by Unknown
CHAPTER ONE
'AND you're sure you don't mind going to Haslewich to sort out everything...?'
'No, Mum, I don't mind at all,' Chrissie assured her mother quietly, exchanging looks over her head with her father as she did so.
It was no secret in their small, close-knit family unit just how much her younger brother's irrespon-sible behaviour and alcoholic lifestyle had upset Chrissie's mother.
In the early years of her marriage she had tried her best to help Charles, naively believing that he was genuinely trying to mend his ways. But eight years ago, following a short custodial sentence after he had been convicted of stealing several small items from the home of an acquaintance, which he had later sold to pay for the drink on which he was by then dependent, Chrissie's mother had decided that enough was enough and had cut herself off from him completely.
Chrissie understood just why she had felt compelled to do so.
Her father was a hard-working heart surgeon in a busy local hospital in the small Scottish border town where they lived and her mother was a member of the local town council and involved in several local charities.
Her brother's unsavoury reputation and dishonest behaviour was so completely opposite to her own way of life that it was very hard for her to deal with the situation.
Now though, Uncle Charles was dead and someone, one of them, would have to travel to Cheshire to sort things out, dispose of the small property he had owned in the centre of the town of Haslewich—all that was left from his share of the farmhouse and land that he and Chrissie's mother had inherited from their parents, and Chrissie had volunteered to take on the task.
'Heaven knows what kind of state the house will be in.' Chrissie's mother gave a small shudder. 'The last time I was there the whole place was filthy and you couldn't open a single cupboard door without an empty bottle falling out.
'I just wish I knew why he...' She closed her eyes.
'Even as a child he was different...awkward...self-destructive, very different from our father. He was such a kind, gentle man like my grandfather, but Charles... We were never very close as children, perhaps because of the big age gap between us.' She shook her head.
'I feel guilty about letting you go down to Haslewich on your own but we've got this conference in Mexico followed by your father's lecture tour.'
'Look, Mum, it's all right,' Chrissie reiterated. 'I don't mind, honestly, and it isn't as though I don't have the time.'
There was a big reshuffle going on in the English department of the school where Chrissie worked as a teacher and she had already warned her parents she had heard on the grapevine that the department was looking to cut costs and shed some staff.
'Well, I'm not entirely happy about your having to stay in Charles's house,' her mother told her.
'But that is the whole point of my going,' Chrissie reminded her wryly. 'The house has to be sold to help pay off Uncle Charles's debts and you said yourself that there was no way it could be put on the market until it had been cleaned from top to bottom.'
'I know. Which reminds me, I'll have to get in touch with the bank and the solicitors to make sure you've got my authority to deal with all the necessary paperwork.'
Once again Chrissie and her father shared a look over her mother's head.
Charles Platt had not just left behind him an untidy house and an unsavoury reputation; there was also a large number of outstanding debts.
In truth, she wasn't particularly looking forward to being the one to sort out the mess Uncle Charles had left behind, Chrissie admitted, but someone had to do it and she certainly wasn't going to let her mother be even more upset than she was already by letting her see her own distaste for the task.
The last time she had visited Haslewich had been following her grandmother's death, and her memories of the occasion and the area were coloured by her mother's grief.
Her Uncle Charles had been living with his mother in the old Cheshire farmhouse that had been passed down through many generations of their family, but her grandfather, disappointed in his son and well aware of his weakness, had sold off the land to another farmer, and following his wife's death the farmhouse itself had been sold, as well.
She could still remember the searing shame she had felt on seeing her Uncle Charles staggering from one of the town's many public houses whilst she had been shopping there with her mother. When a group of children had jeered at him and mocked him, her mother had drawn a quick, sharp breath and gone white before turning round and abruptly walking Chrissie off in the opposite direction.
That had been the first time she had become aware of the reason for the pain in her mother's face and voice whenever she mentioned her brother.
Now, as an adult, Chrissie was, of course, fully au fait with the history of her uncle's addiction to alcohol and gambling.
Weak and vain, he was something of a misfit in the local farming community in which he had grown up, and it had been obvious even before he reached his teens that he was not going to follow in the family tradition of farming.
'He broke my father's heart,' Chrissie's mother had once told her sadly. 'Dad did his best, selling off small pieces of land so that he could give Charles an allowance. He tried to understand and support him when he said that he wanted to be an actor. But it was all just an excuse to get money out of Dad and spend his time gambling and drinking, initially in Chester and then, when his cronies there got wise to him, back in Haslewich.'
And as they had talked, Chrissie had recognised how hurt her grandparents and her mother had been by her uncle's behaviour, how his attitudes to life, which were so very different from theirs, confused them. How impossible they found it to understand how he could so easily and carelessly flout the moral laws they lived their lives by and, most painful of all perhaps, how shamed they felt by him.
And now he was dead and with him had died a small piece of Haslewich history. Platts had farmed the land around Haslewich for over three centuries as the headstones on their graves in Haslewich's churchyard testified, but no longer.
'Don't get upset,' Chrissie urged her mother, going over to put her arm round her and kiss her.
Facially they were very similar, with wide-set, al-mond-shaped eyes and high cheek-bones in a delicately feminine face, but where her mother was small, barely five foot two and softly rounded, Chrissie had inherited her father's height and leaner body frame.
She also had, quite mysteriously since both her parents were dark-haired, hair the colour of richly polished chestnuts, thick and straight and healthily glossy.
At twenty-seven going on twenty-eight, she considered herself mature enough to be above being flattered by those men who did a double take when they saw her for the first time, plainly expecting her to feel complimented by their admiration of her face and body without having bothered to take the time to learn anything about her, the person. Physical attractiveness was not, in her opinion, the prime factor in motivating a new relationship. For her there had to be something far more compelling than that. For her there had to be a sense of being instinctively drawn to the other person, 'knowing' that the magnetic pull between the two of them was too overwhelming, too powerful, to be ignored. She was, in short, a true romantic, although she was very loath to admit it.
'It's not fair,' one of her friends had told her mock-crossly the previous summer.
'If I had your looks I know I'd make much better use of them than you do. You don't know how lucky you are.'
'True beauty comes from within,' Chrissie had told her gently—and meant it.
Whilst she had been at university, she had been approached by a talent scout for a modelling agency but had refused to take them seriously.
There were those who had wondered if her irre-pressibl
e sense of humour was quite the thing one wanted in a schoolteacher, but Chrissie had proved that the ability to see and laugh at the humorous side of life was no bar to being able to teach—and to teach well.
'I'm still not entirely happy about the idea of your staying in Charles's house,' her mother repeated.
Chrissie sat down opposite her.
'Mum...we've already been through all this,' she reminded her. 'The whole point of my going to Haslewich is to prepare the house for sale and the best way I can do that is if I'm living there.'
'Yes, you're right, of course. But knowing how Charles lived...' Her mother gave a small shudder.
She was a meticulous housewife, a wonderful cook, the true daughter of ancestors who had spent their lives scrubbing dairies and stone floors, polishing, washing and waging war on dirt in all its many forms.
'I've got my own bedding and my own towels and utensils,' Chrissie reminded her mother.
'I should be doing this,' Rose Oldham protested.
'Charles is...was my brother....'
'And my uncle,' Chrissie pointed out, adding, 'And besides, you can't. You don't have the time right now and I do.'
Although she wasn't going to say as much to her mother who she knew, despite her modern outlook on life, was still eagerly waiting for the day when Chrissie became a wife and mother, she had been rather glad of the excuse of having to go to Haslewich. It had enabled her to turn down an invitation from a fellow teacher who had been pursuing her all term to join him and a group of friends in Provence for the summer.
Provence had been very tempting, but the teacher had not. Privately, Chrissie had always been a little wary of her weakness for men of a distinctly swash-buckling and impetuous nature and more suited to the pages of an historical romance than modern-day so-ciety and it was one she very firmly squashed whenever she felt it stirring.
The fellow teacher had not come anywhere near creating any kind of stir within her and would, no doubt, have made excellent husband and father material, but he certainly wouldn't have done anything to satisfy that quirky and rather regrettable feminine desire she knew she had for a man who would excite and entice her, a man who would challenge her, match her, a man with a capital M.
Well, one thing was for sure, she certainly wasn't likely to find him in Haslewich, which by all her reck-oning was a sleepy little market town, a quiet back-water where nothing much ever happened.
CHAPTER TWO
'I TAKE it they still haven't caught whoever broke into Queensmead?' Guy Cooke asked Jenny Crighton as she came into the small antiques shop in which they were co-partners.
'No,' Jenny told him, shaking her head as she responded to his enquiry about the recent theft and break-in at her father-in-law's home.
She smiled warmly at Guy as she spoke. He really was the most extraordinarily good-looking man and if she wasn't so firmly and happily married to her own husband she had to admit that it could have been all too easy to join the long queue of women who sighed dreamily over Guy's very masculine blend of a vir-ilely powerful and tautly muscled male body—the kind of body that would have allowed him to pose for a trendily provocative jeans advert any day of the week—allied to enigmatically hooded eyes set above high cheek-bones and a certain way of looking at you that was completely irresistible, virtually resulting in a complete meltdown. Add to that highly sensual cocktail the intensely masculine genes he had inherited from his Gypsy forebears and the reputation that went with them and it was easy to understand why the word 'sexy' accompanied by a longing look was the way most of her sex would quite freely have described him.
Not that Jenny was totally immune to Guy's looks or the unexpected and even more dangerous generosity and warmth of character that went with them, but she loved Jon and she thought it was very sad that with all he had to offer a woman, Guy had not yet found the right one for him.
'At least they didn't harm Ben,' she added. 'But it has shaken him. You know how stubborn he can be normally and how hard Jon and I have found it to try to persuade him to have someone to live in.'
'Tell me about it,' Guy invited. 'When I went up there to do a valuation on the antiques for his insurance company, he practically hit the roof when I told him that he was going to need to have an alarm system installed. I take it he never did?'
'Well, you know Ben,' Jenny sighed. 'Luckily they didn't take very much and the police think they must have been disturbed either by the phone ringing or by someone arriving at the house.'
'It's so hard to contemplate that someone would actually break in in broad daylight and calmly proceed to remove not just small items but actual pieces of furniture, as well.'
'The police did warn us that there's very little chance of our getting anything back. Apparently there's been a spate of these kinds of robberies recently and they think it's gangs coming out from the city wanting to make money to buy drugs. The new motorways, of course, facilitate a quick getaway and make them and the stolen property so much harder to trace.'
'But you've managed to persuade the old boy to have someone living in?' Guy questioned her as he started to check through the contents of a large pack-ing case that contained goods from a house clearance.
Junk in the main, he suspected, but you never knew....
'Well, unfortunately, no,' Jenny replied. 'But Maddy is due to arrive at the end of the week. You know she always comes up from London to spend a few weeks here in the summer.'
'Will Max be coming with her?' Guy asked, referring to Jon and Jenny's elder son and Maddy's husband.
Jenny bit her lip. 'No...no, he won't. It seems he's heavily involved on a case at the moment and he's going to have to fly out to Spain to see his client.
She's got a yacht that's apparently in a marina out there.'
Max was a barrister working from a prestigious set of chambers in London. He specialised in divorce work and it hadn't escaped Guy's notice that most of his clients were women. Max liked women, or rather he liked the boost to his ego that deceiving them gave him.
Guy did not have a very high opinion of Max but he cared far too much for Jenny to let her know it.
Life hadn't always been easy for Jenny and although she and her husband, Jon, were happy together now...
Unlike Max, Guy genuinely did like women, all women, but some women especially so. Women like Jenny—warm, gentle, womanly women with quiet, understated beauty. Their more flashy, visually eye-catching counterparts held very little allure for Guy.
He was a physically good-looking man himself and well knew how worthless mere good looks could be.
A warm, loving, caring nature, though, now that was something that time could never erode, something enduring and worthy of loving, cherishing...
But he had long ago come to accept that Jenny was not for him; that she loved her husband and would never see him as anything more than a friend. 'A much younger friend' as she had once stressed to him, reminding him of the age gap between them. At thirty-nine Guy no longer considered himself to be particularly 'young'.
'Apart from the shock of the burglary itself, the thing that's upset Ben the most,' Jenny was saying,
'is losing the little yew desk. His father apparently had it copied from the French original that belonged to his grandmother. It was a very pretty little piece, but being a copy, not really of any great financial value.'
'But a good deal of sentimental value,' Guy suggested.
'Very much so,' Jenny concurred. 'When I was talking to Luke about it the other day, he told me that the Chester side of the family owned a matching pair of the original from which Ben's desk was copied and that they had been gifts brought back from France for the twin daughters of the Crighton who bought them.
His father now has one of them and his uncle the other.'
'Mmm...well, perhaps the thief or thieves didn't realise Ben's was a copy.'
'Maybe not, although the police seem to think they probably took it because it was in the hallway and easy to move like the silver and
jewellery they took.
'Ruth and I had to spend virtually a whole day checking over the house and listing what was missing.
Ben certainly wasn't in any fit state to help and although, of course, I had some knowledge of what should have been there, Ruth, as Ben's sister, was naturally much more accurate.'
'She's back from the States, then?'
'Yes, she and Grant flew in on Saturday.' Jenny laughed. 'I think it's wonderful how the two of them have stuck to their agreement to spend alternate three months in one another's countries.'
'It's lovely to see them together. They're so much in love, even now.'
'Well, I imagine all that they've been through must make the time they're having together now all the more precious.'
'I agree. Real confirmation that fact can be stranger than fiction.'
'And real love so strong that nothing can diminish or destroy it,' Jenny added softly. 'In all the years they were apart, neither of them was ever tempted to marry someone else.'
'But at least they're together now and so deeply in love that Bobbie complains that despite the fact that they were all married at the same time, Ruth and Grant are a far more romantic couple than her and Luke.'
'Well, Bobbie and Luke do have a young child and two busy careers,' Guy commented, 'while her grandparents are both retired and free to concentrate exclu-sively on one another.'
'They may both be retired but Ruth is still on half a dozen local committees as well as running her single-parent units,' Jenny reminded him. 'And Grant has an extraordinary spread of business interests to keep him busy. I sometimes feel exhausted just listening to what they've been doing. I can't help comparing their energy and the enjoyment they get out of life with Ben's growing lack of interest in everything.'
Jenny's forehead pleated in a worried frown as she reflected on her father-in-law.
'Is he still going ahead with his hip-joint replace-ment operation?' Guy asked her.
'I hope so,' Jenny told him feelingly. 'It's sched-uled for the end of the summer and the plan was that Maddy would be there when he comes out of hospital to look after him. He responds far better to her than he does to any of us, partially because she's Max's wife, of course, and so far as Ben is concerned, Max can do no wrong.'
