Page 12 of Heirs and Graces at Highland Hall
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‘I’m not sure if you’ll find much down here,’ Bex said as they walked down to the kitchen. Fergus had never been one for keeping food in the house. In fact, he’d insisted on eating out at a different restaurant, pub, or café every day, claiming it was his way of supporting the community. The fact that he was the landlord to most of those establishments didn’t seem ironic to him in any way.
‘So, you already know about my uncle’s habit of not having food in the house,’ Kieron said. ‘Don’t worry, I came prepared.’
‘I managed to break it a little bit,’ Bex said. ‘I persuaded him to at least keep bread in for toast, just so that he didn’t exist solely on whisky in the evenings when he didn’t go to the pub. And he would join me and Duncan for dinner when Duncan cooked here too.’
‘Duncan cooked in the castle? The groundsman?’
‘Well, he and Fergus were very close,’ Bex said, hoping she could skim the conversation around that particular person,but she could already feel that Kieron had latched on to him.
‘Yes, I heard as much,’ he said, his tone laced with the slightest of edges. ‘And what about you and Duncan? Were you two… friends?’
There was something about the way he said the word ‘friends’ that made it apparent exactly what he was saying. Then again, she was the one who’d told him she might bump into her ex while she was here.
‘We were,’ she said, wondering if he could read between the lines.
His lips pressed tightly together before the tension released, and they curled up into a smile. ‘Well, let me get started on some food.’
As he cracked eggs into a pan, he moved the conversation to a standard level of small talk.
‘So, were you and your uncle close?’ Bex asked. ‘I mean, I never saw you when I was here.’
‘No, and what a shame that is. Unfortunately, my visits were always fleeting. You know what it’s like when you have a busy job. You can’t just spend your days strolling around the countryside, no matter how much you might like to.’
Was that a dig? she wondered. At Duncan or even Fergus, perhaps? Or was she just reading too much into it? That seemed a more likely explanation.
‘What is it you do?’ she asked as she leaned against the countertop. ‘Now that I know you’re not a lawyer.’
‘No, no.’ He flashed her a grin as he continued to stir the eggs. ‘I work in banking.’
She raised an eyebrow. There were so many men in London who had used ‘banking’ as a vague umbrella term for whatever it was they did. Some seemed to classify everything from working as a teller to being a top hedge fund manager under the same label. Somehow, though, she didn’t think Kieron was the type to be working behind a counter in a bank.
‘I’m sorry you had such a mess to deal with when it came to the old man’s accounts,’ he said. ‘I’d been on at Fergus for years to sort it out. I even bought him a computer. Though my mother suspected he just used it as an oversized paperweight.’
‘I don’t feel like I should comment here,’ Bex said with a small laugh.
‘Do you know where the plates are? Could you get me some?’ he asked.
‘Sure thing.’ Bex moved over, instinctively getting plates and cutlery from the drawers the way she had done before.
‘And the salmon’s in the fridge,’ he told her. ‘If you could grab that, too.’
A few minutes later he sprinkled some finely chopped spring onions onto the scrambled egg; it looked like the kind of meal she’d have paid a fortune for at a café in London.
‘I’m afraid it’s nothing special,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said, taking her plate and moving over to the small table. It was a long way from the dining table upstairs that had to be able to seat at least twenty people, but she’d had a lot of laughs around it. ‘This is absolutely delicious,’ she added, trying to focus on current company and not relive the past.
‘So, I guess if you’re the person Fergus insisted on having here, you must be a director at your firm,’ Kieron asked as he took a bite of his food.
‘No,’ Bex replied. ‘I’m a senior manager.’
‘Manager, not director? With a big job like this?’
She shrugged, hoping she didn’t show quite how much the comment irked her. It wasn’t Kieron’s fault, after all. She had hoped to be at the director level by now, with a nice corner office and views out of London, and she had been given a promotion up to senior manager when she’d finished the job before, but it sometimes felt like the directors at the firm were an old boys’ club, and being neither old nor a boy, she wondered if thepowers that be would ever even notice how much she deserved the role. ‘Director is not an easy position to get in my job,’ she said diplomatically. ‘A lot of it is about longevity. You know, how many clients you bring in and how long they stay.’
‘I’ve got a lot of friends in London who could use your help. If you don’t mind me passing them your name? In fact, I think I probably owe you that. I’m sure that what I’m inheriting would be a hell of a lot harder to deal with if you hadn’t done all that work for him last year.’
