CHAPTER TWO

      ELLEN MADE IT to the kitchen, her heart knocking. Having anyone arrive to look over her home, thinking he was going to buy it, was bad enough—but...oh, dear Lord...that it was such a man as Max Vasilikos! She felt her cheeks flame again, just as they’d flamed—horribly, hideously—in that first punishingly embarrassing moment of all but sending him flying at the back door.

      She had been gawping like an idiot at the devastating male standing in front of her. Six foot plus, broad-shouldered, muscled, and just ludicrously good-looking, with classic ‘tall dark stranger’ looks and olive skin tones. Sable hair and charcoal eyes, a sculpted mouth, incised cheekbones and a jaw cut from the smoothest marble...

      The impact he’d made had hit her all over again when she’d taken in the coffee. At least by then she’d been a fraction more prepared—prepared, too, for what she’d known would be the inevitable pitying glance he’d cast at her as she took her place beside Chloe.

      She felt her throat tighten painfully. She knew exactly what he’d seen, and why he’d pitied her. She and Chloe couldn’t have made a bigger contrast, sitting beside each other. Hadn’t she seen that same expression countless times over the years, whenever male eyes had looked between the two of them? Chloe the svelte, lovely blonde—she the heavy, ungainly frump.

      She wrenched her mind away from the image. She had more to concern her than her lack of looks. Somehow she was going to have to find an opportunity to lay it on the line for Max Vasilikos about his buying her home. Oh, Pauline and Chloe might trot out all that sickeningly hypocritical garbage about ‘painful memories’, but the truth was they couldn’t wait to cash in on the sale of the last asset they could get their greedy hands on.

      Well, she would defy them to the last.

      They’ll have to force it from me in a court of law, and I’ll fight them every inch of the way. I’ll make it the most protracted and expensive legal wrangle I can.

      A man like Max Vasilikos—an investment purchaser who just wanted a quick sale and a quick profit—wouldn’t want that kind of delay. So long as she insisted that she wouldn’t sell, that he’d have to wait out a legal battle with Pauline and Chloe, she would be able to fend him off. He’d find somewhere else to buy—leave Haughton alone.

      As she checked the chicken that was roasting, and started to chop up vegetables, that was the only hope she could hang on to.

      He’ll never persuade me to agree to sell to him. Never!

      There was nothing Max could say or do that would make her change her mind. Oh, he might be the kind of man who could turn females to jelly with a single glance of his dark, dark eyes, but—her mouth twisted—with looks like hers she knew only too painfully she was the last female on the planet that a man like Max Vasilikos would bother to turn the charm on for.

      * * *

      ‘Sherry, Mr Vasilikos? Or would you prefer something stronger?’ Pauline’s light voice enquired.

      ‘Dry sherry, thank you,’ he replied.

      He was back in the drawing room, his tour of the house complete, his mind made up. This was a house he wanted to own.

      And to keep for his own use.

      That was the most insistent aspect of his decision to purchase this place. Its prominence in his mind still surprised him, but he was increasingly getting used to its presence. The idea of having this place for himself—to himself. Mentally he let the prospect play inside his head, and it continued to play as he sipped at the proffered sherry, his eyes working around the elegant drawing room.

      All the other rooms that Chloe had shown him bore the same mark of a top interior designer. Beautiful, but to his mind not authentic. Only the masculine preserve of the library had given any sense of the house as it must once have been, before it had been expensively made over. The worn leather chairs, the old-fashioned patterned carpets and the book-lined walls had a charm that the oh-so-tasteful other rooms lacked. Clearly the late Edward Mountford had prevented his wife from letting the designer into his domain, and Max could not but agree with that decision.

      He realised his hostess was murmuring something to him and forced his attention back from the pleasurable meanderings of the way he would decorate this room, and all the others, once the house was his to do with as he pleased.

      He was not kept making anodyne conversation with his hostess and her daughter for long, however. After a few minutes the service door opened again and Pauline Mountford’s stepdaughter walked in with her solid tread.

      ‘Lunch is ready,’ she announced bluntly.

      She crossed to the double doors, throwing them open to the hall beyond. Despite her solidity she held herself well, Max noticed—shoulders back, straight spine, as if she were strong beneath the excess weight she must be carrying, if the way the sleeves of her ill-fitting blouse were straining over her arms was anything to go by. He frowned. It seemed wrong to him that his hostess and her daughter should be so elegantly attired, and yet Ellen Mountford—presumably, he realised, the daughter of the late owner—looked so very inelegant.

      But then, sadly, he knew that so many women who felt themselves to be overweight virtually gave up on trying to make anything of what looks they had.

      His gaze assessed her as he followed her into the dining room, her stepsister and stepmother coming in behind him.

      She’s got good legs, he found himself thinking. Shapely calves, at any rate. Well, that was something, at least! His eyes went to her thick mop of hair, whose style did nothing for her—it wouldn’t have done anything for Helen of Troy, to his mind! A decent haircut would surely improve her?

      As he took his seat at the end of the table, where she indicated, his eyes flicked over her face. The glasses, he decided, were too small for her, making her jaw look big and her eyes look small. And that was a shame, he realised, because her eyes were a warm sherry colour, with amber lights. He frowned again. Her lashes might be long—what he could see of them through her spectacle lenses—but that overgrown monobrow was hideous! Why on earth didn’t she do something about it? Do something about the rest of her?

      It wouldn’t take that much, surely, to make her look better? Plus, of course, decent clothes that concealed her excess weight as much as possible. Best of all, however, would be for her to shift that weight. She should take more exercise, maybe.

      And not eat so much...

      Because as they settled into lunch it was clear to Max that he and Ellen Mountford were the only ones tucking in. That was a shame, because the roast chicken was delicious—the traditional ‘Sunday lunch’ that the English loved so much and did so well. But neither Pauline Mountford nor her daughter did anything more than pick at their food.

      Max found himself annoyed. Didn’t they realise that being too thin was as undesirable as the opposite? His eyes flickered to Ellen Mountford again. Was she overweight? Her blouse might be straining over her arms, but her jawline was firm, and there was no jowliness or softening under the chin.

      She must have noticed him glancing at her, for suddenly he saw again that tide of unlovely colour washing up into her face. That most certainly did nothing for her. He drew his glance away. Why was he thinking about