Worlds Apart

Chapter One

Taylor stared at the two smiling faces on his computer screen. His parents looked tanned, fit and healthy. So they should, having spent the last five years living in an up-market golfing retirement community in Spain. Taylor didn’t begrudge them their happiness. They’d waited long enough before they’d reached out for it, and a part of him wished they’d done it sooner.

“Stop scowling,” said his mother.

Bloody Skype.
Taylor rearranged his features into a smile.

She harrumphed. “Now you look like a chimpanzee. And you need your hair cut.”

Taylor glowered. “I don’t have time to do this.”

“We don’t ask for much, Taylor,” his father snapped.

A splash of guilt wrapped its tentacles around his heart. “I don’t
want
to do it.”
Shit.
That sounded more like a whine than an authoritative refusal.

“I don’t see what the issue is,” said his father. “It’s just until we sell. A few months at the most. The estate agent reckons we’ll get a much better price if the house is tidied up a little and lived in.”

“I already have a place to live,” Taylor said through gritted teeth.

“But I thought you were staying temporarily with a friend,” his mother oh-so-bloody-helpfully pointed out.

Taylor glanced at the bedroom door. His current
friend
was crying in her bathroom because he wasn’t making an effort in their relationship. Taylor wasn’t sure two weeks qualified as a relationship. He’d only moved in with her because he had to vacate his flat.

“We wouldn’t have asked if you’d still been living in London, but now that you’re back in Leeds, you’re on the doorstep,” his mother said.

“It isn’t just the tidying up,” said his father. “The remaining contents of the house need to be dealt with. Take some photos and email them. I’ll send a list of what we want to keep, either to send out here or put in storage. The rest can go to auction, be given to charity, or if there’s anything
you
want to keep…”

“There’s still stuff you want after all this time?” Taylor regretted the question even before he saw the shadow cross their faces. There was one thing they’d want until the day they died, though it wasn’t in the house.
Christ, he hoped not.

“Probably not, but we’d still like you to check,” said his father.

“Why can’t
you
come back and sort things out?” Taylor asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Because the deal on this cruise is too good to miss. A hundred days at sea? It will be fantastic. We’re getting a huge discount and your father’s looking forward to lecturing again.”

And
that
wasn’t the answer.

It had taken them a long time before they could bring themselves to leave Sutton Hall, and five years away from the place before they could bear to sell it. It wouldn’t kill him to help them, and it would solve the immediate problem in the bathroom who was no doubt practicing weeping without smudging her mascara.

“You don’t need to worry about the garden. We have someone dealing with that. What
is
that noise?” his father asked. “Is there a cat in pain?”

The crying had grown louder. Taylor picked up his laptop and moved to the kitchen.

“Goodness, I thought we were at sea already,” his mother said with a laugh after he put the laptop on the table.

“You can run ICU from the hall just as easily, can’t you?” his father asked.

Taylor glanced at the boxes piled up against two walls of the small kitchen, floor to ceiling. Since he tended to meet his clients on neutral ground, he could run his private investigations company from anywhere. Until this call from his parents, he’d been planning to decamp into a hotel.

His mother sighed. “If we knew you were there looking after the house and taking care of everything, it would lift such a weight from our shoulders.”

And pile it on mine.
His mother had gone for the jugular—guilt. Responsibility, duty, care—the words might not have been spoken, but Taylor knew when he was beaten.

“All right,” he said in as grudging a voice as he could muster.

“Fantastic.” His father looked at his mother and smiled before the pair turned to face him. “Thank you, Taylor.”

His mother waved. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

“Niall’s the name of the chap doing the garden,” his father said. “He’s been working in lieu of rent. Gas, electricity and water’s on. We’ll be in touch when we get back.”

They cut the connection before Taylor could ask what the hell
that
meant. Not the getting in touch but the—

“Tay…lor,” hiccupped a feeble voice.

He turned to see Sophie standing in the doorway. Taylor noticed that despite her professed devastation, she’d changed into the new red underwear she’d spent thirty minutes admiring last night. It probably cost a fortune and was little more than three small triangles that barely covered—
Shit
. He felt a surge of lust and mentally slapped his cock down. She might be crying, but she was also scheming.

Red-eyed and sniffing, Sophie stepped toward him. “We need to talk.”

Four words guaranteed to strike terror into most guys’ hearts, but not Taylor’s, because frankly, he didn’t give a fuck. He’d had enough of sitting on her couch being forced to watch cookery programs when there was never anything to eat in the fridge, enough of waiting to use the bathroom while she plucked and polished and pouted, enough of her brushing her hair exactly one hundred times before she came to bed. Heaven forbid he interrupted her, or she started again, claiming he’d made her lose count. He was surprised she could count that far. The sex had been pretty good, but there were plenty more women out there. Anyway, he’d fulfilled his guilt quota for today in agreeing to help his parents.

“Please,” Sophie said.

“There’s nothing else to say.” Taylor closed his laptop, put it in the nearest box and carried it to the door.

“But I love you,” she whispered.

Christ.
Two weeks and she thought she loved him? She didn’t even know him.

In the fifteen minutes it took to call a cab and carry all his possessions down to the foyer of Sophie’s apartment building, she shot through the five stages of grief.

“You don’t mean it. You’re just trying to teach me a lesson.”

“You fucking, selfish, wanking, arsehole bastard of a…” Taylor didn’t think he’d heard her swear before and his interest piqued. He stared at her expectantly, but she ran out of cuss words and moved on to bargaining.

“If you stay, I’ll let you watch football on TV.”

“If you don’t stay, I’ll kill myself.”

The hopeful look he shot her didn’t go down well. Taylor should have known she couldn’t take the joke.

“Fine, fuck off then and I hope you rot in hell.”

Of course he would, but he planned on having a good time before that happened. Her final comment was the point on which he’d hoped to leave, but as he glanced around and picked up the last of his things, she started at the beginning again.

“So what would you like for dinner? Shall we go out?”

Taylor sighed. With his job, he ought to be better at getting people to see sense, but the problem was in this instance, he wasn’t being paid for it and he just didn’t care. He didn’t do involved, he didn’t do emotion. It made life simpler. He took her key from the bunch in his pocket—coincidence it was next to the one for Sutton Hall?—and pressed it into her hand.

“Thanks for everything,” he said, and walked out.

“Fuck off,” she screamed. “I never want to see you again, you…dick brain.”

She probably had that right. The door slammed behind him.

The taxi waited at the curb and the driver gave him a hand to load his stuff. It filled the trunk, the backseat and front passenger seat. Taylor told the driver to follow him, gave him the address in case, and carried the last couple of boxes to his BMW in the underground parking.

It had been a mistake to stay with Sophie. Usually, Taylor never went out with the same woman for more than a couple of dates, and that was only if he hadn’t gotten into her pants on the first. He’d never moved in with a woman before. He could see why now. Sophie had caught him at a low spot. Taylor had needed to vacate his apartment, but the one he’d hoped to make his home had been unexpectedly taken off the market. He put most of his stuff into storage and only brought what he needed. The couple of nights he’d intended to stay with Sophie drifted to two weeks, mostly because he’d had a lot happening with work and he was too busy to sort out an alternative. Really, the request from his parents couldn’t have come at a better time.

Except the idea of living at Sutton Hall filled him with as much dread as the word commitment. Maybe more.

The taxi followed him along the A65 to Ilkley. On the way, Taylor rang his personal assistant.

“Hi, Taylor, had you not noticed it’s Saturday?” Emma asked.

“God, is it?” He smiled. “I’ve moved out of Sophie’s and I’m moving into my parents’ house in Ilkley. For the time being, I’m going to run ICU from there.”

“Oh great. So I don’t have to work from the two square inches of Sophie’s kitchen table anymore. Do I get four square inches at your parents’?”

“There’s a room we can use as an office.”

Emma’s heavy sigh told him she wasn’t happy.

“What?” he asked.

“That’s a lot farther for me to travel.”

Taylor sucked in his cheeks. “So start half an hour later.”

Emma sighed again. “Okay. What’s the address?”

“Sutton Hall, Thorpe Lane. It’s on the Middleton side of town.”

“See you Monday.”

Taylor pressed the button to end the call. He’d worried Emma might not want to come so far out of Leeds. Half an hour was a small price to pay. He then called Jonas, his friend and sole operative.

“Hi, what’s up?” Jonas asked.

When Taylor told him, Jonas laughed. “About time you dumped Sophie. Bird from hell, that one. I’ll see you on Tuesday. I’m in court on Monday.”

“Plead guilty.”

“Very funny.”

Taylor ended the call. Jonas was giving evidence in an insurance swindle case in London. A guy had set fire to his premises and Jonas had taped him admitting it. Taylor turned right at the lights, drove down the hill to cross the river where he’d played as a boy and up a steeper hill until the sharp turn onto Thorpe Lane. He took a meandering path down the rutted lane, trying to avoid the worst of the potholes. Some of them looked big enough to swallow his car.

By the time he pulled in through the weatherworn gateposts, his heart was banging in his chest. He glanced at the giant stone acorns that topped the posts and remembered how, as a kid, he’d imagined huge squirrels salivating over them. The rusty gates were still attached—just—and Taylor continued up the drive, his hands tightening on the wheel. He’d spent eighteen years of his life here before he’d left to go to university, and in the seven years his parents had continued to live here, he’d only returned for brief visits. Since they left for Spain five years ago, he hadn’t been near the place.

He drove along the avenue of trees fronted by overgrown rhododendron bushes, and when the house came into view, his heart clenched. Taylor loved and hated Sutton Hall in equal measure. He’d lived here for fourteen happy years and then four hellish ones. He never thought he’d call this place home again.

Taylor pulled up on the sweep of gravel in front of the stone steps and the taxi stopped behind him.

“Quite a place,” said the driver as he lifted Taylor’s boxes out of the cab.

Constructed well over a hundred years ago from gray Yorkshire stone, Sutton Hall was a three-story, seven-bedroom monster with a turret, crenellated battlements, and a higgledy-piggledy roofline that would make an architect cringe. Taylor swept his gaze over the house. The windows were dirty, the paint cracking and the drainpipe next to the drawing room hung loose.
Oh fuck.
It looked old, tired and miserable, which was about how Taylor felt.

He paid the driver and walked up the steps to the front door. Once the taxi left, Taylor let himself in. He braced for the smell of mildew and old age, and instead inhaled the faint tang of freshly baked bread. He shook his head. Had to be his imagination recalling his mother’s baking. He’d always come home from school to fresh baked biscuits or carrot cake or scones. Until he was fourteen, anyway.