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CHAPTER ONE
JASON HARCOURT’S right hand hovered over the telephone for a second, then dropped down to his side. He pushed both hands into the side pockets of his dark, well-worn cords and hunched his wide shoulders.
The room was crowding in on him. The over-ornate French antiques, the baroque-framed paintings, the fussy carpets suffocating him. He paced to the long, elaborately draped French windows, dark brows drawn down over flint-grey eyes as he stared moodily out over Lytham Court’s winter-bleak gardens.
How he hated this place!
Seven years since he’d set foot over the doorstep—except for the hour he’d spent here after Harold’s second wife Vivienne’s funeral—and he was only here now because he had no real option. Lytham held bad memories, more than a few.
Following Vivienne’s death, four years ago, he had made peace, of a sort, with Harold, the man who had legally adopted him almost thirty years ago on his marriage to Jason’s widowed mother. For a three-year-old child, whose real father had been killed in a climbing accident before he was born, it had been easy enough to accept the substitute.
Only after his mother had died of leukaemia, when he was seventeen, had he begun to see his adoptive father with new eyes.
But that was in the past, and the tentative peace had progressed relatively smoothly because he had stipulated that their occasional meetings took place at the older man’s London club. Neutral ground. He was glad, now, that he’d gone with the flow, somewhat sceptically giving Harold the benefit of the doubt when he had insisted he’d changed. He owed his adoptive father that much.
But the scepticism had hardened to downright disbelief when at their last meeting, two months ago, Harold had told him, ‘Georgia’s been back in England for six months now; we’ve been meeting fairly regularly.’
Jason had watched the way the mere mention of her name had made Harold’s tired, faded eyes brighten in the older man’s face, a face that had shrunk in on its own bones. Harold had gone downhill, slowly but very surely, since Vivienne had died, and his obvious physical frailty had been the only thing that had stopped Jason from getting up from the lunch table and walking out of the muted dark brown atmosphere of the club and into the relative sanity of London’s teeming streets.
‘So you keep in touch with Georgia.’ He practically spat the words out, the old bitterness surfacing as it always did whenever he was unguarded enough to think about her.
‘Since Vivvie died, yes. She, God rest and bless her, was the stumbling block there. Wouldn’t have her daughter’s name mentioned.’ Harold pushed his barely touched meal aside. Jason speared a forkful of game pie with smooth savagery, debated whether he wanted it, decided not, and laid down his cutlery.
‘I know you said you were going to break the long silence and phone New York to tell her of Vivienne’s death,’ he said carefully. He had offered to put his personal distaste aside and break the news of the fatal car accident, to spare Harold, but the old man had insisted he was the one to do it. As it turned out no one need have bothered; she hadn’t cared enough to attend her own mother’s funeral.
‘Well, yes.’ Old eyes fell uneasily. ‘There were things that had to be said, and I said them,’ he stated enigmatically. ‘And I like to think we got close again after the air was cleared. It doesn’t do to hold on to old grudges. In any case, she’s well settled back in England now. She heads up one of the design teams at the branch of her advertising agency in Birmingham—you’ll remember she went out with the girl Sue’s family when the father opened a branch in New York?’
Jason glanced fiercely at his watch. He’d had enough of this. Of course he remembered!
‘I thought we might all get together at Lytham one weekend soon,’ Harold said. ‘Mend fences. You and little Georgia are the only family I have left.’
‘Spare me the sentimentality.’ Jason flung his napkin down. ‘It’s not impressing me.’ He stood up.
‘It was worth a try.’ The faded eyes held a sudden gleam of humour. ‘But you will come? I’ll fix a weekend with Georgia. Be like old times.’
Old times he could do without. ‘In your dreams!’ he said, and walked out.
He hadn’t seen Harold since. He’d meant to, of course he had, but work had got in the way. He regretted that now that Harold was dead, he thought, his eyes still fixed on the dreary garden scene.
It was raining now, icy needles that clattered against the window pane, and the short winter day was ending. The housekeeper, Mrs Moody, had told him that a hard frost was forecast for tonight.
It meant driving conditions would be tricky in the morning. Georgia would probably decide not to risk the icy roads. She hadn’t bothered to grab a flight and get over for her mother’s funeral, so why should she put herself out to attend Harold’s?
Unless she wasn’t totally sure of the way her stepfather had left his money and was anxious to find out, he thought cynically.
His hard mouth pulled down, he strode over to the phone and lifted the receiver.
Georgia was hunting in the back of the kitchen cupboard for the spare jar of coffee granules she knew she had somewhere when the phone in the apartment’s living room rang.
‘I’ll get it.’ Ben levered his tall, whip-thin body from the kitchen doorway, where he’d been lounging, watching her, the slow smile he gave her as sexy as his husky voice.
Returning to her search, she briefly wondered why she always blew each and every one of his suggestions of a date clean out of the water. Yet she knew why, really. It had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her.
They’d both occupied apartments on the same floor of the converted Edwardian mini-mansion in one of Birmingham’s leafier suburbs for the past eight months. Returning from New York after
more than six years, she’d known no one in the city, and had been grateful for the friendship Ben had offered.
He often dropped by for a chat in the evenings; sometimes, as now, to borrow something, at other times bringing a bottle of wine to share, or a recently acquired CD he thought she might like to listen to. He asked her out to dinner on an average of once a week, and apparently did not get disheartened when she consistently turned him down.
She didn’t want sex rearing its ugly head and spoiling the easy friendship they had.
