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Shrewd, though. She must have been, to get old Dunstant to marry her in the first place, and to leave her all this money.
* * *
So Anthony Quentin thought that Nick was having an affair with Venice, Adam reflected bitterly.
Was he, or was the other man simply trying to stir up gossip? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that Nick had been unfaithful to Fern.
Did she know? If so, he was the last person she was likely to confide in. He could imagine how hurt she would be, though, and how fiercely determined not to allow anyone to see what she was suffering.
Dear God, how could Nick even think of wanting anyone else when…?
But that had always been Nick’s way. Adam could remember how, from being a boy, Nick would single-mindedly pursue something to the point of obsession, be it a new football or a new friend, only to lose interest in it virtually from the moment he possessed it.
They had never been close, had never really got on. Adam had been almost adult when their parents had married. He had liked and admired Nick’s mother, who had been a friend of his father’s for several years before they had actually decided to marry.
She had adored Nick, and for her sake and his father’s he had made every attempt to get on with him, but he had realised almost from the start that Nick did not want to get on with him, and that in fact he took an almost perverse pleasure in thwarting his attempts to make friends with him.
In fact Adam had very quickly come to realise that Nick actually wanted to foster antagonism
between them and he had discovered that Nick was very quick to run to their parents with exaggerated tales of imagined injustices and slights, which had always cast Adam in the role of aggressor.
The only way to deal with Nick’s hostility was to ignore him, Adam had decided. For their parents’ sake, he had striven to maintain a semblance of some kind of reasonable relationship between them, but he had very quickly learned not to put himself into a position where anything he said or did could be turned against him and used to hurt their parents.
It had taken a little longer for Adam to come to accept that Nick had a warped, defective personality which seemed to take delight in opposing and even actively hurting others.
So far as he could ascertain, there was no reason for this.
His mother adored him, and when he went out of his way to do so he could be so breathtakingly charming that Adam was not really surprised that no one else seemed to share his own view of him.
Neither had he been surprised when Fern had fallen victim to that charm.
He just hoped for her sake that the scales would never fall from her eyes and that she would never, ever see Nick as he saw him, because if she did, he knew it would break her heart and totally destroy her. And that was something he could not bear to contemplate.
He wished now that he had been less abrupt with Anthony Quentin. Who knew what gossip he might inadvertently start to spread? It would have been more tactful of him simply to have listened to what the man had to say and then found a way of defusing it rather than…
Venice… How could his stepbrother possibly want a woman like that when he was married to Fern?
CHAPTER TWELVE
NICK was in a good mood. Fern heard him humming under his breath as he came in. She went to the kitchen door and opened it, walking into the hall.
When he saw her, Nick stopped humming, and started to scowl instead.
Fern could feel her stomach muscles tightening. Ever since Laura Welch had commented innocently in the supermarket the previous day how much she envied Venice the ability to simply drop everything and take herself off to London for an impromptu shopping trip just whenever the mood struck her, Fern had known that Nick’s interest in Venice and hers in him was not merely a fiction created by her own overworked and suspicious imagination, as Nick had implied.
The coincidence of both of them choosing to visit London at the same time; the fact that Nick had claimed that he was unable to tell her where or how she could get in touch with him; the hyped-up mood he had been in before he left… they were all signs that were familiar enough to her by now.
She didn’t want to have to tackle him about it, she admitted cravenly as he glowered sullenly at her, but she couldn’t just close her eyes and pretend it wasn’t happening.
Listening to Lord Stanton talking about his wife, hearing the love, the loss, the respect in his voice had brought home to her how barren and sterile her own marriage was.
‘She was my best friend,’ Lord Stanton had said of his wife, and Fern had ached with a sense of loss and grief as she listened to him.
Friendship was something she and Nick had never shared, nor ever would share. She tried to imagine the kind of relationship they might have had if they had not married and acknowledged with a sickening sense of despair that friendship could never have existed between them. They had nothing really in common, no shared interests or hobbies, no past memories of shared happiness to treasure.
No matter how much he might claim that he needed her and refuse to discuss the state of their marriage, Nick surely could not be happy… could not love her.
She took a step towards him and then stopped as he pre-empted her and spoke first, his voice harsh and critical as he looked at her and demanded, ‘For God’s sake, Fern, can’t you do something with yourself?’ His mouth twisted contemptuously. ‘You look closer to forty than thirty. Why don’t you get your hair restyled… wear some make-up…?’
