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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘ALL READY FOR the wedding tomorrow, are you? What time is she getting married?’

      Kate shook her head wryly in answer to the first part of the postman’s question and offered, ‘Half-past three,’ to the second.

      As she collected the unusually thick pile of envelopes from him with the warm smile that transformed the serious repose of her small, heart-shaped face, she wondered how long it would take her daughter to drive up from London. Sophy had promised to set off early so that they would have at least a couple of hours to catch up on one another’s news before they started going through all the arrangements for tomorrow.

      It hadn’t been easy: organising the wedding for her daughter and her son-in-law-to-be, with both of them so busy in their careers that she hadn’t even seen Sophy since the announcement of her engagement at Christmas, apart from one brief occasion just after Easter when she had gone to spend a few days with Sophy at John’s family home in the south of England, at their invitation.

      She had been dreading the visit, even though Sophy had assured her that John’s parents were looking forward to meeting her, and had confirmed that she had told them everything.

      That had been a hard decision for her to make, but she had felt that she owed it to Sophy to permit her to tell her in-laws-to-be the truth.

      After the visit she was glad she had done so. John’s parents had turned out to be a very pleasant and understanding couple in their late fifties. John was the youngest of their brood of four children, and Mary Broderick had had the same kind of briskly maternal warmth that Kate remembered from her own mother…and still missed.

      How her mother would have enjoyed tomorrow. She had adored her only granddaughter…both her parents had, and she still missed them dreadfully, even though it was now nearly eight years since the plane crash that had taken their lives.

      They had been marvellous parents, so understanding, so loving and protective of both her and Sophy. As she stood in her comfortable if rather shabby kitchen, she felt the hot burn of tears stinging the back of her eyes and grimaced to herself. She was thirty-seven years old, for heaven’s sake…far too old to indulge in a silly bout of weeping, even if tomorrow she was going to have to close the door on a very precious period of her life.

      Sophy, married…She grinned a little to herself, her mood changing. At nineteen Sophy had been a dedicated career woman, swearing that marriage for her was something she would not even contemplate until she was close to thirty, and yet here she was at twenty, going on twenty-one, fathoms deep in love; insisting that she was married traditionally from her childhood home in the small village church, surrounded by the people she had grown up among in an environment totally different from the fast pace of her London life.

      Sophy was a thoroughly modern young woman, highly qualified and skilled, independent, ambitious and very mature. Kate loved her dearly, but from the day that Sophy left home to go to university she had fought desperately to give her her freedom…not to cling or be possessive about her, even though at first she had missed her desperately.

      They had always been so close, and had stayed close despite the fact that Sophy now lived and worked in London, but from now on their relationship would be different…must be different. From now on, Sophy’s first loyalty must be to the man she was marrying tomorrow.

      Kate liked John, and would have liked him as a person even if he had not been deeply in love with her precious daughter.

      She liked his family, too…liked their warmth and closeness, liked the way they were making Sophy welcome into that family…and she was grateful to them for their compassion in so calmly accepting the history of Sophy’s conception and birth.

      It must have come as quite a shock to them to learn that their son was marrying Sophy, a girl whose mother had conceived her when she was barely sixteen and unmarried; she knew, had their positions been reversed and she been the one to discover that her child was marrying someone whose mother had been sixteen and unmarried when she conceived, that she would have had serious doubts as to both the emotional and moral stability of the parenting that child had received.

      Perhaps because of her own bitterly painful experience, she was very much aware that it took more to lay the foundations for a marriage that would hopefully be both loving and lasting than the exciting but sometimes short-lived intensity of physical and emotional desire. Things like mutual trust and respect…backgrounds and beliefs that meshed and sat easily within one another…a shared sense of humour and purpose.

      Sophy was a very sensible young woman, everything any mother could want in a daughter, and Kate considered herself to have been unfairly blessed in the gift of a daughter who had brought her so much joy-as though fate had relented of its earlier cruelty.

      From the kitchen window she could see the men hard at work in the garden erecting the marquee which was to hold tomorrow’s wedding guests, and she reminded herself that now was not the time to stand around daydreaming.

      She flicked through the post…most of it was cards for Sophy and John. She put these to one side, on the old pine dresser which her parents had inherited from her grandmother and she from them.

      Its wood gleamed softly with the polish of generations, the thick willow-patterned pottery setting off both the dark wood and the sunny yellow décor of her kitchen.