Sudden Pleasures by Bertrice Small Page A

pretty classy, considering you’re country mice. Lunch in the boardroom.”
    “Usually it’s yogurt, salad, or sandwiches,” Ashley admitted as she ate the artfully arranged greens before her. “I generally eat at my desk. You?”
    “Yeah, unless I have to take a client or a supplier to lunch. I try to keep those dates to a bare minimum. I don’t eat breakfast except for coffee and juice. Lunch is a waste of time, and time is money.”
    “I eat three meals a day,” Ashley said quietly. “I try to keep the carbs to the healthy kind. Good breakfast. Light lunch. Nice, but not too filling dinner.”
    “Do you cook?” he asked her.
    “Actually I do, but not if I can avoid it. Mrs. B. cooks for me,” Ashley told him. “If I had to cook after a long day at work I probably wouldn’t eat, or eat all the wrong things. Having Mrs. B. to look after me is a great blessing.”
    “You have a cook?”
    “I have a married couple, and a housemaid,” Ashley told him. “When you came into town did you notice the large house on the hill overlooking the bay? That’s my home, Kimbrough Hall. When you own a house like that you need help to keep everything running smoothly. The hall is on the National Registry of Historic Places in the state. I’ve lived there my whole life.”
    “Since you’re your grandfather’s only heir,” he said, “I’m going to assume your parents are dead.”
    “They died in a boating accident when I was fourteen,” Ashley told him. “They were totally in love to the exclusion of everyone else, including my brother and me. My father grew up at the hall, as my grandfather had. When he married, of course, my mother came to live there. They had two children, and then flitted off to enjoy themselves traveling the world. My brother and I were always getting marvelous gifts from their travels, and listening to them talk about their adventures on their rare visits home was really quite fascinating. Actually, my brother knew them better than I did. He was eight when they decided to go off on an extended holiday. I was just three.”
    “Who raised you then?” Ryan wanted to know. He was fascinated, and yet at the same time put off by the fact that she was so casual about a lifestyle that had left her virtually motherless. Would she, under the circumstances, have any maternal instincts herself?
    “Well,” Ashley said slowly, “Grams was around until I was eleven and Ben sixteen. After that it was usually Mrs. Byrnes who kept an eye on me.”
    “The cook?”
    “Oh, no. The elder Mrs. Byrnes.” Ashley laughed. “She was the housekeeper back when I was a kid. The Byrneses have been with the family for centuries. Grandfather always said they came with the house. My Mr. and Mrs. Byrnes are the elder Byrneses’ son and daughter-in-law. But when they retire there’ll be no more Byrneses at Kimbrough Hall. Their son is on Wall Street, and their daughter married a dentist. But Byrnes says he and his missus are good for at least fifteen more years.” She chuckled. “I suspect they’ll die in service, the way Byrnes’s folks did. I just love them!”
    Raised by servants. It just got worse, Ryan thought.
    “Who brought you up?” Ashley asked him cheerfully, mopping the last of the salad dressing off her plate with a piece of roll.
    “Our parents,” he said.
    “You’ve got siblings? I really miss my brother, Ben. He died in Desert Storm,” she told him.
    “I’ve got six sisters,” he replied. “Bride is the oldest of us. She’s fifty-three. Then comes Elisabetta, Kathleen, Magdalena, and Deirdre. There are four years between Dee and me. With five daughters my parents were reluctant to try again, but finally they did, and I was the result. They were so encouraged they did it one more time, but when my sister Francesca, Frankie, was born, they decided enough was enough.”
    “I can’t help but notice your sisters’ names. Irish and Italian,” Ashley said.
    “My mother’s from Rome,” he