Hitched! (3 page)

To my annoyance, his engine leapt into life without so much as
a murmur of protest. I cast a reproachful look at Audrey as George reversed out
behind her, and changed gear.

‘You know, you could invest in a reliable car,’ he said, a
ghost of amusement in his voice.

‘I couldn’t get rid of Audrey,’ I said, instantly on the
defensive. ‘She’s a great car. It’s just that she can be a
little...temperamental.’

Or downright contrary, at times.

George raised an eyebrow. Have you ever met anyone who could
actually do that? Raise one brow? George could.

‘
Audrey
?’ he said.

‘She’s named after Audrey Hepburn. Because she’s so glamorous,’
I added when George seemed unable to make the connection.

‘Right.’ He glanced at me and then away, shaking his head a
little, but I could see the curl at the corner of his mouth.

I pushed my seat belt into place with a firm click. ‘She’s got
style,’ I said defiantly. Vintage, perhaps, but definitely style.

‘Lime green is an interesting choice of colour,’ George
commented.

‘It’s not everyone’s first choice, I know,’ I said, ‘but she
was the only car I could afford when I bought her. I washed dishes for three
years to pay for a car of my own,’ I told George. ‘Audrey’s a symbol as much as
a car.’

George swung the Land Rover out of the site gates and onto one
of the narrow lanes that criss-crossed the Whellerby estate. ‘I’m surprised to
hear Kevin Taylor’s daughter had to buy her own car,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t your
father buy you one? It’s not like he can’t afford it.’

My face closed down the way it always did when I had to talk
about my father. I hugged my arms together and looked out of the window. I
hadn’t taken a penny from him since I left school, and I wasn’t about to start
now.

‘I pay my own way,’ I said. ‘I always have, and I always
will.’

TWO

‘I didn’t even know Kevin Taylor had another daughter,’
said George.

I kept my eyes on the hedgerow brushing past my window. ‘Few
people do,’ I said. My voice was perfectly even, the way I had trained it to be
when I talked about my father. ‘I’m not sure he even knows himself any
more.’

‘How long is it since you’ve seen him?’

‘Six years. I made the mistake of asking if he’d come to my
graduation,’ I said. ‘He went to New York on business instead.’

As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I couldn’t think what had
possessed me to tell George Challoner of all people about that bitter memory. I
tensed, waiting for the sympathetic noises, but he surprised me.

‘I haven’t seen my parents for four years,’ he said, and I
slewed round in my seat to look at him in surprise. He was so golden, so
effortlessly charming. I couldn’t imagine him falling out with anyone.

‘Why not?’

‘We had an...er...disagreement,’ he said, lifting one hand from
the steering wheel and spreading it in an eloquent gesture of resignation. ‘It
culminated in one of those never-darken-our-doorstep-again conversations, and so
I haven’t.’

‘I know what those are like,’ I said, unprepared to find myself
sharing some fellow feeling with George.

‘Fun, aren’t they?’

‘Fabulous,’ I agreed. ‘Can’t get enough of them.’

‘Still, at least you’ve got your sister,’ said George. ‘I did
family estrangement as a job lot. I haven’t seen my brother since then either.’
He spoke lightly, but I sensed the pain lurking, and I looked away.

‘Perhaps I should be grateful for Saffron, then,’ I said,
keeping my tone light to match his. ‘Although if she upsets Lord Whellerby and
anything goes wrong with Hugh’s contract, I will personally strangle her and
then I’ll end up without any family either.’

‘Don’t worry about Roly,’ said George reassuringly. ‘He’s
really not the grudge-bearing type.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ I gnawed fretfully at my thumbnail.

‘Is your sister really going to marry Jax Jackson?’ George
asked to distract me after a moment.

‘Half-sister,’ I said automatically. ‘And so she says. I’m not
really sure what it’s all about,’ I confessed, shifting back with a sigh to look
out of my window where the hedgerows were a blur of spring green.

‘As far as I can tell Jax was a mediocre pop star until he
started dating Saffron and became a celebrity. Now he’s on the cover of all
those glossy magazines you get at the checkout in the supermarket. He seems to
spend most of his time on tour, but Saffron’s so thrilled by the idea of getting
married that he appears to be incidental to the whole process.

‘It’s going to be the wedding of the century, I gather,’ I
added with a sigh. Ever since Saffron had announced her engagement, she had been
in a frenzy of wedding plans, and if I never heard the word wedding again right
then, I’d have been more than happy.

George glanced at me. ‘So are you going to be bridesmaid?’

‘No, thank God. Saffron did ask me, but obviously only because
she thought she should, and when I said I didn’t think I’d fit with her other
bridesmaids and would rather just be happy for her on the sidelines, she was so
relieved it was funny. I really don’t blend with Saffron’s décor,’ I said to
George. ‘She’s a socialite and I’m an engineer...you can probably imagine how
much we have in common!’

‘I’d certainly never have guessed you were sisters,’ he agreed.
‘You don’t look at all alike.’

‘No, Saffron’s gorgeous,’ I said without rancour. ‘Her mother
was a model, and Saffron gets her looks from her, not my father. Saffron’s
blonde and bubbly and beautiful, and I’m...not.’

I wasn’t looking at George, but I could feel the blue eyes on
my profile. Instinctively, I lifted my chin a little higher to show him that I
didn’t care.

‘No one could argue that you were blonde,’ he said. ‘And I’d
put you down as prickly rather than bubbly, but otherwise I think you
underestimate yourself.’

‘You don’t need to be polite,’ I said, in what he probably
thought was a very prickly way. ‘I know I’m not beautiful. I’m not ugly either.
I’m just...ordinary. As my father never tired of telling people when I was
younger, Saffron got the beauty, and I got the brains.’

‘Ouch.’

‘It’s true.’ I shrugged. ‘Saffron and I are so different it’s
almost comical when we’re together, which isn’t very often.’

‘And yet it’s you she rings when she’s upset.’

‘That’s because she doesn’t have a mother. Tiffany ran off with
her personal trainer when Saffron was a baby, and she died a couple of years
after that. I always felt sorry for Saffron. She was the prettiest little girl,
and she’s always been the apple of my father’s eye, but nobody really had any
time for her.’

‘So you’re the big sister?’

‘That’s right. I was seven when my father decided a model
suited his image better than my mother. Mum didn’t want a divorce, but when
Tiffany got pregnant, Dad insisted. His company wasn’t as successful as it is
now, so the settlement was fairly modest, and Mum and I had a very ordinary
life. We lived in the suburbs and I went to the local school.

‘It was fine,’ I said, pushing away the memory of my mother
weeping at night when she thought I couldn’t hear her. It hadn’t been fine for
her. ‘But I had to spend two weeks every summer with my father, who was super
rich by then and kept getting richer. It was like being dropped into a whole
different world. I hated it,’ I said.

I sighed. ‘And then Mum died when I was fifteen.’

‘I’m sorry,’ George said, all traces of his usual lurking smile
gone. ‘That must have been hard for you.’

‘It was awful.’ I pressed my lips together in a straight line.
Just thinking about that time could still send a wave of desolation crashing
over me.

Mum was only thirty-nine when she dropped dead at the sink one
day. ‘The doctors said it was an embolism, and that she wouldn’t have felt a
thing. I wasn’t there,’ I told George. ‘I was at school, and a neighbour found
her. By the time I got home, they had taken Mum away.’

I swallowed hard, remembering how I had stood in the kitchen in
dazed disbelief. One minute my mother had been there, the next she wasn’t. Gone,
just like that.

There was nothing I could have done, even if I had been there.
Everybody said so. But deep down, I always felt as if I should have known. I
should have said goodbye and told her I loved her instead of cramming a piece of
toast in my mouth and running for the bus. I wish I could remember the last
thing I said to her, but I can’t. It was just an ordinary day.

And then it wasn’t.

‘My whole world fell apart.’ I’d almost forgotten that I was
talking to George by then.

My nice safe life had vanished the moment that clot blocked my
mother’s brain and I was pitched into an existence where nothing seemed certain
any more. For months I flailed around in a hopeless search for something to hold
onto, until I realised one day that the only thing I could be sure of was
myself.

Slowly, carefully, I built a new life, and I made it as secure
as I could. Friends sighed and called me a control freak, and maybe I was, but
routines and plans at least gave me a structure, one that nobody else could take
away from me without warning. Without them, I would have been lost.

‘Presumably you went to live with your father then?’ said
George after a moment.

‘If you can call being packed off to boarding school “living”
with him,’ I said. ‘At least I had Saffron in the holidays. She’s over seven
years younger than me, but neither of us had a mother and she was so desperate
for attention that we used to spend a lot of time together then.

‘It was Saffron who painted the eyelashes over Audrey’s
headlights,’ I told George.

‘I wondered about that.’

‘She was so pleased with them, I didn’t have the heart to paint
them out, and now they’re part of her.’ My smile was probably a little twisted.
‘Saffron’s spoilt, but she’s got a sweet nature and all she wants is a little
attention. Unfortunately, this wedding has made her hysterical.’ I sighed,
remembering the situation. ‘I just hope Lord Whellerby’s not too angry.’

‘You haven’t met Roly yet, have you? If you had, you’d know
you’ve got nothing to worry about,’ said George when I shook my head.

‘Easy for you to say,’ I said tensely. ‘It’s not your sister
having hysterics over your most important client!’

* * *

We were bowling up an avenue lined with stately trees.
To either side stretched lush parklands, with placid cows grazing under the
horse chestnuts. The Land Rover rattled over a cattle grid, the avenue curved
round over a hill, and I caught my first sight of Whellerby Hall. I’d been too
busy to visit before, and my jaw dropped.

It was an extravaganza of a house, a vast Baroque structure
with a domed roof in the centre, and two wings stretching out on either side,
set atop a slope on the far side of a serene lake.

George drove right up to the imposing entrance and parked with
a crunch of gravel. The door was opened by a cadaverous-looking individual who
looked offended by George’s cheerfully casual greeting but unbent enough to
explain that Lord Whellerby was in his private sitting room.

‘That’s Simms.’ George led the way up a sweeping marble
staircase, past massive oil paintings of naval battles and skimpily clad nymphs.
My father’s house was ostentatiously ornate, but still I had to make an effort
not to goggle at the sheer size of the Hall. ‘He was old Lord Whellerby’s
butler, and Roly inherited him along with the house. Roly’s terrified of
him.’

‘I don’t blame him.’

‘You’d get on well with Simms. He always refers to Roly as Lord
Whellerby too. He’d really like Roly to be out shooting peasants all day and
coming home to sit over his port and cigars.’

‘It’s a strange way to live, isn’t it?’ I said as we climbed
another flight of stairs, rather less imposing this time.

‘I know. I feel as if I’m part of a costume drama whenever I
come to see Roly. I keep expecting a dowager duchess to pop up and tick me off
for seducing the housemaids under the stairs—and no, before you ask,’ he said,
turning his head with a smile that did odd things to my breathing. ‘There are no
maids. A very efficient cleaning firm comes in once a week, and they’re far too
busy to dally with me anywhere.’

‘Disappointing for you,’ I said tartly to cover the fact that
my lungs were still not cooperating with the business of inflating and
deflating. Perhaps it was all these stairs, I thought hopefully. George
was
taking them awfully fast. It was hard to believe a
single smile could have such an effect.

‘Not at all. I’m fussy about who I dally with,’ said George. ‘I
like a challenge,’ he said, turning his head to look straight at me. ‘I like to
be intrigued. I like classy girls who don’t need me and maybe don’t even like
me. I like to feel that any dallying I do will lead to something
really...special.’

I waited for him to smile to show me that he was joking, but he
didn’t. He just kept looking into my eyes and for some reason my breathing got
all tangled up again.

So, nothing to do with his smile. Must be those stairs after
all.

‘Here we are.’ A minute or so later, when we had trekked down a
long corridor, and I had given up trying to work out whether or not he had been
serious, George flung open a door. ‘Frith to the rescue,’ he announced.

There was a moment of silence in the room, and then both
occupants of a sofa leapt to their feet.

I had a professional smile fixed on my face to greet Lord
Whellerby, but Saffron gave me no chance to make the fluent apology I had
planned. She stumbled across the room to throw herself into my arms. ‘Oh,
Frith,’ she wailed. ‘I’m so glad to see you! Everything’s gone so horribly
wrong!’

I held her close and patted her back comfortingly, while trying
to grimace apologetically over her shoulder at Lord Whellerby, who was hovering
anxiously. I could see why George had been amused when I insisted on referring
to him as Lord Whellerby. He had a pleasant face, fair skin that clearly flushed
as easily as mine, a solid figure that was already growing stout and a hesitant
air in marked contrast to George’s easy assurance.

I could feel George watching us, and, although I couldn’t see
his face, I knew that his eyes would be dancing. We must have looked ridiculous.
Saffron was so much taller than I was, she had to bend right over to bury her
head on my shoulder. She was shuddering with little sobs and clearly teetering
on the edge of hysterics. That was all I needed.

‘That’s enough, Saffron,’ I said sharply. ‘Stop crying and tell
me what you’re doing here.’

My sister is one of those irritating women who can cry
prettily. When I held her away from me, tears spangled the end of her beautiful
green eyes, and her soft mouth trembled, but under my stern gaze she made an
effort to gulp back her tears and bravely knuckled beneath her eyes, being
careful, I noted, not to smudge any of her mascara.

Roly—impossible to think of him as anything else now!—hovered
nearby, clearly torn between relief that Saffron had stopped crying at last and
alarm at my crisp approach.

‘I had to s-see you,’ Saffron hiccupped. ‘Daddy’s in Beijing
and there’s no one else.’

‘What’s the matter?’ She really did seem upset, I thought with
compunction. Perhaps there was something really wrong. ‘Is it Jax?’

‘No.’ The beautiful face crumpled and Saffron buried her head
back on my shoulder. ‘It’s Buffy!’

‘Buffy?’ I echoed blankly. ‘Who’s Buffy?’

‘My bridesmaid! My
chief
bridesmaid! She’s ruined
everything
!’

Another outburst of weeping. Roly wrung his hands helplessly,
and I began to feel a little frayed at the edges.