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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘TASHA, I think I’m going to need your help.’

      ‘What, again?’ Natasha Lacey queried humorously, looking up from her work to smile at her cousin. ‘What is it this time? Another crisis over the bridesmaids’ dresses? If you want my honest opinion, my love, you’re never going to make your Richard’s sister look anything other than the little dumpling she is. Poor girl. I can well remember what it feels like to be fourteen, chubby and detesting every female in the world who isn’t.’

      ‘When you add to that the fact that she virtually worships Richard, it’s no wonder that she isn’t exactly overjoyed about your marriage.’

      ‘No, it isn’t Sara…not this time,’ Emma Lacey interrupted hastily. ‘Nothing so simple. I only wish it were.’

      Natasha’s frown deepened. Three years her own junior, Emma had always been more like her sister than her cousin. They had lived in the same small cathedral city all their lives, their parents close friends as well as relatives, both of them glad to have a peer with whom to share the burdens of growing up.

      Perhaps because she was the elder, she had always been the calmer, the more logical of the two of them, her emotions and moods controlled and predictable where Emma’s were subject to wild variations and swings.

      In the family it was tacitly acknowledged that the death of Emma’s father when she was fifteen years old had to have been the cause of the sudden wild streak which had then developed in her behaviour—a wild streak which had led her into scrape after scrape, some of them so serious that they had led to a rift developing between the two cousins. Emma, bored and rebellious, had insisted on leaving school at sixteen, while Natasha had gone on to university, calmly and determinedly working her way towards the qualifications she needed while Emma had played her way around the world.

      However, if Emma had been a little wild, that part of her life was behind her now, and no one could be more pleased than she was herself that she had fallen in love with Richard Templecombe.

      It was true that the Templecombes were not perhaps as happy with the match as Emma’s family. For one thing, the Laceys were not and never had been part of the ecclesiastical life of the city, and even though both families had lived there for several generations they inhabited two very different worlds. The Laceys represented commerce and worldliness, the business which the first Jasper Lacey had established on the outskirts of the city over seventy years before being, after the church, the largest employer in the area. The Templecombes, on the other hand, prided themselves on being above such materialistic things as commerce. Their connections with the cathedral and the church went back even further than the Laceys’ connection with the city. Richard’s father was dean of the cathedral, he and Richard’s mother acknowledged leaders of local ecclesiastical society, and it was generally accepted that, one day, hopefully Richard would follow in his father’s footsteps.

      A thought struck Natasha and her heart sank. The wedding was less than a week away now, but her sudden fear had to be expressed. ‘You haven’t…you’re not having second thoughts, are you?’ she asked.

      Emma shook her head and gulped. ‘No, I’m not…but Richard probably will, once Luke tells him what I’ve done.’

      ‘Luke?’ Natasha questioned her, snapping off a thread with expert care, and frowning over the repair she had just completed. It seemed ironic that, having spent all those years qualifying and then travelling the world as an embryo news reporter, she should suddenly discover when she was twenty-five years old that the place she really wanted to be was here in this quiet cathedral town, and the thing she really wanted to do was to work with the rich fabrics and embroideries of that world.

      She was establishing quite a name for herself now. A couple of prestigious magazines mentioning the quality of her stock, and the sudden demand for fabrics more suitable for the refurbishment of the ancient piles now being acquired by the migrant tide escaping from London, had helped—as had the fact that she had been able to bully her father into expanding the range of ecclesiastical fabrics the company produced so that they had a more general appeal.

      ‘Luke?’ she repeated encouragingly. ‘I don’t think…’

      ‘He’s Richard’s father’s cousin.You won’t know him, but he’s a typical Templecombe,’Emma told her tearfully. ‘Narrow-minded, bigoted, just waiting for me to do something wrong so that Richard will break our engagement.’

      Being used to her cousin’s emotional highs and lows, Natasha merely said calmly,