CHAPTER ONE

      SO MANY thoughts and emotions went through Emmie’s mind as she drove to the job interview that winter’s afternoon, chiefly how desperately she needed this position, and the tremendous hope that she would be successful in getting it. It didn’t matter that it was only temporary—probably a maximum of nine months—it paid extremely well and would afford her some financial breathing space.

      The work involved as assistant PA, and then acting PA while Mr Barden Cunningham’s PA took maternity leave, would be very demanding, which accounted for the high salary. But, though Emmie had endured a blip in her career during this last year—well, several blips in actual fact—she knew, previous to that, her work record was exemplary.

      Her secretarial training had been first class, and she had thought that, after three years with Usher Trading, she was really going places, and that she was due to be promoted as PA to one of the directors—only to go into work one Tuesday morning to learn, with utter astonishment, that the firm had folded. Usher Trading had, with a mile-long list of creditors, ceased trading.

      It had not been her only shock that month. She had still been getting over her astonishment that, overnight, or so it seemed, Usher Trading had gone under, when her stepfather had suffered a heart attack and had died. The fact that she’d been without a job or financial security had been neither here nor there to her then. She had lovedAlec Whitford as a daughter, and now he was gone.

      Emmie clearly remembered her own father. He had been a scientist dedicated to his work, and for a lot of the time had seemed to be in a world of his own. He had also died, in some experiment that had gone wrong, when she had been ten years old.

      Her life had been different then, Emmie recalled. Her family had lived in an elegant house in Berkshire and had been very comfortably off—sufficiently so for her mother to be able to indulge her love of antiques.

      They’d had a whole houseful of beautiful furniture when, two years after her husband’s death, her mother had married Alec Whitford. Alec had been a total contrast with Emmie’s father. Alec had loved to laugh, and had been full of life, but—he hadn’t liked work.

      Though it hadn’t been until after her mother’s death three years later, in one of those freak garden machinery accidents that were never supposed to happen, that Emmie had begun to have any inkling that she and Alec were not financially sound.

      She had been fifteen then. ‘Shall I get a job, Alec?’ she’d asked him, her thoughts on evening and weekend work.

      ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, sweetheart,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll sell something.’

      By the time she was eighteen, and had completed a most meticulous business training, there hadn’t been much left to sell. By then Emmie had grown up fast to value security above all else. She’d loved her stepfather, and wouldn’t have had him be any different, but he had seemed to make an art out of spending. She’d rather thought then—and later knew—that he was having a one-sided affair with his bookmaker—Alec doing the giving, his bookmaker taking.

      Emmie’s mother had died intestate, so the house had passed to Alec. By that time Alec’s mother, a formidable if slightly unconventional woman, had been living with them. Hannah Whitford had turned eighty, but was as sharp as a tack—and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Emmie had calculated that she must be some kind of step-grandmother to her, but when out of respect she’d addressed her as Mrs Whitford, the thin, straight, white-haired woman had advised her that, since she drew the line at being called ‘Granny’, Emmie could call her Aunt Hannah.

      So Aunt Hannah she had become. She had her own private pension—but, having already ‘lent’ her son her savings, had declined to let him see any of her pension. ‘If you’re that hard up,’ she’d told him forthrightly when he’d come on the scrounge, ‘sell the house!’

      So he had. And they’d moved to a three-bedroomed rented apartment in a very nice area of London. And Emmie had started work at Usher Trading. All in all, given that Emmie had learned to more and more value her security, she had come to love Aunt Hannah too, and the next three years had passed very pleasantly.

      And then Emmie had been made redundant and dear Alec had died. About that time, when Emmie had been trying to get a grip on things, she’d become startled to realise that Aunt Hannah was occasionally losing her grip a little!

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