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      CHAPTER ONE

      CHARLOTTE paused outside the block of offices, studying the plaque which read ‘Jefferson & Horwich, Solicitors’.

      Her knees were trembling slightly and the skirt of her dark blue wool suit, which if anything had seemed rather prim in London, suddenly felt uncomfortably short.

      She tugged at it a little self-consciously as she glanced around the busy market square.

      It was only just gone eight in the morning, but it was market day and the stallholders were already hard at work preparing for their day’s trading.

      Perhaps she ought to have bought herself a new suit, something more suitable for a very junior, albeit qualified solicitor, just starting work in a new practice, but the trouble was that new clothes were a luxury she simply could not afford at the moment.

      ‘Jefferson & Horwich’. She read the name again.

      Well, Richard Horwich she had already met. He had interviewed her for the job. A comfortable middle-aged family man who epitomised everyone’s mental image of a solicitor with a country practice.

      But as for the Jefferson…

      Charlotte took a deep breath.

      Face it, she told herself bitterly. You would rather be working for almost anyone than Daniel Jefferson. The new golden hope of the legal profession, the man who had single-handedly—well, almost, if you excluded the odd barrister or so, and the usual full complement of legal staff—championed the cause of the downtrodden, in this case the victims of the negligent and callous refusal of a large drugs company to accept that the side-effects of their drug had caused detrimental physical symptoms in some of those people prescribed it, never mind doing anything about it, and had won for them not only recognition of the drugs company’s negligence, but also one of the largest sums in compensation ever awarded by a British court.

      As she stood staring at the polished brass nameplate on the front of the elegant Georgian building she couldn’t help contrasting her circumstances with those of Daniel Jefferson.

      She too was a qualified solicitor. She too had once had her own premises with her name alongside the door, and she too had once championed the cause of those who sometimes seemed most to need legal advice and who nearly always could least afford it. But there the resemblance between them ended.

      Where Daniel Jefferson was successful, feˆted, inundated no doubt with people wanting him to act for them, especially since the Vitalle case had made the headlines, she was now forced to seek work as an employee…forced to start again right at the foot of the ladder, her home, her business and even her fiancé gone, swallowed up by the recession which was slowly strangling and destroying so many businesses.

      Perhaps she ought, as her parents and her friends kept telling her, to feel grateful that she had been able to get another job with such relative ease instead of still being so full of anger and resentment about all that she had lost.

      But she was angry and she was resentful. She had worked so hard. First just when she was studying, and then in her first job as the only female newly qualified solicitor in the large London practice where she had been lucky enough to be employed.

      She had even learned to bite on her tongue and not to retaliate when the men she worked with tried to demote and degrade her, giving her the dullest and most routine jobs, and even on one infuriating occasion actually asking her to make coffee for the rest of them. Yes, she had worked hard then, and always with one goal in mind. Her own practice…and before she was thirty.

      She had been over the moon when by what had seemed to be the most amazingly fortuitous stroke of good luck she and Bevan, her fiancé, had happened to come across a small local single-partner practice for sale.

      It had been just about the time that people were moving out of London in swarms, extolling the virtues of country living, and, as Bevan had told her, she would have been a fool not to have jumped on the bandwagon.

      She had bought the practice with a mortgage the size of which had made her wince. And she had also bought herself a small elegant town house several streets away.

      After all, as she and Bevan had agreed, once they were married the town house would be large enough for them both, and then later they could sell it at a decent profit and buy something larger.

      Their part of the world was an up-and-coming area with property prices going through the roof, as