HELEN BROOKS - Ruthless Tycoon, Innocent Wife

‘Steed?’ Gillian was a Cornish lass, unlike Marianne’s mother who had moved to the district from the north of England with her family when she was a young woman. ‘He must be Andrew Steed’s son. Yes, I can see it now although he’s a head taller than his father was, but Andrew was very good-looking, too. They’ve got the same black hair and blue eyes. It was a combination that used to send the girls in a tizzwazz. With your father being so fair, Annie, and Andrew being so dark they used to have the girls throwing themselves at them.’

‘What about Dad?’ Victoria interjected a little defensively.

‘Oh, your father was always mine,’ Gillian said comfortably. ‘Everyone knew that.’

Victoria’s gaze was on Rafe Steed again. ‘He’s barely taken his eyes off you, Annie. And he’s got a very sexy mouth,’ she added, almost to herself. ‘In fact he’s “very” everything.’

‘ Victoria .’

This time her mother really meant it and Victoria recognised the tone. ‘Sorry,’ she said quickly to Marianne. ‘I wasn’t being flippant regarding your mum and dad, Annie. You know how much I thought of them.’

‘It’s fine.’ It was. In fact, she preferred Victoria’s naturalness to the awkwardness with which most people were treating her today. ‘Why don’t you go across and introduce yourself?’ she suggested, knowing Victoria was longing to. ‘You’ve got the excuse he’s an old friend of your father’s and, furthermore, he doesn’t know anyone. You’ll be taking pity on him.’

‘That’s just what I thought.’ Delighted, Victoria was off.

‘That girl.’ Gillian shook her head while her two sons and eldest daughter and their respective spouses smiled indulgently. ‘I don’t know what it is about her but she attracts the men like bees to a honeypot. He’ll be taking her out for dinner tonight, you mark my words.’

Marianne said something non-committal and moved on. She didn’t care if Rafe Steed took half of Cornwall out for dinner tonight; she thought he was the rudest man she had ever met. If she saw him again in the whole of her life after today it would be too soon. Victoria was utterly welcome and, thinking about it, if anyone could bring such a man to heel, Victoria could.

She purposely didn’t look over the other side of the room for some time, but when she did it was to see that Rafe Steed and Victoria had been joined by the rest of Tom’s family and they were all chatting and smiling. Ridiculously, Marianne felt betrayed. The feeling disappeared almost as soon as it had come but it left her with stinging eyes and a trembling mouth. Suddenly she wanted her mother so much it hurt.

Don’t be stupid, she told herself silently, walking across to the french windows and gazing out over the rolling grounds which stretched down to the high stone wall separating their property from the cliff path. She was a grown woman of twenty-seven and she had lived in London for the last five years since qualifying as an occupational therapist. She had a responsible job with a top London hospital and she had long since taken charge of her life. She was grown up, not a child.

It didn’t help. Right at that moment she would have given everything she owned and was for five minutes with her parents.

You’ve still got Seacrest and Crystal. She hugged the thought to her as she fought back the tears. And, whatever it took, she would keep both. She would find a job down here and live at home and hopefully, if they were careful, she’d manage to pay the bills a large seven-bedroomed house like Seacrest produced. They could always do bed and breakfast in the holiday season; she’d been thinking about that in the last few days since the accident. And she would take care of the grounds herself rather than have the gardener her parents had employed one day a week.

If she had to, that was, she qualified, her eyes following a seagull as it swooped and soared in the blue June sky. She had no idea if there would be any money attached to her parents’ estate; she and her parents had never talked of such things. There had been no need. Her parents had still been relatively young at fifty-seven and sixty respectively, and she’d had her flat and career in London. When she had come down to Cornwall for the occasional weekend or holiday, illness and death and wills had seemed as far away as the moon.

Eventually people began to take their leave. She knew the second Victoria and Rafe Steed began to walk towards her. Somehow she had been vitally aware of him the whole afternoon. She hadn’t wanted to be—in fact, it had irritated and annoyed her—but somehow he had forced himself on to her psyche in a way which would have been humiliating should anyone have been able to read her mind.

‘We’re going, Annie.’ Victoria enfolded her in a hug which was genuinely sympathetic. ‘Call me as soon as you get back to the city and we’ll do lunch. I don’t know why we haven’t thought of it before with both of us based in London.’

‘Goodbye, Victoria.’ Marianne hugged her back and then extracted herself to offer a polite hand to Rafe Steed. ‘Goodbye, Mr Steed,’ she said with deliberate formality. ‘I hope you have a safe journey home and please give my best wishes to your father.’

He took her hand. ‘I have some business to attend to before I return so I shan’t be leaving for a few days, but I’ll speak to my father before then and pass on your regards, Miss Carr.’

His flesh was warm and firm and, in spite of herself, Marianne became aware of the faint scent of his aftershave. There was the shadow of black stubble on the hard square chin and the expensive suit he wore sat with casual nonchalance on the big frame. He was a man who was comfortable with himself and his sexuality. He would be dynamite in bed .

The thought, coming from nowhere as it did, shocked Marianne into snatching her hand away in a manner that was less than tactful. For a moment they stared at each other, Rafe’s features etched in granite and Marianne’s eyes wide with confusion. Victoria, who had moved slightly to their left to say goodbye to her father, was thankfully unaware of what had transpired.

‘Goodbye, Miss Carr.’ It was expressionless, cold.

For a crazy, wild moment she wanted to ask him what she had done to make him dislike her the way he did. They had never met before this day; he knew nothing about her. She had thought at first he was probably the same with everyone, but he had been altogether different when he had been talking to Victoria and her family. Instead, she said, ‘Goodbye,’ and left it at that. She just wanted him to go now. She wanted everyone to go. But first there was the formality of the will. Once that was done—she took a silent gulp of air as she turned away from Rafe Steed—she could get on with sorting out her life and the changes she would have to make to avoid selling Seacrest.

Only it wasn’t as simple as that.

An hour later, sitting across the coffee table in the drawing room from Tom, Marianne and Crystal stared in horror at the solicitor. ‘I thought you knew.’ Tom had said this twice in the last ten minutes since he had dropped his bombshell and his voice was wretched. ‘I didn’t imagine …I mean—’ He stopped abruptly. ‘Your father said he was going to tell you, Annie.’

‘I suppose he was,’ she said numbly. ‘He’d asked me to come down to Seacrest the weekend before the crash but I’d got something on. I was coming down the next…’ Her voice trailed away. ‘How, Uncle Tom? How could he lose everything?’

‘The business has been struggling for years but he hung on to the belief that the tide would turn. He thought borrowing against the house would be a short-term measure at first.’ Tom waved his hands expressively. ‘It wasn’t. There’s basically your father’s boatyard and one other left in the area and that’s one too many. They were both competing for a lucrative deal and they knew it would be the death knell for the one that didn’t get it. The other boatyard won. It’s as simple as that.’

None of this was simple. How could there be nothing left? How could her father have risked losing Seacrest? Why hadn’t he cut his losses with the boatyard and got an ordinary job somewhere? At least then Seacrest would have been saved.

As though Tom knew what she was thinking, he said quietly, ‘The boatyard and Seacrest went together in your father’s head, Annie. They were built at the same time by your great-great-grandfather—’

‘No.’ Her voice cracked. ‘No, the house is different, Uncle Tom, and he should have seen that. Seacrest is…’ She couldn’t find the words to describe what Seacrest meant.

‘There’s no way at all we can keep it?’ Crystal entered the conversation, her face white. ‘I’ve got some savings, nearly twenty thousand in the bank. Would they come to some sort of an arrangement…?’

Her voice trailed away as Tom shook his head.

Marianne reached out her hand and grasped Crystal’s. She would remember Crystal’s offer all her life. ‘What happens now?’

‘The bank will claim what it sees as belonging to it, in essence. Then Seacrest will go on the open market. In the position it occupies and being such a fine old house, you’ll be looking at a great deal of money. Even if you used Crystal’s twenty thousand as a deposit, you wouldn’t be able to make the mortgage repayments.’

‘What if we did bed and breakfast, even evening meals, too? Turned Seacrest into a hotel?’

‘Have you any idea of the cost of such a project? You’d need to do so much work before you could start taking guests. All sorts of safety procedures, not to mention converting the bedrooms into en suites and so on.’

‘Three are already en suites .’

‘Annie, we’re talking tens of thousands to get the place round if you’re going to get approval from the tourist boards and so on. Where’s your collateral?’

‘There has to be a way.’ She stared at him, wild-eyed. ‘I’m not going to give in. They can’t take Seacrest.’

‘Annie, to all extents and purposes it’s theirs already.’

‘Dad would have wanted me to fight this.’

Tom said nothing, looking at her with sad eyes as he laid out a host of papers on the table in front of her. ‘Look at these overnight. This has been a shock, I see that, and if I had thought Gerald hadn’t told you I would have said something before rather than dropping it on you like this. Take time to let it sink in.’

She didn’t want it to sink in. She wanted Seacrest.

Somehow Marianne managed to pull herself together sufficiently to see Tom out and then comfort Crystal, who was beside herself. After Crystal’s husband and two young sons of four and five had been drowned in a freak storm when he’d taken the boys out in his fishing boat, Gerald and Diane Carr had taken the broken woman in until she recovered sufficiently to decide what she wanted to do. Crystal’s home had been rented and there had been no life assurance or anything of that nature. Shortly afterwards, the Carrs’ housekeeper had suddenly upped and got married, and somehow Crystal had just taken over the role. That had been over thirty years ago and the arrangement had been a blessing for everyone concerned. Now, though, it was as though Crystal’s world had ended for the second time in her life.

By the time Marianne had persuaded Crystal to go to bed and taken the older woman a mug of hot, sweet milk and a couple of aspirin, she felt exhausted. Her head was spinning, she felt physically sick and stress was causing her temples to throb. Nevertheless, she sat down at the coffee table and began to work through the papers Tom had left for her.