Sailing to Capri Read Online Free PDF Page A

hunt anymore.”
    “Still, you get the picture. Isn’t it what we Americans always think about the English country life?”
    “I guess so.” I smiled. “I’ve learned a lot in the past five years, about that English country life. But please, let me take your coat.”
    He put down the leather laptop case and shrugged out of his almost ankle-length black overcoat. It was as light as a feather, cashmere I guessed, with an expensive Italian label, but underneath that coat was a different man. Narrow frayedworn-in jeans, black boots, a black turtleneck sweater. His shoulders under the sweater were broad, his hips in the jeans, narrow, and on his right wrist he wore a silver and leather bracelet studded with turquoise stones. I felt a flutter in the pit of my stomach. With his cropped head and lean looks he should have been auditioning for the role of the bad guy in a Hollywood western, not attending the funeral of a Yorkshire tycoon.
    I hung his coat in the hall closet alongside my own, then took out the old towel kept there for that purpose and went to dry off Rats who had already parked himself in front of the fire. “Good boy,” I murmured. “Good boy, Rats. It’ll be okay now, I promise. And I promise I won’t leave you.”
    “You inherit the dog, then?” Harry Montana said from behind me.
    “I’ve inherited nothing.” I scrambled to my feet. “I’m just an employee. But of course I’ll take care of Rats, because Bob would have wanted that. Anyhow, now I feel as though he’s my dog, even though I know that for him there’ll only ever be one master.”
    I felt Montana’s eyes on me as I put the cloth away. I remembered I still didn’t know who he was or why he was here. I suggested we move into the drawing room and he held open the heavy door to let me pass.
    This was my favorite room in the house. Even in a snowstorm it seemed sunny. Light ocher walls, golden brocade sofas with cushions squashed from much lounging around over the years, soft pale rugs a little frayed from wear, lamps that shed a warm golden glow and a fire sparking in the grate. In fact whenI thought about it, this wasn’t so far removed from the country-house comforts I’d first noticed in Le Gavroche, when I’d thought how nice it must be to come home to a place like this. Soon, though, I would be gone.
    Mrs. Wainwright bustled in pushing a two-tier Victorian mahogany tea trolley piled with plates of tea sandwiches and biscuits and the famous jam sponge, plus the silver coffee things. She said good afternoon to Harry Montana and left me to do the honors. I poured steaming hot coffee into fragile blue-and-white Wedgwood china cups and handed one to my cowboy. He was completely relaxed, knees apart, long legs crossed at the ankles, sleeves pulled up, revealing a glimpse of a tattoo in what looked like Chinese script running around his forearm.
    I ate a piece of the jam sponge. Usually, it tasted of summer strawberries. Today it tasted like dust.
    “So how d’you know you didn’t inherit?” He stirred two sugars into his black coffee. “The lawyers read the will yet?”
    I frowned, suddenly on the alert. I’d asked a perfect stranger into Bob’s home. He could be anyone! A business rival trying to find information. A reporter on the scent of a good story. A long-lost relative on the make. I stared at him again. He looked like a fashionable version of a Marine, with his haircut, his frayed old jeans, his bracelet, his tattoo. I pushed my heavy, still damp hair from my forehead, hot with anxiety. Had I inadvertently let the enemy within Bob’s gates? “Who the hell are you, anyway,” I snapped, “asking me all these personal questions?”
    “I’m kind of a friend of Bob’s.”
    “There’s no such thing as ‘kind of a friend,’” I replied tartly. “A friend is a friend and that’s it. How did you know him?”
    “I met Bob ten years ago. He was having some personal problems. He’d heard about me from someone he knew.