They could blame her; she deserved it.
“There now, don’t you fret, Miss Cassy,” said Mrs. Hadlow, putting an arm round her. “Your grandfather wasn’t daft. He wondered if your mother had put you up to it; malice beyond the grave, I heard him say once. You see, it wasn’t like you. You’d been coming to Ridge House since you were tiny; it was more like your home than anywhere in the world.”
“Do you really think he knew?” Cassy wept.
“I’m sure he knew,” said Mrs. Hadlow. “He always loved you. Those years when you were a sunny little girl, following him around the farm, wanting to be with him, chattering away; they were his happiest years and believe me I know.”
Jake saw Cassy’s torment and wanted to comfort her, to tell her she would always be safe with him. For a few seconds, Cassy was faint with weakness; all her flaming fire of independence left her. Jake saw that momentary weakness and knew he would never take advantage of it. He wanted her to find that bright spirit again.
“I would have felt bound to do the same,” he said. “It was a matter of honour, Cassy.”
She knew he was a man of honour. Everything about him told her so. She could admire that fundamental strength in him, even when it worked against herself.
“Perhaps you and I should take a walk,” he went on. “I promised to show you the most beautiful view in the world.”
Cassy smiled at him tremulously. She could tell from his voice and the smile in those dark eyes, that he understood and she was forgiven. Mrs. Hadlow was smiling too.
“That’s a good idea, Mr. Everand. A breath of our Derbyshire air is the best tonic in the world.”
Cassy ran upstairs to get ready to go out. She had read Jake’s dark eyes and their message was clear. He cared and perhaps one day he might even love her. She zipped up her padded, straw-coloured anorak and tucked her hair into a rakish tweed cap. Her eyes sparkled. It was not simply what she wore but the way she wore the clothes, an in-born elegance that was in every tilt of her head, every gesture.
Jake was waiting outside with the car and she went to him, her face trusting and happy. His kiss was deep and yearning and she felt his body shudder against her. It was too late to hide her feelings and Cassy’s lips parted, yielding to his embrace with every fibre of her being.
“I love you,” she breathed.
“And I love you, my angel, and I’ll love you for as long as I live. You’re the woman I’ve always wanted, always been searching for. It’s taken me such a long time to find you. I’m sure not going to let you go.”
“But everything that’s happened….” Cassy was still dubious. “Alician and your father…”
“Leave the past where it belongs, Cassy. You and I are what matter now; I bet Thomas Ridgeway and Lewis have made it up, wherever they are. And they’d be tickled pink to know we’re together.”
“Jake, darling, hold me tight. Am I dreaming all this?” Cassy knew what she had to do. “I want to give you Pennyroyal. It’s yours by right and I want you to have it.”
“I’m touched by your generosity,” he chuckled. “But I thought I was doing the favours by buying the mine from you.”
“Doing me a favour?”
“You wanted capital for this modelling agency you’re so keen on starting. Cassandra? I thought I was being pretty generous giving you the money to throw away.”
“Throw away!” Cassy began indignantly, then more calmly. “Is that why you made the offer? So that I could start my own agency?” Cassy could hardly believe it. Jake had been prepared to put his money into her hands, to trust her, in a world that was so alien and distant from his own. She shook her head. “I’m getting confused,” she said. “But I’m not offering you a worthless mine, Jake. It was in Alician’s diary. Lewis had found some minerals other than lead. Now what were they? Fluorspar and barytes… Do you know anything about them?”
“I’m not surprised. I was looking for them. I found crystals of fluorspar in the old workings. The old miners used to throw it away. It didn’t have much value in those days, but now it has important industrial uses…it’s used as a flux in steel making, to make aerosol propellant and nonstick plastics.”
Cassy remembered glimpses of fluorescent sparkles in the tunnel, glinting in the darkness as the boat took them smoothly through the dark water. Had she been looking at the real wealth of Pennyroyal?
“And barytes have many uses in paint and glass manufacturing, as a lubricant, and the most well-known is in the medical world, for making barium meals for X-rays.”
“And it’s all there, in Pennyroyal?”
“I aim to find out. If it’s there, I’ll find it.”
He was driving the car towards Winnats Pass, the sun streaking the High Peak with gold. He turned to smile at her with warmth and companionship. Whether she gave Jake the mine, or he bought it…it didn’t seem to matter now. There were a lot of decisions to make and things to sort out, but time was in their hands.
Cassy knew that she and Jake would work it out.
He turned the car into the parking space at the foot of Mam Tor. He loved this place. His soul was here. And now he wanted to share it with Cassy.
“What about Kettlehulme?” he asked, helping her out. “Have you thought about it? Do you think you could face living in a ruin? A picturesque ruin.”
“Are you asking me to?”
“Yes, I won’t live there by myself.”
A sigh of pure happiness escaped her lips as he crushed her in his arms. She thought she could not bear anymore as he kissed her, igniting a wild passion that spread to every inch of her body. His hands strayed to her small, soft breasts, cupping them with a delicate touch that made her head spin and long for more.
“I could live anywhere with you,” she gasped. “A tent, a cave, anywhere. I don’t care.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said with a husky laugh.
He took her hand and led her to the first steps of the long climb to the top of Mam Tor. The wind tore at her tangling hair, whipping away her breath; the sweet scent of heather and the wild grasses was a heady nectar.
“I’ll make Kettlehulme into a house fit for the angel by my fireplace, my beautiful bride,” he said, leaping the steps with long strides.
“And I’ll make it into a home,” Cassy promised, her eyes shining.
They climbed and climbed, laughing like children, stopping to wonder at the glorious view, sensing the expanding landscape that grew before them into a rich panorama of moors and ridges and the wild, wild beauty of Derbyshire.
They reached the rocky plateau at the summit where the ferocious wind lashed and slammed into their bodies and they clung together for strength.
Jake took a deep breath and flung open his arms.
“Mam…Tor!” he shouted.
Cassy looked up at him, her man, her rock, her future.
“Mam…Tor,” she called out, following him, tossing the name of the High Peak to the wind with abandon. The wind grabbed at the words and sent them spinning into the endless sky.
About the Author
Stella Whitelaw has been writing since the age of nine when her father gave her a second-hand portable typewriter. She was in bed with measles and, covered in spots, she immediately started to teach herself to type.
She progressed from short stories in national magazines to writing novels. She is a cross genre writer with 15 crime books, eight books of cat stories and many romance mysteries. She is currently writing the ninth book in the acclaimed Jordan Lacey PI series. It’s called Jazz and Die.
Her short story won the Art of Writing competition in The London Magazine, judged by Sheridan Morley. She was short-listed for the Catherine Cookson memorial prize and was awarded the Elizabeth Goudge Cup at Guildford University by the RNA.
Her hobbies, when she has time for them, are singing, walking and of course, reading.
Look for these titles by Stella Whitelaw
Now Available:
Flood Tide
Coming Soon:
The Secret Taj
Is he the man of her dreams…or her darkest nightmares?
Flood Tide
© 2012 Stella Whitelaw
Ever since the death of her father, Reah Lawrence has been haunted by nightmares of a terrifying mystery man. When she meets Ewart Morgan, a successful playwright, she knows he is the man in her dreams. Despite her distrust, Reah is drawn to him, and they soon embark on a whirlwind romance.
Putting her ominous dreams aside for the time being, Reah and Ewart explore the magical city of Florence, Italy, as well as each other. But all fantasies must come to an end, and when they return to stormy Sussex, Reah at last learns the truth behind her dark dreams.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Flood Tide:
Later she could not remember why she had been in such a hurry that morning, her head in a book.
It had been an old, rust-coloured, leather-bound book she had picked up at Oxborough market, the pages brown-edged and fragile, the faded printing difficult to read and the pen-drawn illustrations like spider’s legs on the paper.
She had been hurrying along the main corridor at college, absorbed in the old book, when some small, spine-chilling message made her look up instinctively.
The staircase at Oxborough College was a curving sweep of wide, worn oak treads, a relic of the days when the main building had been the home of a prosperous Victorian coal baron.
She stopped at the foot of the stairs. A swift sense of apprehension ran through her veins. She stood, staring, frozen to the spot.
There was a man on the stairs. He was descending the long sweep with an easy vitality that drew her gaze like a magnet. He was quite tall, wearing a casual pale blue safari suit and an open-necked blue shirt. His light brown hair was cropped Hamlet-style with a fringe falling over his tanned brow.
But it was his eyes which drew and held Reah’s gaze. They were the most electrifying, dark brown eyes she had ever seen, laughter crinkles at the corners like fans of sunshine on his tanned skin.
She stood, rooted, the book still open in her hand.
“Are you about to say something important?” he said briskly. “If not, young lady, would you kindly get out of my way?”
The accent was difficult to place. Later Reah was to know that it was Welsh, nurtured in a tiny village tucked in the green hills where Ewart Morgan had grown up and become a man who wrote magic onto the television screen with an ease that belied the lonely hours of discipline and concentration behind every play.
“Sorry. I’m s-sorry,” she stammered, unable to move.
His eyes raked over her. He was taking in the old Trilby hat crammed down on her red hair; the tight patched jeans; the baggy sweater that hid the femininity of her figure. Amusement, then irritation flashed through his expressive brown eyes.
“If you’re going, then go—if not, perhaps I could climb over you?” he suggested, his voice now tinged with exasperation. “No doubt this habit of blocking the stairs always makes you late for your class.”
He thought she was a student. Reah was not surprised. She looked about sixteen with her fine-boned face freshly scrubbed and her mane of red hair tucked up under the old Trilby. She loved the old hat.
It had been one of her father’s. It made her feel close to him, wearing his old hat. It was his sweater too, a baggy cable knit which her aunt had produced for him to wear on his sailing boat. He had not been wearing it the day the boat overturned during a sudden squall off the coast. The lifeboat crew had searched for his body for hours. He had been washed up on deserted French sand dunes days later, sea-battered and hardly recognisable. It had not helped that the sailing boat had been called Reah.
The man on the stairs made as if to squeeze past her. Reah moved in the same direction. It was like a farce, predictable comedy from a sit-com.
“Since you are obviously intent on preventing me from being on time for my lecture, perhaps I’d better start climbing now?” he said. “I take it you are on your way to the conference hall?”
Reah shook her head, the Trilby tipping a little over her eyes. She guessed he must be the visiting celebrity come to give the end of term lecture. Ewart Morgan, the playwright.
Miss Hardcastle, headmistress of Oxborough College, expected Reah, as the youngest member of staff, to make the customary speech of thanks, but Reah hated having to do it.
That was why she was not going to the Ewart Morgan lecture.
“No,” she said, looking him firmly in the eye, those penetratingly deep eyes which were still taking her apart. “I don’t go on ego trips.”
Her words cut through the air and hung there as if she had spray-painted them on the walls.
She heard his sharp intake of breath. In his left hand, he was holding a stick.
It was a thin bent branch of silver birch. He had picked it in the grounds of the college to use as a pointer for the black board in the conference hall.
“What a pity,” he said, the ice edge to his voice telling Reah that she had gone too far, much too far. “You might have learned some good manners.”
He touched her sharply on the arm with the stick. She felt the rap shoot along the raw nerve ends of her arm. It was almost a pain and she had to bite her lip to stop herself crying out.
Ewart Morgan brushed past her. He was taller than she had thought; her eyes were level with his shoulder. He was very slim, the leather belt round his flat waist fastened on the last hole. She was taking in everything about him, her mind was acting like a camera.
He strode away down the corridor and she watched his back, memorising in every detail, seeing the controlled vitality in his walk and the set of his shoulders.
She would know him again. She already knew him. She had seen him before. But not on the stairs or anywhere. It had been in a dream. She had seen him in a dream that had been so frightening that for months she had shut it completely from her mind.
In one moment, she had learned two devastating truths. The man in her dream had always been unknown. Now she could give the face a name. Ewart Morgan, who had brought her so much distress when her father died. She turned blindly, pushing the thoughts away.
When a hidden beauty meets a bold Englishman, they break all the rules for love.
The Weeping Desert
© 2013 Alexandra Thomas
A man in the royal harem!
Khadija could not believe her eyes. The daughter of a powerful sheikh, she has never been allowed to mingle with foreigners, and certainly never alone. She knows she should summon the guards, but Khadija longs for freedom, and this handsome Englishman might just be her ticket out.
Meets a caged bird longing for freedom.
John Cameron is entranced with this wild desert beauty, and she seems fascinated with him. After a whirlwind secret affair, he is ready to take her home to his small English town. But are they ready for someone like Khadija? And when a jilted lover from her past tracks them down, Khadija and John must decide how far they are willing to go to stay together.
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Weeping Desert:
It was approaching two o’clock in the afternoon. Another afternoon, any afternoon. They were all the same: hot, humid and as empty as the desert which rolled away into the haze like an ocean of sand.
Khadija moved into an open alcove, hoping that some breeze might stir from the sea and cool her face. The view over the rooftops and harbour wall was still now, in the heat of the early afternoon while everyone slept. But she knew it was deceptive, and hordes of families would emerge with the coolness to shop and gossip and light their pots to cook an evening meal.
But she would do nothing. There was nothing for her to do. This was a prison. A prison of love, perhaps; but she was a prisoner as surely as if chains shackled her ankles to the stone parapet.
So many years now and still she lived like a bird in a cage, commanded only to sing sweetly, while outside the desert wept for her and its tears evaporated under the hot sun.
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She leaned her head against the cool stone and longed for freedom, whatever this freedom meant. She wanted it with a passion that simmered unsuspected behind the mask of her immobile features. The veil she wore when she left her private apartments hid more than just her face. It hid stirrings and tumult and a fierce determination to escape.
It was approaching two o’clock in the afternoon. The white-hot desert sun had been at its highest for over two hours, scorching, blinding and burning anything or anyone foolish enough to go out without protection.
John Cameron checked the last figures of his shift, wiping away the sweat which dripped off his chin onto the log sheets. He moved slowly round the machinery of the pumping station, examining gauges and fuel levels. The temperature was stifling inside the building.
He dried his hands down the sides of his khaki shorts, sweat streaking the grime and oil. His short-sleeved shirt was blotted with damp patches between his shoulder blades. It was almost too hot to breathe.
“She’s all yours,” he said with some relief to the engineer who was due to take over his shift. Don Parker took the log sheet from John and studied the figures. He was a small, wiry Australian, almost burnt black by the Arabian sun.
“She’s pumping away real nice,” he said. “You go get yourself a cold beer, fella. Marvellous what a cold beer can do.”
John licked the moisture off his top lip, dug out his sunglasses from his back pocket and checked his keys.
“In another week, I’ll be home,” he said. “Back in England. I’ve had enough of the desert. You can keep it. England for two whole beautiful rainy months, and I’ll never complain about rain again.”
“You’re nuts and blind. You hate it so much, you don’t see nothing. I tell you, fella, once the spell of the desert gets you, you get a sick feeling for that vast empty space for the rest of your life.”
“I get a sick feeling all right,” said John drily.
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