Читать книгу: «A Husband's Price»

CHAPTER ONE

CLAUDIA passed an uncertain hand over the photograph album. She hadn’t looked at it in years; hadn’t wanted to set eyes on it even. She tried to walk away and out of the room but somehow couldn’t, then, her teeth biting into the warm flesh of her full lower lip, she gave into temptation and knew she’d regret it.

Sitting abruptly at the table beneath the library’s stone mullioned window, she hooked a strand of soft brown, deadly straight, shoulder-length hair behind one ear and tentatively opened the album. Here they all were. All the people; all the memories. All the shattered dreams and broken trust.

Her fingertips shakily grazed the glossy surface of the prints. She had put the album away on the top shelf out of sight a long time ago. Her father must have glanced through it then abandoned it here on the library table. Had he, in his grief, been searching for that lost summer, desperately straining to catch an echo of vanished, happier times?

And here he was. Guy Sullivan, her father. Six years ago, he would have been fifty-two, a big man, in his prime then, his arm around his blonde and beautiful bride of three months. Her stepmother, Helen.

Twenty years her father’s junior, recently divorced, the sizzling blonde could have turned into the stepmother from hell, but hadn’t. From the day Helen had applied for the position as a relief receptionist here at Farthings Hall, Claudia had seen how attracted her father was. Guy Sullivan had been a widower for eight years, Claudia’s mother dying of a rare viral infection when her only child was ten years old.

Three months after their first meeting, Guy and Helen had married. Claudia had been happy for them both; her initial fears that Helen might resent her, or that she might resent the woman who had taken her mother’s place in her father’s affections, had been unfounded. Helen couldn’t have tried harder to charm her new stepdaughter.

And here she herself was: the Claudia of six years ago. Hair much longer then—almost reaching down to her waist—her curves lusher, her smile wide, open, untouched in those long-gone innocent days by the betrayal that was to come later.

Her eyes misted as she looked at the photograph. She’d been eighteen years old and happy to be spending the summer at home before going to teacher training college. She’d been glad to help out around Farthings Hall, the exclusive country house hotel and restaurant that was both home and livelihood not only for her father now, but for his father before him.

And there in the background, prophetically perhaps, Tony Favel had been caught by the camera leaning against the stone parapet that bordered the terrace that ran along the west façade of the wonderful old Tudor house.

Tony Favel, her father’s accountant, the man who had brought Helen into their lives, introducing her as some kind of distant cousin, keen to make a new life for herself after a messy divorce. Even now she could hear the echo of his following words. ‘And haven’t you said, Guy, you’re looking for a part-time receptionist for when Sandy packs it in to have that baby she’s expecting?’

Tony Favel. At the time the photograph had been taken, he would have been thirty. Even then, his lint-blond hair was beginning to recede, his waistline to thicken. Claudia swallowed hard, her vivid blue eyes clouding as they rested on the grainy, slightly out-of-focus image of her husband. Tony Favel, whom she had married at the end of that summer six years ago.

Slowly, not wanting to, yet driven by something too dark for her to understand, Claudia turned the page and found what she had known she would find. And feared. All those pictures of Adam.

At the end of that summer, she’d vowed to destroy every last one of them, to rip them to shreds and burn them. But, when it had come down to it, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch them. Or, at least, that was what she had told herself at the time. Love and hate: different sides of the same coin. She had told herself she hated him but obviously she must have still been in love with him. Why else would she have found it impossible to destroy his likenesses?

She had taken all but one of the photographs of Adam herself and, looking at them now, she couldn’t deny that fatal male beauty. Or deny that those smoky grey eyes, that rumpled, over-long black hair, those pagan-god good looks and body to match hid a black, black heart.

The odd picture out was the one of her and Adam together. Adam’s arm was placed possessively around her waist, pulling her close into the side of his lithely powerful body, and she was gazing adoringly up into his face. So there they were, the two of them, eternally smiling, caught for posterity looking as if they were walking confidently through the best, the most blissfully happy, the most wonderful summer of their lives...

She never looked back into the past because it hurt too much, but now she couldn’t seem to help herself and the memories came crowding in. She could clearly see her younger self running lightly down the service stairs on that sunny, early summer day six years ago.

She’d spent the best part of the morning helping the housekeeper, Amy, to ready the guest suites. There were only four of them; by country house hotel standards Farthings Hall was small. But very, very exclusive. There was a waiting list as long as your arm both for accommodation and for the restaurant tables.

And, after all that hoovering, polishing and dusting, she’d been good and ready for a dose of that glorious sunshine she’d only so far yearned for through the spotless, glittering upstairs windows. She’d been just eighteen years old, was at the very beginning of the long summer holiday, had done her duty by helping Amy and now smelt freedom.

‘Oops!’ She skidded to an abrupt halt before she knocked her new stepmother to kingdom come. ‘Sorry—didn’t see you!’

Small and willowy with hair like spun sunlight, Helen always made Claudia feel large and clumsy and, just recently, awkward and a bit in the way. Oh, Helen had never, ever, given her an unkind word or look either before her marriage to Guy or after, but for the past few days there’d been an edginess about her, a brittleness that went hand in hand with discontent.

But thankfully not today. Claudia felt her muscles relax as Helen’s narrow green eyes gleamed at her. ‘Such energy! Oh, to be young and full of bounce again!’

‘You’re not old.’ Claudia grinned, falling in step beside her stepmother who was heading down the passage to the courtyard entrance. At eighteen, just, she regarded the thirties—even the early thirties as she knew Helen to be—as knocking on the door of middle age. But there was something timeless about Helen’s sexy little body, golden hair and perfect features.

‘Thanks.’ Helen’s voice was dry. She reached the door first and pushed it open. The sunlight streamed through and made her a dazzling, glittering figure in her lemon-yellow sheath dress and all that chunky gold jewellery she seemed to favour. ‘Coming?’

Claudia had promised herself a walk to the rocky little cove that could only be reached via the deep valley that bisected the Hall’s extensive grounds, but if Helen wanted her company she would gladly tag along. She usually fell in with other people’s wishes because she liked those around her to be happy and, perhaps just as importantly, she liked people to be pleased with her.

Like a big, exuberant puppy, she thought with wry, self-mocking humour. She could almost hear herself panting, feel her tongue hanging out!

‘Sure. Where to?’

‘To find Old Ron. He hasn’t sent the fruit and veg up to the kitchens yet. Chef’s furious. Lunches will be starting in an hour. I said I’d chase him up. Besides—’ green eyes gleamed up into the speedwell-blue of Claudia’s ‘—Guy hired a dogsbody to help Ron through the summer.’ Her sudden giggle was infectious. ‘He may be some kind of a drop-out of no fixed abode, but he sure is gorgeous! Worth the trek down to the kitchen gardens any time of the day!’ She paused significantly. ‘Or night!’

Claudia giggled right back. She knew Helen didn’t mean it; she had been married only for a couple of months or so, and she wouldn’t have eyes for any other man. ‘I didn’t know Dad had been hiring,’ she commented, striding along the raked gravel path.

She wasn’t surprised that this was the first she’d heard of a new employee. Recently she’d overheard her father and his new wife tersely arguing over Helen’s apparently sudden decision to give up her post. She had seemed to be saying that now she was married to the owner she shouldn’t have to work like a hired skivvy—though she would be happy to continue to do the flowers. Claudia had kept well out of the way of both of them, waiting until they’d sorted out their differences. She could imagine only one thing more embarrassing than overhearing them squabbling and that would be overhearing them making love.

Firmly squashing that thought, she asked, ‘So when did Adonis join the crew? Is he really a homeless drop-out?’ Claudia knew she was very lucky to have somewhere like Farthings Hall to call home. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have nowhere.

Helen shrugged slim, lightly tanned shoulders. ‘Goodness knows. He turned up on a clapped-out old motorbike a couple of days ago, looking for work. He admitted he was “just drifting” and apparently seemed happy enough to have the use of that old caravan at the back of the glasshouses for the summer, plus his food and pin money, in exchange for helping Old Rob around the grounds. His name’s Adam, by the way. Adam Weston.’

But Claudia wasn’t really listening as she followed Helen through into the walled kitchen garden, her thoughts exclusively for Old Ron now. The ancient groundsman couldn’t cope. Everyone knew it except him, which was obviously why her father had decided to hire someone to help out for the summer. How would Old Ron feel when he had to make way permanently for someone fit and young, someone who could actually walk faster than a snail?

Old Ron had worked here forever. Her grandfather had hired him initially, before Farthings Hall had been converted into the now exclusive country house hotel with what was reputed to be the best restaurant in Cornwall. He’d been here ever since, never marrying, inhabiting a flat conversion above the old stable block. Of course, Dad would never ask him to vacate his home, or pay rent, and, knowing her father, he would probably find him a token something or other to do, just so the old man wouldn’t feel entirely useless...

Then, for the second time in thirty minutes, Claudia almost ran her stepmother down. Helen had stopped without warning in the centre of the path, just inside the arched doorway in the high, ivy-clad, red-brick wall—the heated summer air was suddenly and unexpectedly thrumming with a tension so sharply intense that Claudia found herself instinctively holding her breath.

She expelled it slowly when she saw what Helen was staring at, her stepmother’s green eyes laughing, maybe even teasing just a little.

The new hired help was enough to bring a smile of glowing pleasure to any woman’s eyes.

Adam Weston was just as magnificent as Helen had implied, only more so. Leaning against a garden fork, dressed only in frayed denim cut-offs and scuffed working boots, he blew Claudia’s mind.

The breadth of his rangy shoulders was, she admitted admiringly, deeply impressive, accentuating the narrowness of his hips, the length of his leanly muscular legs. The tan of his skin was slicked with sweat and his forehead, beneath the soft fall of rumpled dark hair, was beaded with it. And his eyes, an intriguing smoky grey, narrowed now in overt male appraisal, were firmly fixed on the slender, golden figure of her stepmother.

Claudia shivered. It was a brilliant day, the hottest this summer so far. Yet she shivered right down to the soles of her grungy canvas shoes. She stepped forward, out of the shadows, uselessly regretting her faded, a-bit-baggy old jeans, the washed-out old shirt she wore for house-cleaning.

Her movement broke the spell. Whatever had been here, shimmering and stinging in the scented summer air, had gone. Helen said, her musical voice low and quite definitely husky, ‘Adam, meet your employer’s solitary offspring and pride of his life—Claudia. Dearest, say hello to Adam. And then, perhaps, he can run along and find Old Ron before Chef arrives with his cleaver!’

‘Hi there—’ Adam Weston brushed the wayward hank of soft dark hair out of his eyes and stepped forward, extending a strong, long-boned hand. And smiled.

And Claudia, for the first, and very probably the last, time in her life, fell deeply, shatteringly and quite, quite helplessly in love...

‘So there you are.’ The mesmeric spell of the past was broken as Guy Sullivan walked slowly into the book-lined room leaning on his ebony-handled cane, a little of the strain leaving his eyes when he saw his daughter. ‘Amy’s just got back from collecting Rosie from school. They were looking for you.’ His eyes fell on the album and he shook his head slightly, admitting, ‘I can’t think why I wanted to look at that. No good looking into the past—you can’t bring it back. Neither of us can.’

Claudia got to her feet and resolutely stuffed the album back in its former hiding place, aware of her father’s eyes on her, the rough compassion in his voice. Six weeks ago, his wife and her husband had been killed when the car they were in was mown down on a blind bend on a steep hill by an articulated lorry that had lost its brakes.

Just over a week later, they had discovered that Helen and Tony had been lovers. Their affair had been on and off, but mostly on, since before Tony had introduced the glamorous divorcée and suggested that Guy consider her for the post of relief receptionist.

Her father had made that discovery when he had been going through his dead wife’s effects and had happened across diaries and some highly explicit love letters. It had devastated him. Coming on top of the shock of the fatal accident, it had brought about his third heart attack in six years.

It hadn’t been anything like as severe as the one he’d had, right out of the blue, at the end of the summer six years ago but, nevertheless, it had weakened him still further and it would be a long time before she could stop worrying about him.

And how she was going to be able to break the other piece of shattering news she couldn’t imagine. The thought of what it could do to him terrified her.

‘Did you mention the possibility of the loan we need to refurbish the guest suites?’ Guy sat on the chair Claudia had vacated and leaned his cane against the table.

His once strong features were now gaunt and grey and Claudia would have done anything to spare him from this final horror. But the best she could do was prevaricate, just for now, delay the inevitable for as long as she possibly could.

Ask the bank manager for a loan? As if!

Her discussion with the manager this afternoon had been on a different topic entirely. Their business was as good as bankrupt, their financial difficulties severe—so severe that selling up was the only option. It was something her father was going to have to be told about. But not now.

Now she asked, changing the subject, ‘Where’s Rosie?’ As a rule she collected her small daughter from school every day, but because of her appointment at the bank she’d had to ask Amy to do it. She didn’t know what they would do without the grey-haired, rosy-cheeked dumpling who had been at Farthings Hall as long as Claudia could remember. Amy had done her best to do what she could to fill the gap when Claudia, as a ten-year-old, had been left motherless.

‘Amy took her through to the kitchens for some juice. Oh, I forgot to mention it, but Jenny can’t come in this evening—summer flu, or some such excuse.’ Guy Sullivan got slowly to his feet. ‘Look, I can help Amy out round the kitchens—we can take the trickier stuff off the menu—and free you up to take Jenny’s place, wait on tables.’

‘No, Dad.’ Claudia automatically declined the offer. Her father was physically and emotionally frail, and still in need of all the rest he could get. ‘Amy and I can manage.’

Ever since Tony had had a falling-out with Chef six months ago—and Claudia had never got to find out what it had been about—she and Amy, with Jenny’s help, had been keeping the restaurant going on a reduced and simplified menu. Tony had been reluctant to hire a replacement chef and now Claudia knew why. Tomonow she would have to cancel the advertisements for the new and experienced staff she’d decided had to be hired if the hotel and restaurant were to continue. There was no point now. The business, their home, was to be sold over their heads.

‘Why don’t you sit outside, Dad? It’s a glorious day; let’s make the most of it.’ She almost added, While we can, but managed to stop herself in time. ‘I’ll fetch Rosie and we’ll all have tea on the terrace.’

Ten days later, Amy asked rhetorically, ‘I guess you can’t have told your father the bad news yet?’ She filled a mug with strong black coffee and held it out. ‘He looked happy, almost back to his old self, when his friend collected him this morning, so he can’t know that his home’s about to be sold from over his head.’

‘I’m a coward,’ Claudia admitted wearily, taking the mug of steaming coffee. ‘But every day he gets that little bit stronger. And the stronger he gets, the more able he’ll be to cope with yet another blow.’

‘And what about you?’ Amy demanded. ‘The blows fell on your head, too. Your husband died; he’d been playing around with that madam, Helen, his own stepmother-in-law, would you believe? And yes—’ her round face went scarlet ‘—I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead—but really! So you’ve had blows, just the same, so why should you have to carry this other load on your own?’

‘Because I haven’t had three heart attacks in half a dozen years and because I didn’t love Tony, and Dad adored Helen.’ Claudia looked at the mug in her hands, and frowned just slightly. ‘I really haven’t got time to drink this.’

‘Of course you have,’ Amy asserted firmly. ‘This Hallam man won’t be looking under beds for fluff or running his fingers round picture frames looking for dust. You’ve been running around like a scalded cat ever since you got back from taking Rosie to school. So drink your coffee and try to relax. You’ve got time for that before you need to get changed. And, no matter what anyone else believed, where you’re concerned, nobody can pull the wool over my eyes. Like my own daughter, you are. I knew your marriage to Tony Favel wasn’t a love match. When you married him you were still hankering after Adam—and don’t pop your eyes at me—I knew how you were feeling when he just upped and disappeared. But, like I said, you and Tony rubbed along; you didn’t hate him, so what happened must still have been a dreadful shock.’

Claudia eyed her old friend over the rim of her mug as she sipped the hot liquid. What else did Amy suspect? Know?

She didn’t want to think about that. She put her mug down on the work surface, changing the subject. ‘How many tables are booked for this evening?’

‘All of them.’ Amy collected the used mugs and up-ended them in the commercial-size dishwasher. ‘I dare say we do have to keep going as best we can so it can be sold as a going concern. But thank heaven we’re at the end of the season, that’s all I can say.’

Casting her eyes over the spotlessly gleaming kitchen, Claudia nodded her heartfelt agreement. It was early October now and hotel bookings ceased at the end of September, so they didn’t have that aspect to worry about. They didn’t do lunches, either—they wouldn’t start up again until Easter—but evening meals went on right through the year. So yes, that was something they could give thanks for.

And there were other things, too, she admitted as she lay in the warm bath water ten minutes later. Life wasn’t all bad; there were tiny glimmers of good luck if you looked hard enough.

The bank manager wasn’t exactly an ogre. He had shown considerable if understated compassion at that meeting she’d had with him ten days ago. After painting his pitch-black picture and explaining that Farthings Hall would have to be sold, and preferably as a going concern, to cover those terrifying debts, he had advised, ‘Before you have to advertise the property for sale I suggest you contact the Hallam Group—you’ve heard of them?’

Claudia had nodded. Who hadn’t? No one remotely connected to the hotel and leisure industry could be ignorant of that huge and exclusive outfit.

She’d felt suddenly nauseous. One shock too many, she supposed. The bank manager had used the intercom to ask someone called Joyce to bring through a tray of tea, leaning back in his chair then, steepling his fingers as he had continued—just as if she’d denied any knowledge of the Hallam Group—‘Quality hotels and leisure complexes; they don’t touch anything that’s run-of-the-mill or even marginally second-rate. It’s mainly a family-run company, as you probably know, and Harold Hallam was the majority shareholder. He died, oh, it must be a good twelve months ago and rumour has it his heir is about to expand, acquire new properties.’

He had paused when the tea was brought through and poured, then had suggested, ‘If you could interest them in Farthings Hall and effect a quick sale, it would be better all round—a quick takeover by the Hallam Group would mean less time for the type of speculation that could agitate your father. I suggest you ask your solicitor to get in touch with them.’

Useful advice, because only yesterday her solicitor had phoned to say that someone from the Hallam Group would be coming out to Farthings Hall to meet her this morning to discuss the possibility of a private sale.

‘Don’t commit yourself to anything. This new chief executive might be trying to show his board of directors what a smart operator he is. Remember, this will be an exploratory meeting only. The legal people can be brought in after the initial informal discussion between the principles. That’s the general idea, I believe.’

That suited Claudia. And what suited her even more was David Ingram’s invitation to her father. They were near neighbours, had been friends since boyhood, and David had wanted to know how Guy felt about being picked up the next morning. After lunch, they could have a game of chess.

Claudia had breathed a huge sigh of cowardly relief when her father had accepted the invitation. She could have her meeting with the Hallam man with her father none the wiser. Every day that passed without him having to learn the miserable truth was a bonus.

And Rosie was out of the way, too, safely at school. Had she been at home, she would have wanted to be with her mummy, even though she loved Amy to pieces. Serious conversation with a bubbly, demanding five-and-a-bit-year-old was problematical to say the least.

The trouble was, since the death of her daddy and Steppie—as Helen, her stepgrandmother, had preferred to be called—Rosie had become very clingy. Not that either of them had spent much time with the little girl, and both of them had developed the habit of absenting themselves if Rosie had been ill or just plain tiresome.

Their deaths must have left a hole in the little girl’s life; one day they’d been around—in the background, but around—and the next they’d been blown away. But possibly the most traumatic thing had been her beloved grandpa’s illness and his subsequent need for lots of rest and quiet. Rosie probably couldn’t understand why her grandpa could no longer play those boisterous games she enjoyed or read to her for hours on end.

Claudia sighed and heaved herself out of the bath. The Hallam man would be arriving in half an hour. She couldn’t remember if the solicitor had actually said his name. But it would be Mr Hallam. She definitely recalled him saying that her visitor was the deceased Harold Hallam’s heir. It would be his son. Her solicitor would surely have said, had the new chief executive gone under a name other than the family one.

And what to wear? A simple grey linen suit with a cream silk blouse. Cool, businesslike, entirely suitable for a young widow.

Her soft brown hair caught back into the nape of her neck with a mock-tortoiseshell clip, and with the merest suggestion of make-up, her mind played truant, sliding back to those photographs she’d been looking at on her return from her traumatic meeting with her bank manager. Particularly, the one of her.

How she had changed. Still five feet seven inches, of course, but she’d lost all those lavish curves. After Rosie’s birth she’d fined down but now, since the traumas of the last few weeks, she looked positively scrawny. The Claudia in that old photograph had been a cheerful optimist, with laughing eyes and a beaming, open smile.

The mirror image she scrutinised now was older, wiser, a bit of a cynic with an overlay of composure, a strength of will that practically defied anyone to mess with her. She was through with being anyone’s eager little doormat. She was twenty-four years old, the age Adam Weston had been when they’d first met. She looked and felt a great deal older.

And another difference: the woman in the mirror was as good as bankrupt. The girl in the photograph had been quite a considerable heiress.

And therein had lain the attraction, of course.

She remembered with absolute and still painful clarity exactly how, over six years ago now, she had discovered that particular home truth.

Helen had told her. Helen had been sitting on the edge of her bed, clad in brief scarlet satin panties and bra, looking absolutely furious, yet finding compassion as she grabbed Claudia’s hand and squeezed it.

‘And you know what that slimeball Adam Toerag Weston had the gall to say? I can still hardly believe it! He actually told me not to be miffed because he’d been messing about—as he so chivalrously put it—with you! Miffed—I ask you! As if I’d be interested in a loser like him! As if I’d have some furtive, sleazy affair with a jobless, homeless, penniless layabout when I’m married to a lovely, lovely man like your father! But this is the point, dearest—’

Helen had released her hand with a final squeeze, reached for a scarlet satin robe and wrapped it around her body. ‘He actually said that he’d played up to you because you were quite an heiress. You’d agreed to marry him, or so he claimed, and, as his darling daughter’s husband, Guy wouldn’t object to keeping him in the manner to which he had always wanted to become accustomed—not if he didn’t want to alienate his darling daughter. I only hope, dearest, that you haven’t let him go too far with you, that you haven’t actually fallen for him, or anything stupid like that...’

Claudia had closed her eyes to stop the hurt from showing. She had wanted to scream that it wasn’t true, that Adam loved her, loved her for herself, that he didn’t care about her father’s wealth, Farthings Hall, the land, all that stuff. But she had never lied to herself. And if the evidence of her own eyes hadn’t been enough there had been that conversation on the first date they’d ever had.

It hadn’t been an accident that had found her in the vicinity of the old caravan at the back of the glasshouses about seven hours after she’d first been introduced to Adam. Or an accident that she had been wearing a pair of very brief shorts and her best sleeveless T-shirt. The crisp white garments had shown off her long and shapely legs and accentuated the honey-gold tan she’d managed to acquire.

Her heart had been fluttering wildly as she’d approached the open caravan door, but she’d told herself not to be stupid. She, as his employer’s daughter, had the perfect excuse for being here.

She could hear him moving about, whistling tunelessly beneath his breath, and before she could knock or call out he had appeared in the doorway, still wearing nothing but those threadbare cut-offs, a towel slung over one shoulder. Instead of the heavy working boots, he’d been sporting a pair of beat-up trainers.