by Penny Jordan
The fact that he had no close family of his own was something that Finn felt very keenly. His parents had married late in life, when their own parents had been elderly, so Finn had never known his grandparents. His father had died of a heart attack shortly after Finn’s eighteenth birthday and his mother had died less than a year later. His own experiences had taught Finn how important family was. And as he drove into the farmyard he was deep in thought.
‘And then Bas said that he didn’t care how long it was going to take, he was going to keep on proposing until I gave in and agreed to marry him. So I thought I might as well save us both a lot of time and hassle and give in there and then.’
Politely Maggie joined in the others’ laughter as they all listened to Lisa, drolly explaining how she came to be wearing a huge solitaire diamond engagement ring having sworn only weeks earlier that she was never ever going to get married.
The eight of them had been meeting up once a month for the last five years, all of them dedicated career women, all of them independent twenty to thirty-somethings, with their own flats, cars, accountants, and the wherewithal to buy their own diamond rings if they wanted them, and all of them determined to stay single. But gradually things had started to change.
Maggie wasn’t sure she could pinpoint exactly how or when that change had started to happen. She just knew that it had, and from being earnest occasions on which they discussed their ambitions and successes over a meal at whichever of London’s trendy eateries they were currently favouring, their get-togethers had begun to take on a much more personal note. The names of family members had begun to creep into their conversation, along with shamefaced confessions of parental or sibling pressure regarding their lack of partner and/or offspring, and a bonding at a much deeper level had come into being. Maggie had relished that closeness. Her friends were very important to her and she knew she wasn’t alone in that feeling. Friends, as anyone who read a magazine or newspaper knew, were the new ‘family’.
But now once again things were changing, and this time Maggie did not like it.
Caitlin had started it, returning from a holiday in Ireland to announce out of the blue that she was moving in with her boyfriend.
‘My sister has this gorgeous baby,’ was how she’d limply explained her change of heart, ‘and I suddenly realised that I’m five years older than she is and that if I’m not careful…’
‘It’s your biological clock ticking away,’ Lisa had told her knowledgeably, and that had been the start of it.
Now all of them had partners—all of them but her, Maggie realised as she listened to the others’ laughter as they teased Lisa. But they were the ones who had changed, not her; just as they were the ones who sometimes looked a little self-conscious when they talked about their altered goals. As she talked to her friends right now, the unwelcome thought struck Maggie that it was almost as though Finn, with his back-to-nature, downshifting lifestyle, was more akin to them than she was herself. She felt…she felt almost as though she was an outsider, she recognised indignantly. And for some reason she was not prepared to analyse she felt like putting the blame for this on Finn’s shoulders. And why shouldn’t she? After all he was to blame for the fact that she was sitting here thinking about him.
‘Of course Ma’s jumped on the bandwagon now,’ Lisa was telling them. ‘I think I’m going to have to physically restrain her from organising a full-works wedding—and Bas isn’t much help. He’s virtually egging her on. Mind you, if he had his way there’d be no way I’d be decently fit to walk down the aisle. Waddle down perhaps; I’ve never known a man so desperate to become a father…’
‘It’s the new thing,’ Charlotte interrupted. ‘Men are baby-mad. Everywhere you look men are downscaling, cutting back their working hours, insisting that they want to spend more time with their families. I’ve lost count of the number of couples I know who’ve moved out of the City in the last year, and all of them because they either have or want to start families.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘And after all what could be more cosy than a huge country house big enough for you to work from home, and to house a family? Loads of people are trying to persuade their parents to move in with them, too. I mean, you just couldn’t get any better childcare than your own parents, could you?’
As Maggie listened to the heated debate that followed she felt a cold sharp pang of alienness. But these were her friends, women she had shared her hopes and dreams with for the last five years—women who, after her grandmother, formed her closest relationship circle.
‘Well, moving out to the country is quite definitely a hot new trend,’ Tanya confirmed. ‘I mean look at Greta and Nigel. Of course those with the financial resources to do so have always aimed to own a house in the country along with a city pièd-a-terre, but…’
As another heated flurry of exchanges broke out Maggie remained silent, locked in the pain of her own thoughts.
‘You’re quiet Maggie,’ Charlotte noticed, turning to look at her. But before Maggie could make any response Lisa was laughing.
‘Oh, Maggie thoroughly disapproves of us all. She thinks we’re traitoresses to the cause, don’t you?’
‘No, of course I don’t,’ Maggie denied, but she could see that they didn’t believe her. And she could see, too, that suddenly she was excluded from their new shared closeness.
‘Putting relationships first is the really happening thing now, Maggie,’ Tanya told her gently.
Tanya worked in PR and knew all about ‘happening’ things. She had gone on holiday six months earlier—a tiny private island one could only visit by invitation—fallen in love with a fellow guest, and was now planning to give up her job and join him on his planned trek across the Andes.
Not that Maggie really needed anyone to underline for her what she already knew. She had lost count of the number of people she had ‘relocated’ recently who had insisted on ‘time out for family’ clauses being built into their contracts.
In the past their evenings out had ended late, but now it seemed everyone had things they needed to go on to—everyone but her, Maggie acknowledged. She could walk to her apartment from the wine bar where they had met. Halfway there she stopped outside a small supermarket, and somehow or other she found she was walking into it…
It was only when she was back outside that Maggie allowed herself to question just why she had found it necessary to buy the ingredients to make a chilli.
‘Gran, why don’t you come back to London with me? We could shop, and there’s a wonderful new show we could go and see,’ Maggie suggested to Arabella Russell that weekend.
‘No…no. It’s kind of you to think of me, Maggie, but I just don’t feel in the mood. At least in this house I feel as though I’m still close to your grandfather, even though he was only here for a few short months.’
Her grandparents had moved into a smaller house six months before her grandfather’s death, and Maggie could feel her throat aching with tears as she listened to her grandmother. In the few weeks since Maggie had last seen her she seemed to have become so frail. She looked frighteningly tired and defeated, as if…as though…
Thoughts Maggie dared not let herself form sent a sickening weave of panic through her. If Finn hadn’t stopped her from buying the Dower House right now she could have been telling her grandmother that she had a special surprise for her. She could have been anticipating the pleasure and happiness in her eyes as she walked into the house she had known as a young wife. And Maggie just knew that in that house her grandmother would ‘see’ her grandfather as he had been when they had been young together, and that she would draw strength from their shared past happiness.
Finn…Finn…
She got up and hurried into her grandmother’s kitchen, opening cupboard doors, searching…
‘Maggie, what on earth are you doing?’
Guiltily Maggie looked round as her grandmother followed her into the kitchen.
‘Umm…I was going to make some chilli.’
&
nbsp; ‘What…?’
Red-faced, Maggie closed the cupboard doors. What on earth was happening to her? Why was it every time she thought about Finn she had this peculiar desire to make chilli?
Subliminal association was one thing; taking it to the ridiculous lengths of being physically compelled to make chilli just because the act of doing so brought her closer to her memories of the time she had spent at the farm with Finn was something else—and a very worrying and unwanted something else at that. Why on earth should she need to cling to those memories, as if…as if they were some sort of comfort blanket that she simply could not get through any anxiety without?
It was over a month since she had last seen Finn—well, five weeks, two days and seven and three-quarter hours, actually. Not that she was counting. Or cared. No, indeed not. Why should she? She didn’t. No way. No way at all. She was perfectly happy as she was—more than happy. She was ecstatic. Her life was perfect…everything she had ever wanted it to be. At least it would have been if only her grandmother…
Damn Finn. Damn him and his ridiculous antagonism towards city people buying country property. What right did he have to dictate what others could and could not do? No right at all…other than the power that having far too much money gave him, to pay more than twice its value for a house just to stop another person owning it. Well, she just hoped he would be happy in his huge mansion, with his land and his alpaca and his empty Dower House…No, she didn’t; she hoped he would be thoroughly miserable, because that was what he deserved. Unlike her beloved grandmother, who did not deserve to be unhappy at all.
Finn looked grimly at his surroundings. He had taken possession of the estate three days ago, his livestock had been moved to their new home, and he had successfully interviewed a first-class team of workers to help him put his plans into practice. So why wasn’t he feeling more happy? Why, in fact, was he feeling distinctly unhappy?
From the library of the house, which was the room he intended to work from, he could see across the parkland to where the empty Dower House lay behind its high brick wall. Despite the warmth of the room—the house’s ancient heating system had proved surprisingly efficient once it had been coaxed into life—the house had an air of chill emptiness about it.
According to Philip’s assistant, it needed a woman’s touch, and Finn knew exactly which woman’s touch she had envisaged it having. But she wasn’t his type. She was…not Maggie.
Angrily he dismissed the taunting voice whispering the words inside his head. He had been down to see the Dower House the previous day. Structurally it was sound and weather proof, but, like the main house, inside it needed modernising.
‘Pity to let a place like this stand empty.’ Shane Farrell, the man he had taken on as his gamekeeper, had commented. ‘Wouldn’t mind living here myself,’ he had added hintingly.
‘I’d planned to offer you the cottage next to Pete’s,’ Finn had told him, referring to the second of the pair of empty estate cottages he had bought at the auction. But Shane was right. It would be shameful to allow the Dower House to stand empty and deteriorate, especially when…
Walking back over to his desk, Finn picked up the telephone and searched the directory for the number of his solicitor.
The letter was waiting for Maggie when she arrived home at nine o’clock in the evening after a particularly trying day. Gayle was off work, ill with bronchitis, and the person Maggie had been discreetly courting on behalf of one of her best clients had telephoned her in a furious temper, from her home, to announce to Maggie that she had just been informed by her current employers that they knew what was going on—when she had specifically stressed to Maggie how vitally important it was that their discussions were kept a secret. Maggie suspected that it must have been the woman’s partner who had leaked the information; they worked in the same field, but the partner was less well thought of. However, there was no way she could voice such a suspicion.
She had then had an equally irate call from her clients, who had been informed of what had happened by the woman herself. Appeasing them had made her late for lunch with another client—one who had a thing about punctuality. And then after lunch she had tried to ring her grandmother, and panicked when she had not been able to raise her either on the house phone or the mobile Maggie had insisted on giving her.
She had virtually been on the point of driving into Sussex to find out if she was all right when her grandmother had finally answered her mobile, explaining that she never liked to take it with her when she went to visit Maggie’s grandfather’s grave, which she did every week, because she felt that it was the wrong thing to do.
Without Gayle’s capable hands controlling the day-to-day running of the office Maggie had found herself becoming bogged down in paperwork, and the last thing she had needed had been a long complaining telephone call from a man she had headhunted unsuccessfully the previous year and who had now decided that he had made the wrong move in electing to take a job competitive with the one she had been authorised to offer him. He had wanted her, in his own words, to ‘fix things’ so that he could accept her client’s offer after all.
It was only sheer professionalism that had allowed her to grit her teeth and bite back her instinctive response to his patronising manner—that and the satisfaction it had given her to tell him sweetly that, unfortunately, ‘fixing things’ was quite simply beyond her capability.
Having opened her apartment door, she picked up her post before closing it again and then locking it. The block her apartment occupied was in a part of the City that had certain and specific restrictions on alterations to the elegant late-Georgian buildings, which meant that it was devoid of any kind of modern high-tech security features—much to Maggie’s grandmother’s relief.
‘I’m sorry, Maggie, but I just don’t trust those horrid little “speak into me” things—they never seem to be able to hear me properly,’ she had complained, whilst Maggie had stifled her giggles. ‘And I certainly feel much happier knowing that you are properly protected by a good old-fashioned doorman and that your apartment door has a proper kind of lock on it. Modern technology is all very well, but you just can’t beat a real lock,’ Arabella Russell had pronounced firmly. And Maggie had known better than to argue with her.
Whenever her grandmother visited Maggie’s apartment she invariably brought a little ‘home-made something’ with her—not just for Maggie, who she was convinced did not eat properly, but also for Bill, the commissionaire, a widower who lived in a small apartment in the basement with a large ginger cat, and who seemed to conduct a running battle with the block’s central heating and air-conditioning systems.
The arid heat of the central heating system felt stifling to Maggie after the cold outside, and just recently the apartment’s silence had begun to grate a little on her nerves. She had even actually dreamed about waking up to birdsong and the sounds of the countryside.
Ridiculous, of course. She hated the countryside. It was dirty, and wet, and filled with impossible men wearing boots and driving battered old Land Rovers, masquerading as poor farmers whilst all the time owning squillions of pounds which they used to stop people like her from buying any of their wretched countryside.
Shrugging off her coat, Maggie started to open her mail. And then stopped, dropping the letter she was reading in furious disbelief. What on earth…? How could…? Angrily she walked into her small kitchen and then walked back again, picking up the letter she had thrown aside and rereading it.
Finn understood that she had wanted to buy the Dower House for her grandmother, and on that understanding, and on condition that she never at any time moved into it herself with her lover, he was prepared to rent the property to her at a favourable peppercorn annual rental, to be agreed. If she would write back to him confirming her agreement to these terms then he would instruct his solicitor to begin the necessary legal proceedings and to draw up a lease.
Maggie couldn’t believe what she was reading. The arrogance. To dare to…<
br />
Did he think she would actually…? And what did he mean, on condition that she never at any time moved into it herself with her lover? She did not have a lover. How could he possibly think that when he…when she…Oh, yes, now she could see the City trader coming out in him. Of course to him the idea of sexual exclusivity would be laughable.
Write back to him! Maggie was seething. Oh, no. She had a far, far better idea than that!
CHAPTER SIX
AS SHE drove west along the motorway Maggie was mentally rehearsing just what she intended to say to Finn. The ‘time out’ effect of a night to sleep on her fury had done nothing to lessen it. That he should dare to patronise her in such a way! And what had he hoped to gain from changing his mind? Her eternal grovelling gratitude? After that condition he had so insultingly outlined? Did he really think that if she had been involved with another man she would have behaved with him as she had, never mind allow him to dictate to her how, when or where she saw her lover?
Engrossed in her fury, she let the miles fly by, and it was only the sharp pangs of hunger gripping her stomach that reminded her how long it was since she had last eaten. Last night she had been too tired and then too furious to even contemplate eating. This morning she had been too busy thinking about what she intended to say to Finn and how she intended to make sure that he never made the mistake of trying to patronise her again to bother with any breakfast. A cup of coffee had been enough, but now her body was insisting that it needed nourishment!