Marriage Reclaimed: Marriage at a Distance / Marriage Under Suspicion / The Marriage Truce. Sara Craven
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Former journalist SARA CRAVEN published her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.
Marriage Reclaimed
Marriage at a Distance
Marriage Under Suspicion
The Marriage Truce
Sara Craven
Table of Contents
Marriage at a Distance
THE air in the study was stale and cold. It was gloomy, too, with the curtains at the long windows half drawn against a February dusk.
But the girl who sat curled up in the big leather chair beside the fireplace had not switched on any of the lamps, or lit the neatly laid fire waiting in the grate.
Her only response to the chill in the room had been to spread an old velvet smoking jacket over her legs like a rug. And every so often she looked down at it, touching the worn pile gently, breathing the faint aroma of cigars that rose from it.
Impossible to think that Lionel would never wear it again. That he would never come in through that door, large, loud and unrelentingly kind, rubbing his hands together and exclaiming about the weather, his face red from tramping over the hills with the dogs, or riding out on his latest hunter.
When the new chestnut had come back yesterday without him, Sadie, his girl groom, had said dourly that she’d warned him the horse was too fresh. But the worst they’d expected was that Lionel had been thrown, perhaps suffered a broken collarbone.
Instead, as Dr Fraser had told them, the massive heart attack that he’d suffered had probably knocked him from the saddle. It was also, he’d added gently, the way Lionel would have wanted to go.
Joanna could accept that. Lionel had always been restless, she thought. Always active. Since his retirement as chairman of Verne Investments five years ago, he’d been forever looking for ways to fill his days. He would never have wanted to be chronically ill, perhaps bedridden, the rush and bustle he’d thrived on denied him.
But that did not make it any less of a shock for those left behind, she thought, the muscles in her throat tightening.
And the question endlessly revolving in her tired