LITMIR.BIZ

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daughter exclaimed impatiently, ‘aren’t you going to ask me why I’ve been trying to get in touch with you? Don’t you want to know why I turned down Harry’s offer?’

      Laura stifled a sigh. ‘Well—of course,’ she said, looking longingly towards the sherry decanter residing on the bureau, just too far away to reach. ‘But I assumed you were about to tell me.’ A twinge of anxiety gripped her. ‘What’s happened? You’re not ill, are you?’

      ‘No.’ Julie sounded scornful. ‘I’ve never felt better. Is that the only reason you can think of why I should want to stay in London?’

      Laura lifted her shoulders wearily. Her neck was aching from looking up at people, and her spine felt numb. It had been a long day, and she wasn’t really in the mood to play twenty questions.

      ‘Have you left the agency?’ she asked carefully, conscious that Julie could throw a tantrum at the least provocation, and unwilling to arouse her daughter’s anger. ‘Have you found a better job?’

      ‘You could say that.’ Evidently she had made the right response, and Julie’s tone was considerably warmer. ‘But I haven’t left the agency. Not yet, anyway.’

      ‘Oh.’ Laura endeavoured to absorb the subtler connotations of this statement. ‘So—it must be a man.’

      There had been a lot of men during Julie’s five-year sojourn in the capital, but this was the first time Laura had known her daughter give up a modelling contract for one of them.

      ‘You got it.’ Julie was apparently too eager to deliver her news to waste any more time playing games. ‘It is a man. The man! I’m going to marry him, Mum. At least, I am if I have anything to do with it.’

      Laura’s lips parted. ‘You’re getting married!’ She had never expected this. Julie had always maintained that marriage was not for her. Not after her mother’s unhappy experience.

      ‘Well, not yet,’ Julie conceded swiftly. ‘He hasn’t asked me. But he will. I’ll make sure of that. Only—well—he wants to meet you. And I wondered if we could come up for the weekend.’

      ‘He wants to meet me?’ Laura was surprised, and Julie didn’t sound as if the proposition met with her approval either.

      ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘Silly, isn’t it? But—well—I might as well tell you. He’s not English. He’s Italian. An Italian count, would you believe? Although he doesn’t use the title these days. In any case, he’s not an impoverished member of the Italian aristocracy. His family owns factories and things in Northern Italy, and he’s very wealthy. What else?’ Julie uttered an excited little laugh. ‘I wouldn’t be considering marrying him otherwise. No matter how sexy he is!’

      Laura was stunned. ‘But—Julie…’ She licked her lips, as she endeavoured to find the right words to voice her feelings. ‘I mean—why does he want to meet me? And—coming here. This is just a tiny cottage, Julie. Why, I only have two bedrooms!’

      ‘So?’ Julie sounded belligerent now. ‘We’ll only need one.’

      ‘No.’ Laura knew she was in danger of being accused of being prudish, but she couldn’t help it. ‘That is—if—if you come here, you and I will share my room.’

      ‘Oh, all right.’ Julie made a sound of impatience. ‘I don’t suppose Jake would want to sleep with me there anyway. After all, it’s his idea that he introduce himself to you. That’s apparently how they do things in his part of the world. Only I explained I didn’t have a father.’

      Julie’s scornful words scraped a nerve, but Laura suppressed the urge to defend herself. It was an old argument, and Julie knew as well as her mother that she had had a father, just like anyone else. The fact that her parents had never been married was what she was referring to, a situation she had always blamed her mother for. She had maintained that Laura should have known that the man she had allowed to get her pregnant already had a wife, and no amount of justification on her mother’s part could persuade her otherwise. Even though she knew Laura had been only sixteen at the time, while Keith Macfarlane had been considerably older, she had always stuck to the belief that Laura should have been more suspicious of a man who worked in Newcastle and spent most of his weekends in Edinburgh.

      But Laura hadn’t been like her daughter at that age. The only child of elderly parents, she had been both immature and naïve. A man like Keith Macfarlane, whom she had met at a party at a friend’s house, had seemed both worldly-wise and sophisticated, and she had been flattered that someone so confident and assured should have found her so attractive. Besides, she had enjoyed a certain amount of kudos by having him pick her up from the sixth-form college, and for someone who hitherto had lived a fairly humdrum existence it had been exciting.

      Of course, with hindsight, Laura could see how stupid she had been. She should have known that a man who liked women as much as Keith did was unlikely to have reached his thirtieth birthday without getting involved with someone else. But she had been young and reckless—and she had paid the price.

      Looking back, she suspected Keith had never intended to get so heavily involved. Like her, he’d evidently enjoyed having a partner who was not in his own age-group, and at sixteen, Laura supposed, she had been quite attractive. She had always been tall, and in her teens she had carried more weight than she did now. In consequence, she had looked older, and probably more experienced, too, she acknowledged ruefully. So much so that Keith had expected her to know how to take care of herself, and it had come as quite a shock to him to discover she was still a virgin.

      That was when their relationship had foundered. Keith had seen the dangers, and drawn back from them. Three weeks later he’d told her he had been transferred to Manchester, and she’d never heard from him again.

      Tom Dalton, the father of Laura’s best friend, at whose house she had first met Keith, eventually admitted the truth. He had worked with Keith, and he knew why he spent his weekends in Edinburgh. Laura wished he had seen fit to tell her sooner, but by then it was too late. Laura was pregnant, and for a while it seemed as if her whole life was ruined.

      Naturally, she had dreaded telling her parents. Mr and Mrs Fox had never approved of her generation, and she was quite prepared for them to demand she get rid of the baby. But in that instance she was wrong. Instead of making it even harder for her, her father had suggested a simple solution. She should have the baby, and then go back to school. There was no point in wasting her education, and if she was going to have a child to support then she ought to ensure that she had a career to do it. And that was what she had done, leaving the baby with her mother during the day, while she’d studied for her A levels, and subsequently gained a place at the university.

      It had not been an easy life, Laura recalled without rancour. Julie had not been an ‘easy’ baby, and when her parents had died in a car accident during her first year of teaching it had been hard. Coping with the pupils at an inner-city comprehensive during the day, and still finding the energy to cope with a fractious five-year-old at night. But Laura had managed, somehow, although at times she was so tired that she’d wondered how she was going to go on.

      Of course, much later, when Julie discovered the circumstances of her own birth, other complications had arisen. As a young girl, Julie had always resented the fact that she only had one parent, and as she grew older that resentment manifested itself in rows and tantrums that often escalated out of all proportion.

      But Julie had one consolation. Her features, which as a child had been fairly ordinary, blossomed in her teens into real beauty. Not for Julie the horrors of puppy-fat and acne. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, her height unmarred by extra inches. Her hair, which she had inherited from her mother, was several shades darker than Laura’s, a rich, burnished copper that flowed freely about her shoulders. She became the most popular girl in her class, and, although Laura worried that she might make the same mistakes she had made, Julie was much shrewder than she had ever been.

      Laura hated to admit it, but when Julie left school before she was eighteen, and took herself off to London to work, she was almost relieved. The effort

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