Hate Bale by Stephanie Dagg

Author:Stephanie Dagg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2019-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

“You were amazing today.”

With effort Martha peeled her eyes open and blinked in surprise across at Lottie, who was sprawled on the sun lounger next to her, but considerably more elegantly so.

They’d been home an hour or so now, and had spent most of that time at Lottie’s pool, Martha in it and Lottie sunbathing beside it. Martha had thrashed up and down as many times as it took to get the stresses of the day out of her system, then five minutes ago she’d climbed out and was drying contentedly in the hot sunshine.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I think we both coped rather well in the grisly circumstances.”

“Pfft, I don’t mean finding the body.” Lottie flapped aside those minor inconveniences in a gesture that seemed also to consign poor Bruno Saunier’s life and death to meaningless. “I meant at the viewing. You were excellent. You struck up a great rapport with the clients and you came over as genuine and trustworthy.”

“Shouldn’t estate agents actually be genuine and trustworthy?” queried Martha, raising an eyebrow.

“Only if they want to go out of business fast,” snorted Lottie disparagingly. “Moderation in everything. It was great you could tell them so much about running a smallholding, and all the legalities they need to know about. And thank goodness your French is so good.”

The Dutch couple turned out to be a Dutch and Belgian couple. Dutch Cindy had good English but pitiful French, and with Belgian Wout it was the other way round. Martha had come in very useful as a translator for them. She could only assume the couple usually talked to each other in some sort of Dutch variant or their own made-up sign language.

“You should come into business with me,” announced Lottie.

Despite her fatigue, Martha sat bolt upright in a fraction of a second.

“Me? Seriously?”

“Yes, why not? You’re always moaning about how much work the holiday cottage is, and you do seem to get some right morons staying there. You can give that up, like you’re planning to do anyway, and make plenty to live on selling houses with me. You can come on board as my junior associate to start with, and decide if you want to do the training and become a fully-fledged professional.”

Wow. Martha hadn’t expected that. Getting more money for less work was certainly appealing, but the idea of that new start in a low-maintenance, animal-free property in a new location was appealing, as was the prospect of travelling. And she wasn’t sure she could cope with spending more time with Lottie. She loved her friend dearly but she also loved her private time and space. Lottie had the tendency to swamp everything and everyone around her, with the possible exception of Madame Bouvier, with her forceful personality.

Martha chose to side-step the issue for now.

“Do you think Cindy and Wout will buy the cottage and land?” she asked.

They’d seemed very interested, and full of enthusiasm for taking on a smallholding and a self-sufficiency lifestyle. Lottie had been suitably vague about events at the nearby farmhouse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.