A Summer to Remember by Victoria Connelly

back down first.
    ‘I think you’d better introduce me to our new secretary,’ he said in a strangely subdued voice.
    ‘ That’s more like it,’ Olivia sighed with relief. ‘Nina, you can come out now,’ she said with more than a touch of humour, well aware that she had been hiding in the shadows whilst the scene had played itself out.
    Nina emerged and stretched her hand out to meet Dudley’s.
    ‘Well? Don’t you recognise her?’ Olivia prompted.
    ‘Recognise her?’ Dudley’s white eyebrows rose.
    ‘There aren’t too many Ninas about, are there?’
    ‘Nina,’ Dudley said thoughtfully. ‘NINA!’ he suddenly exclaimed, taking her hand again and shaking it vigorously. ‘Good heavens! Young Nina – the babysitter!’
    ‘Hello, Mr Milton,’ Nina said, suppressing a sudden urge to hiccup for the first time since leaving the claws of Hilary Jackson.
    ‘Dudley – I think you can call me Dudley.’ His hand was still shaking hers, but then his face clouded with embarrassment and he withdrew it, raking it through his thick white hair.
    ‘I should think so, too,’ Olivia said, as if reading her husband’s mind.
    ‘I er—’ he began, sounding very much like Dominic apologising the day before, ‘I feel I should apologise for my earlier outburst.’
    Nina looked down onto the rug, feeling the weight of his embarrassment.
    ‘Really, Dudley, I don’t know what got in to you. We’re only trying to help. I don’t know how you think you can live in such a pigsty of a study and be able to work efficiently. You can’t produce anything good in this awful mess. It just isn’t conducive to a calm mind – and it’s a calm mind you’ll need if you’re going to get this novel finished.’
    ‘All right, all right!’ Dudley raised his hands into the air in obvious defeat, but his eyes were scouring the room at the same time. ‘It’s just that I don’t like strangers going through my things.’
    ‘But Nina’s hardly a stranger now, is she?’
    ‘I’m sorry, Mr Milton – er – Dudley – if I’ve upset you in any way,’ Nina said. ‘My only intention was to help. I really want to help out, and I know I can. I’ve made a start, but—’
    ‘But she needs you to be at least a little cooperative if she’s to continue,’ Olivia finished.
    Dudley glanced at Olivia, before walking over to the table that Nina had been in the process of tidying when he’d arrived so unexpectedly. His fingers gingerly touched the receipts and papers she’d been organising into neat piles, his eyes narrowing at her work. Reaching forward, he picked up what looked like an invoice, examining it in silence. After a few moments, he turned around, holding the yellow paper.
    ‘Ferrars, Byrne and Co.,’ he said rather cryptically to Olivia.
    ‘What?’
    ‘The invoice I’ve been trying to find for the last three months,’ he explained.
    ‘What did I say?’ Olivia said, giving her husband an ironic smile. ‘I tell you, it’s a stroke of luck that Nina came along when she did.’

Chapter Ten
    Olivia had made out a list of items that she thought would make Nina’s life a lot easier and had sent Dudley off into Norwich to buy them.
    ‘There, that should keep him out of our hair for a few hours,’ she said with a smile. ‘I do apologise for his behaviour.’
    ‘It’s quite all right,’ Nina assured her. ‘I don’t think I’d be very happy if I found a stranger in my private study. If I had a study, I mean.’
    ‘But you’re not a stranger, Nina,’ Olivia said. ‘You’re like family to us!’
    Nina smiled. It was the loveliest thing anybody had ever said to her. Growing up as an only child to parents who didn’t pay her much attention and paid her even less now, she’d never really felt as if she had a family. But, with the Miltons, she really felt a connection – a deep sense of truly feeling a part of something bigger than herself.
    For a moment, Olivia hovered in the door and Nina instinctively knew