Snippet #1352242

Alvaro eyed the underside of Ian's boots with distaste and cleared his throat loudly. Ian Thornton, who'd been asleep in his chair, his booted feet propped up on his desk, opened one eye then the other then yawned.

"What is it, Alvie?" he said, kneading his knuckles into his eyes to rid himself of the vestiges of sleepiness.

The older man frowned. He'd been his father's manservant back in Ibarra and of a far more ancient school of thought than Ian himself. He hated being called Alvie, which, of course, was why Ian continued to call him it. Despite of this, he actually was rather fond of the old cove. Alvaro Tameyo had been working for his father in Ecuador before Ian had even been born and had travelled back to England with him once his long exile had finally ended. After Richard Thornton died, he'd simply turned his attentions to Ian and went on as if nothing had changed, although he occasionally loudly opinioned that 'Sir Richard would never invest his money in those shares' or 'would never go about his business in that way'. Sometimes Ian listened, sometimes he didn't, reminding the manservant that what his father had done had landed him in a foreign country for eight years with the threat of jail awaiting him back home.

"You have a visitor, Mr Thornton," replied Alvaro, his baritone nudged into a lilt by the traces of an Ecuadorian accent.

"What? Who? I'm not expecting anyone," said Ian, removing his feet from his desk and standing up. His fleet was grounded for the next two weeks and he'd been spending the past few days lounging around his townhouse in Soho filling out paperwork and indulging in sixteen year-old Scotch with the few friends in this snobbish hell-hole who deigned him to be acceptable company. But if it had been a regular visitor then Alvaro would have surely have sent them straight up. His business associates certainly knew there was nothing he could do about weather patterns on the other side of the Atlantic (Ian had made sure of that) so he doubted they'd be round to angrily berate him. So who was it?

"Well, sir..." began Alvaro with a look that was a mixture of embarrassment and disapproval. "It is a young lady and she-"