The Inheritance: Racy, pacy and very funny!

‘It is not the same thing. Christ, what is wrong with trying to buy a few fields anyway?’

Throwing back the covers, Laura climbed into bed, punching the pillows as if she had a grudge against them. She hated it when Gabe was deliberately obtuse. Not to mention deceitful.

‘It is not “a few fields”. It’s hundreds of acres of land that we can’t afford. And that may not even be Brett Cranley’s to sell. You know as well as I do that his inheritance is disputed.’

‘All the more reason to buy now, while we’ve got the chance.’

Laura let out a stifled scream of frustration and turned out her bedside light. Pulling the covers around her like a shield, she pointedly turned her back on her husband.

Gabe was equally frustrated. Running the farm was his job. He didn’t tell Laura how to produce television programmes or write scripts. What gave her the right to meddle in his business decisions? On the other hand, he hated fighting with her. Putting down his book and sweets, he wrapped his arms around her stiff, angry body.

‘I love you,’ he whispered in her ear.

Laura didn’t move.

‘I know you want to know what they’re like,’ Gabe teased, slipping a warm rough hand under her nightdress and caressing her wonderful, full breasts. ‘The Cranleys.’

Despite herself, Laura moaned with pleasure. It was utterly infuriating, how good he was in bed.

‘I’ll tell you if you’re nice to me,’ Gabe whispered, his hands moving slowly down over her belly, his fingertips just skimming the soft fur between her legs. Unable to keep up her resistance any longer, Laura turned around and kissed him, luxuriating in the solid warmth of his body. God, he was beautiful.

‘Go on then, tell me,’ she said, releasing him at last. ‘What are they like?’

‘Ha!’ said Gabe. ‘So you do want to know. I knew it! You’re just a sad old village gossip, Mrs Baxter.’

‘What’s he like?’ asked Laura, ignoring him. ‘Brett Cranley.’

‘Actually, I liked him,’ said Gabe. ‘I mean, I can see how he could be seen as arrogant.’

Laura frowned. ‘In what way?’

‘He’s a big personality. Maybe even a bit of a bully. He obviously favours his daughter over his son, and the wife seems a bit afraid of him.’

Gabe told her about his brief encounter with Logan and Jason today, and about Angela’s nerves the first time they met.

‘He sounds vile,’ said Laura. ‘What on earth did you like about him?’

‘I don’t know, exactly,’ said Gabe, thinking. ‘He’s direct. Honest. I don’t think he’d cheat you in business.’

‘Well he certainly cheats in his private life,’ said Laura with feeling. ‘At least if the press coverage is anything to go by.’

‘Oh, yeah, but that’s different,’ said Gabe.

‘Why? Because it’s OK to cheat on women? Just as long as you’re honest with men, is that it?’

Laura felt her hackles rising again. She loved Gabe but sometimes he could be so … unreconstructed.

Gabe sighed. ‘Give it a rest, Germaine Greer. You asked, I answered. I liked him. Sorry if you and the rest of the village lynch mob have already decided he’s the Swell Valley’s answer to Vladimir Putin. But I do have the advantage of having actually met the guy.’

‘Well, bully for you. I hope the two of you will be very happy together,’ said Laura.

Turning away from her, Gabe turned off his own bedside light.

‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ he added defiantly. ‘I’m going to get him to sell those fields to me. So put that in your bra and burn it.’

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_2ec86a21-a724-5a0a-b95c-d0d0363bdaaf)

‘Have you seen that stack of marked Year Three homework anywhere? The robot sketches?’

Dylan Pritchard Jones ran a hand through his curly chestnut hair and scanned the mess that was his kitchen. Aside from the detritus of breakfast, almost every surface was covered with copies of Country Living, Elle Décor, Period Homes and every other conceivable variety of interiors magazine. Dylan’s wife, Maisie, was expecting their first child and had gone into a frenzy of what the pregnancy websites called ‘nesting’. Apparently this was a woman’s primitive urge to spend thousands of pounds on expensive Farrow & Ball paint and decorative antique rocking chairs. Dylan prayed it would soon pass. On an art teacher’s salary, it was not easy to make Maisie’s Homes & Gardens dreams come true.

‘Last I saw them they were upstairs on the landing.’ Maisie chewed grimly on a piece of dry toast. ‘I passed them on my way to the loo at about five a.m.’

Pregnancy had not been kind to Dylan’s young wife. Relentless morning sickness had turned Maisie’s former peaches and cream complexion an unattractive shade of greenish-grey. At only a few months gone she was already thirty pounds heavier than usual, and her legs were covered with revolting varicose veins that reminded Dylan of mould running through a slab of Stilton cheese. Apparently there were men who found their pregnant wives uniquely attractive and desirable. Dylan Pritchard Jones could only imagine that their wives looked more like expectant supermodels – lithe amazons with compact little bumps beneath their lululemon tank tops – and less like the swollen, exhausted figure of his own other half. He tried to be a patient and understanding husband. But he couldn’t help but count down the days till it was over, and prayed that Maisie intended to get her figure back quickly afterwards. His suggestion last week that she think about hiring a trainer had been met with what he felt was excessive frostiness.

‘Thanks, you’re an angel.’ Kissing her on the head, Dylan raced upstairs, grabbed the work and ran out to his car, a piece of peanut butter toast still clamped between his teeth. St Hilda’s art teacher was perennially late. It was part of his charm, along with his broad, boyish smile, twinkly, bright blue eyes, and the mop of curls that made him look years younger than his actual age of thirty-three, and that women had always found hugely attractive. Dylan Pritchard Jones enjoyed being the ‘cool’ teacher at St Hilda’s, the one whose classes the children actually looked forward to, and with whom all the pretty mothers flirted at parents’ evening. Yes, Fittlescombe’s primary school was a small pool. But Dylan was the prettiest fish in it, if not the biggest. He loved his life.

In the staff room at St Hilda’s, tempers were fraying. The Year Six SAT exams were less than a month away now, but the government had seen fit to choose this moment to dump an enormous amount of additional paperwork on its already overloaded state teachers. This morning’s staff meeting had been called to agree a consensus on whether or not Max Bingley should hire an additional administration person. Cuts would have to be made to pay for such a hire, so it was vital that all the departments be represented. The art department, as usual, was late.

‘We really can’t put this off any longer.’ Ella Bates, one of the two Year Six class teachers, voiced what the entire room was thinking. ‘If Dylan can’t be bothered to turn up for the vote, he doesn’t deserve a say in it.’

‘It’s not a matter of what he deserves,’ Max Bingley said calmly. ‘We need consensus, Ella.’

In Max’s long experience, all staff rooms were political snake pits, even in a tiny, tight-knit school like this one. It had been the same story at Gresham Manor, the private boys prep school in Hampshire where Max had spent most of his career, as head of History and, latterly, deputy head of the school.

Max Bingley had loved his job at Gresham Manor. He would never have taken the St Hilda’s headship had his beloved wife not died two years ago, plunging him into a deep depression. Susie Bingley had had a heart attack aged fifty-two, completely unexpectedly. She’d collapsed at the breakfast table one morning in front of Max’s eyes, keeled over like a skittle. By the time the ambulance arrived at Chichester Hospital she was already dead. Max had kept working. At only fifty-three – with a mortgage to pay, not to mention two daughters still at university – he didn’t have much choice. But without Susie, life had lost all meaning, all joy. He moved through his days at Gresham like a zombie, barely able to find the energy to get dressed in the mornings. The Fittlescombe headship offered a new start and a distraction. Max had taken it under pressure from his girls, but it had been the right decision.

Right, but not easy, either personally or professionally. When Max first arrived at St Hilda’s he’d been forced to cut back a lot of dead wood. Inevitably his decisions to fire certain people had angered some of the remaining staff. As had his hiring choices. The staff room was already divided into ‘Camp Hotham’, the old guard hired by his predecessor and championed by Ella Bates, a heavy-set mathematician in her late fifties with a whiskery moustache, brusque manner and penchant for pop socks that drew an unfortunate amount of attention to her wrinkly knees; and ‘Camp Bingley’, made up of the new teachers and those amongst the old who, like Dylan Pritchard Jones, approved of Max’s old-school teaching style and relentless focus on results. Even Camp Bingley, however, had been resentful of Max’s hiring of Tatiana Flint-Hamilton as an assistant teacher. The fact that Tati was unpaid did little to assuage the anger.

‘We don’t have time to waste training charity cases,’ was how Ella Bates had put it. ‘She’s a drain on resources.’

With the notable exception of Dylan, the other teachers all agreed. So far Max Bingley had held his ground: ‘If we do our jobs and train her properly she could be a vital addition to resources at a fractional cost,’ he argued. But, in truth, he too had doubts about the wisdom of bringing Tatiana on board, doubts made worse by the new administrative pressures they were under.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ Dylan breezed in, looking anything but sorry. Mrs Bates and the headmaster both gave him angry looks, but the rest of the (mostly female) staff swiftly melted beneath the warm glow of the famous Pritchard Jones smile.

‘Traffic,’ he grinned. ‘It was bumper to bumper on Mill Lane this morning.’

This was a joke. There was no traffic in Fittlescombe. Tatiana laughed loudly, then clapped a hand over her mouth when she realized that no one else was following suit. ‘Sorry.’

She’d made the mistake of inviting a girlfriend from her party days, Rita Babbington, down to Greystones for the night last night. Inevitably the two of them had begun reminiscing – Tati’s days and nights had been so unutterably boring recently, just talking about excitements past felt like a thrill – and Rita had demanded cocktails. Multiple home-made margaritas later – Tati might never have had to pay for a drink in her life, but she certainly knew how to make a world-class cocktail and after four lines of some truly spectacular cocaine that Rita had brought down with her ‘in case of emergency’, Tatiana had collapsed into bed with her heart and mind racing. She’d woken this morning with a dry mouth and a head that felt as if she’d spent the night with her skull wedged in a vice, tightened hourly by malevolent elves. It was a testament to her friendship with Dylan Pritchard Jones that he still had the capacity to make her laugh.

Not for the first time, Dylan reflected on how beautiful St Hilda’s new teaching assistant was, and how out of place such a stunning young creature looked in their grotty staff room. Although he did notice the shadows under Tatiana’s feline green eyes this morning. Clearly she’d had a lot more fun last night than he had.

The headmaster’s voice cut through his reverie. ‘Right. Now that we’re all here, a vote. To hire an additional PA for a year will cost us thirty thousand pounds. That’s money we don’t have. It would have to be funded out of a combination of cuts to nonessential classes – that’s art, music and games – and salary cuts. I don’t have all the numbers worked out yet. I just need to know if, in theory, this is something you’re open to or not. So. A show of hands please for making this hire.’

Nine hands, including Mrs Bates’s, went reluctantly up. Dylan Pritchard Jones’s did not. Nor did Orla O’Reilly’s, the reception teacher, or Tatiana’s.

‘I can’t afford a pay-cut,’ said Orla. ‘I’m sorry.’