Not even his mother could penetrate the defence system he’d erected like a steel cordon around his emotions.
His emotions, like everything else in his life, he could take care of by himself.
‘Didn’t you know that your father was in debt? Is that the problem?’
‘Part of it,’ Sophie admitted. ‘Do you mind if I help myself to another glass of wine? I’m not accustomed to discussing my private life with other people.’
Theo felt a strange sense of satisfaction that he had got it right about this aspect of her personality. It seemed to him an almost masculine trait because, in his experience, there wasn’t a woman alive who didn’t enjoy discussing every small facet of whatever happened to be flitting through her mind.
It was reassuring to think of his landlady in those terms. Masculine, brusque, quick to bristle, never mind the stubby girlish plaits or the soft pink of her cheeks as she glanced away from him.
‘There’s nothing less private than a financial mess,’ Theo said dryly.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it always needs cleaning up and it’s almost impossible to hide the cleaning up tools once you set to work.’
‘Don’t say that!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want my father’s reputation to be ruined. I don’t want him to be remembered as the man who left a mess for his daughter to sort out. I don’t want to be an object of pity.’
‘No.’ Theo could certainly understand that one. ‘So how big is the mess?’
‘I honestly don’t know where to begin. Dad was the most disorganised person in the world. He has notes scribbled on pieces of paper in places no one would think of looking. Just yesterday I found a file stuffed at the back of the sofa in the sitting room above the office.’
‘Which your father used…?’
‘Oh, when he was very busy into the night reviewing something or other. Which is another problem. I don’t actually understand a lot of what’s in his files so I don’t know whether to bin them or not. Robert’s been good helping me go through them, but there are just so many!’
‘Tell me about Robert.’
‘Why?’
‘How does he fit into the dynamics?’
‘He worked with my father, off and on, so to speak. He’s a trained pharmacist as well. I think he saw my dad as something of a mentor and, in the absence of a son to carry on the profession, Dad was pleased to have Robert tagging along over the past few years, especially as I’ve been away a lot of the time, going to university and doing my teacher training.’
‘So the two of you go back a long way?’
‘I guess so,’ Sophie said in a guarded voice.
Theo’s curiosity cranked into gear and, with it, his age-old talent for reading members of the opposite sex. He had always been able to sense what the slight change in body posture meant, the barely noticeable shift in tone, the quick glance. It was a talent that had spent the past eighteen months getting rusty.
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