Chapter 1
In the glimmer of early morning light provided by a high bank of windows, Marigold Reynolds picked her way through white-sheeted furniture, a collection of floor lamps with oddly angled shades, a table needing another leg, and a stack of badly folded canvas sheeting. Two long shelves along the back wall of the warehouse sat blatantly empty while boxes of who-knew-what had been scattered higgledy-piggledy across the long expanse of the concrete floor. Wan picture frames had been huddled together, waiting to fall onto the unwary. For a woman with an orderly mind, this was her idea of being dragged through hell.
The loading bay door she had slid shut after her entry began to rumble open again, and a larger patch of light hovered around the ghostly shapes. She sneezed.
“Is that you, Marigold?”
“I’m over in the far aisle,” she called.
The top of Antigone Allbrook’s blond head bobbed up behind one of the stacks. Tiggy, a tallish, long-limbed sweetheart, dodged and twisted through the unmarked aisles toward Marigold. “Sorry I’m late.” Tiggy was always late.
Marigold was usually early. “I’ve been exploring.” She gave her friend a hug. “I need to know what you’ve got here if I’m expected to look after it.”
“This is pretty well everything.” Tiggy glanced around, scratching at her eyebrow. “Though, I often find weird little surprises that I’m sure I haven’t seen before. Treasures all,” she said in an offhand tone. Her unicorn-pink hair matched her tight jeans, contrasting with her green sneakers and her flowing yellow top. Tiggy had decided long ago that as the artist of the family, she should dress accordingly. “And I won’t miss a single one of them.”
Marigold laughed. She and Tiggy had met at school, or maybe she had met Calli, her sister, first. The two were identical twins, though Tiggy made sure everyone knew she was the elder. Somehow Marigold and Tiggy had clicked, perhaps because their opposing natures complemented each other. Artistic Tiggy had a wayward streak while unimaginative Marigold was embarrassingly methodical.
Marigold’s tidiness hadn’t diminished over the years, and Tiggy still hadn’t settled down. She had decided to take a break from her job with her father, a property developer, and do something in Cambodia. When Marigold had asked what, Tiggy had shrugged. “Teach orphans to paint?”
From that, Marigold had deduced Tiggy planned to do charity work. She also planned to be back in three months, and she had asked Marigold to take over as AA & Co.’s property developer and event coordinator, the first of a more comprehensive decorating job than Marigold had handled before. “Let’s hope I learn where everything is before I break my neck.”
“It won’t take you any time. You’ve seen half the props before because you made all the curtains and the cushion covers, and I don’t know what-all else.”
Marigold had done odd sewing jobs from home for the past six years, and her weekly orders from Tiggy were not only her way of supporting herself but also the highlights in her soulless existence. When everything in her life had consisted of routine trips to the hospital, counting out tablets, cooking special meals, and keeping her mother interested in life, having another focus kept her going. Plus, she needed a steady income. “I hope you have enough here to cover every event.”
“Don’t worry about that now. Hagen’s going to show you around.” Tiggy planted her hands on her hips, an expectant smile on her face.
Marigold dragged in a breath and eked it out, her cheeks tingling. She doubted Tiggy’s brother Hagen, the golden boy, would be particularly thrilled to see her. He had always been polite, but golden boys were best left to golden girls, not those with a slight tarnish. At school, Marigold’s tarnish came from being a poor scholarship student. In those days, Hagen preferred the people who had as much cash to splash around as he did. “It will be very nice to see him again,” she said, using her impartial voice.
Tiggy made a wry face. “He’s not the same man. Mercia’s death knocked the stuffing out of him.”
Last year, Hagen’s beautiful wife, Mercia, had been killed in a car accident, and at the time Marigold had commiserated with Tiggy. Marigold didn’t want to be mean-spirited about the death of anyone, but Hagen’s stuffing had been so tight in recent years that he could barely acknowledge her. A little less stuffing might not be so bad. “You left a list of this week’s jobs?”
Tiggy found a pocket in her loose cashmere top. “It’s a bit messy, but I think you’ll understand it.”
Marigold skimmed over the words in the torn-out page of a small notebook. She had been dealing with Tiggy’s lists for three years now and her writing no longer confounded Marigold. Nor did Tiggy’s shorthand. “My biggest problem will be finding things. Where did you leave the furniture for today’s staging job?”
“Close to the loading door. It’s easiest if you go with the props. I give myself a day for each job when I’m staging a house. I plan a month ahead, if possible, but sometimes I only have days. The events take much longer. The bigger event, the trickier. We often need to hire chairs, but we have most things in the warehouse. I’ll wait until Hagen arrives, and then I’ll go. My plane leaves this afternoon, and I want to see Calli and Ma before then. Last minute requests in my will.” Tiggy laughed.
“Don’t even joke about dying, Tiggy.” Marigold grabbed Tiggy and hugged her again. “Because if you leave me with this mess for more than three months, I’ll kill you.”
Tiggy laughed. “Trust me, I’ll be back.” She smoothed Marigold’s carefully tied back hair in a motherly way. “If you hadn’t said you would do this, I probably wouldn’t have been able to go. I don’t know too many people I would trust to take this on, but you’re an experienced stager and you know my style. This time of the year we’re busy, but I had to get away. I couldn’t stay here any longer, letting my life pass me by.”
Friend or not, Tiggy hadn’t shared her personal problems, but most women’s problems stemmed from a man. Likely, Tiggy’s did, too. Marigold’s didn’t. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a date, and only one man had ever caused her a problem, other than in family matters where males were the cause of all the ructions.
Tiggy let her go and led the way to the furnishings she had picked out for one of the houses in a new row of ten in the western suburbs. AA wanted a single show home readied for publicity photographs before putting the houses on the market later in the month. “The list will tell you what is meant for each room, but you have wriggle space. If anything looks out of place, move it elsewhere. If it looks really odd, you’ll need to come back and pick around for what you want. As you know, in the warehouse I keep tables together, chairs together, and the soft furnishings on the shelves.”
As Marigold was trying not to look surprised at Tiggy’s gross exaggeration of her placement skills, a car drew up outside. The view from the twelve-foot-high open door showed a bleeding, bloody, red Porsche rumbling to a stop in the staff car park. Marigold didn’t have to guess who the driver might be. Even in his last year at school, Hagen had owned a nice Mazda sports model. He had no qualms about flashing his parent’s cash. If Marigold still had a family, they would have been horrified.
Unlike Hagen, she came from ‘old money’ but in her case, the money was so old that it had disintegrated and wafted off into the air after three generations. She was the fifth. Her father had snatched a little back, but her mother was his first wife. His second wife lived in comfort with him and his two sons, while Marigold’s mother had accepted his half of her house with her child support.
Then, as she and Tiggy watched, the golden boy strolled into the warehouse. Over the years—Hagen would be almost thirty now—the gold had remained. His white-blond hair had darkened somewhat, but in the light of the doorway he stood surrounded by a halo that he could never have earned. If the fates collaborated with justice, a person as endowed with money, brains, and athletic ability as Hagen should be only minimally attractive. Instead, the man was a tall, wide-shouldered heart stopper.
Her breath sighed out as he hesitated and glanced across the shrouded furniture. He spotted Tiggy and lifted a hand. Then his gaze slowly shifted to Marigold. Her mouth dried.
Nothing in the world would let her visibly react. She’d last seen him at Calli’s wedding a year ago, but she hadn’t spoken to him on that day. His aloof expression had warned off everyone. She managed a polite, if not vague smile. “Hi.”
“Marigold with the marigold hair.” He sounded surprised, probably because he had finally connected her name with her appearance, but her hair was a dead giveaway. She had been named after the orange of her hair, the name an embarrassment she had tried to argue her mother into letting her change a long time ago.
“It’ll be tricky when I go gray.” She shrugged. “No one will ever remember me.”
“Your hair is aggressively red enough to defy fading.”
Even uttering that line, which was mildly funny, he didn’t smile. His thick-lashed eyes didn’t glint with slow amusement the way they used to. His words seemed to come from someone else, not from the handsome young man she remembered who had the world at his feet, but from a man who would more likely kick the world in passing. Anyone could see Hagen hadn’t yet dealt with his grief.
She was also bereaved, though admittedly she’d had time to come to terms with losing the person she loved most. Her mother had passed away little by little. His wife had died on impact when her car had crashed into a tree. “I’ll probably adopt the clown red. I’m the eccentric type.”
Tiggy sighed loudly. “Civilities completed, I will now leave you to Hagen. I’m off to pack.” She kissed Marigold’s cheek, kissed Hagen’s cheek, and left two people sharing the same heavy silence.
Hagen let out an audible breath. “It’s very good of you to take over at such short notice,” he said stiffly. “Calli could have done the job, but she’s busy on her own projects, or so she says.”
“You’re implying she’s lying?”
He briefly drew his imperious eyebrows together. “I’m using poor phrasing. Calli says she is busy on her own projects. Does that suit you better?”
Marigold decided to smile rather than answer. She could haggle with him all day, but he was her employer now and she had already shifted the boundaries on a burgeoning boss/drudge conversation. “Tiggy said you would show me around.”
“You’ll have to find your own way around,” he said unhelpfully, pushing his hands into the pockets of his perfectly cut gray trousers. His perfectly cut gray jacket sat perfectly misplaced. A thousand dollars wouldn’t buy either item. “I have no idea of Tiggy’s filing system. She doesn’t have one as far as I can tell.”
Marigold paused for the beat of three, again holding her words. “I think she meant the main building—her office, and the amenities, etcetera. I know the warehouse because this is where I deliver my goods, but I’ve never been in her office, and I don’t know where to powder my nose, for example.”
He glanced at her nose. “That would be old money’s way of saying the bathroom, I expect.”
“Old money can also say loo, but I wasn’t sure if new money would understand.” Her heart dropped. Her mother would have been ashamed to hear her talk that way. Descended from the earliest settlers, Sir Patrick and Lady Grace, her mother would never have dreamed of belittling anyone else who had arrived in the country since. “That was ungracious of me.”
“And old money is never ungracious.” He turned away, as if shutting out the knowledge of a past memory.
“I wouldn’t consider it if I stopped to think, but you have to admit you goaded me,” she said with an apologetic lift of her shoulders.
He examined the expression on her face, and appeared to lose concentration. “Through that side door is a corridor,” he said, his broad shoulders squaring. He averted his gaze and pointed to where the main building, a modern concrete office block, joined onto the warehouse beneath the rest of the building. “That leads to the amenities and to the staff room. You can make tea or coffee or enjoy whatever sugar-loaded filler is currently available. I’ll walk you through and show you where my office is. Tiggy’s, now yours, is there, too.”
“Right,” she said as he led the way.
He walked like a cat, using a smooth, athletic stride. A grieving widower or not, he still had an admirable back view, though his suit jacket hid what used to be a very tight behind. His hair had been well-cut, not shorn or trendy, but expensively styled, and brushed back. Even in the throes of mourning, he presented himself like a billionaire’s son.
The corridor had been carpeted with industrial gray and the walls were painted a lighter shade. He showed her the all-white bathroom and the facilities, and she was impressed by the staff room, possibly the only staff room she’d seen in her life, other than that at school. This one had the flow-through gray carpeting and the same walls, but bright, modern paintings hung grouped together on one wall. Immediately, the place looked friendly. Tables and chairs sat around the room and a few comfortable armchairs, but the piѐce de résistance was the glass servery.
Apparently, with no charge, an employee could help herself to Greek pastries, short breads, custard slices, or a cheese-and-olive platter. Hagen’s Greek mother used to be a compulsive feeder of people and apparently hadn’t changed since the days when Marigold was hauled by Tiggy into the lovely big house the Allbrooks filled with their noise. Coming from a single-parent household, Marigold couldn’t get enough of people shouting with laughter, or arguing obscure and wonderful points. She was a natural arguer of points herself.
“My—our—office is two doors farther along.”
“Ah. Good placement.”
He stared down at her.
“Two doors away from coffee and shortbread? Who would argue that?”
He gave a sideways glance. “Follow me.”
Two doors down, he turned into a mini-foyer presided over by a long desk and a middle-aged, black-haired woman who lifted her head and smiled at Hagen. “Good morning. Who’s this? Tiggy’s wonderful friend?” She aimed her direct brown eyes at Marigold. Her hair had been scraped up into a bun at the crown of her head and she wore her green-framed glasses halfway down her nose.
Marigold smiled. “I don’t know how I came to be wonderful but yes, I’m Tiggy’s friend.”
“You’re wonderful because you’re taking over from her at a moment’s notice.” The woman looked amused.
“Marigold, meet Sandra, my personal assistant. If you have any questions, Sandra is more likely to know the answer than I am.” With that, Hagen strolled through the door that featured his name added to the title of Business Manager.
Sandra stood and walked over to the other door, marked Antigone Allbrook. “You’ll find your work station in here. Tiggy left her appointment book on the desk and she says you know your way around a computer. Any problems, call out.”
Marigold walked into her new office and glanced at the computer, fighting the temptation to run back to her car. She wanted to drive home and stay there, dreaming of her old life where computers only featured for the odd e-mail, the odder address, or occasionally for finding a tradesman.
She glanced at the appointment book, but she already knew she would be staging a house today. That was within her comfort zone. Barely. She managed single-contract staging for land agents, but she used the client’s furniture fluffed up a little with touches of her own, her homemade cushion covers, or her borrowed furniture. The rest… She warded off a panic attack by concentrating her gaze on Tiggy’s messy desk. Tidying up was a job she could handle. Later.
After a few moments of deep breathing, she edged back past Sandra’s desk and made her way to the warehouse again. The double doors had been dragged wide open and two men had started shifting a houseful of furniture into a truck marked AA & Co.
“I’m Marigold, the new stager,” she called over the noise of the rumbling trolley. “I’ll be coming with you. How long will you take to load?”
“An hour, give or take. I’m Billy Bunter.” A middle-aged man with a squashed nose like an ex-boxer and a perfectly round bald patch on the back of his head, stopped and grinned at her.
“You’re not!”
“I’m Jeff Bunter, but I’m called Billy,” he explained, standing patiently with his hands on his hips. “But call me Jeff if you like.”
She smiled. “I like Billy.”
“He’s Joe.” Billy indicated the other man with a head of wild dark curls who also looked as if he would be handy in a fight. He nodded at Marigold and grabbed up an armchair.
The two men worked fast, not like normal furniture movers who were paid for the job. These men worked for the company, like Marigold. She wouldn’t waste time on the job either, mainly because she didn’t know how much time she would need to do the job Tiggy did. She might take twice as long, for all she knew, never having needed to work to a tight schedule.
While the men loaded, she checked inside the boxes she had seen scattered in the far aisle, wondering where to put them. Bad mistake. The boxes were full of items returned from a previous staging that ought to be sorted before being stored in their rightful places on a shelf somewhere. Since at this moment the shelves had no discernable order system, she busied herself looking under dust sheets and trying to remember what she had seen where. She couldn’t resist shifting a few chairs that appeared to have been filed under tables, to the chair aisle.
By the time the men got to the smaller props, she began stashing items away in the truck, too. Barely an hour later, she was on her way. The unloading worked in reverse. She took the smaller items off and dropped them in the most appropriate rooms. As soon as the curtain rods had been carried into the house, she matched the sizes to the windows, grabbed the ladder, and looked around for the tool kit.
“I can put up the curtain rods if I can borrow a powered screwdriver,” she said to Billy, who had dropped a disassembled king-size bed into the largest bedroom.
“I’ll get them up for you. You could put that bed together.”
“Okay.” She sat on the floor with an Allen key and the pieces, but she hadn’t assembled a bed before. After a bit of mumbling to herself, she decided which ends fitted with which sides. Then she worked on the slats. Without another job until a mattress arrived, she put together a double bed in each of the two smaller rooms. By this time, the soft furnishings had arrived, and she made up the three beds.
The next two hours flew by. She wondered what Tiggy usually did about lunch, or a drink. Apparently, AA & Co. supplied the food needed during the job. Joe dumped a cardboard box in the kitchen and pulled out individual meal packs of salads, sandwiches, and fruit. He also took out an electric kettle, a milk carton, tea bags, coffee bags, and mugs.
“Wow, this is organization,” she said to the two men. She neatly covered the dining table with a sheet of packing paper and set the meals in front of the chairs.
Billy grinned. “It’s pretty good. Anyone who works for AA knows a great deal when he sees one. No one ever leaves voluntarily. But they get more work out of us in the deal, first, because we want to keep the job, and second, because we don’t have to waste time finding shops when we’re on a break.”
Marigold nodded. When she had an interesting task to do, she didn’t like wasting time to prepare food. This system suited her down to the ground. As soon as she had finished her cup of tea and rearranged the table and chairs, she skedaddled back to the master bedroom.
Tiggy’s choices were perfect. She had been doing this job since she had been given her degree in design, and she was someone Marigold wanted to learn from. Tiggy had even boxed accessories for each room, though Marigold was tentative about using them in a house that would be up for public inspection. Bearing in mind that Tiggy would know best, she placed a mirrored jewelry box on the tall dresser with a couple of framed photos of anonymous people.
She had finished styling the house when she left with the men a little after four. Tomorrow, while she researched the next job, noted in Tiggy’s book as the interior design for the old school, she would begin sorting out the warehouse.
* * * *
Hagen walked into his home through the gym attached to the garage, and switched on the main lights. The soles of his shoes clipped over the white marble floor to the main hallway. He took the pristine, white-painted stairway, heading for his white bedroom, where he swapped his suit jacket for a black knit. The dull chime of the old grandfather clock downstairs was the only sound in stark silence.
He remembered all over again that he now lived alone, and that the house would remain silent—no more Mercia clattering around in the kitchen, no more Mercia opening or closing doors, turning her music up loudly, or talking to him from obscure rooms.
Sighing, he pattered down the stairs to the kitchen at the back, through a house that was set at the perfect temperature, and he strode into the stark severity of the white room. Mercia would never return to clutter the marble counter tops with her piles of food that would not be eaten before the use-by date. She liked to be prepared for any event and consistently over-catered.
He spotted his evening meal, a pasta dish of some sort, left by his daily help, who also tidied his house and ironed his shirts, except on weekends. Duly, he put the plate into the microwave, and poured himself a glass of wine.
One place had been set in the adjoining dining room, a massive space, mainly white, softened by a pale gray carpet. The biggest, whitest chandelier imaginable, bar the matching one in the entrance hall, hung over the white dining table. He sipped, the timer rang, and he carried his meal and his glass to his set place.
After he had eaten and finished his wine, Hagen strode into his study off the main hallway, a room with French doors that opened out to the side garden. He had fought with Mercia about the furnishings in this room, a Persian carpet in blue and gold, a comfortable tan leather couch, and his gigantic antique desk with a walnut patina he could never resist running a palm along. He did so again before sitting in his creaky, swiveling desk chair and checking his mail.
Mercia hadn’t liked him bringing his work home, but he was the business manager of his father’s large company and had been for three years, since the age of twenty-six. Rather than let the world assume he owed his position to his father, he was determined to prove he had earned his job on merit. Even now he still insisted on proving himself, and this fact wouldn’t have entered his mind but for seeing Marigold Reynolds again.
Obstinate, confident Marigold with the marigold hair had grown into a wary, self-possessed woman. She hadn’t lost that quick tongue of hers, but he had lost his ability to laugh. Apathy had stolen his mind, and beside her he acted slow and sluggish. Perhaps he had been that way when he had met her, over ten years ago, when Tiggy had first brought her home, but he had never taken much notice of his sisters’ giggly chums.
He rested his chin on the knuckle of his fist, staring blankly at his computer screen. The summer before his last year at school—the year he had turned eighteen—he and his sisters had been allowed to invite one friend each to stay with the Allbrook family for Christmas at their beach house. He had invited Brent Adams, a member of his swimming team who was also interested in sailing. Any eighteen-year-old with two younger sisters would want to escape them for the summer, and Hagen’s plan had been to set up his yacht and spend most of the days sailing with Brent. That or go surfing. Calli had invited one of her nerdy friends, and Tiggy had invited Marigold.
As soon as Brent spotted Marigold he had another plan. With her neatly contained curly red hair and her awful clothes, she looked like an easy conquest, or so Brent had said. As soon as he discovered she wasn’t interested in him, he got snarky. He mumbled about her to Hagen, who wouldn’t have bothered trying to change her mind the way Brent did, which was to niggle at her.
“Ignore her. She’s too young anyway,” Hagen had said with all the confidence of his eighteen-year-old self.
“I’ll ignore her at school, that’s for sure.”
Hagen didn’t have that luxury, since his sisters hung on her every word, but Marigold annoyed the hell out of him that summer. She had a habit of staring a challenge right into a person’s eyes. Despite dressing in the charity shops’ rejects, she had poise and an innate confidence he hadn’t seen before in a kid her age. She knew who she was, and she didn’t think much of Hagen and Brent.
And then when they got back to town, she and his sisters, then in tenth grade, had shifted into the senior school. A senior himself, he had been appointed the school captain that last year, as well as being the captain of the football team and the captain of the swimming team. Marigold joined the swimming team.
Her swimsuit was the only piece of her school uniform that suited her. Her skirts and blazers looked weary and her hems had been let down. Clearly, she wore the same uniforms from a couple of years back. His sisters had new uniforms each year as they grew. Yet again, she marked herself out as being poor. And he wouldn’t have minded if she hadn’t had a way of making him feel inferior.
She spoke better than he, using a drawling upper-class accent. And she threw out challenges faster than he could pick them up. Primarily, he was an athletic scholar with rich parents. She was a socially connected, scholarship student with a single mother who worked as a dental nurse. Never the twain should meet. And yet she swam like a fish on steroids. As the year progressed, her body grew curvier and her speech more diplomatic. They won the interschool championship that year. He was the golden boy, and she was a smart-mouthed sixteen-year-old.
Back then, he had tried not to notice her. However, she taught him his final lesson six years ago, which he had tried and failed to understand. Fortunately, this had motivated him to stay away from her. He didn’t plan to let himself get involved with her again. She would be gone in three months, and good riddance. Meanwhile, he had schedules to plan, meetings to attend, and a whole lot of forgetting to do.
And yet, when he awoke in the morning, Marigold’s presence in his workspace was the first thing to enter his mind. Tiggy had told him Marigold would be taking over for her when she had informed him she would be toddling off for three months. He should have told her to find someone else. Instead, she had left him with the only person in his life who had completely and utterly rejected him.
He arrived in the staff car park directly behind Marigold, as would naturally happen when he wanted to avoid her. He took his named spot, and she drew up in the general area. She, of course, drove a small car of obscure make. He couldn’t walk off without acknowledging her and so he waited. She, of course, stared his car up and down without a word.
“I know I should drive a twenty-year-old homemade car, but I prefer speed and comfort,” he said, using his bored voice.
“I didn’t say a word, and if I had, it wouldn’t be about your beautiful car. Don’t doubt it, if I had less class and more money, I would buy one of those, too.”
He blinked at her. She didn’t smile but her whole face expressed hope. Her eyes sparkled and her mouth pursed. He eked out a reluctant laugh, possibly for the first time in a year or more. “Words you might wish had remained unspoken.”
“Oh? Was I making one of those comments that make me sound like an envious snob?”
He put his hand to the back of his neck and considered. “That sounds like something I might once have said.”
“It does, doesn’t it? And I might have said something about the high proportion of village idiots who owned fast cars. But I also might have grown up a little.”
“Since school days? I know,” he said with emphasis, staring straight into her eyes. He began to walk with her to the loading bay door.
“Though I’m still wearing hand-me-downs. Well, that might change in the near future. You will be pleased to know that for three months I will be earning more than the average wage. I might even buy something smart.”
He glanced back at her, concentrating for the first time on the clothes she wore. If they were hand-me-downs, he wouldn’t have guessed, not that she wore the type of clothes Mercia used to buy, which he knew were expensive and seen only a few times before she loaded her dressing room with her next buys. Marigold wore a plain blue shirt with a black skirt and jacket. She looked like any businesswoman of his acquaintance, except for her light golden-red hair, which she had tangled into a knot at the back of her head. As ever, the soft curly tendrils around her face had escaped. He thought she didn’t wear much makeup. Her eyelashes, long and spiky, seemed to be her own, but what would he know? “How did you manage yesterday?”
“Pretty well, I think, but Tiggy had everything organized for me. I see the next on the list is to design the interior of a building that has been renovated for sale. I gather I decide which style.”
He nodded. “Based on the area and the age of the building, though not necessarily. For example, I have an old house, but my wife wanted a modern interior.” Whatever he had planned to say next didn’t eventuate when he noted her wary gaze.
“I’m sure it’s very beautiful.”
“Most people think so.” He stiffened his shoulders. “She’s dead. My wife,” he said, wishing he hadn’t felt the need to explain a fact that Marigold doubtlessly knew. “A car accident.”
She nodded. “I know it’s hard. My mother died a year ago, and I have only recently thought about having her room painted. It seemed sacrilege to wipe out memories of her with a paint color. But in the end, a room is only a room and she would have liked another color if she had lived.”
“Does that mean you are alone now? I recall you didn’t have much to do with your father.”
“Or my half brothers.” She made a wry face. “They went to our school, you know, but they were in the junior school while I was in the senior school so I hardly ever saw them. Once my father had sons, he was happy to forget his daughter existed.”
He already knew that she had younger brothers who barely knew her and a father who chose not to. Hagen might have attitude himself if either of his parents had been so uncaring. Instead he had a bright mother, a somewhat severe but loving father, and two smart sisters. He had based his later reactions toward Marigold on his mistaken assumption that he was one of life’s winners, but he doubted that any other hormonally driven bonehead would have been any more sensitive to the nuances than he. He needed to think of himself less often rather than think less of himself.
He parted from her at his office door, realizing that his tone when he mentioned his house must have given her a hint that he didn’t admire the modern décor; the cold, impersonal, disposable furnishings; and Mercia’s deliberately conspicuous spending. As soon as he could motivate himself, he had every intention of wiping out the memory of her with a change.
The only room he liked was his study.