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‘Don’t react.’ Steve bit back a laugh as he saw the depth of Mina’s horror. ‘According to your sister, she’ll forget it again if you don’t make a fuss. But, as the culprit who said it within her hearing, Roger is never likely to use it again, even if he does drop a block on his big toe!’
Steve took her round the garden centre, pointed out the new extension with pride and completed the tour in his incredibly untidy office. ‘Fancy some coffee?’
‘I would have loved some but I’m baby-sitting this afternoon.’
‘Rather you than me. Even on her own, Susie can be a handful. She has a will of iron and a temper like a tornado,’ Steve remarked as he watched her daughter through the window. She was splattering back and forth through a pile of sand she had been scolded twice already for playing in.
‘You were a bad girl,’ Mina began, taking a short cut across the fields back to Thwaite Manor.
‘I’m a good girl!’ Susie told her with a flash of raw temper, and ran on ahead, thin, brown-as-nut legs twinkling under grubby white shorts, black pigtails bouncing.
Cesare’s daughter and so agonisingly like him, Mina reflected painfully. The only thing Susie had inherited from her mother was her diminutive size. At three and a half, she was still tiny but, by virtue of her temper, highly unlikely to be bullied. She was bright, stubborn, manipulative…and often badly behaved, Mina conceded grudgingly.
Yet Roger and Winona had treated Susie exactly the same way as they treated their own brood of three. But John, Lizzy and Peter were quiet, easily handled children. Susie was different, a cuckoo in the nest with a far more volatile temperament. She had not received the firmer hand of discipline that she required. And whose fault was that? The buck stops here, Mina reflected guiltily.
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‘Well?’ Winona demanded impatiently as Mina walked into the manor’s large country kitchen.
‘I’m starting on Monday.’
A vibrant smile lit her twin’s face, so like yet so unlike her own. They were not identical, but as children the marked similarity between them had often fooled people into assuming that they were. In adulthood, the differences had become far more prominent. That had bothered Winona. She still lightened her hair to a shade as close as she could get to Mina’s and wore it in the same style.
‘Thank heaven you’ve finally seen sense! The four of us should go out for a meal and celebrate.’
‘Five, surely—Steve’s girlfriend would probably like to be included.’ Mina tried not to sound dry.
Winona frowned. ‘Jenny’s away on a course right now. Anyway, what’s it got to do with her? It’s not as if they’re engaged or anything…I’ll book a table at the Coach——’
‘No,’ Mina inserted flatly.
‘But why not?’ Her sister already had the phone in her hand.
Mina sighed, wearily registering what her twin had contrived to hide until this moment. Incredible as it seemed to her, Winona still longed to see Steve and her twin reunited like Romeo and Juliet. ‘I just don’t think it would be a good idea.’
‘What else happened with that creep Falcone?’ Winona asked without warning.
Flames of colour washed over Mina’s startled features. Caught unprepared, she had no time to assume the mask that concealed her inner turmoil. ‘I——’
Her twin dropped the phone in shock. ‘You didn’t… I mean, not again?’
Mina studied the surface of the breakfast-bar in the silence, her stomach cramping with sudden distress. She would not have told her sister but, directly faced with the question, she could not lie to her either.
‘I’m going to do it this time,’ Winona swore in a shaking voice. ‘I’ll take a gun out of Baxter’s cupboard and I will go to London and shoot that bastard dead!’
‘Winona——’
‘Shut up,’ her sister hissed furiously, this being the one subject capable of rousing her to temper. ‘You protect him—you’re still protecting him! Roger and I are perfectly willing to pay for you to take him to court and you won’t let us——’
‘I am not protecting him, I’m protecting Susie,’ Mina whispered tightly. ‘You know how much publicity such a case would attract and I wouldn’t be able to hide her. Everyone around here knows I’m a single parent. I couldn’t possibly take my daughter’s father to court!’
‘You slept with him—you actually slept with him again?’ Winona suddenly demanded in complete disbelief.
Mina went white. ‘I don’t want to talk about it——’
‘Are you still in love with him?’ Winona muttered tautly.
Mina was rigid. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
