Read Online One Summer Night At the Ritz by Jenny Oliver - Free Book Online

wine out his nose. ‘I’m sorry? Give her half? You can’t just give someone half a business? Well, technically you could, but there’s no way I’m giving her half. She doesn’t do anything. You can’t just give someone half a business.’
    ‘You just said that.’
    ‘That’s because I’m being emphatic.’
    ‘Well you don’t need to be. I listen to everything.’
    He paused before he carried on. She was right, she did listen. Maybe that was what made her so refreshing. Who listened nowadays?
    ‘Well then, you’ll understand that I can’t give her half.’
    ‘What do you mean she doesn’t do anything, your aunt?’
    ‘She doesn’t do anything. She just invested the money at the start so my dad could start it.’
    ‘So she did do something.’
    ‘Technically yes, but not really.’
    Jane frowned and raised herself back up onto her elbows. ‘Sounds to me like she did something. She helped your dad start his business.’
    ‘You don’t understand. Let’s not go into this.’
    He watched her smile.
    ‘Why are you smiling?’ he asked.
    ‘Because I think people only say that when they’re scared of the answer.’
    ‘Bullshit.’ He snorted a laugh.
    ‘Well tell me then. You know everything about me.’
    He repositioned himself on the grass so he was sitting a bit more comfortably. Wondered whether to take his shoes and socks off. Then considered when the last time he’d done that was. Probably as a kid. He took a sip of his wine.
    ‘Come on…’ she said, half impatient, half-encouraging.
    ‘So this is the feistiness that you hide under some veneer of poor island girl lost.’
    She snorted. ‘I’m thirty-six, I am not a poor island girl lost.’
    ‘Are you really thirty-six? You look younger.’
    ‘Am I out of your age range for women?’ she said with a smirk.
    He nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re a year above the usual tick box.’
    ‘Lucky escape,’ she said and as soon as he heard it, he purposely didn’t reply. Instead, he waited to see if she’d blush.
    She glanced away, feigning interest in a patch of daisies. But he kept watching, and gradually there it was – like pomegranate seeds popping under her skin, the tips of her cheekbones speckled pink – and he smiled on the inside.
    ‘Go on then,’ she said after a couple of seconds of silence, the blush gone. ‘Tell me why you can’t just give her half.’
    ‘Because I can’t,’ he said. She raised a brow and he sighed. ‘You can’t just give away what you have, what you’ve worked for all your life. Because it’s my dad’s really and he wanted it to be this massive success and it was for a bit in his lifetime and then it struggled a fair bit, quite a lot in fact, and then it was handed to me. I mean, what do you do? You know it’s a part of his soul. You have to make it work. And anyway, that’s all by the by because she wants cash out of it.’
    ‘And what does he say now?’
    ‘He doesn’t. He’s dead, died a couple of years ago.’
    He watched her lick her lips, mull over what she was going to say next. The mention of death usually stopped any further questions.
    ‘So he wouldn’t know what you did with it,’ she said and he frowned, surprised.
    ‘Well that’s…’ He paused for a second. ‘That’s not really the point, is it? It’s keeping his legacy alive. It’s what he’d want.’
    ‘He told you that?’
    ‘He gave me the business, he didn’t have to.’
    She took a sip of wine. She seemed annoyingly relaxed, at ease, while he was getting het up.
    She shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    She sat up, crossed her legs underneath her and said, ‘Just that. Maybe.’
    ‘Or?’
    She smiled, her whole face lit up and he found himself staring.
    ‘Or maybe not,’ she said. ‘Maybe he hoped you might give it a go, see if you enjoyed it and then do whatever made you happy if it didn’t work.’
    ‘Yes but it is working. We’re a successful business, we just don’t have the capital to