CHAPTER ONE

      “THAT was Uncle Leo’s car!” Jamie glanced up from the hand-held computer game that was his latest obsession, his brown eyes alight with excitement as a sleek silver-grey Aston Martin appeared behind them on the quiet road that led from the suburbs of Stockport towards the contrasting wildness of the Peak District and overtook the elderly Escort Estate in one smooth manoeuvre. “Isn’t it super? It does almost two hundred miles an hour.”

      “Does it really?” Maddy responded drily. “Pity the speed limit’s only seventy.”

      “Oh, Uncle Leo never goes too fast,” her son confided. “Though he can when he’s in Germany—they don’t have a speed limit there, and I bet he really bombs along!”

      “I expect he does,” Maddy conceded. “Remind me never to accept an invitation from him.”

      Jamie returned her a scathing look. “You wouldn’t be scared would you?” he queried, with all the scorn of a bright eight-year-old for anything that could be thought remotely cissy.

      “Yes, I would,” she confessed without hesitation. “I’ve too healthy a regard for my own skin to want to dash around at that sort of speed with only a tin box around me.”

      Jamie chuckled with laughter, and turned his attention back to the challenge of the EcoWarrior, the tip of his tongue between his teeth as he zapped out the greenhouse gasses to repair the hole in the ozone layer. It had been a gift from his Uncle Leo, who owned the company that made it.

      Well, at least forewarned was forearmed, Maddy reflected wryly. In fact, she ought to have guessed that he would be here—if she had allowed herself to think about him; but the habit of refusing to let herself think about him had become deeply ingrained over the years. She became aware that her hands were clenching the wheel a little too tightly, and made a conscious effort to relax them. She could cope with meeting Leo Ratcliffe again.

      The telephone call from her sister-in-law had come in the small hours of the morning. She still wasn’t quite sure how she was supposed to feel. Jeremy, the husband she had walked out on nearly six years ago, was dead—killed in a skiing accident. Off-piste, of course, and in defiance of all the avalanche warnings; sensible caution had never been Jeremy’s strong point—he had always lived as if he believed himself to be indestructible.

      Yes, she was sad—sad for the thought of what might have been, if only the spoilt little boy she had married had ever been able to grow up. And sad for a man who at least had known how to enjoy life—albeit with such magnificent selfishness—who suddenly was not there any more. He hadn’t even reached his thirtieth birthday.

      She glanced down at the child by her side, his soft brown head bent in deep concentration over his game. So far he seemed to have taken the news quite well. But at just eight years old he was just getting to the age when a father was important to him—and whatever else she might have accused Jeremy of, she couldn’t deny that he had tried to be a good one. Once a month, regular as clockwork, he had arrived to take his son down to Hadley Park for his weekend visit.

      Hadley Park…Of course—the beautiful old house, barely beyond the suburbs of Manchester but seemingly a world away, would be Jamie’s now. A wry smile curved her delicate mouth at the thought Jeremy, whose family had owned it for generations, had always seen it as nothing but a millstone, while she had loved it. Unfortunately, after death duties had taken their toll, there wasn’t likely to be much money left to keep it up, she reflected pragmatically. But it would be a shame to have to sell it.

      The quiet roads out of Manchester had once been so familiar to her, and now they brought the memories flooding back. She hadn’t been back to Hadley Park since the day she had walked away from the wreckage of her marriage.

      It had been a tough decision at the time, to strike out on her own with a small child in tow—she’d had no family to back her, and no marketable skills that she’d known of to earn her living. But her marriage had been going wrong virtually from the beginning, and finding out that her husband was sleeping with her best friend had just been the last straw.

      She had often wondered why he hadn’t married Saskia in the first place. He had known her long before he had met herself—in fact it had been Sass who introduced them. And if not then, why not later? He had known that she would