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      CHAPTER ONE

      JESSICA GRIMACED with exasperation as her phone rang, disturbing her train of thought. This was the fifth time it had rung this morning. How on earth was she going to get even the research done for this new book, with all these interruptions?

      As she reached for the receiver she remembered that her sister had told her she ought to employ a secretary: with two definitive books in her particular field published already she was regularly in demand to speak at seminars and universities. Initially she had quite enjoyed these opportunities to lecture on her work, but now she was finding she was having to cut down on these activities. There was only three months to go before the draft of her third book was due at her publishers and as yet she was only half way there.

      Rather abruptly she spoke into the receiver, her frown deepening as she heard her sister’s anxious voice on the other end of the line.

      ‘Jess … please … you’ve got to help me … I just can’t cope any longer. David’s behaving so oddly. I’m sure there’s someone else …. He’s so … so indifferent towards me …’

      The mixture of pity and irritation churning inside her was not an unfamiliar one. Jessica had never wanted her elder sister to marry David Chalmers; right from the start she had recognised him as a weak, vain man who would soon grow tired of her sister’s open adoration and start to stray.

      But what she had not bargained for, was that David would want to stray in her direction! Listening to her sister’s outpourings with one ear, she started to doodle absently on the pad in front of her, her frown deepening when she realised that what she had drawn was a caricature of her brother-in-law’s boyishly handsome features. Angrily she stroked through the sketch. The desire that David insisted he had for her was not something she returned. On the contrary she loathed the man; found him vain and shallow to the point where her irritation often threatened to boil over, but so far she had always managed to keep her temper under control, more for her sister’s sake than her own. Andrea had fallen head over ears in love with David during her university days when she had been one of his students. Delicate, blonde and rather fragile as Andrea had been in those days it was easy for Jessica to see why her sister had appealed to David, especially when one took into account the rather substantial amount of money both she and Andrea had inherited from their father on his death. Oh yes, David had always had a healthy respect for money and for all the comfort it could provide.

      It was Andrea who had bought the large five-bedroomed house they lived in, on the better side of town; and it was Andrea’s investments that provided the money for the new BMW every two years, and private school for their son William. But the most damnable thing of all, at least as far as Jessica was concerned, was that when it came to revealing to her sister her husband’s inadequacies, her hands were tied.

      From the moment her first book had started to be acclaimed a success David had been a nuisance. At first she had found his over-attentiveness in public, his constant claims to being what he termed ‘her only real male relative’, and his equally unacceptable physical overtures towards her whenever they met, more of an irritation than a threat.

      She had presumed that Andrea, having gone ahead and married the man, was well aware of her husband’s weaknesses; and where better for a man with David’s taste for a succession of adoring, nubile young women in his life to be employed than at a university as a lecturer?

      But as Jessica had discovered over Christmas, her sister seemed to have a facility for blinding herself to her husband’s true nature.

      When she had come upon Jessica struggling in David’s arms, in the study, where she had gone to borrow some books, Andrea had immediately leapt to the conclusion that Jessica had been the one doing the inviting. For weeks afterwards there had been a coolness between the sisters, which Jessica suspected had affected her more than it did Andrea. Although Andrea was the elder, in many ways it had always been she, Jessica, who had been the stronger of the pair for all the three years’ difference in their ages.

      It had been Andrea who almost collapsed following the death of their father from a heart-attack, her grief driving her to the edge of a nervous breakdown, even though neither of them had seen him since his divorce from their mother ten years previously.

      Jessica had been stunned to discover that they had been included in their father’s will along with the two children from his second marriage. Following the break-up of their parents’ marriage her father had emigrated to Australia, where he had done very well for himself financially.

      Jessica had gone to his funeral: Andrea had not been well enough to make the flight, but Jessica had felt totally out of place there; a stranger who had no right to be amongst the grieving family of a man whom she barely knew.

      It had been following her father’s death, as a catharsis for the guilt she had unexpectedly felt, that she had written her first book; basing it on research which she had spent almost two years gathering. The book dealt with the problems arising from the break-up of family units and its effect on the members of those families and its publication so soon after she had obtained her degree in psychology had caused quite a stir.

      She had followed it up eighteen months ago with a more detailed study on the long-lasting effects of childhood events, including parental divorce, on children, and that book too had been received very well. She had, or so her publisher claimed,