The Mistress's Child. Sharon Kendrick
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Birthday Girl sitting at her desk and smiling at him, and realised that he didn’t even know her name.
‘Hello, Mr Caprice!’ she said cheerfully.
Reluctantly he smiled back—but there was something about her which made him want to smile. ‘I think the trade-off for your delicious cake was that we should be on first-ame terms, don’t you? Except that I don’t know yours.’
‘It’s Lisi—short for Elisabeth. Lisi Vaughan.’
Pretty name, he thought, and the question seemed to come out of nowhere. ‘So are you going to show me around today, Lisi Vaughan?’
Lisi gulped, her heart banging excitedly in her chest. ‘Are you sure you want me to?’
‘Only if you’re confident you can.’
She knew that confidence was the name of the game—particularly in selling—and why on earth should her confidencedesert her just because she was about to accompany the most delicious man she had ever seen? She gave him her most assured smile. ‘Oh, yes. I’m confident! That’s if Jonathon doesn’t mind.’
‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t,’ he said easily.
Jonathon knew better than to argue with his most prestigious client. ‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘Let’s throw her in at the deep end!’
The viewing was unsuccessful—at least from a buying point of view. Philip tore the places to pieces in his car as he drove her back to the office afterwards.
‘Overpriced!’ he scorned. ‘I don’t know how people can ask that much—not when you consider how run-down the property is! And when you look what they’ve done to the garden—that garage they’ve built is nothing short of monstrous!’
‘You didn’t like it, then?’ asked Lisi meekly.
He swiftly turned his head and, seeing her expression, laughed. ‘Oh, very perceptive,’ he murmured sardonically. ‘You were good, Lisi,’ he added unexpectedly.
‘Was I?’
‘Very good.’ She had diplomatically left the monstrous garage until last and drawn his attention to all the good points in the house, but not in an in-your-face kind of way. She was chatty, but not intrusive, beautiful yet not flirtatious. In other words, she was a little like a glass of water—refreshing, but without any pernicious undertaste.
He sighed. Most of the women he met these days were nurses, and then only in a grimly professional capacity. Not that he wanted to meet women, of course he didn’t—not with Carla lying so…so…
He flinched and changed gear more aggressively than he had intended to.
‘It’s a shame there’s nothing else you’re interested in,’ Lisi was saying. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for your dream house!’
He threw her a rather mocking look. ‘Do you think there is such a thing?’
Lisi thought of her mother’s house and gave a slow smile. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said in a soft voice, and smiled. ‘Very, very definitely.’
He smiled back, but the smile died on his lips as he forced himself to look away from the slender outline of her legs, relieved when Langley High Street came into view and he was able to draw up outside her office.
‘Thanks very much,’ she said as she began to push open the door. ‘I enjoyed that!’
‘No, thank you,’ he said gravely, but as soon as she had slammed the door closed behind her, he made the car pull away. He didn’t want to watch her confident young stride as she walked to the office, or the way her firm young breasts pushed against her soft, clinging sweater.
Lisi saw Philip seven, maybe eight times after that—on a purely professional basis. Sometimes Jonathon would accompany him on the viewings, but mostly it was her. For some reason she grew to know his tastes better than Jonathon. Often she would mentally reject a house once she had skimmed through the details, then phone him and suggest that he might like to see it.
‘Do you like it?’ he would demand.
She hesitated.
‘Do you, Lisi?’
‘I don’t think it’s quite what you’re looking for.’
‘Then I won’t waste my time coming to see it.’
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