His Cinderella Heiress by Marion Lennox Page B

a bit defensive.
    â€˜I didn’t just look up the Internet and decide to restore from Internet Lesson 101. I’ve been playing with tapestries for years.’
    â€˜Why?’ It seemed so unlikely...
    â€˜When I was about ten my then foster mother gave me a tapestry do-it-yourself kit. It was a canvas with a painting of a cat and instructions and the threads to complete it. I learned the basics on that cat, but when I finished I thought the whiskers looked contrived. He also looked smug so I ended up unpicking him a bit and fiddling. It started me drawing my own pictures. It works for me. It makes me feel...settled.’
    â€˜So what do you do the rest of the time?’
    â€˜I make coffee. Well. I can also wait tables with the best of them. It’s a skill that sees me in constant work.’
    â€˜You wouldn’t rather work with tapestries?’
    â€˜That’d involve training to be let near the decent ones, and training’s out of my reach.’
    â€˜Even now you have a massive inheritance?’
    She paused as if the question took concentration. She stared at her feet and then turned and gazed out at the grounds, to the mountains beyond.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I like café work. I like busy. It’s kind of like a family.’
    â€˜Do they know where you are?’
    â€˜Who? The people I work with?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Do you mean if I’d sunk in a bog yesterday would they have cared or even known?’ She shrugged. ‘Nope. That’s not what I mean by family. I pretty much quit work to come here. Someone’s filling in for me now, but I’ll probably just get another job when I go back. I don’t stay in the same place for long.’
    â€˜So when you said family...’
    â€˜I meant people around me. It’s all I want. Cheerful company and decent coffee.’
    â€˜And you’re stuck here with me and Mrs O’Reilly and coffee that tastes like mud.’
    â€˜You noticed,’ she said approvingly. ‘That’s a start.’
    â€˜A start of what?’ he asked mildly and she glanced sharply up at him as if his question had shocked her. Maybe it had. He’d surprised himself—it wasn’t a question he’d meant to ask and he wasn’t sure what exactly he was asking.
    But the question hung.
    â€˜I guess the start of nothing,’ she said at last with a shrug that was meant to be casual but didn’t quite come off. ‘I can cope with mud coffee for a week.’
    â€˜All we need to do is figure what we want to keep.’
    â€˜I live out of a suitcase. I can’t keep anything.’ She said it almost with defiance.
    â€˜And the armour wouldn’t look good in a nice modern bungalow.’
    â€˜Is that what your farmhouse is?’
    â€˜It is.’ The cottage he’d grown up in had long since deteriorated past repair. He’d built a large functional bungalow.
    It had a great kitchen table. The rest...yeah, it was functional.
    â€˜I saw you living somewhere historic,’ Jo said. ‘Thatch maybe.’
    â€˜Thatch has rats.’
    She looked up towards the castle ramparts. ‘What about battlements? Do battlements have rats?’
    â€˜Not so much.’ He grinned. ‘Irish battlements are possibly a bit cold even for the toughest rat.’
    â€˜What about you, Lord Conaill? Too cold for you?’
    â€˜I’m not Lord Conaill.’
    â€˜All the tapestries in the great hall...they’re mostly from a time before your side of the family split. This is your history too.’
    â€˜I don’t feel like Lord Conaill.’
    â€˜No, but you look like him. Go in and check the tapestries. You have the same aristocratic nose.’
    He put his hand on his nose. ‘Really?’
    â€˜Yep. As opposed to mine. Mine’s snub with freckles, not an aristocratic line anywhere.’
    And he looked at her freckles and