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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘SO, it’s all settled then. The weekend after next we’ll go down to Gloucestershire and break the news to my parents, and of course you’ll want to tell your brother.’

      ‘Stepbrother,’ Lindsay corrected absently. Since she had accepted Jeremy’s proposal, she had had the disconcerting suspicion that he expected her to turn almost overnight from an independent career woman into a dutiful, clinging fiancée, but she quelled all the doubts crowding into her mind, reminding herself that she was twenty-four; old enough and mature enough to accept that it was far better to choose a marriage partner for practical reasons rather than emotional ones. After all Jeremy was everything that her father had wanted for her in a husband. He was something in the City; his parents were comfortably-off landowners and if she personally had not particularly taken to Sir John and Lady Irene then she was not so very much different from thousands of other females who at times found it difficult to get on with their inlaws.

      ‘Brother, stepbrother … it’s one and the same thing,’ Jeremy informed her fussily. ‘But you’ll have to let him know. The parents will want to hold an engagement party for us and then there’ll be the press announcements. It would look rather off if he learned of our engagement second-hand. In fact it might be an idea if we went to see him together this weekend. He’ll want to talk to me about handing over the responsibility for your inheritance anyway.’

      Something cool flashed in Lindsay’s normally warm golden eyes for a moment, but she knew that Jeremy was oblivious to her momentary anger. Jeremy was not a man who felt at ease with female emotions, but it seemed childish to mentally berate him for his lack of understanding of her feelings now, when originally, his calm unflappableness had been one of the things that drew her to him. Ever since she had been seventeen Lindsay had been pursued by the male sex, but she had come to wonder how many of her supposed admirers had wanted her for herself and how many had been drawn to her by the magnet of her father’s wealth. She was attractive enough in her own way she supposed, if one liked tall, slender women with slightly irregular features and honey blonde hair, but she would never have described herself as beautiful. Many of her escorts had however. Her full lips thinned slightly. What had they wanted? Her or her inheritance.

      Strange to remember that until Lucas’ engagement it had never occurred to her to think of herself as a rich prize that a man might marry to secure her wealth.

      Her father had over-protected her of course, and perhaps that was natural. The death of her fragile, delicate mother after the birth of her stillborn son had had a traumatic effect on her father. For months afterwards he had barely let Lindsay out of his sight. He had blamed himself for her mother’s death; she knew that, cursing himself for taking her away from her natural environment and subjecting her to the rigours of life as the wife of a man with his way to make in the world and with no means of doing so other than his own brain and will.

      Her parents’ marriage had been a true love match. Privately Lindsay thought her mother must have possessed a much stronger personality than her father had thought, otherwise how had she found the courage to leave her parents and everything else that was familiar, behind her, to run away from that luxurious pampered existence to marry the son of her parents’ gardener?

      At the time the press had been full of the story. When she had been old enough to pick up scraps of gossip Lindsay had gone down to the local library and turned up the old story. Her mother had been eighteen when she ran away with her father. He had been twenty-two and they had been married most romantically at Gretna. In true high emotional fashion Lindsay’s grandparents had refused to have anything to do with their erring daughter and it was this unrelenting attitude that had led to her father’s determination, obsession almost; that Lindsay should marry into the class that had so cruelly rejected her mother and thereby vindicate her mother’s sacrifice in marrying him.

      Over the years Lindsay had come to realise that her father’s grief had left him scarred and intractable over this issue. Even when he had married for a second time, he had not abandoned his determined stance over Lindsay’s marriage. In fact there had been a time when Lindsay suspected that it had been the only thing that kept him alive; his fierce determination that his daughter should not be looked down upon and rejected as his wife had been. And he was a wealthy enough man to ensure that Lindsay should have the best of everything, including a top-drawer husband. The financial success which had come too late to save his delicate wife, was the weapon he was determined to use against what he considered to be the rejection of her family. Lindsay had grown up from the age of seven knowing

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