Persuade Me by Juliet Archer Page A

between Henrietta and Rick in the bud.’
    Kyle McIntyre ran the Musgrove farm and had been going out with Henrietta for two years. With good farm managers thin on the ground, Roger and Barbara thought the world of him; whether Henrietta did was harder to tell.
    Charles added, ‘Lou, on the other hand …’ He raised his eyebrows and grinned expressively.
    Anna knew exactly what he was thinking. Lou was unattached and much more single-minded than her sister. Whatever Lou wanted, Lou usually got.

Chapter Fifteen
    Rick found himself unexpectedly back at Uppercross Manor shortly before lunch, but in a much happier frame of mind. They’d packed up fishing half-an-hour earlier, when Barbara phoned Charles to ask if he’d seen her spectacles. He hadn’t, but went off to the Great House anyway to ‘do a proper briefing’.
    Handling the press invasion seemed to have brought out hidden depths in Charles. He was now behaving as though he had the lead role in a third-rate war movie, planning ‘Operation Dunkirk’ in enthusiastic detail and firing off a barrage of instructions at the slightest opportunity. He told Rick to ‘lie low’ at the Great House and call his driver to fetch him – not on Tuesday morning, as ‘the enemy’ would expect, but at dead of night on Monday. He also ordered Sophie and Ed to take a leisurely stroll with rucksacks on their backs. Ideal cover, he explained, for bringing Rick his belongings – but they must take a particularly circuitous route to the Great House and throw those ‘paparazzi johnnies’ well and truly off the scent. Rick suggested that he went to see Barbara too; but Charles insisted on going alone – he could ‘check that the coast was clear’ at the same time – leaving the others to follow at a more leisurely pace.
    The path round the lake was only wide enough for two, and Rick was relieved when Lou – as opposed to Mona – manoeuvred herself alongside him. She was the tactile sort, grabbing his arm at every opportunity to steady herself, or alert him to sightings of monster trout – largely imaginary, he suspected. Eventually her arm simply stayed locked in his, and he felt it would be rude to ask her to remove it. Anyway, what was the harm in exchanging mindless banter with a young adoring female? Although it didn’t seem to go down well with Mona; as soon as the path widened, she took his other arm and demanded a detour via Uppercross Manor so that she could change her boots.
    On this visit, Rick took a lot more notice of his surroundings. Uppercross Manor was little more than a couple of cottages knocked into one; clearly the name reflected Mona’s pretensions rather than reality. Thinking that Anna might be inside, he chose to wait out on the terrace – and Lou and Henrietta immediately did the same. But Anna wasn’t there; and the whole boot-changing exercise took far longer because Mona kept popping outside to see what she was missing.
    Once, when Mona was safely indoors, Henrietta observed that Anna’s car was still here – a five-year-old Mini, Rick noted – and hoped that she hadn’t attempted to carry Ollie to the Great House. Lou retorted that Anna gave those children too much attention for their own good – and was it all that surprising when she seemed to be on a permanent guilt trip where Mona and Charles were concerned? Rick listened and wondered, but said nothing – yet.
    At last Mona was ready and they set off for the Great House. Charles came to meet them, anxious because Rick had been back to the Cottage – ‘too near the enemy lines for comfort’. When he realised that the Cottage was Charles’s name for Uppercross Manor, Rick smiled to himself. He’d known Charles and Mona less than twenty-four hours, but already he’d have been amazed if they could even agree which day of the week it was.
    And so, when he found himself in the same room as Anna once again, it was quite different from last time. More people, more noise … He