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      With thanks to the immortal Jane

      CHAPTER ONE

      NOT a single thing had changed in the cobbled streets around the medieval market hall since the stormy day he’d driven away like a bat out of hell, swearing never to set foot in the place again. Ten years on, the steep roofs and stone mullions typical of local architecture glowed in the sun as he left the town centre for Broad Street to walk past graceful old buildings, the private dwellings outnumbered by medical consultants, banks, chartered accountants, solicitors and even interior designers. To satisfy his curiosity he went inside the bank he was aiming for and learned that one thing had changed. But on his way out he heard a voice behind him exchanging greetings with one of the bank clerks and stopped dead, his heart slamming rabbit punches against his ribs. He turned slowly, and felt a jolt of visceral satisfaction when the woman walking towards him turned so deathly pale he almost put out a hand to steady her.

      ‘James!’ She swallowed, so visibly shocked his satisfaction doubled as he held the door open for her.

      ‘Why, hello! How are you, Harriet?’ he asked affably.

      ‘Very well.’ A statement which was such a palpable lie he almost laughed in her face. ‘And you?’

      ‘Never better.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Good to see you again, but I can’t stop—running late. Goodbye.’

      James Crawford strode down the street without a backward glance, angry because the chance sighting of Harriet Wilde had affected him so violently. She’d changed out of all recognition from the girl he’d once adored. The girl who’d shut him out of her life and changed his own for ever.

      Harriet stood transfixed outside the bank, staring at the man striding away down the hill. At last she let out the breath she’d been holding and turned, shaken, to make for her car. For years after the painful break up she had dreamed of meeting James Crawford again. The result had been too many sleepless nights, and weight loss that ruined her looks, according to the siblings who’d accused her of dieting. And in time she had stopped imagining that every tall, dark male figure she spotted in the distance was James, mainly because in ten long years she had never actually laid eyes on him again. And now she had at last bumped into him, fate arranged it to be after a hard day’s work when she probably looked every minute of the ten years since their last meeting. She hadn’t bothered with lipstick since lunch, either. She smiled bitterly. It would take a lot more than lipstick to mend fences with James Crawford. Who was sure to be a husband and father long since. Harriet’s sharp twinge of pain at the thought was the last straw. She’d been so sure she felt nothing for him any more. But it was only natural to feel something, if only to wonder what he was doing here after all this time. Her phone rang as she turned up the steep, winding drive but she let her father’s call go to message. After the devastating encounter with James she was in sore need of some peace at her own place before tackling the evening ahead.

      When Harriet had qualified as a chartered accountant she accepted a job with a local firm instead of a tempting offer from a London-based company, and then astonished her family by announcing that she wanted to move permanently into the Lodge at River House.

      ‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’ had demanded Julia, the eldest of the three Wilde sisters. ‘It’s so small!’

      It was also self-contained, enough distance from the main house for privacy, but near enough to keep a monitoring eye on it. ‘I like it there,’ Harriet had told her. ‘I’ve always used the Lodge to study, anyway. It’s surely not unreasonable at my age to want a place of my own.’

      Aubrey Wilde had dismissed the idea instantly. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Why live down there alone?’

      Because it would be infinitely preferable to life alone with him at the main house. Julia, the brilliant one, edited a fashion magazine in London, and rarely made time to come back to River House. Neither did the prettier, but considerably less brilliant Sophie, who was too involved with her child and husband, and her social life in Pennington.

      ‘If you don’t agree, Father, I’ll get a flat in the town,’ had been Harriet’s impassive response. And because she was the daughter who did everything by the book, other than one teenage episode he preferred to forget ever happened, Aubrey Wilde had reluctantly agreed.

      It would be a fight to get his agreement tonight. Harriet’s mouth tightened as she wriggled into her favourite dress for morale. As a further boost she released her hair from its severe daytime coil and went to work with a brush. She alone had inherited her mother’s abundant