“No,” Max replied. “Oh, I should, and I think I would win too, if I did. Look at the optics of it to the outside eye: me, the rightful heir to Sir Geoffrey Nesbit’s estate, winnowed out by the blonde, leggy and youngcompanionwho took advantage of an old man.”
“Carer,” Bo corrected him instantly, but her voice wavered slightly, and Max shrugged.
“You could shout that from the rooftops of London, and no one would believe you.”
“Why not? It’s the truth.”
Max gave her a long, hard look. “Because you’re beautiful, Bo. You’re young and beautiful, and people will believe that Sir Geoffrey, being old, mostly forgotten and out of his prime, wanted a piece of that beauty.”
Bo shifted in her seat.Beautiful.People told her that all the time, as though it were a compliment, a kindness towards her. As though it hadn’t already been said, a hundred times, in a hundred different ways, until the word no longer meant anything to her at all.
She was sick of it. So sick of it.
Bo knew she was beautiful. She’d been trained her whole life to know it, her mother remarking upon it almost every hour.Stand straight, shoulders back, smile more.Beauty was the only armour Bo had ever been given in life; the language she was best fluent in. But what had beauty ever done for her? Beauty hadn’t helped her career. Beauty hadn’t made Oliver stay. And now, even here, her beauty was being used to rewrite the truth, turning care into manipulation and affection into scandal.
Suddenly, Bo had had enough and her patience fractured.
“Funny, the only person in this house who ever had apieceof this beauty was—” Bo began, before she snapped her mouth shut, reddening.
“Me?” Max filled in for her, and for the first time that day, he looked flustered. “Look, Bo, I think it’s for the best if we forget that night. I think we can both agree it was a one-off event—”
“Event?” Bo interjected, feeling stung and not knowing why. “You can hardly liken a night of sex to, I don’t know, throwing discus in the summer Olympics.”
“Fine,” Max snapped, rolling his eyes. “An incident then.”
“An incident, like a train crash. Fine,” Bo snapped back, and for a moment they both sat in silence, glaring at one another.
Abruptly, Max sighed, his shoulders dropping. “I don’t want to argue with you Bo. I really don’t. I told you; I don’t hate you and I’m not going to challenge the will. Whatever I personally thought of Geoffrey, his wishes were made more than apparent. He wanted you to have the garden and so you shall have it, with no argument from me. But like I also explained earlier, there are some logistics to work out.”
“So, that’s the aim of this little talk then? Logistics?”
“Partly. Actually,” Max added with a swallow, “I’d also like to make a deal with you.”
At that, Bo fell silent. Max seemed unnaturally nervous, as though reluctant to go on much further, and she was intrigued by his use of the word ‘deal’.
“All right,” she said slowly, doing her best to keep her voice calm. “I’m listening.”
Max straightened, regaining the measured composure he’d shown earlier. He cleared his throat, looking her directly in the eye. “As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t live in London,” he began. “I live and work in Berlin.”
“How nice for you. I hear thewienerwurstis excellent.”
There it was again, that hint of an amused twinkle in his eye. It brightened the dull grey of his eyes into a sparkling sea-blue, and Bo was momentarily mesmerized. Quickly, she reminded herself she was cross with him, and crossed her arms over her chest.
“As I was saying, I live and work in Berlin,” Max tried again, the twinkle disappearing as quickly as it had arrived. “However, I find I have a need to be in London this summer. Work,” he explained, as though Bo had asked. “I had planned to rent a place and then hire a housekeeper to care for it for me.”
“Okay,” Bo replied, beginning to have an idea of where this conversation was going, and not knowing how to feel about it.
“Now that I own this house though, it feels wrong to spend money on a flat when I could just as easily live here. Unlike Geoffrey, I’m not a millionaire, and I hate to see money wasted on fripperies.”
He gave her a look as he said it; a look Bo understood all too well.He thinks I was one of Geoffrey’s fripperies,she thought angrily.He thinks he was wasting his money on me.
“A housekeeper feels like a luxury to me, when you’re young and more than capable of caring for yourself,” Bo answered, and Max stiffened, hearing the barbed subtext of her words.
“It isn’t a luxury when you work as hard as I do,” Max bit back. “I work hard. Sometimes that involves evenings — long evenings, which mentally and physically exhaust me. When I have a night like that, I sleep on and off for most of the day. Having someone cook and clean for me isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. A necessity which you can help me with.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. I’ll be in London until mid-September, living here in this house. You’ll be here too, in your summer house, I take it?”
