Jackie held up a hand. “Let me finish, please. Despite an inordinate amount of pleading on my part, your mother then puts on her wretched pink raincoat and leaves, saying that I can look after the place, the children, and the dogs.” She moved slowly towards Dan, swinging the plastic gloves from side to side. “But the one itsy-bitsy problem with that, Dan, is that I can’t. Why, you might ask yourself? Because I have a job, an extremely important job both to me and to this family, and right at this wonderful moment in time, it just happens to be the busiest time of the year for the company for which I work. You, on the other hand, do not work, therefore your input to this family at the best of times is fairly useless. So I think it not wholly unreasonable for me to ask what the hell you were doing in Scotland!”

Dan handed her a mug of coffee, but she never broke her anger-filled eyes away from him. He placed it on the work island beside her and walked over to the table and sat down on a chair. “I went up there to have a look at a company.”

Jackie was silent for a moment. She began drumming her red-painted fingernails on the top of the island. “What kind of company?” she asked, her voice now sounding more controlled.

“A clothing mail order company.”

“Why?”

“Because it was for sale.”

Jackie frowned. “And you were looking to buy it?”

“Well, I certainly wanted to have a look at it before making up my mind one way or the other.”

“And?”

“It had been sold two weeks ago.”

“Hah!” Jackie scoffed loudly, placing clenched fists on hips. “You went all the way up to Scotland to look at a business that had been sold two weeks ago?”

“It happened to be quite an understandable mistake.”

“Oh, I’m sure. Pray tell me, Dan, how were you supposing to fund this purchase?”

“Well, my thoughts were that if I felt that the company was a goer, then we could maybe have remortgaged the house—”

“Wait a minute,” Jackie cut in. “What do you mean ‘we’?”

Dan let out a sigh. “I wanted to talk to you properly about all this.”

“We are talking properly about it. What do you mean ‘we’?”

Dan slid his coffee cup across the table. “Okay. I thought that if this company looked good, then, with your skills in the fashion business and mine on the financial side, we could grow it into a worldwide business on the Internet.” He paused. “I just thought that it would be good for both our . . . relationships if we did something together, you know, jointly, and made a bit of money at the same time.”