Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       Copyright

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘KATE, for goodness’ sake, it’s a dinner party I’m inviting you to, not a Roman orgy!’

      With wry exasperation, Sue reflected that her husband John had been right when he said that Kate would dig her heels in and prove to be as intractable about refusing this invitation as she had been in refusing all their others.

      She and Kate had been friendly ever since their High School days; they had grown up together, and yet despite that, there was a barrier between them now, that Kate used as a drawbridge, to pull up and hide herself behind.

      Sue knew why, of course, and she sighed inwardly, reflecting how perverse and cruel fate could be. No woman gifted with Kate’s looks and sensuality should live as she did, completely cutting herself off from almost all human contact. At least she had agreed now to put the farmhouse up for sale, Sue reflected. The land that had once gone with it was long gone, sold after Ricky’s death to pay off his gambling and other debts. Kate refused to blame Ricky for the wasteland their marriage had been, but Sue’s quick temper and loyalty to her friend were fired every time she thought about him. It was all very well for Kate to say that she was equally to blame; that she should never have married him. But she had been a naïve eighteen to his twenty-eight; still shocked by the sudden death of her father and the totally unexpected arrival into her life of the mother she had not seen since she was ten years old.

      Perhaps Kate was right, and Ricky was not to blame; it had after all been Kate’s mother who had been so eager for the marriage. The land Kate had inherited from her father had run alongside the farm Ricky had inherited from his grandfather, and he hadn’t taken much persuading that in marrying Kate he would be gaining far more than a docile, biddable wife. Even then there had been rumours about his gambling, and Kate’s mother must have known about them, but it had still not stopped her from marrying her daughter off to him, with what Sue, now a mother herself, recognised as extremely unmaternal haste. But then, at only seventeen and a half, Kate was still under age, and her mother would have had to take her back to the States with her, if she had not been able to leave her with Ricky.

      Sue knew enough about Valerie Patton to know how unwelcome an addition a beautiful teenage daughter would have been to her Los Angeles lifestyle. Following her divorce from Kate’s father, Valerie had resumed her acting career, landing a part in an American television ‘soap’, eventually giving up that role in order to take up the far more financially rewarding one of becoming Mrs Harold Patton the Third.

      She had been frankly staggered when she saw Valerie at her ex-husband’s funeral; she had looked barely half a dozen years older than her own teenage daughter, and almost as beautiful. But unlike Kate, Valerie’s beauty was barely even skin deep; her charm as brittle and delicate as the mask that a clever plastic surgeon had fashioned on her face. No, there had been no room in Valerie Patton’s life for a grown-up daughter, and so while she was still suffering from the shock of her father’s death, Kate had been hustled into marriage with Ricky.

      Only once in the ten years since then had Kate ever mentioned the subject of her marriage to Sue; and that had been six years ago, just after Ricky’s death. What she had confided then had both appalled and stunned Sue. Even then Kate would not blame Ricky, claiming that she herself was as much to blame; that she had married him of her own free will believing herself in love with him, and that admission more than anything else had made Sue’s sympathetic heart ache, especially now from the vantage point of her own maturity. What could a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old, who had only known the distant and ill-expressed love of a much older father, know of adult emotions? In Sue’s opinion, if Kate had believed herself in love with Ricky, it had been because both Ricky himself and her mother had taken good care that she should do so. Although Kate had never confirmed it to her, Sue had a strong suspicion that knowing of Ricky’s predilection for gambling, Valerie had offered him more than just her ex-husband’s land when he married her daughter. After all, Valerie Patton was an extremely wealthy woman.

      A soft, faintly mocking cough drew Sue back from the past to the present. Kate was standing in front of the window and the light from it framed the darkly turbulent beauty of which she herself was so unaware.

      Once again Sue sighed. It was all such a waste. Kate should be going out, meeting people, enjoying life, not living here alone in this remote farmhouse. She had tried again and again to get her friend more interested in life … in men, but Kate had changed over the years. She was no longer the shy, vulnerable adolescent she had once been. In fact nowadays she was surprisingly firm, self-possessed and stubborn; sometimes maddeningly so, like now.

      ‘Look, Kate, I promise you I’m not trying to matchmake,’ Sue told her firmly. ‘I want you to come to dinner with us, that’s all.’

      ‘Only with you and John?’

      Humour curved her full bottom lip, her densely blue eyes gleaming knowingly as Kate looked back at her friend.

      ‘No, not just John and me,’ Sue admitted. ‘There’ll be others there … But, Kate, can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?’ She sounded exasperated now, and she was. She had talked this over with John again and again, and her husband who was a G.P. in local practice agreed with her that because of the isolation of her home, and her habit of cutting herself off from other people, Kate was in real danger of becoming too solitary. ‘You’re young … only twenty-seven,’ Sue persisted doggedly. ‘You’re clever, beautiful … Kate, you can’t possibly want to spend the rest of your life alone!’

      Just for a moment a faintly brooding, haunted expression touched the blue eyes, and then they hardened to mocking flippancy as Kate responded teasingly, ‘Why not?’

      ‘Oh, you …! Well, you’re coming to this dinner party, even if it means driving out here to drag you back myself. You’ve got to start living again some time, Kate.’

      Across the room their eyes met, and then suddenly, almost wearily, Kate gave in.

      ‘Okay, I’ll come,’ she smiled wryly, ‘who knows, I might be able to persuade one of your guests to buy the farm.’

      Sue smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re selling it, although I know you’ve always loved it.’

      ‘Yes, I know.’ Kate smiled evenly at her and said with chilly truthfulness, ‘I sometimes wonder if it was Ricky I married, or this place. I fell in love with it when I was six years old. I could just see the rooftops from our cottage. I can’t afford to keep it on though, Sue—it costs a fortune to run.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sure it’s no secret locally how Ricky left me financially. What was left of the land had to