Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       Copyright

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘IS THAT the bride? Where on earth did she get that dress?’ Grania demanded disparagingly. ‘Honestly, Nell, if Gramps had known what you were going to do with this place when he left it to you, he’d have had forty fits. It’s so …’ she wrinkled her small nose ‘so …’

      ‘Enterprising?’ Nell suggested drily.

      They were in the book-room. And the bride whose pretty white dress her stepsister had so disparaged was making her way on the arm of her groom beneath an archway of roses into the marquee that Nell and her small staff had spent the whole of the previous day putting up and organising.

      ‘Enterprising or not, I still say Gramps wouldn’t have approved. And you know it.’

      That was the trouble. Nell did. Her grandfather had been one of the old school: a stiff, military gentleman, fiercely proud of the tradition of his family and its service to its country. Fiercely loyal to everything he believed in, and that included an old-fashioned and outdated belief that he owed a responsibility, not just to his immediate family, but also to the small village that nestled less than a mile away from Easterhay’s front gates.

      The village had been there long before the first Hugo de Tressail had built his home there, but it had been under his auspices that the shabby collection of untidy dwellings had been superseded by his manorial hall, and the Norman church with its square tower that overlooked the gentle roll of the Cheshire plain.

      In the small church itself, a tomb marked the burial place of that first de Tressail, his stone effigy lying at rest on top of it in the classic medieval pose. Alongside him lay his wife, a small dog curled at her feet.

      She had been a Saxon Thane’s daughter, well born but poor, and it was supposed to be from her that every now and then throughout the generations a de Tressail woman would inherit her wheat-blonde Saxon hair.

      Nell had it herself, a straight waterfall of pale straw which she privately thought colourless. She would much rather have had her stepsister’s more vivid colouring, with its inheritance of Latin ancestry.

      ‘I wish I’d known you’d got one of these dos on this weekend,’ Grania continued disagreeably. ‘I’d never have bothered coming down.’

      ‘Then why did you?’ Nell asked her calmly.

      At first sight many people dismissed her as timid and withdrawn, but Nell had her own quiet strengths, her own firmly held beliefs and, so some people considered, more than a touch of her grandfather’s notorious stubbornness.

      ‘I need an advance on my allowance,’ Grania told her curtly. She saw Nell’s face and said sharply, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t look so po-faced. Joss won’t mind …’

      ‘Maybe not, but I don’t like you taking money from him,’ Nell told her stiffly.

      ‘Why ever not? He is our trustee and it is our money, although I’ll never understand why Gramps insisted on leaving everything tied up so stupidly. An allowance until I marry … then a small lump sum. I’d rather have the whole lot now, and I’ve a good mind to tell Joss as much.’

      ‘No, don’t do that.’

      Nell spoke more sharply then she had intended. Outside, the last few remaining guests had gone into the marquee. She had been rather surprised at the success of her small venture into commercialism, although as yet it was true that she had not made much of a profit, barely enough to pay the wages of the staff, in fact; but it was a start. A first small step on the road to independence …

      She and Grania were so different, and not just in looks. Grania had the fiery temperament of her Italian parents, Nell’s stepmother and her first husband, and she also had her careless, insouciant attitude towards money.

      Her success as a model should have made it possible for her to earn more than enough to live on, and not need the small allowance Nell’s grandfather had organised for her, but Grania had never seemed to realise exactly what their financial situation was. For all her sophistication—and she was sophisticated, far more so than Nell herself, who was three years her senior—she had appeared to have no idea that the allowance she spoke of so glibly came not from their grandfather’s estate, but from Joss Wycliffe’s own pocket.

      But, most shamingly of all, Nell knew that if she were to tell Grania the truth, she would not feel in the least mortified but would probably make some mocking quip about Joss being able to afford to pay her ten times as much as he did … which of course was true.

      There had been a time, some months before her grandfather’s death, when Nell had wondered if Joss’s constant visits to Easterhay were perhaps because he hoped to make Grania his wife. It had seemed the only explanation for the unlikely relationship which had sprung up between her grandfather and the man who had no compunction at all about saying that he had clawed his way up virtually from the gutter to achieve the multi-millionaire status he now had.

      He had moved into the area three years ago, buying a house on the opposite side of the village. Nell had heard the gossip about him before he moved in, but had scarcely expected that her grandfather would make a close friend of him, not for any snobbish reasons, but simply because her grandfather was a very reserved man, with few friends and the kind of sharp tongue that made people view him askance.

      And if it hadn’t been for that fateful fall, she doubted if Gramps would even have met Joss.

      Despite his age, and the handicap of a severe wound incurred during the action that had earned his KBE, her grandfather had always insisted on walking the five-mile perimeter of the parkland every morning after breakfast. The morning he first met Joss, just after the younger man had moved into the village, it had been frosty, and despite Nell’s protests Sir Hugo had insisted on going out, taking with him the German pointer that was his favourite companion. He had been seventy-eight then, crusty and irascible; and Nell had loved him desperately. He was virtually the only family she had.

      There was Grania, of course, but she and her stepsister had never been close. Grania had been with her mother and Nell’s father at the time of the horrific road accident in Italy which had robbed Lucia de Tressail of her life, and reduced Nell’s father to a speechless, bedridden form who never regained consciousness. He had survived his father by a matter of days, never knowing that he had inherited the earldom, and died before Nell had taken in the shock of her grandfather’s death. Grania had rung from Italy to break the news, saying, ‘It’s quite convenient in a way. That hospital must