Kitabı oku: «Glittering Fortunes»

For Kate Wilde

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Love and thanks to Sally Williamson, Jenny Hutton, Donna Condon, Ian Grutchfield, Ali Wilkinson and all at MIRA/Mills & Boon, for turning a hot date into a romance.

Also to Maddy Milburn, who works so hard for my books; to Cesca Major for what makes a hero; and to Alice Usherwood for letting me borrow her beautiful name.

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Part Three

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS A fine day to be on the sea. Summertime in England and the sky was wide and cornflower-blue, golden sunshine twinkling on the water, and on the shore the small Cornish town of Lustell Cove sat pretty as a drawing.

Olivia Lark sensed the wave at her back and began to paddle, working her arms as the rush gathered pace and she braced herself for the leap. On a surge she lifted on to the board, the motion of the swell carrying her for an electrifying instant before her footing slipped out from beneath her and she toppled into the water. For seconds she was submerged in a whoosh of salty-fresh silence before surfacing, half gasping, half laughing, into the day, and feeling, as she always did, on the receiving end of a cosmic punchline. Despite a mouthful of chalky Atlantic and the noose of seaweed wrapped around her ankle, out on the water she felt happiest of all.

She splashed into land, the board tucked under one arm and the other lifted to squeeze the briny dregs from her chestnut hair. On the beach, bronzed bodies basked in the heat on pink towels, a rainbow of parasols fluttered lazily in the breeze and chased an arc around the horseshoe inlet. Holiday makers licked strawberry ice cream and patted castles out of gritty, grainy buckets, while on the water black shapes paddled, bobbing on the sway, counting to the ultimate wave.

Swiftly she showered and dressed, tying her hair in a loose, damp ponytail, and made her way across the sand. She couldn’t put it off for ever.

The Blue Paradise surf shack was a timber cabin bordered by cut-out palms. Out front a heap of kayaks were knotted together, haphazard driftwood stumbling a path to the entrance. She almost collided with a group of girls on their way out.

‘Oops,’ she backed up to let them pass, ‘sorry!’

Slinky as panthers in their wetsuits, tossing manes and tinkling laughter, the girls were like glossy creatures from another planet. Olivia couldn’t help wondering if, in her younger years, she had enjoyed access to mascara, a hairdryer, a wardrobe—words that through her teens had taken on the exotic overtones of a far-flung spice market—she might have earned access to that kind of magazine-friendly femininity. As it was there seemed to be an awful lot of effort that went into it (seldom was the day she staggered into the morning with so much as a perfunctory glance in the mirror), time that could be better spent doing other things, like sticking your head out of a car window, or running at cows through a mud sludge, or daydreaming about the guy you fancied, or having a lie-in, or painting a picture, or making lists about all the things you really ought to spend your time doing, which wasn’t any of the above.

Even as a child, playing Teatime at Tiffany’s (horrid little conferences she had endured as a six-year-old; Tiffany Price pouring air out of the spout and asking if anyone took milk, which had troubled Olivia’s young mind deeply because how could there be milk if there were no actual tea?) had never held the same allure as whatever adventure the boys were having—building dens, firing catapults, hunting the beach for gold. She had scrambled into their fold by way of initiation: Oli who could climb a tree quick as a monkey, who picked up spiders in her bare hands, who drew her own comic books with a blunt pencil and who always had grass stains on her knees.

Taking a breath, she stepped inside.

‘Hey, Addy.’

She propped her board by the door. The shop was gleaming with drowsy afternoon glow, its shelves stacked with reef gear, trunks and bikinis, racks and wax. On the wall hung an impressive model of a Great White, tail whipping and teeth bared.

Addy Gold was in his usual position at the counter, thumbing through his phone with his top off, a string of beads at his neck and wrists. Illuminated in a shaft of sunlight, his six-pack glistening above the peeled-down skin of his wetsuit, Olivia half expected a burst of choral music to accompany the sight.

‘Hey,’ he mumbled, glancing up from important business to give her a fleeting, if somewhat confused, smile. ‘Back already?’

‘It’s been a year.’

‘Has it?’

His indifference stung. ‘Yeah, well, London didn’t work out.’

That was the understatement of the century. It was hard to believe she was back at Lustell Cove, her childhood home: scene of angst-ridden school years at Taverick Manor, endless lazy Saturdays paddling the water and stolen kisses after dark with Theo Randall from the tennis club, who had always smelled faintly of Aertex. At twenty-two Olivia had graduated from a local art course, London had seemed like the next logical step and so she’d headed to the city to Become A Painter (how ridiculous that sounded!), envisaging days spent floating about museums discussing abstract expressionism and sipping free wine. Instead she’d spent the next year trading an Aix-en-Provence atelier for an Archway bedsit, and camping with a tortured writer who never bought loo roll and who was in possession of so much body hair it was like showering after a gorilla. Wading ankle-deep through unsold drawings had soon become depressing and, following a series of short-lived bar jobs, the last of which had culminated in Olivia telling an aggressively sexist customer to fuck off, her bank account had finally run dry and she’d been forced to admit defeat.

‘No kidding,’ he droned.

She smiled brightly. ‘So did I miss much?’

‘Nah.’ Addy yawned, stretching so his chest opened before her like a casket of treasure. ‘The cove’s dead. Nothing exciting ever happens round here.’

‘It will now I’m back. I can’t spend the entire summer sitting under my mother’s caravan roof, you know.’ If it could be called that: parts of Florence Lark’s ancient Pemberton Static were tacked down with masking tape.

‘Guess you’ll be looking for a job?’

‘It’s why I’m here.’ She consulted the noticeboard. ‘Anything good come up?’

‘Dunno—haven’t checked it in ages.’

Every opening at the cove advertised at the Blue Paradise and the display was thick with flyers requesting bar staff, shop help, grape pickers at the Quillets Vineyard or muck shovellers at the Barley Nook stables … The list went on. Olivia had taken most as holiday earners when she was still in training bras.

‘Suppose I should,’ Addy commented boredly. ‘New horizons and all that.’

Her head snapped up. ‘You’re leaving?’

‘Maybe. I’m antsy. You know how I get. I need more out of life than sitting round here chatting up girls … It’s samey after a while, you know?’

She forced a smile. Was Addy aware of how she felt? Maybe. But then he could have the pick of any girl he wanted, and she was just his friend. She could make him laugh. She could surf with him in the rain. She could help him with his English homework because he had a fear of any book that was longer than fifty pages. What she couldn’t be was a six-foot blonde with legs that went on for miles.

Even though Olivia had known him since the beginning of time, the Addy fire burst before her now just as brilliant and dangerous as the first day she’d seen it. She’d been six and he’d been nine, and Addy’s little sister a regular at Tiffany’s tea parties. Olivia would spy him outside with his friends playing Gun Tower Home! and would long to flee the dinky dining room and china pots filled with nothing, and tear through the brambles till her dress ripped. Of course the boys had tried everything to shrug her off: locking her in the Creepy Shed, vowing that she had to be slave, racing on their bikes so she couldn’t keep up, setting up dares they never thought she’d meet … But Olivia was determined, and once she had accepted the ultimate challenge of sprinting across the field owned by Farmer Nancarrow, a shadowy, mysterious, darkly enticing character who had become in the children’s eyes more myth than man—he would shoot anyone who trespassed on his land and then cook them for supper!—they had finally accepted her as marginally all right for a girl.

It was a lifetime ago, and yet still only yesterday.

Olivia had hoped that seeing Addy again might have prompted an epiphany, a realisation that all these years he had tricked her into seeing what wasn’t there, believing what wasn’t true. But with Addy, just with Addy, always with Addy, it returned to the same. Olivia wasn’t stupid, but he made her crazy. She was solid; he turned her to mush. She was level-headed; with him she went wonky. Her love for him could be traced back to twelve, eleven, ten, maybe before, when they had made hideouts in the ferns and she’d started noticing his eyes were blue, not grey, and her mum would pack them fish-finger sandwiches, and each time Olivia gave him a sketch, of him, of her, of the swinging tyre they had rigged above his parents’ lake, folded tight and slipped into his pocket, it had felt like losing a tiny piece of her heart.

‘There’s tons of stuff on here,’ she said, without conviction.

‘No offence, Oli, but I’m aiming higher than the cove. I haven’t bothered with that waster pinboard.’ Addy scratched his chin. ‘I’m thinking big.’

Olivia almost didn’t see it.

A leaf of paper obscured by a yachting brochure, but where its edges escaped it bore the unmistakeable crest she remembered from her youth:

Usherwood Estate seeks able & enthusiastic gardener Summer hours at competitive rates— please enquire

She frowned. As the stately residence of the former Lord and Lady Lomax, grand old Usherwood was a fairytale castle of turrets and wings, towers and acreage, a majestic relic of a forgotten time. The Lomax couple had perished in a plane crash thirteen years ago, and their sons, at that time only teenagers, had inherited. Cato, the eldest, was notorious, a Hollywood A-lister who had bolted after the tragedy, never to return. The youngest had stayed at the ancestral home, and was by all accounts a recluse.

‘Hey, Humpty, check this out!’

The voice was so upper class it sounded like there was a bag of marbles rolling around in its mouth. Olivia turned. A strut of city boys had located a window mannequin in a state of undress and one of them was making an obscene gesture at her nether regions. Lustell Cove attracted the Made in Chelsea set. With its lush, wild panoramas matched by higgledy-piggledy streets dotted with quaint Cornish cottages and tea shops, it was far enough from the capital to feel exclusive to the seriously wealthy, while its hot beach culture ensured it was anything but a stuffy hideaway.

‘Too funny, Ruffers, too funny.’ Humpty was sporting a pair of Hawaiian-print boardshorts despite Olivia’s suspicion he had never done anything in the water save a breaststroke—and that only if it promised not to get his hair wet.

‘D’you surf?’ asked Addy, not especially interested. Olivia saw his eyes scan the gathering for a hot blonde with a trust fund—she knew him too well.

‘My dad’s got a Maxus,’ Humpty replied, tossing his coiffed arrangement in the direction of the marina, which was bobbing with sleek white speedboats. His entourage of Hooray Henrys guffawed their approval. ‘Who needs a plank of wood?’

‘Can I help you, then?’ said Addy. ‘You know, with anything surf-related?’

One of them asked: ‘Dude, do you know the Lomaxes?’

Addy returned his attention to his phone. ‘Not if you mean Cato,’ he bristled. ‘Far as I know he hasn’t been back here in, like, for ever.’

‘The house is pretty creepy, huh,’ said Humpty.

‘Is it true it’s, like, the biggest house in England?’ enquired Ruffers.

‘I heard they’ve got champagne fountains in the gardens,’ said another.

‘And Cato keeps a monkey in the cellar,’ put in Humpty, ‘to bring him things. I read about it. Someone saw it swinging about in a gold waistcoat.’

There followed an inventory of increasingly extravagant fictions. Everyone was so busy talking that they didn’t notice when Olivia unpinned the Usherwood flyer and fed it discreetly into the back pocket of her jeans. She slipped outside.

The sun had vanished, casting the bay in shade. Olivia folded her arms against the rash of goosebumps prickling across her skin. High on the hill loomed the vast silhouette of the Usherwood Estate, staining the horizon like a great inkblot.

She stepped on to the beach. The sand was cool and silky between her toes and she padded across the inlet, away from Usherwood and back into sunshine.

CHAPTER TWO

‘OH, BABY, YES! Keep going, stud—you are truly the best in the world!’

With each brutal thrust Susanna Denver’s back was scraping painfully against the knobs on her lover’s gold-plated washroom cabinet, but then space was always going to be at a premium at thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic.

‘Keep it dirty,’ Cato growled, his breath ragged in her ear. ‘You know I love it when you talk filth, you scandalous harpy.’

Susanna clamped her thighs around his waist and reached down to clasp the most famous backside in America (recently initiated into the Hollywood Hall of Fame after an Award-nominated nude scene). Sharp crimson nails dug into his flesh.

‘Harder!’ she squealed, bucking a touch too fervently so that behind her a decorative tap flicked on and she found her ass being sprayed with water. ‘Faster!’

‘Not wet enough already?’ Cato snarled in that impossibly attractive English accent, which made Susanna think of black-and-white World War II movies where everyone went about smoking pipes and talking about submarines.

‘Always for you, baby,’ she gasped, ‘always for you!’

Cato slipped a hand between her legs, dousing her in the liquid heat.

‘Say my name,’ he croaked, ‘say it!’

‘Ca-to!’ she managed, the word severed in two as he thrust into her, his black shock of hair abrasive against her chest and his face buried in her tits.

‘Say my full name—my full name, goddamnit!’

‘Lord Cato! Fuck me, Lord Cato, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!’

Lord Cato did as he was told, seconds later coming so fiercely that Susanna’s ass was slamming in and out of the porcelain bowl and Cato had water coursing down his legs and into the nest of suit pants pooled at his ankles.

‘You’re a rampant little nympho, aren’t you?’ he choked afterwards, fighting to catch his breath. ‘Be a good girl and run along, I could murder a gin on the rocks.’

Back in her seat on the Lomax private jet, Susanna patted her hair and checked her reflection in a crystal compact. Her lipstick was smudged—Cato preferred there to be a prime blowjob on the menu; it was one of his foibles—she fixed it and smiled with satisfaction. Looking back at her wasn’t just the face of Susanna Denver, romcom queen who commanded ten million a movie—oh, no, it was the face of a future Lady of the Manor! She couldn’t suppress the mewl of excitement that escaped when she thought of it. Surely it was only a matter of time before Cato proposed, and what would she say? She would say Yes, yes, yes! as fiercely as she had five minutes before with his cock driving through her like a steel truncheon.

It was several minutes before Cato joined her (he always needed the bathroom after sex: another eccentricity). He picked up his Tanqueray and balanced the tumbler in the palm of his hand. The dark hair on his knuckles was a stark contrast to the clean, ice-cracked liquid, and on his pinkie he wore a fat gold signet.

‘Everything all right, darling?’ Susanna asked, giving him her most winning smile. She had considered that he might have asked her to marry him on the jet—after all, he spent most of his life on the darned thing—but obviously he had something far more romantic planned for when they got to Cornwall. She couldn’t wait to see the mansion: it looked like Charles Dickens lived there, as if they’d have a chimney sweep, and a maid who wore a doily on her head! It was too sweet for words.

‘Fine,’ Cato barked. She went to rub his shoulders but he batted her off. ‘If you must know, I’d rather turn this filly around and be touching down in LA in an hour’s time, not bloody Heathrow.’ He swigged the gin in one.

‘Oh, darling,’ she comforted, ‘it’ll be gorgeous when we get there …’

‘Will it? It’s England, Mole; it rains all the time.’

How Susanna wished he wouldn’t call her that. It was an endearment—she had a freckle birthmark on the small of her back—but all the same it made her sound like a soggy, twitchy little thing emerging blindly from the ground. Cato had taken to introducing her as Mole in new company, which she absolutely had to put a stop to.

‘I don’t mind a bit of rain,’ said Susanna, flipping open her magazine.

‘You’re not cut out for it,’ Cato retorted.

‘I can be. I will be.’ She wanted to add when we’re married, but didn’t.

A muscle twitched at his temple. ‘If Charles did the right thing and moved on I’d be a damn sight happier. Usherwood is mine, after all. I’m the eldest; it’s my inheritance. Still,’ Cato swirled the glass, ‘I can’t apologise for being a trans-Atlantic man. Career calls—not that my brother would know the first thing about that.’

Susanna flushed with pleasure. She loved it when Cato talked about claiming the estate full-time. Things were going impossibly well for him in LA right now, but come next year he would be ready to divide his time between the two—and she would be right there alongside him as the next Lady Lomax. She couldn’t wait.

‘Another,’ Cato commanded one of his staff, holding aloft the empty glass. ‘Why he insists on being such a miserable bastard is well and truly beyond me.’

Susanna craned to see. ‘Go easy on him, baby, he hasn’t been with us long …’

Cato shot her one of his your-stupidity-never-ceases-to-amaze-me looks. ‘I’m not talking about that cretin,’ he snipped. ‘I’m referring to Charles. Naturally.’

The gin landed, accompanied by a miniature offering of salted nuts.

‘Just because Mummy and Daddy got lost in the fucking Bermuda Triangle’—Cato said ‘fucking’ like ‘fahking’—’I mean, let’s get over it, shall we?’ He chucked the nuts into his mouth like a shot of Tequila and appeared to swallow without chewing. Susanna found him urgently sexy. With his splintering eyes and jet-black mane, so brutish and carnivorous, he possessed the kind of unreconstructed maleness that had women worldwide longing to experience the Lomax magic. Once she was his wife, Susanna Denver alone would achieve that privilege.

‘These are stale,’ Cato complained of the nuts, but continued to pulverise them nonetheless.

‘Try and relax, sweetheart …’

Cato loosened his tie. ‘I am relaxed. Just don’t talk to me about my brother.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You brought him up. And now look! I’m in a terrible mood thanks to you.’

Susanna had learned early on in their acquaintance that Cato was not a man with whom to be argued. She knew better than to raise the issue of Charles (like the prince!), but privately thought their relationship was bound to be strained what with the family history being so raw. Cato rarely talked about the accident, only in garbled bursts when he was blind drunk on Courvoisier. Thirteen years ago, Richmond and Beatrice Lomax had taken a single-engine plane for a day flight over the Bahamas—at nine a.m. they had departed; by twelve they had abandoned radio signal. Their plane was lost, the bodies never found. To this day their deaths remained unclassified.

‘Put him from your mind,’ she calmed him. ‘Shall I rub your shoulders?’

Cato scowled.

Susanna couldn’t help but suspect there was more to the brotherly rivalry than met the eye. Reading between the lines it seemed that Charles, the youngest, had always been the favoured son—and Cato resented him for it. Funny how such petty jealousies could wind their way into adulthood. Perhaps Susanna could be the peacemaker, encourage the men to see what was really important. Once she and Cato moved into Usherwood on a permanent basis she saw no reason why Charles should have to be evicted. Where would the poor mite go?

On cue Cato pronounced: ‘Charles is in for a terrific surprise when I tell him I’m taking over. He never could handle the place; it’s falling apart around his bloody ears. What Usherwood needs is a real man to take care of it.’ Buoyed by the thought, he turned to Susanna and awarded her an indulgent smile. ‘A bit like you, Mole.’

Susanna took his hand. ‘Indeed,’ she purred demurely, in the way English ladies surely did when they were soon-to-be-heirs to great stateliness and fortune.

Cato downed the drink, exhaling heavily through his nostrils like a bull with a ring through its nose. He closed his eyes. When he opened them he said, ‘I think I’ll have your mouth wrapped around my cock one more time before we land,’ as though he were considering which route they would take into the southwest once they hit the roads tomorrow (Susanna suffered from jetlag and preferred a night at Claridge’s before entertaining an onward journey). She had selected a vintage burgundy Bentley for the trip and might even don a floral headscarf, if the weather was clement.

England’s fields appeared like patchwork in the window, a quilt of greens and yellows stitched together by thorn and thistle: Land of Hope and Glory.

Susanna sighed the sigh of the devoted. She couldn’t wait to be introduced to her new home. And once Cato proposed, everything would be just perfect.

CHAPTER THREE

CHARLIE LOMAX STOPPED at the stream to let his dogs drink. He wiped his dark brow, the material of his T-shirt damp with sweat and sticking across his shoulders. It was a scorching day, thick with heat, the only sounds the steady babble and the hounds’ lapping tongues as they attacked the water in loud, contented gulps.

He squinted up at Usherwood House. One hand was raised to counter the glare, and the skin where his sleeve drew back was pale compared with the tan on his forearms. The earthy, musty pocket of his underarm was a hot, secret shadow.

The dogs clambered to their feet for a vigorous shake, their fur releasing a shower of glittering drops. Comet, the setter, pricked his ears in anticipation of his master’s next move: tail bright, eyes alert. Retriever Sigmund panted happily.

Russet sunshine bounced off the stonework, drawing-room windows rippled in the haze. Charlie could picture its quiet interior, shafts of light seeping through dusky glass. A sheet of verdant lawn rolled up to the entrance, studded with flower beds that flaunted summer colour despite their neglect. Mottled figurines hid behind oaks like ghosts, a head or a hand missing, moss-covered and cool in the shade.

It was habit to see everything that was wrong with the place: the dappled paintwork, the peeling façade, and at the porch a stippled, stagnant fountain whose cherubic statuette sang a soundless, fossilised tune. But on days like today, lemon sunbeams bathing the house, the old monkey puzzle rising proud in the orchard and the flat grey sea beyond with its white horses flirting on the waves, it was possible to imagine an inch of its former glory. When Charlie would return for yearned-for ex-eats, the car pulling up alongside his mother’s classic Auburn, gravel crunching under the tyres and the smell of buttered crumpets soaking into the purple evening, those were the times he remembered. That was what Usherwood meant to him.

He climbed the ditch, put his fingers out so a soft, soggy muzzle came in curiosity to his touch, and with it the hot lick of an abrasive tongue.

Through the Usherwood doors the great hall echoed, high windows illuminating a mist of dust particles that drifted into the vaults. Above the sooty inglenook a portrait of Richmond and Beatrice was suspended, its frame a tarnished copper. The dogs skated muddy-pawed through to the library, tails thumping as they waited for Charlie to catch up.

‘Oh, you scamps!’ Barbara Bewlis-Teet, housekeeper since his parents’ day, came in from the kitchen. She shook her head at the dirt the dogs had brought with them. ‘Mr Lomax, you’d let those mutts rule the roost given half the chance!’

Charlie ran a hand through his raven hair. It had grown longish around his ears and he hadn’t shaved in a week, giving him a rugged, piratical appearance. His eyes were panther-black. The bridge of his nose had been split years before in a cricket match, and the residual scar made him look more fearsome than he was.

‘They’re all right.’ He pulled off his boots, thick with caked-on mud.

Affection made Barbara want to reach out and touch him, the boy she had once known—but she couldn’t, because Mr Lomax was untouchable.

How she wanted to rewrite the story whose beginning and end could be found in the landscapes of his face: the concentrated, permanent frown; the dark angle where his jaw met his neck; the fierce brushstrokes of his cheekbones. There was Charlie before the tragedy, a dimly recalled child with a clever smile and a skill for putting things together—cameras, watch mechanisms, telescopes—to see how they worked; and Charlie afterwards, wilted at the Harrow gates, at thirteen so young, too young, for the education that sometimes what was taken apart could never be reassembled. She had driven through the night to collect him in her Morris MINI, doing away with the nonsense of a chauffeured car. Cato had left for the South of France, done with his final year, a hard-boiled show-off whom nothing seemed to touch. Barbara wasn’t sure when Cato had returned to Usherwood, if he even had, to join the mourners and to console the younger brother who had needed him.

‘Tea’s ready,’ she said gently, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Shall I bring it through?’ It was four p.m. sharp and the time-worn set patiently waited, citrus steam rising from the delicate chipped cups Barbara still insisted on using; a splash of milk in a porcelain mug, a silver basin of sugar and a plate of powdery gingerbreads. So long as Mr Lomax cared about Usherwood’s standards, so must she.

‘I’ll be at my desk.’

‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘And shall I light a fire?’

‘No, I’ll manage.’

Barbara was used to his economy with words. He didn’t give himself away, not to just anyone. He was twenty-six this winter, and to all intents and purposes had removed himself from the world. He was a distant rock battered by storms, a locked door in a darkened corridor, a half remembered song.

After what had happened, how could it be different?

‘Very well,’ she said softly. ‘Will that be all?’

‘Yes,’ Mr Lomax replied, ‘that’s all.’

It was cool in the library; cellar draughts seeping through the floorboards, the damp in the walls making everything chill despite the heat of the day. Charlie dragged on a frayed Guernsey and lit the flames. His hands were broad and work-roughened, the flesh stained and splintered, chapped by outdoor grind. Sparks burst and crackled and he spread his fingers to warm them in the orange, spitting glow.

He settled at the morning’s post. Red warnings glared through envelopes, demands for payment and threatened court action. Sigmund padded over and absent-mindedly Charlie scratched the retriever’s head. The dog put both paws on his lap, resting his chops and gazing up at his master forlornly.

The books told a sorry story. Usherwood was in dire straits and despite Charlie’s initiatives—selling off his mother’s art collection; opening the outbuildings; renting the south field as a campsite—it scarcely touched the sides. Each cheque was engulfed by a rising tide of demands. The drive needed resurfacing, the greenhouse was suffering a leak, the roof in the old maid’s lodgings begged a restoration, the arch on the chapel was collapsing … He couldn’t keep up. Maintaining the occupied quarters was bad enough. They’d had neither heating nor hot water for over a month, and Charlie had taken to bathing early morning in the bitter spinney stream.

Of course he was meant to be rich. This was a mansion, after all—palatial, exquisite, the finest example of Jacobean architecture in the West Country—and its inhabitant aristocracy, heir to great fortune. But the upkeep had sapped every penny of that fortune. Huge chambers slept unused, locked away, spaces once bright and vital now relegated to the graveyard. Piece by piece the house was shutting down. It reminded Charlie of a night when he was eight, camping in the trunk of the withered oak with a blanket up by his ears. The house had seemed an advent calendar of golden windows, his father passing through to extinguish one light at a time until nothing was left but the stain of dark upon dark, the shell of a house sliced out of the night.

Amid a nest of paperwork, a red blinking caught his attention.

One message pending:

‘Can’t stop, old bean,’ came a familiar, hated voice. ‘Susanna’s been hankering after a taste of the Cornish Riviera and you know me—never one to disappoint a lady. We arrive tomorrow. Tidy the place up, won’t you? Oh, and do spare us by getting those rotten hounds on a leash; Susanna won’t like them a bit.’ He was about to ring off, before a parting: ‘Tell the girls to whip up something nice. Susanna wants British; you know the thing. Tarts. Shortbread.’

The line went dead.

Charlie listened to it a second time before hitting delete. His knuckles cracked.

Cato Lomax.

Movie star, icon, Casanova—but the world didn’t know him as Charlie did. His Cato was narcissistic, decadent, reckless, wicked; the grubby-palmed boy who had terrorised him, pushing him from the apple tree so he knocked his front teeth grey, dunking his head in the glacial lake one vicious winter, bolting him in the stuffy leather trunk they had taken to Harrow and feeding in a sack of crawling beetles, trapping him in the secret passage that ran between the pantry and the sword room …

And then, when they were adults, taking from him the one thing Charlie could never forgive him for. People said it hadn’t been Cato’s fault, but Charlie knew better.

Acid clutched his heart when he thought of that furious, thundery night … Cato’s tail lights disappearing down the Usherwood drive, rain slashing the windows, a red torch bleeding into darkness …

The very last time he had seen her.

The manslaughter charge had been dropped. Nothing more said about it. That was what money could do—it could buy justice, as rotten and corrupt as it came.

But by Charlie’s judgement, his brother could never be forgiven.

Whenever he read about Cato in the papers, posing with a new actress girlfriend, he swallowed fury like a knot of wire. Despite it all Cato still imagined himself to be emperor of Usherwood. By virtue of his age the true and righteous Lord Lomax, winging in whenever it suited to boast his heritage to a Plasticine army of Americans. Cato had no clue about the place or what it needed; all he cared for was his reputation and the social currency Usherwood awarded. Being gentry wasn’t about playing polo and hanging pheasants; it was about a birthright that had been passed through generations, this wounded house that Charlie toiled for night and day because he felt it in his soul, his true devotion and his true belonging.

He went to the window and released the catch, grounding himself against the approaching storm.

That was it, then: the prodigal son returned.

Cato’s imminent arrival slid over the surrounding hills like an army on the mount. The air outside was fragrant. A cabbage white fluttered on to the sill, twitching its wings. Somewhere in the grounds a nightingale sang.

CHAPTER FOUR

OLIVIA SHOULD HAVE known that the car wouldn’t start. For most of the year Florence Lark had been using the battered green-and-white Deux Chevaux as an elaborate planter, filling it with sorrel and sage, parsley and peppermint, basil and bay. Olivia wasn’t sure if this arrangement was intentional or if her mother had just neglected to unpack the allotment spoils one day and things had grown from there.

‘Take the bicycle,’ Flo said from her position on the caravan steps, where she was busy peeling apples into a basin. She was an attractive woman with a stream of honey-blonde hair, bright blue eyes and the skin of a seventeen-year-old. ‘It’s a glorious afternoon; you could do with getting some country air back into you. I can’t imagine how you put up with The Smoke for so long. I never could.’

‘It was only a year.’ Olivia had a brief, strange pang for the Archway bedsit, and the top decks of buses she’d see sailing past her window as she ate breakfast.

‘Well, a year’s long enough.’

‘I’m not staying, you know.’ She yanked the pushbike from its moorings amid a hillock of grass. A slick of oil smeared blackly across her dress and she wiped it with the back of her hand. ‘This is just a stopgap.’

‘Hmm, you say that now …’

‘I’ll be saying the same in a month.’

‘But you love the cove!’

‘Nothing ever happens here, Mum. It’s full of the people who never left.’

Her mother pulled a face. ‘Like Adrian Gold?’

Olivia glanced away. ‘Maybe.’

‘You’re drastically out of his league.’

‘You would say that.’

‘And you’ll never see it, of course.’ Flo sighed. ‘There he is sailing about with a string of airheads in bikinis without a brain cell to speak of between them …’

Olivia rolled her eyes. So much for the sisterhood that had been drummed into her since birth—and anyway, what was wrong with wearing a bikini and being hot and having Addy Gold lusting after you? All her life she had been steered away from the tricks that helped a girl look nice, and suddenly she felt pissed off, as if she’d been robbed of her only shot, which was ridiculous because it was hardly as if a stick of gloss and a spritz of Dior would have made all the difference. Or would it? Natural is beautiful, her mother insisted, and besides, stuff like high heels and make-up were Crimes Against Women. They were alternative, remember? But alternative was fine when you were forty and wore moccasins and smoked damp roll-ups, and not when you were sixteen and just wanted to go on a date without having to explain why your shoes were made of hay (that was an exaggeration—but only just).

Olivia saddled up. Thanks to this conversation she felt every inch the grumpy adolescent: how did coming home always achieve that?

‘Wish me luck,’ she muttered, before she could mutter anything else.

‘Don’t let that Lomax give you any trouble,’ counselled her mother. ‘He’s meant to be downright insufferable. Any nonsense and you tell him what for.’

In finding her feet on the pedals Olivia almost toppled sideways. It was ages since she’d ridden and the squeaky brakes and cranky gears did little to bolster the confidence. Flo gave her a push and she teetered off down the path.

Olivia might find herself pining for the city, but even she couldn’t deny how free she felt flying down Lustell Steep with the wind in her hair, up on the handlebars, sheer momentum carrying her. She could taste the ocean and hear the swooping cries of seagulls as they wheeled overhead. Over the mount she passed the church. Sweet buds nestled in hedgerows and the back-end of a hare darted into the mossy verge.

This was the way she used to come in the holidays, racing against her best friend Beth to reach the old bench first. Past the weathered seat there was a gap in the border, big enough for two girls to squeeze through. They called the field beyond the Hush-Hush—perhaps because it had been quiet as a lake on the day they’d found it, or perhaps because they’d sworn to keep its discovery a secret. In the hot months it was bright with corn and rape, kernels you could pick off in juice-stained fingers and pop their oily pods in your mouth. In winter it was rough with earth and churned up like the sea in a gale. This was where her mother had taken them when she’d first bought the 2CV, picking them up from school with a tray of eggs laid out on the rear shelf, pink and smooth as pebbles and lined up neatly in rows like a cinema for bald people. Flo had driven fast as a rocket across the field and the car had gone bouncing and bounding and leaping over the ridges, Olivia and Beth in the back, clutching each other and laughing till they cried, shrieking, ‘Slow down!’ even if they hadn’t wanted her to, and when they stopped they were amazed to see the shells still intact.

‘There you go,’ Florence had triumphed. ‘Best set of wheels on the market.’

That was before Olivia found out that Farmer Nancarrow owned the Hush-Hush land. She had never told the boys this, but once, ages ago, she had seen him kissing her mother at a barn dance, a dark, dusky giant of a man, and she had hid in the wings of the stage, wide-eyed and watching.

By the time she reached the foot of the Usherwood drive, the sun was lowering in the sky and early evening shadows were lengthening across the plots.

At the entrance a sign announced the house, faded with age and leaning to one side. Across the cattle grid the route opened up and Olivia rode faster, the track galloping away beneath her wheels. All her life the estate had been a distant wonder, perpetually beyond reach, the untouchable palace of the aristocracy. She’d been ten when Lord and Lady Lomax had died, and supposed she must have come once or twice when she was little, but the memories became eclipsed by their grim successors: TV crews descending; reporters on the streets; the canvas of shocked, sad faces as the cove had digested the news. People like that—rich, glamorous, exceptional people—didn’t just disappear. For months afterwards, Olivia had imagined divers scouring the ocean depths, finding nothing except a diamond bracelet winking on the seabed.

She had been too young then to appreciate what it must have been like for the children left behind. Losing her own father at six had at least spared her the pain of a proper understanding, the significance of it too big, too serious, to process. Even when Flo had held her close and told her Dad was never coming back, Olivia had secretly known that he would. He’d show up one day and surprise them. Got you, monkey! A game; like when he’d chase her round the garden and throw her over his head, forcing her to squeal her delight. But as the weeks turned into months and the seasons unfurled, so did the realisation that her mother had been right. Grief assailed her gradually; there had been no ambush. The Lomax boys had been ambushed.

Through a canopy of trees Usherwood at last came into view. It was beautiful and sad and majestic all at the same time. The entrance was arched, the exterior dotted with dozens of bay windows that gazed enquiringly back at her. Curvilinear gables, peaked like the spade suit in a deck of playing cards, adorned the ridges like icing. Close up, telltale signs of decay blushingly revealed themselves: chalky efflorescence on a renovated chimney, a weathered ox-eye on a central facade, twisted pillars pockmarked by age … Yet nothing could rob the mansion of its splendour.

The drive widened into an oval expanse of gravel, stones grinding beneath her tread, and Olivia climbed off to wheel the rest of the way.

She spotted a man up a ladder, his back to her. From what she could see he was fixing a gutter. She pictured how she must look, a stranger with a cloud of auburn hair and thistle scratches on her legs, pushing a bike whose pannier was stuffed with a beach towel and a crumpled sketchbook.

Two dogs bounded over, hindquarters bowed in excitement, their tails going frantically. She made a fuss of them, patting their flanks and scuffing their ears.

‘Hello,’ she called. ‘Hello there!’ She gave a pointless little wave, like someone on the deck of a ferry.

The labourer swore. He sucked the tip of his finger where he’d splintered it, or bashed it with a hammer, or whatever it was he was doing up there, and turned.

‘Can I help you?’ he hollered down irritably. His voice was very deep, and low, like a shout thrown back from the distant end of a tunnel.

Olivia couldn’t see his face, just a big black shape where he obscured the melting sun. ‘I’m, er, looking for a job,’ she replied uncertainly. ‘I saw the ad at the beach; you’re after someone to help with the gardens? I hope I’m in time …’

The man thought for a moment before climbing down. She could practically see his bad mood, sense it like a squall on the water when she was out on her board and the weather was changing. As he came nearer she was dwarfed by his size. He had a tousle of coal-black hair and his shoulders were treble the width of hers. He was so tall she barely came up to his chin. His eyes were darker than three a.m.

‘I’m Olivia,’ she started. ‘Olivia Lark.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘I know.’

She took in his paint-splashed work trousers and faded checked shirt. He had a clever, angular face, catching the sun on one side. His eyelashes were long. Sooty. She wondered if he had helped out on her mother’s allotment.

‘Could I speak to the owner?’

His frown deepened.

‘Or if now’s a bad time …?’

He continued assessing her in that peculiarly penetrating way. She had never been on the receiving end of such stark, unapologetic scrutiny.

‘The thing is,’ she forged on, ‘I’m an artist. That sounds massively wanky, but it’s the truth so I might as well be truthful, and the other truth is that I’m unemployed and I need to make money so that I can move back to London and get on with things.’ Why was she babbling? She never babbled. His frown became more of a scowl. ‘So I’m back for the summer, and I’m hardworking, and reliable, and I wouldn’t ask to be paid too much. I’m good with plants and stuff—and I cook a bit … though actually,’ she retracted it, ‘not very well; as a matter of fact I had a complete catastrophe with a macaroni cheese the other day. You should have seen it! All burned on the top and chewy as bootlaces …’ She trailed off. His expression was stony.

‘I don’t like macaroni cheese,’ he said eventually.

‘Whoever doesn’t like macaroni cheese?’

‘I just told you: I don’t.’

There was a long, difficult silence that he appeared entirely untroubled by. Olivia’s patience expired. What the hell was his problem? No wonder the house was going under with people like this charged with greeting outsiders.

‘I’m sorry I’ve interrupted,’ she said, prim as a debutante as she turned on her heel. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘Don’t.’

Flabbergasted by his rudeness, she raged, ‘Bloody hell, you’re rude. You could’ve just—’

‘Now will do.’

He rubbed the stubble on his jaw. He was sexy, in a prehistoric sort of way. There was something very raw about him, like one of her pictures when she’d only done the most ragged outline in pencil. The top of his nose was cracked out of shape.

‘I’m looking to open the ornamentals at the end of the season,’ he said. ‘I’ve drawn up the plans, and I dare say you’ll be cheaper than a hired hand. It’ll be hard work and I won’t be paying more than I have to. Believe it or not, we’re in need of money ourselves, so that’s one thing we already have in common.’

She expected him to smile but he didn’t.

He named his price, concluding indifferently: ‘Take it or leave it.’

Olivia agreed before he could change his mind. ‘But shouldn’t I speak to Mr Lomax? I mean, I don’t know who you are, but—’

‘I am Mr Lomax.’

‘Oh.’

She looked away, embarrassed, as if he’d just taken all his clothes off in front of her. There were shades of Cato, maybe: a coarser, unpolished version. She had always envisaged the other brother as the hunchback in the attic, warty and stooped and living on a diet of pickled onions. The reality was rather different.

One thing was for sure: arrogance ran in the family.

‘Well,’ she said stiffly, ‘you could have said—’

‘Remember I didn’t ask you to be here. You asked me.’

She blinked. ‘All right.’

‘Be aware that this house owes you nothing except your pay. My brother doesn’t live here, so if that was your motivation you can leave right away.’

‘It wasn’t,’ she clarified hastily. ‘I don’t even fancy him!’

Her statement sounded impossibly stupid in the quiet that followed.

‘I’m Charlie,’ he gave her eventually. ‘Don’t bother with Mr Lomax or sir or anything like that. Just Charlie.’

‘OK. When do you want me to start?’

‘Not now, I’m expecting people.’

‘Right. So …’

‘So leave?’

Olivia bit back the smart retort he’d been begging for since she’d arrived. Did this man have absolutely no social graces? Deliberately he had put her on the back foot, watching her squirm because that was exactly the kind of enjoyment a person in his position preferred. She supposed life must become tiresome when you were king of all you surveyed, lord of a privileged, proud dominion that sprawled as far as the eye could see. Commoners like her were just a passing opportunity for entertainment. Wasn’t Mr Lomax—sorry, Charlie—meant to be an advocate for the upper classes? It went to show that all the huff and puff of an absurdly expensive education couldn’t buy manners. And anyway, Lomax or no Lomax, she wasn’t sure she could ever altogether trust someone who didn’t like pasta and cheese.

‘Monday morning,’ he directed, ‘eight o’clock. Don’t be late.’

He returned to the ladder, gazed up at the darkening sky, dusted his hands off and lifted it from the stones. Olivia watched him disappear inside the house, the dogs behind. She stood feeling like a prize lemon and hoping against hope that the gardens were miles away from Charlie Lomax … The other side of the county would be fine.

She scooped up her bike, running through all the things she wished she’d said. It was his opener that had thrown her. How could he have any idea who she was?

Puzzled by it, she pushed off through the weeping, hanging boughs. The drive was shrouded in gloom, no faint shimmer of streetlights, no passing sweep of traffic, no distant drone of life, only the far-off crash of waves as they washed over the cliffs. A pair of early evening bats swooped between trees, their leather wings fluttering.

Olivia negotiated the twisting route, and was halfway to the road and lost in thoughts of her mother’s roast pork supper with lashings of Granny Smith sauce, when, seemingly from nowhere, a monstrous car appeared around the corner. The last thing she saw was a pair of dumbstruck faces, bone-white in the burgeoning dusk, before she was thrown from her saddle and after that there was nothing.