Page 151 of Guilty Pleasures

Ruan’s mouth was smiling, but his dark eyes were more intense than ever. ‘That would be telling.’

Emma felt a blush spread down her neck and across her chest. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation. As the music finished and they turned to clap the band, she snuck a sideways glance at Ruan, a curious smile on her face.

By midnight the crowds were dispersing. The remaining guests were laughing in Panton House’s bar and the noisy chugging of taxis outside was almost drowned by out-of-tune but good-natured Christmas songs being sung by partygoers queuing for their lifts.

‘I’m getting a cab to Chilcot. Want to share?’ asked Ruan, flipping up the collar of his charcoal overcoat.

Emma nodded. ‘Yes, please.’

They climbed into the back seat and the taxi grumbled along the road. Ruan and Emma sat in silence, just watching the village slip past. Emma could see the silvery clock face of the church hovering above a line of shadowy trees like the moon. Ruan had a large honey-coloured cottage right at the end of the village. Emma remembered his parents living there and how the track down the side led to a pond in which they would swim in the summer.

‘Do you know all this time I’ve been back in Chilcot I have never been inside your house?’ said Emma, overcome by nostalgia.

‘Well, come in then,’ said Ruan. ‘Albert got me a bottle of good Scotch for Christmas that needs drinking.’

‘You’ve already opened your Christmas presents?’ said Emma with mock-shock.

‘That one, yes. It was bottle-shaped and wrapped in Santa Claus paper so the element of surprise was gone,’ he smiled.

Ruan let them in with a key he kept under a flowerpot on the window-sill. Innocent country ways, thought Emma with a smile. Inside, there was a stone floor covered with a huge brown rug and the living room was furnished in cosy, if masculine, style. Without thinking Emma decided it needed a female touch. She was embarrassed that she had never been here before. She considered Ruan a friend, but the truth was she barely knew him out of the workplace.

‘I can’t believe you haven’t got a Christmas tree,’ she laughed.

‘Why put something up, only for it to have to come down a week later?’

‘Spoilsport’, she said. ‘I think we need to do something about that, Scrooge.’ She turned and disappeared out of the front door, returning with a twig sprouting leaves and berries which she pushed into the top of an empty wine bottle on the dining-room table.

‘What’s that?’ laughed

Ruan.

‘Festive cheer,’ she smiled.

Ruan chuckled and crouched down by the fireplace, busying himself with the task of lighting the coal. Emma flopped onto the sofa and gazed at him breaking up firelighters and arranging kindling.

‘I couldn’t have done it without you, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, turning around. ‘You’re the business brains and Stella is the design wizard. The sisters did it for themselves.’

‘But I couldn’t have understood the industry so quickly without you being there every step of the way, not judging me for my mistakes. In those early days I think I might have given up and gone back to Boston if you hadn’t been there.’

Satisfied that the fire was burning well, he crawled over and sat on the rug near Emma’s feet.

‘Listen, Em, Milford meant everything to my parents and my grandparents before them. My family has worked for Milford for generations and now it means everything to me too. I’ve always wanted the company to do as well as you have and if you’d have been around ten years ago we might already be the British Hermès.’

‘Ten years ago I was 20 years old,’ she grinned. ‘The only thing I’d have been good for at Milford is making cups of tea.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘England?’ she asked, surprised.

‘One summer you were there, the next you’d gone. I thought you’d got a place at Oxford or something, but then I heard you’d gone to Harvard.’

‘America suited me better,’ she said, smirking at the thought that Ruan had taken a vague interest in her whereabouts. Had she had known that as an 18-year-old she’d have been doing cartwheels – perhaps she might even have taken up her place at Oxford. She lay back on the sofa, her eyes closing.

‘Ruan, I think you’d better call me a cab. I’m completely beat.’

He picked up the phone and made a call.