CHAPTER ONE

      CLIAIRE’S hand was trembling. There had to be some kind of mistake, some kind of dreadful mistake.

      That didn’t go very far towards making her feel any better, though, and she subsided into the leather chair by the window with a sick, faint feeling.

      She leaned her head against the palm of her hand, her eyes flicking around the small, exquisite study, but not really seeing it at all.

      She would have to wait for him. He was due back any minute now, and everything would be neatly explained.

      She breathed a little sigh of relief at the thought of that and settled back in the chair, her eyes half closed. Outside, it was pitch dark, and freezing cold. It was March, but a bitterly cold March, with forecasters reminding them every day that England had not seen a spring like this for decades.

      Inside, however, the study was warm, as was the entire place. That had been one of the first things that had struck her when she had started working at Frilton Manor nearly a year ago. This was not one of those splendid country mansions which were breathtakingly beautiful to look at but dismally archaic inside. No, James Forrester was a man who liked his creature comforts, and he was wealthy enough to ensure that every one of them was indulged at the snap of a finger.

      Not for him vast, unheated rooms, threadbare carpets and unflattering portraits of deceased ancestors. The place was entirely heated, the carpets were luxuriously deep-piled and the unflattering ancestral portraits were confined to the gallery in the left wing. In their place an assortment of mostly Impressionistic masterpieces adorned the walls.

      It wasn’t so long ago that she had wandered through the rooms, lost in speechless wonder. Everything had been a revelation of good taste.

      Right now, with that little seven-by-five photo clutched in her hand, she felt as though all that impressionable, youthful ingenuousness had finally been killed off and she had to insist to herself that she was being prematurely pessimistic, that James would be able to explain away that cool blonde, with her arm linked through his, dressed in an ivory suit and holding a bunch of some unidentifiable flowers against her stomach.

      Next to him, with his impossibly impressive, dark and slightly cruel good looks, she was like an ice maiden, tall, pale and with a peculiar, frozen beauty of her own.

      Her fingers tightened on the photo and she found that she was breathing quickly, nervously, like a scared wild animal that had wandered into an unsuspected trap.

      Maybe, she thought with a rare stab of bitterness, this fear was simply a culmination of what she had been feeling, deep inside, for the past nine months, ever since she had begun sleeping with him. What, after all, had she to offer a man like James Forrester—someone with power, wealth and looks, a man who could crook a finger and have any woman he wanted running to him? She was no great beauty with her uneventful brown hair, blue eyes and pale complexion, a brunette who couldn’t tan, of all things.

      And she certainly did not inhabit his rarefied world of the rich, the privileged and the powerful. Her roots were humble ones, her parents both teachers and both now retired, safely tucked away in deepest Devon, a thousand light-years away from stocks and shares and the cut-throat concrete jungle which was his life blood.

      Which brought her to the photo and the inevitable question it raised: where was their relationship going? She was desperately in love with him, and she knew that he was fond of her and was attracted to her, that much had always been obvious in the flare in his eyes whenever they were together, but there it ended. He did not want commitment. That was something which had needed no explanation. It was evident in every caress, every touch that was unaccompanied by the declarations of love she longed to hear. It was as intangible but as powerfully present as the air she breathed.

      And for the past nine months she had, with increasing unease, played the game by his rules; but now, she thought, staring at the photo in front of her, things were going to change. She was not going to become one of those women who spent years miserably devoted to a man who had no intention of offering anything beyond the occasional meal out and sex on demand.

      God only knew why she