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      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Concept Page

       About the Author

       Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Copyright

       End Page

CHAPTER ONE

      ALL THE WAY home from the interview her head was aching. She loathed driving in London’s traffic at the best of times, and today, tensed up as she was with anxiety over the interview, her temples had started pounding almost as soon as she got into her car.

      She was a nervous driver at the best of times, and as though other drivers sensed it they ruthlessly cut in on her, flaunting their superior self-confidence and skill in front of her aching eyes.

      It was a relief to turn into the long drive of the house, a huge Victorian pile in Wimbledon with a massive garden. Her parents had bought it just before the twins were born.

      Several other cars were pulled up untidily on the drive.

      Even before she opened the front door she could hear the thud of pop music. As she turned the door handle and walked in, an adolescent male voice called out, ‘She’s home!’

      The music stopped. Upstairs several doors slammed, and several pairs of feet thudded down towards her. Being left with the task of singlehandedly bringing up her four teenage siblings when only twenty-two herself hadn’t been easy. Now, six years later, she was used to it, or so she told herself.

      Sebastian and Benedict, the twins, came down first; tall, blond, and extraordinarily good-looking, at just short of twenty-one they dazzled the eye, even when one was used to it. Miranda was close behind them, eighteen, and as dark as her brothers were fair. William came last, glasses perched on the end of his nose, fair hair tousled.

      There were times like this, when they surrounded her with their love and affection, when she would willingly have given them ten times as much as she had to take the place of the parents they had all lost.

      There were others when she felt almost claustrophobic from the unending twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week responsibility that went with her guardianship of her four younger siblings.

      No one, least of all themselves, had expected that two such brilliant and dazzling stars of the London stage as Charles and Cressida Bellaire would be so unceremoniously and unfairly deprived of life at the very peaks of their careers, and after the initial grief that had overwhelmed those they had left behind had come the appalling task of dealing with the financial chaos of a couple who had wholeheartedly and energetically put into practice their belief that life should be lived a day at a time.

      Of course, had he known of his untimely death, their father might have had the forethought to provide for his families’ future, but as it was…

      They had been a celebrated and glittering couple, twice married to one another and once each to other partners, and their deaths had left a hole in the lives of their children and close friends that Beatrice doubted could ever be filled.

      She was their eldest child, the child of their first youthful marriage. Impossible to imagine that her mother had only been eighteen when she was conceived. They had been divorced shortly after she was born—her father had been offered a prestigious contract in Hollywood, and her mother had balked at going with him, preferring to stay in Stratford where she was getting