Chapter 2
Marigold wandered into the workroom glad that she and Hagen had made peace at last. The unspoken issue between them had lurked for six years. I know. Naturally she was never going to apologize for pricking his male ego, but at the time she had hurt herself as well. She’d had no choice.
Now that he had also been hit with the reality of life and death, and he quite clearly suffered the loss of his wife, she experienced a tad of contrition. From now on, she would treat him with the respect any boss would expect from an employee.
With a release of pent-up breath, she sat at Tiggy’s desk and fingered the notebook clearly meant for her. The cover had been illustrated with a garish orange pencil drawing of a flower, which looked roughly like a marigold, but the best hint was “Marigold” written with a black marker pen. She smiled and moved the pad aside, glancing at the paint cards, color swatches, scraps of paper, pencils, pens, a length of black ribbon, two feathers, a packet of mints, a scalpel, a pencil sharpener, and a desk calendar. Okay, all were essential items, but not on a working space. Tiggy had left this in as great a mess as the furniture bay.
Before Marigold could begin, she needed to make Tiggy’s desk into her own: neat and tidy. She opened the top drawer, noted a caddy, and she dropped the pens, pencils, sharpener, and scalpel on top. Paper and notebooks appeared to belong in the second drawer, and everything else went into the bottom drawer, whether it belonged there or not.
Now, with her desk space free, she scanned the rest of the room—the rolls of fabric, the cushion innards, a box of curtain tie backs, various handles, and door fittings. A few small articles had no particular meaning at this time, like a stack of old books, multicolored small boxes, and a plant stand. She would find a plant for the stand and take the rest to the warehouse.
Now she could start work. Setting the Marigold notebook in front of her, she flipped through pages of numbers, addresses, and doodles until she came to the last. Here, Tiggy had itemized tasks headed The Schoolhouse.
1. Kell will drop in sometime on Tuesday afternoon and drive you to the schoolhouse.
2. Take color swatches and paint cards.
Even for Tiggy, that was taking brevity a little too far. Marigold had never designed the innards of a house before. A hint or two would have been appreciated. Sighing, she took the articles out of the bottom drawer and dropped them into her bag, with a handful of pencils and a notebook, in fact, most of the things she had recently put away. She thought about adding the feather and the mints, but decided she could risk having neither of those handy during a house inspection.
Since she saw no place for the rolls of fabric in the office, she managed the three of them all the way along the passage to the warehouse without any slipping from her grip. She used her foot to pry open the connecting door to the warehouse. As she dropped the rolls with a stack of others, a shadow crossed the doorway.
She turned, noting a glamorous young woman dressed in a delicious red floral dress and red high heels.
“Knock, knock,” the woman said as she stepped inside the doorway. After lifting her ombre blond hair to one shoulder, she rehooked the straps of her expensive multicolored leather bag onto her shoulder. “What a ghastly day. Is Tiggy here?” Her smooth face barely creased with her smile.
“She won’t be back for another three months. I’m Marigold. I’ve taken over Tiggy’s job in the meantime.”
“How nice to meet you, Marigold. Such a sweet old-fashioned name. I’m Scarlett, and I’m a friend of the Allbrooks, here on a charity mission. The Adelaide Dramatic Society needs a few props for their latest show. I believe the society has borrowed Allbrook’s staging furniture from time to time. They need a three-seater blue couch for their latest production, or so the set designer said. Do you have one?” Scarlett’s perfectly drawn eyebrows queried Marigold.
Smiling politely, Marigold offered a rueful shrug. “I’m not sure I have the authority to give you furniture. If you don’t mind waiting for a few minutes, I’ll ask Hagen.”
Scarlett looked amused. “Hagen won’t mind. We’re very good friends.”
Marigold didn’t doubt that for one moment. Scarlett was Hagen’s type—polished, manicured, and shiny new. “I’ll just check with him.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Please do.” With Scarlett striding behind her, Marigold led the way to the office block and then to Hagen’s suite. “Is Hagen available?” she asked Sandra.
Sandra glanced at Scarlett. “Mrs. Haines, good morning. Yes, Hagen is in.”
Scarlett moved in front of Marigold and opened the door of Hagen’s office. “Hagen, darling,” she said and she closed the door behind her.
“Oops,” Marigold said blinking at Sandra. “She wanted to borrow furniture, and I wasn’t sure who she was.”
“She was a friend of his wife. She broke up with her husband last year, which might be significant. Or not.” Sandra kept her voice low, staring at the door. “I wonder why she wants to borrow furniture?”
“For The Adelaide Dramatic Society,” she said.
“Oh. Tiggy usually lets theater companies borrow whatever they want, but I didn’t know Mrs. Haines had any connection there.”
“She said something about a charity call. I hope Hagen doesn’t mind having his day interrupted by this.”
“If you were a man would you mind being confronted with Mrs. Haines in the morning?”
Marigold laughed. “I see your point. Well, I’ll get back to whatever I was doing.”
In less than five minutes, while Marigold was finding a place for a set of glass vases, which meant she had to find another space for three porcelain bowls, Scarlett returned with Hagen, who looked slightly ruffled. “Give Scarlett whatever she wants,” he said to Marigold. “I must get back to work.”
“You’re a sweetheart, Hagen.” Scarlett rested her red fingernails on Hagen’s wide shoulder, and stood on her toes to give him a lingering kiss near his mouth.
His hand briefly touched her arm. “Marigold will help you.”
Scarlett’s gaze hooded. “Oh, yes. Marigold.” She stood, watching him leave. Most women would. Then she turned to Marigold, appearing politely bored. “A blue three-seater couch?”
“Right. This way. Follow me.”
Scarlett followed Marigold up and down the aisles while she peeked under dust sheets trying to find what the other woman wanted. “Here’s one.” She stopped at a navy-blue couch.
“That will be perfect. Can your man deliver it today?”
“My man?”
“I was told you had a man to do your deliveries,” Scarlett said with an imperious frown.
Not at all eager to ask Hagen another officious question, Marigold nodded. “We have a delivery team. I’ll see when Billy can deliver.”
“The company will be finished with the couch in three weeks, they told me. You can get your man to pick it up then. Thank you, Muriel. I’ll tell Hagen how helpful you’ve been.”
Trying to look like a Muriel, Marigold squeezed out a smile but she doubted Hagen would care to hear about her usefulness. He expected her to do as she was told, and she would, for three months.
She couldn’t find Billy or Joe, but determined to save them work, she scraped the couch over to the loading bay doors. Finding the furniture for Scarlett wasn’t a waste of time, because she had discovered AA & Co. supported amateur theater productions, a generosity she admired. Without the local productions, young actors wouldn’t have a chance, and many professional actors wouldn’t be able to pay back the start they had received themselves. Nor would hopeful young set designers have the opportunity to show their talents.
Plus, Marigold had found a kind of method in Tiggy’s madness. Tiggy put any old couch of any old size or color in the aisle nearest to the loading bay, clearly because these were the heaviest articles. The matching armchairs occupied the middle of the same aisle. Single chairs sat at the far end. Tables of all sizes filled the next row. Wardrobes were rare, but those AA owned were antiques and set against the back wall.
Now that Marigold knew the system, she emptied the boxes, and placed the smaller props—the vases, the cups and saucers, the plates, an umbrella, suitcases, and what-all—on various shelves. Dusting off her hands, she strolled to the staff cafeteria, not only for a coffee but hoping to spot Billy.
Instead she saw Hagen select a mug from the overhead shelves and turn to the coffee machine.
“Could you tell me where Billy might be at this time of day?” she asked him with her best professional smile.
He glanced at her. “He and Joe are at Kell’s workshop. They have a kitchen to pick up and deliver. Why?”
“I need them to deliver the couch we’ve loaned to The Adelaide Dramatic Society for their latest show.”
“Why are we delivering the couch?”
“Scarlett implied that we deliver and pick up.” An element of nervousness lowered her tone.
He frowned. “We let the companies borrow items, but they are supposed to arrange for the collections and returns themselves.”
Marigold swallowed. Her chest deflated. “So, will I have to tell her that we won’t deliver and pick up?”
“That would be unfair, wouldn’t it, when she probably enjoyed conning you?” He dropped a pod into the coffee machine.
“So, I’ve been caught in a charity scam.” Marigold made a deliberately exaggerated face of self-disgust. “I should have realized that beneath that highly polished exterior lurked a devious Miss Marple.”
He examined her expression with eyes as blue and clear as the summer sea. “Treasure the moment. Not too many people would have seen Scarlett touting for charity.” He watched the coffee drizzling into his cup. “Who’s Miss Marple?”
Marigold cleared her throat, reluctant to admit to watching daytime TV to a man who probably watched the news, at best. “A television detective. She acts like a doddering little old lady and no one recognizes the sharp mind behind her sweet face. Scarlett looks like…well, you know what she looks like.”
“She looks like my late wife, except for the color of her hair.” His lips clamped.
She huffed out a slow breath. “That must be hard. Every reminder is hard. We like to pretend they can come back and watch over us while we know they can’t.” Her eyes prickled. Talking about her dead mother to anyone who hadn’t suffered a loss was like talking to a sympathetic brick wall. Those people assumed that mourning the loss of a loved one had a use-by date.
“I’m sorry about your mother.” A muscle in his jaw ticked as he glanced at her. “Was her death sudden?”
She glanced away. He didn’t know about her mother’s condition and he hadn’t been notified about her death. Either Tiggy or Calli must have told him. “She’d been ill for some time. I have accepted that I’ll grieve forever without being in mourning forever. It’s harder for you.” She indicated that his cup had filled.
He nodded briefly, showing he understood, which of course he did, although the shock of losing a young healthy wife was likely far more difficult than watching the suffering of a loved mother end. “I’ll get Billy to deliver whatever she wants as soon as he can.” He pressed the stop button and courteously passed his coffee to her.
“Thank you. And, in future I’ll watch glamorous women with appealing smiles a little more carefully.” She added milk to the cup, while he started another for himself.
“I don’t intend to micromanage,” he said, concentrating on the coffee stream, “but we don’t let many people borrow our props. I’m surprised Tiggy didn’t mention this. I’ll leave you to decide who can, based on something other than glamour.”
“Driver’s license?”
He gave her a sideways glance and stalked off.
She didn’t know what to make of Hagen these days, though the death of his wife would have woken him up to the fact that life was short. In his own distant way, he was kind. She couldn’t say the same about him during their school days. His deliberate ignore of her back then had made an impact on a girl who was well aware that everyone knew her mother bought her school uniforms secondhand. This wasn’t necessarily unusual in a school that charged exorbitant fees, but she was a friend of his sisters, and he saw her in his home at least once a week. He could easily have been a lot friendlier.
Added to that, in his last year Hagen had been the bleeding, bloody captain of everything, the school, the football team, and the swimming team. One thing she had been really good at was swimming. He absolutely hadn’t looked at her during training, and she’d been certain he wouldn’t select her for the inter-schools’ team, but in the end he had to because she had beaten every other girl in the school. She had tried to approach him about her position on the relay team, and he’d said, “Get dressed.”
Get dressed? Every other person on the team could talk to him wearing a swimsuit, but she had to get dressed? He didn’t tell his girlfriend to get dressed, and she had the biggest breasts in the school, and she wobbled them under everyone’s nose. Marigold liked her body, which wasn’t excessive. The only person on the swimming team she would tell to get dressed was bleeding, bloody Brent, who already had the beginnings of a potbelly at the age of eighteen. Who wanted to see that?
In retrospect, Hagen looked fabulous in his swimmers, showing most of his golden-tanned, tall, muscular body. Girls tended to approach him wearing as little as possible, in the hope of his attention for reasons other than wanting to swim last in the relay. He probably thought she was trying the same thing, but as a friend of his sisters that would be low, and probably hurt the most, knowing he thought she had been interested in throwing herself at him. Bigheaded jerk.
But that was then. Time had passed and the few memorable occasions they’d met since schooldays had been put to the back of her mind. Easing her shoulders, again she stared at the sweet treats in the servery and again she deprived herself in favor of getting back to the restacking of the warehouse.
Billy arrived about an hour later, and he shook his head over the delivery to the theater’s backstage. “If I had known this morning, I could have done it then.” He grumped off.
Marigold ate her lunch in guilty silence, and then she shifted various chairs around the warehouse. Although any good designer would hear the word ‘schoolhouse’ and instantly see a theme, she was having an attack of procrastination. Perhaps when she saw the schoolhouse, an idea for the color scheme would waft out of the walls and inspire her. In the meantime, she had looked at new bathrooms online until her eyes ached. She needed shortcuts in this eclectic job she had no idea how to manage. Finally, Kell, Calli Allbrook’s husband, found her.
“Ready?” He waited for her to collect her bag. Kell was a man about the same height as Hagen but there the resemblance ended. Kell had dark hair and the sort of rough handsomeness that model agencies grabbed with both hands. The man was perfect for Calli, Tiggy’s twin, and a quiet and contemplative woman who thought so long before she spoke that mainly she ended up being tactful. She had been the same as a girl, careful, and everyone’s idea of a thoroughly nice person.
Marigold guessed that Kell was less tactful and far more determined to have his way. His dark good looks used to intimidate her, but now she saw more than his looks. He was ultra-smart and had recently been appointed the project manager of AA by his father-in-law, Alex Allbrook, the general manager of the company, the son of the original founder, Hagen’s grandfather.
When she arrived back, Kell walked her to his work vehicle, a white pickup bearing the company’s logo. Within ten minutes, Kell unlocked the safety door of the main building of a former primary school. “We’ve got the walls up in this building, which will be converted into a duplex. We’ll want your interior design by the end of the week.” He followed her into the hallway.
“Right,” she said, swallowing.
“We’ll do the other buildings later. This is intended to be a two-stage job. As you can see, we have subdivided the site into sixteen lots. The other three buildings left standing will be converted into separate houses. The former gymnasium will have another story added and will end up being single-bedroom apartments. Student accommodation, most likely. Then we’ll build ten new houses on the other lots. I have the architect’s floor plans for each, and I’ll give you a copy.”
“When are you completing the build?”
“We’re playing this one by ear, so far, doing the whole thing piecemeal. Most of the men are working on the apartment block we’re building in the city, and they’ll be deployed whenever they have time.”
She stared at him. “Am I doing a separate design plan for each building?”
“You or Tiggy, eventually, but the school building needs to go ahead first. We want it done and sold. Alex likes to keep the money moving.”
Patting her chest as though she had warded off a heart attack, she smiled with overdone relief. “Do you want the same look for both sides of the duplex?”
He shook his head. “Not necessarily the same, but similar.”
Marigold checked each of the rooms, taking photos on her phone. She made notes about the windows and the sunlight as she went. Kell busied himself, but he appeared to be checking measurements rather than plotting. When Marigold indicated that she had enough information, he drove her back to AA. Before he disappeared again, he said, “I almost forgot, Calli wants me to ask you to come to dinner on Friday night.”
“I would be delighted.”
Then she went back to her office, and sat at her desk with a scale graph of two completely different sized bathrooms. For the next two hours, she went online to make her final choice of baths and vanities. She matched virtual tiles, and then shifted handmade cutouts around on her scale drawing of the plan until she was satisfied she had left enough room for towel rails and a double vanity.
Hagen’s light shone through the crack beneath his door, but she didn’t see him either come or go. Sandra spent more time away from her desk than Marigold had imagined a personal assistant would, and Hagen spent more time out of his office than in it. Likely she would too once she had worked out her routine.
She wondered if she was up to the task. For her sort of property designing while she stayed at home looking after her mother, she saved on costs wherever she could. Often, simply moving items around or into different rooms made the house look larger or smarter. If she needed a little extra padding, she knew a secondhand furniture dealer who allowed her to borrow his furniture for a tiny fee. She wasn’t above making new cushion covers or finding prints to frame cheaply, either.
For AA & Co., she started from scratch. She hadn’t ever been expected to plot out where a fridge would best fit into a new kitchen, though she had certainly shifted a few in old kitchens. Although she could work out all the details given time, compared to a professional like Tiggy, Marigold was a rank amateur. The scary part was that Kell’s team would be making cabinets to fit her specifications. If she made a mistake, she would create extra work and costs. Aside from that, because she worked with whatever articles her private clients already owned, she had no idea of the most saleable colors for new builds.
She collected Tiggy’s pile of design magazines and began skimming through, but she truly couldn’t imagine living with a red kitchen for longer than a year, despite the eye-catching color. Then again, some people lived whole lifetimes surrounded by appalling colors without making any change.
She sighed. The kitchen cupboards in her mother’s post-war house, now hers, were crafted from painted wood with cream laminate countertops. The house had been built in the seventies, and the kitchen had never been renewed. Most of the hinges on the cabinets had rusted and almost all hung enough askew, making closing the doors difficult. If she had the money… But she didn’t.
Instead, she could enjoy renewing the old school with a modern, but not too glamorous kitchen. Built after the Second World War, 1940-ish, the severity of the architecture and the stark lines of the crown molding would be set off nicely by a modern industrial design.
She left at six and noted Hagen’s car was one of the few left in the lot. Since she was supposed to report any problems to him, she decided to make tentative plans and run them by Calli when she saw her on Friday night.
* * * *
Hagen ended his last meeting at seven and drove home to his sterile house. He zapped his meal, wrote up the minutes of the last meeting of the board, and signed a pile of checks. Sandra had noted in his planner that his car was due for a service and that his sister Calli wanted him to come for dinner on Friday night. She could have called him, but he had a habit of ignoring personal phone calls, and so, like many others, she often used Sandra to keep him up to date.
Finally, he decided that an evening with her and Kell would suit him well enough. He would be sure of not eating another microwave meal, at least. He contacted Calli and accepted the invitation for seven on Friday night. A family meal wouldn’t leave him wondering where the past year had gone.
* * * *
He almost forgot about Marigold, and when he saw her in the staff room on Thursday he took a step backward. Today she wore her tailored black pants and a crisp white shirt. Her beautiful hair had been swirled on top of her head.
“Good morning,” she said with one of her classy smiles.
He nodded. “Morning. How’s the job going?”
“The schoolhouse? It’s not as easy to plot what goes where as you might think.”
As the person who had plotted ‘what goes where’ in his first year with his father’s company, he tried a sympathetic shift of his mouth. “Computer modeling helps.”
“But first you need to know the size of the loo and the bath, and how much space you need to take a shower.”
“Surely the sizes would be on the computer program?” He glanced over at the far table where the company’s architect sat with the building foreman, planning to join them.
Her jaw moved a little to the side as she thought. “I hope not since I spent hours finding the specifications online.”
“Didn’t Tiggy run through all that with you?” Unlike most redheads he knew, Marigold had dark eyelashes. Her eyes were the color of a fine old brandy—big, candid, beautiful eyes, glossed with health.
She blinked and a slight crease formed between her delicate eyebrows. “She told me she didn’t use the computer often, but I might find something useful. If so, I don’t know what or where.”
He edged sideways, wanting his employees to note that he wouldn’t spend too much time in conversation with an attractive woman. A man whose wife had recently died had to mourn: needed to respect her memory. “So, you’re reinventing the wheel.”
“You could say that.” She lifted her shoulders.
“You ought to have told me you were having a problem.” He glanced away, frustrated. She shouldn’t be in this position that was clearly out of her depth. Tiggy had insisted that Marigold could handle a job that depended on more than the color of a few tiles, and he didn’t know why Tiggy had chosen her if she couldn’t easily knock off a design for an interior. He hoped she could coordinate events because that would be her main role, in his opinion. The designing was important, but impressing prospective clients was more important. Mercia had had the knack. Marigold was as yet, untried.
“I probably don’t like showing my ignorance. In my normal line of work, I only use a computer to order or find materials.”
Although he knew he should sit at one of the tables with her and sort out her problems, he couldn’t handle too much time with Marigold. The sight of her squeezed at his insides and reminded him of that night during his final year at university when he had made an irretrievable mistake. “Sandra will help you,” he said, backing out of the room, coffee in hand, instead of joining the builder and the architect.
He shouldn’t have allowed Marigold to interrupt his disciplined routine.
After super-efficient, slightly motherly Sandra had spoken to Marigold, his PA entered his office, her forehead creased. “She’s right. Tiggy left her out on a limb. She doesn’t have any sort of list of the projects or the specs. I’m going to send her everything. In the meantime, she has done color swatches, etcetera. Nice job, too.”
He sent a text message to Tiggy. What’s up? Why did you leave Marigold hung out to dry?
No answer, but he could see she read the message. Perhaps Marigold and Tiggy had had a falling out. Hagen had never known either of his sisters to be spiteful. He still hadn’t heard from Tiggy by the time he pulled up outside Calli’s house on Friday night. Another car sat right outside the front gate of the place Calli and Kell were currently renovating. Marigold’s blue car.
He gripped his steering wheel. The thought of Kell and Calli having a dinner guest other than him hadn’t entered his head. Finally, he stalked up the garden path, stepped onto the slatted veranda, and rang the doorbell. A couple of light footsteps and Kell, dressed in jeans and a woolly sweater, opened the door.
“I thought this was a family meal?” Hagen said in an accusing voice. He pushed a bottle of red wine at Kell’s chest.
“You saw Marigold’s car? She is family, according to Calli.” Kell led the way to the open plan living area.
Calli had chosen plain white walls for the seventies house. Light, polished hardwood flooring connected the kitchen, the dining room, and the sitting room where a dark blue carpet square complemented the mellow wood. Pops of primary colors had been added in the pictures on the walls and other than that, his youngest sister had furnished in contemporary style.
“Nice,” he said, glancing around. He hadn’t been in this house before and he knew Kell and Calli would make quite a few dollars when Kell sold the place on, which was his intention. Living off his wife’s money didn’t suit him, being the proud and independent type.
Hagen understood, although he hadn’t been brought up poor. He had insisted on paying for his own house, too, despite his father’s impatience. “It will be yours anyway, so why not spend some now?” Far had said, but Hagen didn’t want a house he would sell on. He wanted a lifetime house, one in which his children would flourish. But he didn’t have children, and he no longer had a wife.
He pushed his hands into his pockets and glanced over to the kitchen where Marigold and Calli stood, the latter grinning at him and accepting the bottle of wine from Kell. Calli was tall and elegant with dark hair like their mother. She had the light eyes they had all inherited from Far. The only difference between Calli and Tiggy was their hair color, which changed on a whim. Both had inherited Ma’s cooking skills, but Calli pretended she was a novice, a ploy that had Ma, but no one else, fooled. Ma continued to bury Calli under mountains of food offerings. She had stopped her food parcels to Hagen not long after he married Mercia. No doubt she assumed Mercia had inherited her mother’s cooking skills.
He smiled at Calli, and flickered his gaze to Marigold. “Nice to see you again, Marigold,” he said, folding his arms across his chest, a challenging stance that appalled him. Gazing at his feet, he switched his hands back to his pockets, trying to appear casual but in a room with Marigold, he felt anything but casual.
He had no idea why she always looked right for every occasion without appearing to try, but tonight she wore those plain black pants with a pale blue knitted top. Her beautiful shiny hair had been straightened and fell to her shoulders in a glimmer of gold. Tonight would be unbearable.
Marigold offered a pasted smile. “After all this time?” Her glance at him expressed the vague amusement of the unreadable younger woman she had been.
“A whole day.” He could have bitten his tongue. He hadn’t meant to sound as though he noticed. “We’re not going to talk about work, I hope,” he said, clamping his jaw.
“What if it finds its way into the conversation?”
He sighed. Irrepressible Marigold. Again, she had left him without a comeback. He glanced at Kell, who said, “Would you like a beer or a glass of your wine?”
“Whatever you like.”
Kell gave him beer. The conversation drifted into talk of food while the ladies nursed a glass of wine each. After pulling warm plates from the oven, Calli asked them to sit at the table. Hagen sat opposite Marigold, who spread her table napkin on her lap without glancing at him. He did the same while Calli served apple and pumpkin soup. The delicately sweet flavor caught at his taste buds.
For the past year, he had avoided family meals. He didn’t want the sympathy he didn’t deserve, preferring to wallow in his wretchedness. Tonight, the clear bright colors in the room, the fragrant food, and the sheer pleasure of gazing at calm and careful Marigold relaxed him.
He savored a lamb roast with crisp roasted vegetables, and a pastry packed with creamy custard drizzled with honey syrup. He rarely ate sweets—the decision of the athlete he no longer was, but tonight he wanted everything he had missed. Yes, even Marigold. Marigold most. She had a swimmer’s body, fit and healthy, that he would appreciate in his bed, and graceful hands that he could easily imagine caressing his needy body.
At the moment, her hands rested idly on the table. He groaned silently, feeling the rush of blood to his dick. After lighthearted small talk, while he tried to concentrate on the words rather than Marigold, the company relaxed on the L-shaped sofa. Calli curled against Kell. The pretty little cat they had acquired sat along the top of the couch, every now and again batting at Kell’s face to encourage his attention.
“Remember that summer we spent at Goolwa?” Calli said, idly toying with one of Kell’s fingers.
Hagen knew which summer she meant because she included Marigold in her gaze. “We spent most summers at Goolwa,” he said, hoping to change the subject. He had enough problems with Marigold sitting only an angle away.
“I’m talking about the summer before Tiggy and I moved into the senior school. Marigold was with us for Christmas. I love big family Christmases. We haven’t had one for ages. Kell and I are thinking of going to Goolwa with Ma and Far this year.”
“Do you sail, Kell?”
Kell shook his head and dragged the cat onto his lap.
Calli answered for him. “Kell isn’t a beach boy like you.”
“I’ll bet he plays a mean game of volleyball.”
Kell grinned. “Mean is the word. I have two brothers. If you come, too, I’ll challenge you to a Dee-style game. We play by rules decided on by what the women are wearing.”
Hagen scratched the back of his neck. “Whatever floats your boat. Speaking of which, if I come, I’ll take you out sailing.”
“We blessed your sailing that year. We got rid of handy ol’ Brent for a while.” Marigold gleamed a smile at him. “Handy as in, my god, he was a grabber, wasn’t he Calli?”
“You got the worst of it. I think he was a bit scared of touching Hagen’s sisters.”
Hagen glanced at Marigold. His neck tightened. “If he was touching you, you should have said something.”
“I thought I dealt with him quite well. I touched him back, tweaked him actually, and it hurt. It might have given him the idea that grabbing a girl’s breasts hurt, too. Anyway, he didn’t speak to me again, even at school. I see he married Dina Douglas, aka Dido.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw it in the paper a couple of years ago. It’s a shame you grabbed her back then, because if he could have had her, it would have taken the pressure off the rest of us.” Marigold laughed, and her eyes crinkled with mischief.
“If only you had asked me back then, I would have thrown her to the wolf,” Hagen answered with intentional sarcasm. He didn’t want to want Marigold. “No sacrifice would have been too great for you.”
“It’s a shame that’s past tense because in the present I’m tense. I see in the notes Tiggy left for me that I’m supposed to be organizing a dinner for you next Friday. Why do you need me to organize a dinner for you? Surely it’s only a matter of calling a restaurant and if you can’t do that, Sandra could.”
He glanced at Calli who moistened her lips before she spoke. “Tiggy’s been organizing Hagen’s business dinners since Mercia died. Mercia used to handle the social aspect, and Tiggy managed the organizational part.”
“What part is the organizational part?” Marigold stared straight at him.
He shrugged. “Invitations, table decorations.”
“He thinks it’s that easy,” Calli said, shaking her head. “For an intimate dinner, you need to know the invitees nationalities and their dietary requirements. You might want place cards, name cards. For a larger dinner, you might want a speaker, an order of speaking, sponsors, entertainment. The list goes on. Sometimes you might want a red carpet or photographers, or even the media.”
“Not for this dinner,” Hagen said, alarmed. “I’ll be hosting it at home.”
“In your house?”
“Home is what I call my house.”
“So, I’m organizing a dinner in your home?”
“Imagine it’s a restaurant.”
“Dinner for how many?”
Hagen frowned, again puzzled. “Tiggy must have left you instructions.”
“It said in the notebook, and I quote, ‘Organize Hagen’s dinner.’”
“Perhaps Sandra knows the details.”
“If it’s in your house, you’ll need what? A caterer and staff?”
“You can get the caterer to supply staff.” Calli glanced at Hagen. “Hagen, stop being unhelpful. All of this must have been booked weeks ago.”
“Yes. I’m sure it was. I recall Tiggy saying everyone accepted.”
Marigold breathed out. “Good. So, everyone will arrive, and presumably to have accepted, they’ll know where to go. At worst, I’ll only need to run around like a headless chicken trying to organize a caterer for X number of people with various food intolerances. At best, that’s done, and Sandra knows the arrangement.”
“And the hours you spend at my house will be paid at double time, if that makes this more palatable.” He glanced at Marigold’s expression, which he couldn’t read, had never been able to read, and he wondered if that was her attraction. Mercia’s face had always warned him about what she was about to say or do, but he had never fathomed Marigold.
“I’ll be at your house?”
He spread his hands. “You’re Tiggy’s stand-in. For the past year, she has been my hostess. That’s why she wanted you for this job—you’re not a stranger to me.”
She sat with her hands in her lap, the irises in her big brandy-colored eyes huge. “That does it. I’ll have to buy a new dress.”
She smiled at him, and old memories of her smart, wryly funny words flooded his mind. He concentrated on the coffee table in front of him, anything but think about her.
A man would be a fool to want a woman he couldn’t have. Aside from that, he didn’t deserve another chance.