Forsaking All Others

But Jeremy was demanding her attention, dragging her out on to the dance-floor. She did enjoy dancing, and she couldn’t help but enjoy Jeremy’s company. And as the evening drew on, and the music slowed, she found that she enjoyed being in his arms, and being kissed by him. And, if her mind occasionally wandered to thoughts of Leo, she could remind herself that Jeremy was every bit as attractive, and certainly more fun. And he wasn’t engaged to her best friend.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_da863e0b-44d1-59be-8e1d-0c8bd2b88c5a)

“WHAT…was it you wanted to discuss, Leo?” Maddy enquired, relieved to find that her voice was now completely under control again.

With a wave of his hand he indicated the piles of bills and documents on the desk and on the floor around it, stuffed into shoe-boxes and old brown envelopes—Jeremy had never had much patience with paperwork. “This. I’ve been trying to go through Jeremy’s papers and see if there’s anything that needs my immediate attention, but it’s the biggest mess I’ve ever seen.”

The note of censure in his voice stung her into sharp annoyance. “I’m sure there’s nothing that can’t wait another few days,” she retorted. “Why are you going through it anyway? Shouldn’t that be left to the executors of the estate?”

“I am one of the executors,” he responded evenly. “You’re the other. We’ve also been named as joint trustees. Everything’s been left to Jamie, naturally—although you’re to have a lifetime annuity—and there are a few small gifts to the staff.”

“Oh…” A lump had risen to her throat, and her eyes filled up with tears; it was so sad to think of Jeremy drawing up his will, cheerfully expecting that it would be many years before it would be needed. And it was typical of his generosity to have remembered the staff—but why on earth had he had to make Leo her co-trustee?

The housekeeper’s arrival with the coffee gave her a few moments to regain her composure. She should have guessed, of course, that Jeremy would have wanted Leo to administer his estate; he had always looked up to his older cousin—maybe even been slightly in awe of him. And he hadn’t been aware that Maddy would have preferred not to have too much to do with him.

Leo brought over a small table, set it down beside her chair and put her coffee-cup on it before seating himself on the opposite side of the fireplace. “How has Jamie taken it?” he enquired.

“Oh…He seems OK. Well, you saw him. He’s old enough to understand, but not old enough to really take it in properly. He knows it means he won’t be seeing his daddy again, but I suppose it’ll be a while before the realisation sinks in.”

“Yes.” Leo’s voice had thickened. “It will be for me, too.”

“For all of us,” she mused sadly.

Leo’s cold laughter startled her. “Oh, come on,” he protested, on a note of cynical mockery. “Don’t start playing the broken-hearted widow. All it’s done for you is save you the bother of getting a divorce.”

“I beg your pardon?” Her eyes flashed with frosty indignation. “For your information, I was still very fond of Jeremy. And if I’d wanted a divorce, I could have had one years ago.”

“Not without Jeremy’s consent,” he countered. “You walked out on him, remember? As the guilty party, you could only sit it out for the full five years.”

She stared at him, struggling to regain sufficient control over her voice to answer him. “Don’t you think I may perhaps have had good reason?” she queried with fine understatement.

Those agate eyes were hard and unforgiving. “You knew what he was like when you married him,” he asserted disparagingly. “It didn’t seem to matter to you then. You just wanted the sort of lifestyle you thought he could give you—the chance to mix with the county set, go to all the country house parties. But marriage vows are for better or worse, you know—not to turn your back on just because things don’t turn out to be quite the bed of roses you were expecting.”

Maddy felt her cheeks go from white to deep scarlet. He didn’t know—Jeremy had never told him about Saskia. Of course not, she reflected wryly; even though that hopelessly misconceived engagement had ended inside of three months, Jeremy would have been reluctant to let his cousin know that he was having an affair with his ex-fiancée.

And she could hardly tell him now, she realised in the next instant; he probably wouldn’t believe her, and it would just seem to him that she was trying to off-load the blame on to Jeremy when he could no longer defend himself. Besides, what did it matter to her what he thought of her? Once, maybe—but that was a long time ago. Now she only had to think about what was best for Jamie. She had to work with Leo over the administration of the estate—it would be best if personal feelings didn’t come into it at all.

“What happened between Jeremy and I is none of your business,” she informed him, her voice stiff with dignity. “But neither of us particularly wanted a divorce—it wasn’t as if either of us was in any hurry to marry again. And besides, it was better for Jamie to leave things as they were. It was a perfectly amicable arrangement.”

He lifted one dark eyebrow in frank scepticism, but shrugged the discussion aside with a lift of his wide shoulders. “Well, I suppose it’s all somewhat academic now, anyway,” he remarked coldly. “It’s the future that we have to think about. I’ve made a list of the people who will need to be notified about the funeral arrangements…”

“Oh, have you?” she retorted in sharp annoyance. “Don’t you think perhaps you should have consulted me? I am the next of kin, you know.”

Anger, barely restrained, flared in his eyes. “Don’t get competitive about it,” he warned, his voice quiet with menace. “There’s only one person who’ll suffer if we make enemies of each other, and that’s your son.”

She drew in a sharp breath; was that merely a reminder, or a warning? But he was right, of course—they were going to have to co-operate with each other in order to ensure that Jamie’s inheritance would be worthwhile. And, more than that, it wouldn’t be good for him to have them arguing over his head; like his father, he seemed to have an inordinate regard for his “Uncle Leo”—most times after his monthly visits to Hadley Park he had had as much to say about Leo as about Jeremy. And the fact that Leo was the creator of his beloved EcoWarrior, as well as a number of other cult computergame figures, was enough to elevate him to the status almost of a demi-god.

Drawing in a long, steadying breath, she inclined her head in acknowledgement. “All right,” she conceded evenly. “May I see the list?”

He walked over to the desk and brought her back a sheet of paper, with a long list of names neatly written out in his handsome script—another way in which he had differed from Jeremy, she reflected, recalling her husband’s lazy scrawl.

“That seems OK,” she murmured; she knew most of the names on the list, and none of them were unexpected. She had known Saskia’s name would be on it, of course—she was family, her brother being married to Jeremy’s older sister Julia. Yes, Saskia would be there, weeping touchingly for her childhood friend—and Maddy would be the only one who would know that she was in truth an adulterous little bitch who had wrecked her best friend’s marriage.

“You’re sure?” Those deep-set agate eyes had noted the tautness of her jaw. “Is there anyone you think I—we—should add?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she responded coolly. “You’re suggesting that the funeral should be next week?”

“Yes. I would have gone for Friday, but it may be better to delay it, just in case there are any difficulties arising out of the inquest.”

“Why should there be?” she queried, surprised. “I thought it was a quite straightforward skiing accident.”

He shrugged his wide shoulders. “Almost certainly—but, nevertheless, the authorities will have to be sure that there was no question of…anything else. Like whether he was drunk.”

“Drunk? Don’t be ridiculous! Jeremy could be a little wild at times, but he never drank too much.”

“How do you know?” Leo countered, a hard edge in his voice. “What would you know of his state of mind these past five years—what would you care? You saw him once a month when he came to fetch Jamie for his visit and brought him back.”

She stared at him, her hands shaking slightly. “Are you saying that he’d become an alcoholic?”

He shook his head impatiently. “No, I’m not. But I do know he was unhappy. He was still in love with you—maybe if you’d still been around…”

“Yes?” Maddy’s jaw was clenched tightly in anger. “Maybe if I’d still been around, what? He might not have had the accident—is that what you were going to say? That’s it’s all my fault?”

“No, of course not,” he rapped back. “It just…might have steadied him down a little…”

“I already had one child to think about,” she retorted hotly. “I couldn’t cope with two.” Fulminating grey eyes clashed with agate; Maddy could feel herself trembling—it was rare for her to be so close to losing her temper, and it was a feeling she didn’t like.

She was the first to look away. Leo was right, to some extent—she had married Jeremy for all the wrong reasons. Oh, she had been deeply fond of him—but she had never been in love with him. She had let him spin her into a whirlwind romance, dazzled by his good looks and his charm, and by the aching need inside her to fill the loneliness of her life. And because the man she had fallen instantly in love with had already been spoken for.

But she had kept that last fact a secret for almost nine years. It had been a painful irony to learn, on returning from their crazy honeymoon jaunt around Africa, that Leo and Saskia had ended their engagement just two weeks after her own wedding.

Not that it would really have made any difference, she acknowledged. Leo had made it abundantly clear from the beginning that, like the rest of the family, he disapproved of his cousin’s marriage. She did have some sympathy with their view that at twenty-one he had been far too young, but nothing could have been further from their belief that she had married him in order to claw her way a few rungs up the social ladder.

Leo sighed, and shrugged his wide shoulders in weary impatience. “Perhaps this isn’t the best time to discuss it,” he conceded. “I understand you’ll be staying for a few days—Julia has arranged for you to have the Yellow Room. Jamie can go in the nursery, of course, as usual.”

“Thank you.” So Jeremy’s sister was here already, organising everything in her usual high-handed fashion. Maddy was surprised that they had even bothered to suggest she came down—between the two of them, they seemed to be making all the decisions. But then what else had she expected? They were, after all, Ratcliffes; everyone else was supposed to fall into step with them.

A tap at the door heralded the housekeeper’s return, to announce that lunch was ready. “Shall I bring it up to the morning-room?” she suggested. “You won’t want the big dining-room.”

Maddy was tempted to say that she would prefer to come down to the warm kitchen, but Leo had already agreed that the morning-room would be the most suitable, so she kept her mouth shut. But if he and his cousin Julia thought she was still the diffident young girl who had come into their family all those years ago, they could be in for a surprise. She had no intention of letting herself be pushed around—and no intention of letting them interfere in her son’s inheritance.

It was strange to be back, Maddy mused as she stood at the window of her bedroom, gazing out over the woodfringed parkland of the estate. The house was much as she remembered it—though she couldn’t help noticing that there were even more minor repairs that needed to be done, a few of them now becoming quite urgent if the fabric of the building was to be preserved.

It was a pity Jeremy hadn’t taken his responsibility to the family seat more seriously. She had tried to persuade him often enough, but it had usually led to an argument—he preferred to spend his money on cars and parties and having a good time. The income from the land that went with the estate—farm tenancies, mostly—had barely been enough to support such an extravagant lifestyle even then. His own father’s death, a couple of years before she had met him, had already taken quite a toll in death duties—a second charge now, not much more than ten years later, could well prove to be the last straw.

Which could mean that there was no alternative but to sell the house, or hand it over to the National Trust—if they would take it. But she didn’t want to do that—coming back here had reminded her of how important Hadley Park was to her. It was more than just a house—much more…

Unconsciously she lifted her hand to touch the tiny gold locket she always wore at her throat. It was the only thing that had come out of the fire that had destroyed her own home and killed her parents. She had been just twelve years old, and had survived only because of the odd irony that she had been in hospital having her tonsils out.