Аннотация к роману
«Vengeful Seduction» - Кэтти Уильямс

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Copyright

“We can be friends…”

“Friends?” Lorenzo almost laughed at that, his eyebrows shooting up in an expression of contempt that made her burn. “I’m sure you’d like nothing better, Isobel.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, only that I’m rich, successful——the two prerequisites, if I remember correctly, for any man to be worthwhile in your eyes.”

“That’s not true!” Memories flooded back and she felt faint.

“No? Then pray tell me why you married Jeremy….“

CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and came to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three small daughters.

Vengeful Seduction

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

WHITE was a dreadful colour. Isobel stared at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror and thought that she would probably never wear it again. It would forever conjure up a feeling of despair.

She began brushing her hair, long dark hair, almost black, which fell down her back in small waves. Sooner or later, she knew, she would have to stop brushing it. She had been up here in her bedroom for well over two hours now, getting dressed, but in reality dodging the inevitable which would be progressing now downstairs.

There was a knock on the door and her mother pushed it open and came inside, smiling. Isobel smiled back. The muscles in her jaw ached from the effort but she had no choice. Brides were supposed to be radiant. It was their hallmark. Whoever heard of a depressed bride?

‘I’m nearly ready,’ Isobel said, turning around and hearing the rustle of her dress under her. The sleeves felt too tight, restricting almost, and the neckline was too low, but then she had only herself to blame. Her input in choosing the thing had been next to nil. She had allowed her mother to pick the design from a magazine without even glancing at it. It had a top fitted to the waist, from where it fell in a series of chiffon layers down to her calves. She had been measured for it, had tried it on, had nodded at her mother and the seamstress, and she had hardly seen it at all.

Now she realised that she hated it, but then, she thought, she would have hated any bridal dress.

‘How do I look?’ she asked, standing up, and her mother’s smile broadened.

‘A picture, darling,’ her mother said, with a sheen in her eyes, and Isobel said quickly, firmly,

‘No tears—you promised.’ Cry, she thought, and I shall burst into tears, and as well as being a depressed bride I shall end up being a depressed bride with mascara streaming down my face. Not an attractive sight.

‘But where has my little girl gone?’ Mrs Chandler held her daughter’s hands and Isobel looked back at her with great love and a growing lump in her throat.

‘I’m still here, Mum,’ she said. ‘You’re not losing a daughter; you’re gaining a son.’ That took quite a bit of doing, and saying it made her feel ever so slightly sick.

‘Of course I am, darling,’ Mrs Chandler agreed, ‘but your dad and I…well…Where have all the years gone? One minute you’re a toddler, and now here you are getting married.’

‘I had to grow up some time.’ It was important to keep her voice light, carefree. It wouldn’t do at all to have her parents suspect, even for a moment, that all was not well in Bride City. They would immediately start asking questions, and Isobel couldn’t afford for that to happen. She loved them both far too much. She had been the much longed for and only child of a couple who had given up hope of ever having children, and from the day of her birth she had been showered with parental adoration. They had both taken an inordinate delight in everything she had done, said, thought, and Isobel had returned their joy with the same deep love.

‘And how do I look?’ Mrs Chandler gave a small twirl and Isobel grinned broadly.

‘Spectacular.’ She did, too. Mrs Chandler was as tall as her daughter was, but fair where Isobel was dark, although they both had the same shade of violet-blue eyes and the same long, thick eyelashes. She was sixty now, but her face was still beautiful, with that amazing bone-structure and that clear, faultless complexion. Parkinson’s disease might have tainted her movements, slowed her speech, but it had not diminished her lustre.

‘Dad’s a lucky man,’ Isobel said, and when she thought of her father she had another one of those awful lumps in the back of her throat again.

Mrs Chandler laughed. ‘If you could have seen him an hour ago,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t have described him as a man toppling over under the weight of his good luck. He was scowling rather heavily and trying to squeeze into a dinner-jacket. He insisted that he could still get into the one he wore when we married, and of course he can’t. The odd button at the bottom will have to be left undone, but I don’t think anyone will notice, do you? All eyes will be on you today, my darling.’

That made Isobel feel almost as sick as she had felt when she had told her mother about not losing a daughter but gaining a son, but she smiled again and tried to look terribly radiant at the thought of that.

‘How are the preparations going?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been helping, but…’

‘But nothing. You can’t be scurrying around a marquee in your gown, making sure that everything is all right! I know you’re nervous—I was awfully nervous on my wedding-day—but there are enough hands downstairs making sure that nothing goes horribly wrong. The caterers have been wonderful, the food looks delicious and the guests have now started trickling in. Your father’s holding the fort with Aunt Emma and your cousins. Telling his usual jokes. You know.’ She was smiling, her eyes distant and full of affection.

The perfect family unit, Isobel thought. Except nothing was perfect, was it? As she had discovered to her cost.

‘Has Jeremy arrived yet?’ The question almost strangled her, but she kept right on smiling and looking happy.

‘Due shortly.’ Mrs Chandler started moving towards the door slowly. ‘Darling, I shall have to go and help your father. He’ll come and fetch you in a short while, when everything’s about to start.’ She paused by the door. ‘I’m so happy for you, my dear. I know we both said——’ she spoke carefully, seriously ‘—that we were a little disappointed that you didn’t finish your university education, but I’m sure, seeing you now, that it’s all for the best, and you knew what you were doing.’

She left and Isobel sat on the bed. Now that there was no one in the room, she felt free to stop smiling. She wished that her mother had not brought up the subject of university.

She sighed, and across the room her eyes caught her image looking back at her from the full-length antique pine mirror in the corner of the room. Never mind the years slipping past; that didn’t worry her. What worried her was the prospect of the future hurtling towards her.

She slipped on her high, satin shoes. They felt uncomfortable. She was a tall girl and accustomed to wearing flat shoes, but this dress needed high ones. They completed the image, and there was no doubt that the image was a remarkably beautiful one.

Her mother had once told her, rather proudly, that she had been striking even as a baby, and Isobel had never had any reason to doubt that. She only had to look in the nearest mirror to see that those striking looks had never abandoned her.

Her waist-long hair was like finely spun silk, black silk; her skin was ivory-white and her features were perfect. From a very young child she had known admiration, and over the years she had become accustomed to it, even though she felt that her beauty had been a blessing, but in the end it was an irrelevance. Beauty, after all, was transitory, and sometimes, quite frankly, it could be a terrific disadvantage. It opened doors, but the reception waiting at the other end was not always the one you had hoped for.

She walked across to the window and stared down into the huge back garden which her parents had diligently cultivated ever since they had moved into the house. In a few years’ time they would have to get a gardener to help them out, or else convert some of the land into pasture, if that were possible, but of course they would defer that until the last possible moment. Her mother had been told at the onset of her illness that her condition would worsen, but Isobel knew that she would continue to tend her garden, lovingly if not as thoroughly.

From here she couldn’t see the arriving guests. They would be entering through the front door. Relatives, some of whom she had not seen for a long time; her university friends, who would probably gape and feel dwarfed by the dimensions of her parents’ house, because she had never let on just how wealthy her background was; and of course schoolfriends, hers and Jeremy’s, shared friends whom they had known from the year dot—just as they had known each other from the year dot.

She gazed down into the garden and attempted to speculate on their reactions to this marriage. Most, she supposed, would see it as a sort of natural conclusion, something expected, but some, her closest friends, had already expressed their horror at the match. She had always been the high achiever, the girl with everything, and they had told her, with varying degrees of tact, just how amazed they were that she was throwing it all away, throwing away a medical degree, for God’s sake, to settle down and get married. Naturally she had said nothing. How could she?

Her parents had been disappointed as well, even though they had taken great pains not to condemn her choice. The fact was that they had instilled in her from day one the importance of education, and they had been bewildered when she had arrived home six months previously, sat them down and tonelessly announced her decision to marry Jeremy Baker.

Their immediate concern was that she was pregnant, which, Isobel had thought at the time, had been the only amusing thing about the whole sorry affair.

‘It’s just that it’s all so sudden, darling,’ her mother had said, frowning and trying to make sense of the impossible. ‘I didn’t even think that you and Jeremy were that close. I thought…’

Isobel had known what she had thought, and she had cut in hurriedly, with some nonsense about deciding at last where her heart lay.

‘But can’t it wait?’ her father had asked in a concerned voice, and she hadn’t been able to meet his eyes.

‘We feel that this is the best way for us,’ she had mumbled, and later, when they had gently asked her about her medical degree, she had fudged and muttered something about blood and guts not really being up her street after all.

In the end, they had left it, and her mother had embarked on the wedding preparations with zeal.

Her father was an influential man in the community and strings had been pulled so that everything fell into place with the perfection of an event that could have taken years in the making. Nothing was too small or too great for their daughter, and from the sidelines Isobel had watched and choked back the sickening misery that had threatened to overwhelm her at every turn.

She was consulted on the design for the wedding-invitations, the serviettes, the colours of the flowers which hung in profusion downstairs in the marquee, every conceivable shade of yellow because, her mother had decided, spring was yellow and so the flowers would all represent spring. Frankly, winter would have been more appropriate but she had bitten back the caustic observation and gone along with the general flow.

She began pacing about the room, glancing at the reminders of her childhood which still clung here and there: adventure books which she had devoured in her youth, before biology texts became much more fascinating, a doll which she could remember being given to her as a birthday present from her parents when she was five, a picture of her family which she had done when she was four and which her parents had proudly framed—three figures with odd shapes and stick-like fingers. Her parents had been immensely proud of that picture, but in fact art had been just about the only thing that had eluded her. She had a mind more attuned to the logical.

Ironic, she thought now, that her life, which had been cheerfully pacing towards the most logical conclusion in the world—a degree in the subject she had adored, a career helping people—had petered out into the most irrational ending.

That made her think of Jeremy, and she swallowed down the bitter resentment rising up her throat.

In less than one hour’s time she would be his wife, and there was little point in constantly whipping herself with the insanity of it when there was nothing she could possibly do to remedy the situation.

She heard another knock on the door and stiffened in alarm. Surely not her father. Surely not yet. She looked at her watch, which showed that she still had at least forty-five minutes left of freedom, and said, ‘Yes? Come in!’

If was probably her mother with some detail that needed sorting out, or eIse Abigail, the least tactful but closest of her childhood friends, who would no doubt launch into another lecture on the stupidity of the marriage.

‘Fine,’ she had said when Isobel had told her about Jeremy. ‘Throw your life away on that worm! Throw away your hopes of being a doctor! And while you’re about it, why don’t you fling yourself under the nearest bus as well?’ Abigail was studying drama and had cultivated a theatrical way of talking. ‘I shall never mention another syllable on the subject again!’ But she had continued to expound on the theme whenever they had met, and Isobel assumed that she was about to recommence.

It wasn’t Abigail. It wasn’t her mother. It was the last person in the world she wanted to face, but face him she did, defiantly across the length of the room.

‘So,’ he said, strolling into the room and shutting the door behind him, ‘the bride is ready.’ His voice was sneering, his expression hard and contemptuous.

‘What are you doing here?’ Isobel asked. Her heart was beating quickly, making her feel giddy and deprived of air. He had always had this sort of dramatic effect on her, as if his presence threw her system into some weird kind of overdrive.

‘Didn’t you think that I’d turn up?’ Lorenzo smiled humourlessly. ‘Why, Isobel, my dearest, I’m the best man.’

‘Yes.’ She licked her dry lips. ‘But you should be downstairs, with everyone else.’

What she really meant was that he should be anywhere else, but not here, not in her room. She couldn’t bear this game of cruelty he had played ever since he had found out about Jeremy, even though she could understand it.

‘I never thought you’d do it,’ he bit out, advancing towards her. ‘When you told me five months ago what you were planning, I thought that it was a joke, some kind of mad joke.’

‘No joke, Lorenzo.’

His hands shot out, grasping her arms, and she winced in pain.

‘Why? Why, damn you!’

‘I told you…’

‘You told me nothing!’ He flung her away and walked towards the dressing-table, resting on it with clenched fists.

Isobel followed him, stared at his back, the downbent head, and struggled not to put her arms around him.

Presently he turned around and faced her, his face dark and savage.

‘Why are you doing this, Isobel? You’re not in love with Jeremy Baker.’ There was a sneer in his voice and she answered quickly, to avoid the subject of love.

‘How can you speak about him in that tone of voice? I thought he was your friend!’

‘We both know him,’ Lorenzo bit out. ‘He’s unstable, reckless. You told me so yourself. Wasn’t that one of the reasons that you stopped seeing him, even as a friend, after he went to work for your father? He frightened you. You were glad to be at university.’

‘You frighten me too,’ she said, ‘when you’re like this.’ They stared at each other. He was furious and his fury, she knew, was given edge by his frustrated bewilderment at the situation. She looked at him, at the whip-hard strength of his body, the dark, sexy good looks which had turned every girl’s head at school when he had joined years ago. He had only been sixteen at the time, but already his face had held promise of the powerfully striking man he was to become.

‘I am trying to be reasonable, Isobel,’ he said in a voice that didn’t sound reasonable at all. ‘I am trying to work out whether there’s something here I’m missing or whether you need to be carted off to the nearest asylum in a strait-jacket.’

His eyes narrowed on her, curiously light eyes that were especially striking given the darkness of his hair and the olive tint of his skin. He was Italian, the son of emigrants who had settled in England, choosing their spot carefully so that their brilliant and gifted only son could be sent to one of the finest private schools in the country. He had easily gained a place on a scholarship and had landed among the students, bright enough but mostly with rich backgrounds, like a leopard in a flock of sheep.

He was different from them all, and he had never seemed to give a damn. He hadn’t needed to. His brains were enough to guarantee respect. At sixteen, he possessed a formidable intellect that, it was whispered, outranked some of the professors. His mind was brilliant and creative, and his drive to succeed was formidable. Nothing since had changed.

‘I know what I’m doing, Lorenzo,’ she whispered, looking away to her hands which were clasped in front of her.

‘You damn well don’t!’ he roared, and she glanced nervously at him and then at the door.

‘You’ll bring everyone rushing up to see what’s going on!’

‘And I’ll tell them exactly what I’m telling you now! That you’ve gone off your rocker!’

‘You don’t understand!’ she retaliated, and he moved towards her.

‘What don’t I understand?’ He stood in front of her, staring down.

For a second she didn’t have a clue what to say. From the start there had been a thread of suspicion underneath his anger at her decision and she realised that her words, spontaneously spoken, had tightened the thread. She couldn’t afford for that to happen. He was too clever by half for him to be allowed a glimpse of the truth behind the black farce.

‘I care about Jeremy,’ she said, not meeting his eyes, and he tilted her chin up in a rough gesture.

‘Like hell you do.’ His hand moved from her chin to coil into her hair so that she was forced into looking at him. ‘There’s only one person you care about. Would you like me to prove it to you?’ His mouth twisted into a smile but there was nothing gentle in it.

‘Lorenzo, don’t!’

‘Why? Are you frightened?’

‘No, of course I’m not frightened!’ She tried to laugh but it came out as a choked sound. ‘I am going to marry him,’ she said, placing her palms on his chest and feeling his masculine energy whip into her like an electric current. ‘You may not like the idea, but it’s a fact of life and there’s no point in trying to do anything about it.’

‘You were my lover,’ he said in a low, rough voice. ‘Were you playing games behind my back with him? Is that it?’

‘No!’

‘You hardly saw him when you were at university. You hardly went home and weekends were with me.’ His brain was ticking, thinking it through, applying the same ruthless intelligence to the enigma as he applied to any problem. ‘He could hardly have come up to see you during the week. He wouldn’t have been able to wangle the time off from his job.’

‘He wrote,’ she admitted. It was a small concession and it was true. Jeremy had written.

‘You arranged a wedding courtesy of written correspondence?’ Lorenzo sneered, and his grasp on her hair tightened. ‘Don’t make me laugh. You went out with the boy for one term when you were sixteen, yet you set a wedding-date by virtue of a few letters?’

‘This is pointless,’ she whispered, and anger flooded his face.

‘You,’ he said grimly, ‘have been mine since you were sixteen. You are twenty now and we have been lovers for over a year. Jeremy has never been a part of that picture. You have always belonged to me.’

The words invaded her mind and threw up images of Lorenzo, his strong arms wrapped around her, his mouth exploring her body. He had been her first and only lover.

‘I belong to myself,’ she muttered, trying to wriggle free.

‘Tell me that you’re in love with him,’ Lorenzo murmured savagely in her ear. ‘Let me hear you say it.’

He was so close to her that she could feel his heart beating, smell the rough sweetness of his skin. Ever since she had known that she would marry Jeremy, she had avoided Lorenzo Cicolla like the plague, because his proximity was the one thing she had feared most and, standing here, she knew that she had been right.

‘You can’t, can you?’ he taunted. ‘Then why? Has he threatened you? Answer me!’

‘Of course not,’ she heard herself say quickly, too quickly. ‘I’ve known him since we were children. We played together. We had the same set of friends.’

‘I played marbles with a girl called Francesca when I was ten but that didn’t automatically mean that we were destined for each other, for God’s sake! Anyway, you’re talking in the past tense. The past tense is history.’

‘History makes us!’

‘You forget, I know him well too. Well enough to know that he can be dangerous. He has always taken risks, stupid risks, and the only reason he’s got away with them is because his parents have had the money to bail him out every time.’

‘He holds down a job!’

‘That means nothing.’

‘Why are you his best man if you hate him so much?’ she asked bitterly. Why are you? Why did you have to be here?

‘Don’t you know? He offered it as a challenge, Isobel, and I never refuse a challenge.’

‘You’re as bad as he is.’

‘My intelligence outstrips his,’ he said in a hard, controlled voice. ‘Any risks I take are born from cool calculation. Jeremy saw me as a threat the minute I set foot in that school and when he discovered that I couldn’t be bullied into taking his orders, he did the next best thing. He decided to befriend me, and frankly I didn’t care one way or the other. But don’t you know that underneath the friendship there has always been an undercurrent of envy and resentment?’

‘I know,’ Isobel muttered. ‘But he did like you.’

‘He respected me.’ Lorenzo said this without a trace of vanity. ‘When he asked me to be his best man, we both knew the reason. The reason was you.’

She turned away, not wanting to hear any more. Everything he said was tearing her apart.

‘You were the prize draw,’ he mocked. ‘You have always been the prize draw. In this little, tight-knit community, you were the light that outshone the rest. You dazzled everyone. You were the greatest trophy.’

‘Where is this getting us, Lorenzo?’ she asked, doing her utmost to keep the misery out of her voice.

‘You’re catapulting yourself headlong into disaster,’ he grated, a dull red flush spreading over his cheeks. ‘There is still time to get out of its path.’

This, she knew, was the closest he would ever get to begging, and it made every bone in her body ache with the craving to do just what he asked.

Everything he had said about Jeremy was true. Jeremy had been obsessed with her. He had singled her out and it had never really occurred to him that his privileged background, which had bought him everything, couldn’t similarly buy him her. He had proposed to her when she was sixteen, still at school, while he had been at university, four years her senior. She had laughed. Now the joke was on her.

‘I will marry Jeremy——’ she looked at her watch ‘—in less than thirty minutes’ time,’ she said in a whisper, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’

His lips tightened and his expression changed subtly from anger to contempt. She didn’t know which she hated more.

‘I never took you for a coward or a fool, Isobel Chandler, but I’m rapidly revising my opinion.’

‘People are more complex than you give them credit for,’ she said in a low voice.

‘What are you trying to say to me?’ His eyes glinted and the sun, streaming in behind him through the large bay window, gave him a brooding, dangerous air that frightened and excited her. He had always frightened and excited her, she realised. He had walked into that school and she had been open-mouthed. She and every other girl in the class. They had been a group hesitatingly crossing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood, realising with an uncertain thrill that boys were not quite as uninteresting as they had once assumed. Lorenzo Cicolla with his bronzed skin and his black hair, four years older but vastly more mature than the other boys of his own age, had captivated their imagination. They had giggled from the sidelines, observed him from the distance with the blushing innocence of youth.

The fact that he had not looked at her, at any of them, even with the mildest of curiosity, had only added to his appeal. In fact, it was only when she was sixteen, ironically through Jeremy, that they had struck up a tentative friendship and he had admitted, with amusement at her reaction, that he had always noticed her. He might have been young, but he had already cultivated the dark, intense composure that had hardened as he got older.

‘I’m not trying to say anything.’

‘No? Why do I get the impression that you’re talking in riddles?’

‘I have no idea.’ She shrugged but her hands were trembling, and she quickly stuck them behind her back and clasped them together.

‘What did those letters say?’

She gave him a blank look, and then realised what he was talking about. She might have guessed that he would not have left for too long her unwary admission that Jeremy had written to her. There had only been one letter, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

‘This and that,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘Why are we going through this?’

‘Be more specific.’

‘I can’t. I don’t remember.’

‘Ah.’ His face cleared and he shot her a cruel, cold look. ‘You can’t remember what was said in those letters, yet you still decided to marry the man.’

‘No! You don’t understand! You’re putting words into my mouth,’ she said in confusion.

‘Can you blame me, dammit?’ He gripped her and his eyes were so ferocious that she was terrified that he would do something awful, shake her until she came apart. She opened her mouth to protest and his lips met hers in a kiss that was fuelled by anger.

Isobel whimpered and pushed at him and eventually he stood back and stared down at her.

‘What’s the matter, Isobel?’ he asked, his mouth twisting. ‘Can’t you bear to bid a fond farewell to your lover?’

‘Stop it!’ she moaned. She felt close to tears. When she had first told him about Jeremy, he had been angry, but proud. Too proud to question. He had stormed out of her university flat and had not returned. Time had obviously worked on his fury, stoking it. It was a strange, back-handed compliment to her, but one she would rather have avoided.

‘Why?’ he snarled.

‘You know why! I belong to Jeremy now. It’s just the way it is.’

He turned away abruptly, but not before she caught the hatred that her remark had aroused. She realised, because she knew him so well, that she had not phrased her heated reply in the most tactful way possible, but just then, with her passions threatening to soar out of control, she had had to say something that would deflect him from realising how powerful his effect on her still was.

She made a stilted move towards him, then there was a knock on the door and she sprang back as though she had been burned.

It was her father. He came into the room and gave them a puzzled look, in answer to which Lorenzo said, in a normal voice, as though nothing had happened between them, ‘Just wishing the bride good luck. I doubt I shall see much of her once the wedding is under way, and we’ve known each other for so long and——’ he faced her with a smile even though his eyes were as hard as diamonds ‘—so well, that I thought a private last farewell would be in order.‘

Her father came into the room, oblivious to the undercurrents, and nodded with genial understanding.

‘Quite understand, my dear fellow,’ he said warmly. He had always liked Lorenzo. ‘Lucky chap, getting this beautiful daughter of mine.’

Lorenzo looked at her with icy courtesy. ‘I don’t know whether luck had a great part to play in it. Love, perhaps, wouldn’t you say, Isobel?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, reaching out to hold her father’s hand. She couldn’t look at Lorenzo. That would have been a Herculean feat quite beyond her just at that moment.

‘Well, dear girl, luck or love doesn’t change the fact that your time has come.’ Her father cleared his throat and patted her hand and she thought how true his unwitting choice of expression was. ‘I hope you’re not feeling too dicky. I need your support or else I might just collapse with nerves before we make it to the altar.’ He turned to Lorenzo with a grin. ‘Wait until you’re my age and your daughter is about to marry. You’ll soon discover what nerves are all about. I’ve addressed enough roomfuls of people, but I’ve never felt this fraught before.’ He rested his hand on his stomach. ‘Viola says that it’s indigestion caused by trying to fit my frame into this outfit. Mothers! Don’t know a thing.’ His voice held the same level of tender affection when he spoke of his wife as hers did when she spoke of him.

‘Try telling them that,’ Lorenzo said drily. ‘My mama has always maintained that she rules the roost, which, of course, she does.’ They both laughed at this and Isobel forced her lips into a mimicry of a smile.

‘Well, my dear, shall we go down and make our grand entrance?’ He looked at Lorenzo. ‘Jeremy has been looking for you. Told him I didn’t know whether you’d arrived or not. Didn’t know that you were up here, paying your last respects, so to speak.’ He had moved towards the door, his mind already on the task ahead, and he missed their various reactions to Jeremy’s name.

Isobel clutched his hand and they stood aside so that Lorenzo could leave first, which he did, taking the steps two at a time. She heard his footsteps fading along the marble hallway and felt a dreadful sense of resignation, as if she had aged fifty years in the space of half an hour.

The wedding-ceremony and the reception were both being held in the massive yellow and white marquee, which had been connected to the back doors. She wouldn’t even have the impersonal, imposing view of the inside of a church to fall back on. No, in the marquee they would all be standing close together, too close. Her mother had thought it a wonderful idea, and with cheerful apathy Isobel had agreed. Now she wished that she hadn’t.

She and her father walked sedately down the winding staircase, through the hallway, into the grand apricot and green drawing-room, which had efficiently been cleared of empty glasses and full ashtrays by some of the hired help, and finally through the open French doors and into the marquee, and the further they progressed, the stiffer Isobel felt.

By the time they reached the marquee, and all eyes swivelled in their direction, she felt dead inside. She stared straight ahead, not meeting anyone’s eye, least of all her dissenting clique of friends who had all, naturally, convened in the front row. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Abigail—straight blonde hair, firm features, disapproving eyes.

Ahead she saw Lorenzo, dark and deadly and staring at her with a veiled contempt which only she would recognise. And beyond him Jeremy, dear, obsessed Jeremy, whose fate would now be entwined with hers forever.

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