“I’ve never seen a table this long before,” I said.
Cass smiled. “This place used to be a country club. There used to be tennis courts and they’d swim in the lake out front. People used to travel to stay here, with the mountains and the river across the road.”
“There’s a lake?”
He laughed. “Out front. It’s frozen over at the moment. There’s a dock in the summertime.”
“I hadn’t noticed when I drove in,” I admitted. “I was too busy staring at the house.” I paused. “Is house the right word? Or manor? Mansion?”
He met my eyes and nodded. “It’s my home. So yeah, house is fine. It was called a manor a hundred years ago, but that term isn’t used much in these parts anymore. I wanted to keep the original name though.”
There were those warm eyes again. They cut a little deeper this time.
Oh boy.
Keep talking, Jayden.
“Did your aunt run it as a country club?”
“In the early days, yes. There’s quite the story about how she came to own it when she was so young. It was quite the scandal that an unwed young woman came to own such a place. Apparently her uncle left it to her in his will. He had no children of his own, and my great-aunt was the only family he cared for. He died in 1944, in the war. She was very young and very single. She never married, never had kids. Rumour has it that she had many lady friends who would stay.”
I raised my eyebrows. Was that look he gave me searching for information? Was he fishing for information? “Ooh, scandalous for that time.”
“Very,” Cass said.
“Good for her!” I proclaimed. “She sounds like an amazing woman.”
He smiled then, before he went back out into the family room and through another set of double doors. “And this is the rec room.”
A recreation room? Jesus.
And it was massive. It was basically the end of the house with windows on three sides.
There was a pool table in the middle of the room, a big TV on the wall closest to us, bean bags, and what looked like a gaming console of some kind. There was a Lego table I hadn’t seen since I was a kid, which was cool. An old doll house that was as old as it was well-loved, by the looks of it. There were shelves of books and games and tubs of toys and dolls.
There were also some boxes shoved in one corner and what looked like rolls of linoleum and some planks of wood or something.
“This is basically for the kids,” he said, nodding to the room in general. “I remember playing in here as a kid, and it felt right to keep it that way.”
He was obviously sentimental, and I liked that.
“Well, I’m impressed,” I said. He glanced at me and I explained. “With all of it. It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you,” he said with such gratitude it took me a few seconds to understand where it was coming from.
Because he’d done all this on his own, and someone was finally appreciating his hard work.
That was what it felt like.
He started, then clapped his hands together like he’d just remembered something. “The kitchen.”
“Ah, yes. The kitchen.”
Truth was, I was now excited to see what he’d done with it.
So back we went through the far wing of the house the way we’d come and into the kitchen.
And what he’d done with it?
It was simply huge, like everything else in this house, but clean, functional, and it was definitely country charm themed, despite the industrial stainless-steel countertops. There were white cupboards and an island with storage compartments, which was great for prep. But the stove . . .
The stove.
“What is that?”
Cass grinned proudly. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Oh, is this original?” I asked.
And I meant original from a hundred years ago. It was a large, pale-yellow enamel looking thing with little doors and old-fashioned lever handles and one door with an inbuilt thermometer. The stove top was . . . my god, is that cast iron?
What the hell?
“Oh yep. Original as the day she was made,” Cass said. He was obviously very proud of this stove. Possibly emotionally attached to it. “She’s wood fired and cooks a roast like you’ve never tasted.”
He then realised I didn’t share his enthusiasm.
“Is that okay?” he asked. “Have you never cooked on something like this before?”
“Well, no, because I’m not Fred Flintstone living in Bedrock,” I said before I could stop myself. I covered my sarcasm with a laugh. “I mean, do you fire this up every night? Or for breakfast if you want to cook yourself some bacon and eggs, do you go to all that hassle to light it up?”
He chuckled and pulled open a cupboard door next to the wood fired stove. Except he didn’t open it like a normal cupboard. He opened the door downward and slid it underneath the cabinetry to reveal an ultra-modern, very expensive-looking oven.
Then he lifted that section of the countertop like the hood of a car to reveal a cooktop. The hood clicked into place, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“What?”
Cass laughed. “Pretty cool, yes?”
“Ah, that’s amazing.”
“I paid a fortune for it, so it would wanna be amazing.” He shrugged. “I wanted to keep the original feel of the house where I could. I had to modernise a lot of it, but there was no way I was getting rid of Ernace.”
“Ernace?”
“Yeah, Ernace the Furnace,” he said, patting the hundred-year-old wood stove. “Under the house, there’s extra bracing in the floor they had to put in to support the weight of it. Extra piers too, into the hillside. So when I say there was no way I was getting rid of it, there was no way I could get rid of it. It weighs a lot. I’ve only lit it up a few times.”
I was still staring at the hidden oven and stovetop.
“That door is through to the dining room for easy service,” he said, pointing to a door at the end of the counter before walking through another door at the end of the kitchen. “And in here is your pantry, fridge, and a chest freezer.”
It was a pantry, yes. If you called a pantry another full-sized room with two whole walls of shelving and a fridge and freezer, like he’d said. There was also a lot of mess. Nothing was organised, nothing was set out in any kind of order. There were more boxes and a broom, a utility rack that was still unassembled and sitting on top of the chest freezer, along with a white board and a cordless drill with a box of screws.
“Oh, I was looking for that,” he said, picking the drill up. He pressed the trigger and it whirred slowly, the battery in need of a charge.
So, I quickly deduced, some things were very organised, some things were not. But the kitchen was fine; I could have it whipped into shape in no time. Probably be best if I did it and not him, anyway.
“Anyway,” Cass said. “It’s a bit of a mess at the moment. I wasn’t expecting you until later. I was gonna tidy it up a bit in here.”
“I can do it,” I said. “Won’t take me long.”
“You don’t start officially until tomorrow, so if you wanna rest up or take a nap or watch TV, just go right ahead. There are some books in the reading room, if you like to read. Or whatever you want. You’re not on the clock yet; free to do whatever you want.”