LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘REBECCA my dear…such a relief! For one moment when you didn’t answer the phone straight away I thought perhaps you’d decided to fly out to Australia to see your parents and brother. How is dear Robert, by the way, and Ailsa and the girls? They must be getting quite big now. How old are they? Four and two, isn’t it? It’s…’

      ‘Aunt Maud,’ Rebecca interrupted firmly, tucking the receiver under her chin, and trying to concentrate on the essays she was marking while at the same time following the convoluted drift of her great-aunt’s vague conversation.

      ‘Ah, yes…The reason I’m ringing you, my dear, is that I desperately need your help.’

      Her help? Rebecca’s frown wasn’t caused entirely by the essay of a pupil who was destined to follow his father into the latter’s merchant bank, and yet at ten years old still seemed to think the word instalment possessed a double ‘l’.

      ‘My help?’ She couldn’t resist the faintly ironic underlining of the possessive pronoun. At the other end of the line in faraway Cumbria there was the kind of humming silence that told her that her point had been made.

      ‘Well, my dear, there was simply no one else I could turn to,’ came the dramatic response. Aunt Maud at her thespian best, Rebecca reflected ruefully, catching the note of pathos that had been added to her great-aunt’s original vagueness. ‘I would have got in touch with your mother, but since she’s in Australia…’

      A slight suspicion of aggrieved irritation there, Rebecca suspected, and no wonder. She could well imagine that, whatever kind of help it was she needed, Maud Aysgarth would rather have approached her soft-hearted and far too put-upon mother than herself.

      Her mind was more on her marking than her aunt’s conversation. Those people who believed that schoolteachers did nothing during the long school holidays really ought to see her desk right now, loaded down as it was, not only with the end-of-term essays from the pupils she taught at an exclusive co-educational private prep school, but also the uncompleted work schedules and plans for the coming autumn and winter terms, she reflected grimly. She loved teaching and always had, and counted herself privileged to have a job teaching in a school as well equipped and well run as the one she did…a private London prep school whose pupils were on the whole well-behaved and keen to learn.

      Thinking of her work caused her to lose the thread of her aunt’s conversation; after all, what could there possibly be to worry about at Aysgarth with Frazer in charge?

      Aysgarth was Frazer’s private kingdom, a kingdom in which nothing was allowed to go wrong, nothing allowed to intrude which Frazer did not want intruding, as she knew to her cost.

      Aysgarth was a granite-hard house owned by a granite-hard man. And yet she loved the house, and once she had thought…

      ‘So you see, my dear, with Frazer away and myself in charge, there was really no one else I could turn to. I don’t know how long it will take you to get up here, but…’

      Get up there? Had Aunt Maud gone mad or had she? She must know quite well that if Frazer hadn’t actually forbidden Rebecca to put as much as a fingertip on Aysgarth property, then he had certainly made it quite plain that her presence was not one he wanted or welcomed, and why. Rebecca laughed mirthlessly and soundlessly to herself. Why? Because once she had been idiotic enough to want to protect him from hurt. For that she had been condemned and ostracised, made to feel as though she were a Judas and worse.

      Dear God, the last thing she needed right now was to start walking down that painful path again. It was over, in the past…totally without relevance to her life. A good life—a life filled with a job she enjoyed, friends who shared her interests and tastes, men who took her out, flattered her, flirted with her and, above all, did not look at her with cold grey eyes, the colour of ice, so dark with contempt and bitterness that they shrivelled her very soul.

      She was happy, content; her life was rich and full. There was no room in it for useless daydreams, for might-have-beens. She was twenty-six years old, mature, well adjusted, self-sufficient.

      Or she had been until Great-Aunt Maud had started interfering in her life, reminding her of things best forgotten. And then something her aunt had said hit her.

      ‘Frazer isn’t at Aysgarth? But he must be! Rory and Lillian left the children there because…’

      ‘That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, my dear. Frazer was here, but at the very last minute he had to take over from one of his colleagues, who was due to give a lecture tour in the States. Frazer had no option but to go in his place, as Head of the Institute. He’ll be gone for nearly three months.’

      ‘Three months?’ Rebecca was appalled. ‘What about the children?’ From what her mother had told her, Frazer’s niece and nephew, his brother’s children, were a pretty unruly pair, who required a very firm hand on the reins. Eight-year-old twins whose easygoing father had never made any real attempt to discipline them, and who with their mother had calmly dumped them on Frazer eight months ago, so that he could take up a new job in Hong Kong.

      ‘Well, Frazer did make proper arrangements for them,’ Aunt Maud was saying defensively. She had always hated anyone criticising Frazer. After his and Rory’s parents had been killed in an air crash she had moved into Aysgarth House at Frazer’s request. He had been eighteen then and Rory a much younger

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