CHAPTER ONE

      ROWAN FARRINGDON DREADED Sunday dinners with her parents. The tradition was a new one, instated exactly one month after her parents had retired and bought themselves a gleaming glory of a house that has all the showiness of a museum and no warmth whatsoever. Even the floral arrangements were formal.

      She’d made a mistake two months ago, when she’d turned up with an armful of scented overblown cream- and butter-coloured roses and had had them relegated to the laundry sink—doubtless to be tossed out at her mother’s earliest convenience.

      She hadn’t made that mistake again.

      For some reason her mother loved this house, and insisted that Rowan—as her only child and heir—love the house as well.

       Never going to happen.

      Rowan’s hurried ‘I’m well set up already, Mum. Sell the house. Spend every last penny you have before you go, I really won’t mind …’ probably hadn’t been the most politically sensible thought ever voiced, but Rowan had meant every word of it.

      To say that Rowan and her mother neither knew nor understood each other was something of an understatement.

      Four people graced the enormous round table at this particular evening’s formal dinner. Rowan’s mother, father, grandfather, and herself. Presumably the round table gave the impression that everyone sitting at it was of equal