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      CHAPTER ONE

      NOT far now. Angelica had just driven through the last village on Tom’s list, and, according to the route he had worked out for her, the lane to the cottage should only be a couple of miles ahead of her.

      She was glad that the drive from London was nearly over. Her back was stiff with tension, her eyes gritty and tired. Tired…She smiled cynically to herself. Eighteen months ago, even twelve months ago, if anyone had told her that tiredness, exhaustion, both physical and mental, and most of all emotional was going to overrun and dominate her entire life she would have laughed at them. But then she hadn’t known what she knew now: that this numbing, destructive, all-encompassing form of exhaustion, this longing to close her eyes, curl up in a small ball to sleep and go on sleeping was a form of depression as dangerous and invasive in its way as its far more publicised and recognised cousins.

      She had learned an awful lot during these last eighteen months though, too much perhaps, and certainly a good deal that she would rather not have learned. Her mouth twisted painfully. She ought to have remembered that old adage about there being no fool like an old one; not that at twenty-eight she was old precisely, even though if, right at this moment, she felt as though she were inhabiting the body of a woman thirty years her senior rather than one supposedly at the height of her mental and sexual peak.

      Her sexual peak. The twist of her mouth became even more pronounced. In these days of increasing concern over and responsiveness to the growing threat of AIDS, it was perhaps not the stigma it had once been to be a woman of over twenty-one with so limited a sexual history that she was still actually a virgin, but it was still something she preferred to keep to herself; a vulnerable Achilles’ heel, in someone who, to the rest of her small world at least, was the subject of admiration and envy.

      When she had first taken over her father’s ailing business, manufacturing an old-fashioned brand of face cream and cleansers supplied on a mail-order basis to a very limited list of customers, she had done so because she had no alternative. When she was fresh from serving her articles with a firm of accountants, and had just passed her exams, her father’s sudden heart attack and death had left her mother solely dependent on an income from a company which had become more and more precariously financially based.

      It had been a chance conversation with a friend which had led to her turning round the whole focus of the company, so that instead of marketing its traditional products Angelica had taken the huge risk of completely reorganising the company and marketing products which were based entirely on natural ingredients.

      There had been no time for careful market research; no time to do anything other than make her decision and then act upon it.

      The success of the company was something that sometimes surprised even her. It had expanded to such an extent that she had had to invest in new factory premises and an increased work-force, and had taken on the kind of financial and emotional burdens that went with economic success.

      And yet she had thrived on it, revelled in the challenge. When others flagged, she had laughed at them; when others doubted, she had stuck to the force of her own convictions and been proved right.

      Her mother was now living very comfortably indeed in an elegant flat in Brighton, her future secure; Angelica herself had a tiny but very valuable mews cottage, tucked away from view in one of London’s precious and increasingly rare oases of peace and quiet. All of the mews houses had separate garages, and the mews itself had no vehicular access to the pretty cobbled courtyard they all shared.

      On admittedly rare warm summer weekends, it was not unusual to see all its inhabitants breakfasting al fresco in the courtyard in a manner more reminiscent of France than Britain, on delicacies supplied by a local delicatessen.

      It had been on one such morning that she had first met Giles. He had been living in one of the cottages on a temporary basis. He had told her that he had been loaned it by some friends who were spending six months in the States.

      Later she had discovered that this was not the truth; that in fact the house belonged to the parents of his previous girlfriend, and that he had casually moved in and refused to move out, claiming the property as his by virtue of his relationship with their daughter. Giles had had a gift for distorting the truth, for bending it to suit his own selfish purposes, and she, like the fool she was, had been completely taken in by him.

      It didn’t help that her friends had been equally easily deceived, that they had been equally stunned by the truth. They had quickly and determinedly rallied