LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      IT WAS not unusual for Jermaine to work late. She was part of the sales support staff at a busy plant and machinery manufacturers and was used to working under pressure. Her work was varied, but mainly she dealt with reports from Masters and Company’s top-notch sales executives when they either rang in or visited head office in London.

      This week she had nothing in particular to rush home for. It didn’t matter that it was going on for eight o’clock when she let herself into her small flat.

      She had been going out with Ash Tavinor for three months now, only for the last two weeks Ash had been working away from home in Scotland, too far away for him to return to London, or for them to spend any time together. He could have flown down, of course, but he preferred to work at the weekends, the sooner to get his business done.

      Jermaine smiled as she thought of him. She had missed seeing his happy sunny face. She would be glad to see him again. He was tall, good-looking and—her smile dipped a little—had broached the subject a month ago of some kind of ‘commitment’ from her. In fact Ash had called her old-fashioned in the extreme, because she was not prepared for them to become lovers in the true sense of the word.

      She had wondered herself, since knowing him, if it was time to yield her stand. The stand she had taken six years ago when her beautiful sister, Edwina, had clapped her eyes on Pip Robinson, Jermaine’s first boyfriend, and decided that she’d like him for herself.

      Jermaine recalled again the hurt she’d experienced then. She supposed she couldn’t have been all that fond of Pip because it hadn’t been his defection that had hurt so much. She had been more bruised by the fact that her sister—whom, it had very soon became apparent, had had no particular interest in Pip other than as another conquest—didn’t care that he was Jermaine’s boyfriend.

      Suddenly Jermaine didn’t feel at all like smiling. Pip hadn’t been the only boyfriend Edwina had clapped eyes on and taken from her.

      Jermaine made some coffee, musing that it wasn’t any wonder that, over the years, her decision not to make the sort of commitment Ash wanted her to make had become deeper and deeper entrenched.

      But her smile came out again; all that had been before Ash. Ash was different. When she had been going out with him for about a month, she had grown to like him so much that she had begun to ponder occasionally about introducing him to her sister and taking the risk of everything falling apart.

      She had pondered needlessly. Ash had met Edwina and—nothing. Not that Jermaine had ever come to any decision about introducing him to Edwina. Neither of the Hargreaves daughters lived with their parents any longer. But Jermaine and Ash had been driving through the Oxfordshire countryside one early September afternoon when she had happened to mention that her parents lived close by.

      ‘Don’t you think it’s time I met them?’ he had teased, as ever smiling. She had smiled back—most men ran a mile at the thought of meeting a girl’s parents.

      She had tensed up, however, when, turning into her parents’ drive, she’d seen that she and Ash were not the only visitors that Sunday afternoon. Edwina’s sports car had been parked outside.

      ‘My sister’s here,’ she’d informed Ash, and had hidden her reluctance to go into the large old house she had been born in.

      She need not have been concerned. Ash had been pleasant and courteous to her parents, and had smiled and been polite to Edwina, and that was all. Jermaine hadn’t missed the way her sister had gone into action—the smile, the breathless laugh, the big blue eyes attentive, absorbed in every syllable Ash uttered.

      Ash had been unmoved as Edwina had flattered his choice of car and enquired—after an interval—what sort of profession he was in. ‘I’m in computer software,’ he had answered, and, probably because he was proud of his elder brother, ‘I work for my brother’s company, International Systems—I don’t know if you’ve heard of them?’

      Edwina hadn’t, but Jermaine hadn’t doubted as her sister’s glance had taken in Ash’s discreetly expensive

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