‘Cup of coffee and a sticky bun,’ a voice said beside her.

‘Mmm. Thanks.’

When Elise looked up again the coffee cup was three-quarters full of cold liquid and the bun had had two bites taken out of it.

‘How’s it going?’

She turned to Harriet, who was hovering in the doorway. ‘Have you time to read it and tell me what you think?’

She almost held her breath as Harriet bent over the computer.

‘It’s good but you don’t do yourself justice. Give me a few minutes to work on it.’ She made a shooing motion with one hand. ‘Go on, finish eating that bun and then move your body about a bit. You’re walking stiffly.’

When Elise returned after a stroll round the garden, Harriet was leaning back reading the piece and nodding.

‘Here you are. See what you think.’

Elise read it in astonishment. Was this what her niece thought of her? She’d never have dared say such things about herself. ‘Isn’t it a bit … boastful?’

‘No. Everything I’ve said is true.’

She could feel herself blushing. ‘Oh. Well, thank you.’

‘Which pictures are you going to send photos of, Auntie?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Which is your favourite? Oh yes, I like the lake at sunset too. Let me choose the other one. It has to show a different type of subject.’

When everything was ready, Harriet flourished one hand towards the computer. ‘Go on. Send it. I’m not letting you alter a word.’

So Elise took a deep breath and clicked on send, then found herself being danced round the room.

‘You’ll get one of those houses, Auntie, I just know you will. Oh, I wish I could be here to see your face when you find out.’

‘Don’t be too disappointed if I don’t get chosen.’

‘Don’t drop dead of shock when you do get chosen.’

Chapter Seventeen

Hobkins hummed and hawed when Nell phoned him but she used the ‘broken record’ trick and refused to be sidetracked, just kept quietly insisting that Angus was too busy to deal with this at present and that she had full authority to act on his behalf.

After she had refused to budge on the matter for several iterations, he made an irritated sound and agreed to deal with her ‘in the first instance’. But not for a couple of days as something urgent had come up at his end.

He’d said his business with Angus was urgent, so what was going on here to make him delay, she wondered? She didn’t trust him, not in the slightest.

In the meantime, she carried on, getting the walls of another couple of rooms painted and making sure Angus remembered to eat, since this job was proving to be what he called ‘delightfully tricky’. Most people would have found that irritating, but her man loved puzzles of any sort.

When the day of her appointment with Hobkins came, she dressed in the one and only business outfit she’d brought with her to England the previous year. How long ago that seemed! How her life had changed since meeting Angus.