The Little French Guesthouse Read Free Page B

Nathan was quiet (morose at times, now I came to think of it), Rupert was the exact opposite – loud and bumptious, sometimes outrageous. I would have put Nathan’s instant dislike of him down to a simple personality clash if it hadn’t been for the unnerving conversation we’d had the morning after we arrived.
    We had been sitting in the garden recovering from our journey, and as I’d blissfully taken in the glory that surrounded us – neat lawns, late spring flowers, lush trees – I had been foolish enough to open my big mouth and voice my thoughts.
    ‘Glorious here, isn’t it?’ I’d murmured.
    Nathan scanned his surroundings, quietly assessing. ‘Hmm. Wonder how much it cost him?’
    I propped myself up on one elbow and looked across at him. Ever the accountant. If I put it down to professional curiosity, I could forgive him comments such as these.
    ‘No idea,’ I said dismissively.
    ‘Last night at dinner, he said it was a wreck when they bought it, so he probably got it cheaply enough. But it must’ve cost him a fortune to do up.’ Nathan craned his neck to look back at the house where deep green foliage crept up the grey stone walls. The stone looked older, almost crumbling, in some places, and patched in others – but red roof tiles added colour to the façade, and the blue-painted shutters which stood sentry at each window were smart and welcoming. Nathan swept his eyes across the newer whitewashed wing that was Rupert and Gloria’s living quarters, built on the side of the house, with what was left of an old orchard separating it from the road. ‘The renovation of the farmhouse itself. That extension,’ he muttered. ‘The gîtes across the way. Can’t be cheap, converting an old barn like that. And the grounds were a wasteland when they moved in, apparently.’
    I glanced over at the rows of lavender lining the courtyard between the house and the gîtes , a long building with a rough exterior of cream-and-grey stone and three wooden doorways, each surrounded by clambering grapevines. ‘Well, they made a good job of it,’ I said admiringly.
    Nathan gave a cursory nod. ‘Yes, but where did he get the money, Emmy, eh? He never said what he did for a living before they came out here.’
    ‘Not our business, though, is it?’
    Nathan curled his lip in an unpleasant sneer. ‘Posh accent. Probably born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Doesn’t look like the type who’s ever had to work for a living.’
    I raised an eyebrow in surprise. This was a side to Nathan I wasn’t familiar with, and I wasn’t at all sure I liked it.
    ‘They must have worked pretty hard to create this,’ I defended them, sweeping my arm to encompass our home for the next two weeks.
    ‘I doubt he knows the meaning of hard work,’ Nathan grumbled. ‘I bet he paid other people to do it all while he just lounged around and watched. Jammy bastard.’
    I frowned at him. ‘Why does it matter? You’d be complaining if we were paying all this money and it wasn’t nice here. Can’t we just enjoy it?’
    Nathan flopped down on his lounger in a sulk and I lay back too, my good mood dissipated.
    I wondered if we would have been better off in one of the gîtes , thereby minimising Nathan’s exposure to Rupert, but that thought didn’t last long. I knew from bitter experience that Nathan’s idea of self-catering was to grumble his way around the supermarket glaring at all the foreign brands, then stay out of the way while I did all the cooking and clearing up. Self -catering was the operative word. The first time it had happened, in Spain, I’d been so smug and self-satisfied with my newly-caught man that I hadn’t noticed the one-sidedness of the arrangement. Not so in Greece, where we had a studio apartment so small, it would have been lucky to be classed as a bathroom in most hotels. After a fortnight of tripping over Nathan’s feet as he lounged on the sofa bed while I cooked in a kitchen the size of a cupboard,