The Grayson Trilogy

by Georgia Rose

  Greene, fortunately, had no problem with the way we were, and she had turned out to be a great friend to me. Following my experience with my previous friend, Amy, who had slept with my husband, I’d been wary when we first met. Then for a while Greene had ridden out with me and we got to know each other better. I knew she’d come to the estate having come out of a long-term relationship, needing the time to nurse her wounds, and I could relate to that. It wasn’t until we were closer friends that she had told me her long-term relationship had been a completely inappropriate one involving a senior officer – a married senior officer. She had known my feelings on women who betrayed other women by taking what wasn’t theirs to take, but by the time I knew about this I was much more philosophical about it. I knew it took two, and was actually amazed at her acceptance of the situation she’d found herself in. While he, who should have known better, was still climbing through the ranks to the upper echelons of the Army, she had been advised to leave the role she had carved out for herself, and that must have been a bit of a kicker. I had sympathy for her and the pain that had caused, but what the Army had so foolishly chosen to lose had been the estate’s gain. Greene had flourished here, and fallen in love.

  Trent was not quite so comfortable with my relationship with Carlton. It had been one of the reasons, along with Alex coming back for me, why at one time he had been possessive of me. To give him his due, though, he had changed. As he had once put it, he aimed to turn his possessiveness into protectiveness, which was better, but I was trying to get him to relax on that front as well. I guess it wasn’t surprising he was protective of me considering I’d been attacked by his ex-wife earlier in the summer, then, having practically gone on the run with Grace and the children when the estate came under siege, I had come close to being abducted by Orlov.

  When he came into the kitchen at lunchtime and I explained where the ginger tea had come from, I couldn’t quite describe the noise he made as he put the box down and wandered through to the sitting room, but it was somewhere between a strangled groan and a growl. However the cup of ginger tea I had with my dry crackers and cheese felt quite soothing and I told him so.

  The next day there were three more boxes of it in the cupboard.

  We progressed through the rest of what became a blustery October, with the high winds blowing the trees bare and the nights drawing in until all the yard lights had to be turned on for evening stables. There was a brief highlight when Sophia and Reuben came home for half term. I was able to spend some time working with them in the arena, and I tried not to sulk too much when they rode out on a hack with Carlton and Greene instead of me.

  Once they had finished with their ponies one day Sophia and Reuben came in to join me for lunch. I loved catching up with them. I’d noticed how much both of them, but particularly Reuben, had grown. I knew by next summer he would have outgrown Benjy and I wondered what Grace and Cavendish wanted to do about that. Moving him on to Zodiac would be the sensible option and then getting something new for Sophia, but I wasn’t sure how keen she’d be to relinquish her beloved pony to the tender mercies of her little brother. Problems for another time, I thought.

  We sat round the table and while they ate the sandwiches, crisps and fruit I’d doled out to them, I nibbled on some crackers and helped myself to a few of their crisps.

  “Why aren’t you eating much?” Reuben mumbled through a mouthful of sandwich, gamely trying not to spit bits of it out. They already knew I was pregnant, Grace had told them so they would understand why I wasn’t able to ride out with them.

  “The baby is making me pretty sick at the moment,” I explained, “and don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  “Why is it doing that?” Good question, Reuben, I thought.

  “I wish I knew – it’s very inconvenient. You know how much I like cake,” and I grinned at him as I got up to go and get the cake tin from the side, happy to see his eyes light up.

  “Do you know what you’re having?” asked Sophia. I shook my head, not wanting to tell them what I was already thinking.

  “No, we’re saving that as a surprise. There are few enough of those in life.”

  “Will I be able to look after it?”

  “Of course, once Baby is a bit older.” I’d had so many offers from people wanting to look after Baby I hoped he, or she, would be good-natured so those offers didn’t start being withdrawn.

  “Anyway, more importantly, how are you guys getting on back at school?” There had been a decent period of time following ‘the incident’ during which we had all been busy with wedding plans and then the wedding itself, which had proved a good distraction, but I had often wondered how they were coping once life had returned to normal. The resilience of children is astounding though I knew Cavendish and Grace had arranged some counselling for them.

  “Fine,” a standard reply from Reuben, whose eyes were firmly fixed on the piece of cake I was now cutting for him, though he then went on to elaborate, “the schoolwork is boring but I’ve been picked for the football team.”

  “Congratulations!” I exclaimed, delighted for him as he did love his sport. “You’ll have to let me know how you get on.” He nodded, munching away happily. Both of them were good at keeping in touch with me by text and I loved hearing their news. “Sophia?” She looked over at me vacantly as if she hadn’t even heard the last exchange. “How are you enjoying school?”

  “It’s okay,” she shrugged. I felt saddened. Some of the joy had gone out of her world. I knew she had become anxious and that her parents were worried about her. She liked art and music and I asked her if she would come and play her violin for me sometime but she wasn’t that enthusiastic about it. Grace had told me Sophia didn’t want to be away at boarding school anymore but they were hoping she’d settle down again as she’d previously loved it there. However if she didn’t soon she would be coming home to be enrolled at a local school.

  Carlton appeared at the kitchen door asking for volunteers to come and help unload a delivery of hay due to arrive soon. Reuben leapt up, happy to get involved in anything Carlton was doing, and Sophia followed along purely because he encouraged her to. He checked to make sure that everything was all right with me. Then reassured and about to leave he doubled back to tell me Grace had driven into the yard so I asked him to send her in and she could join me for a cup of tea while the children finished off in the barn.

  Grace walked in a minute or so later; she’d passed the children so knew what they were up to and as I carried the mugs to the table she asked how I thought Sophia was.

  “A bit subdued,” I replied, not telling her anything she didn’t already know.

  “We were thinking we might ask her if she wants us to send someone along as protection when she goes back, if that might make her less anxious.” I knew Cavendish and Grace had decided against setting up any sort of additional protection for the children when they went back for the autumn term. Both schools already had a lot of security in place because they attracted the children of many rich and powerful families, any of whom could be potential targets, and Cavendish and Grace hadn’t wanted to single their children out. But maybe they needed to revise that.

  “I don’t know. She hated it last time.” And she had. When there had been a kidnap threat against Cavendish, Young had been despatched to act as her a bodyguard and Sophia had loathed every moment.

  “You’re right of course.” Again I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know and as Grace fretted about what to do I sympathised, knowing that before too long I would be thrown back into that pit of parenthood where you second guess every decision you make, worrying constantly as to if you’re doing the right thing or not.

  The following week, when Sophia and Reuben had returned to school, without any additional protection, we passed into the Stygian gloom of November. Although the winds dropped, an extra challenge descended in the form of a murky fog which lifted at best to a fine mist. I could barely see the cottage from the stabl
es most days and the damp air seeped into clothing to add an uncomfortable chill.

  Despite Trent’s best efforts at pressing food on me, I lost weight. He wasn’t happy, the doctor wasn’t happy and, to be honest, neither was I, but I was doing my best. If I tried to force the issue, nothing stayed down. As it turned out the baby was doing all right, taking what it needed from me, so it was only my body that was suffering. The draining effects of growing a baby showed in the fragile state of my skin, hair and nails.

  The one thing that kept me going through all of this, the one glimmer of hope for me, was that this pregnancy was nothing like the one I’d experienced with Eva. With her I’d been traditionally sick a couple of mornings, a little weary a few evenings, and that was it. And it was this that focused my mind on the fact that this baby was going to be a boy. Although we chose not to find out when we went for the scan, I told Trent of my suspicions and ignored the sceptical look that came across his face. He tentatively suggested we should keep an open mind and that we should discuss girls’ names as well as those for boys, but I would have none of it. With my mind made up, I blanked out Trent’s worries and imagined the boy that was coming – the boy that wouldn’t be a replacement for Eva.

  Trent’s delight at seeing our baby on the scan was wonderful to experience. He proudly took the grainy photo everywhere, whipping it out to show everyone he came across. This was a happy interlude in a bleak time when he was away quite a bit with Cavendish, taking Carlton and Wade with them. Greene had her work cut out with the horses, though Grace stepped in to fill the breach where she could, and we muddled through.

  Trent didn’t say much about his work away. He wasn’t meant to – even though we’d all signed non-disclosure agreements, his work, being with the Secret Intelligence Service, was of a higher level altogether. I remembered a conversation I’d once had with Grace when she’d said, “They can’t tell you what they’ve been through and you learn not to ask”, but Trent and I had built up a sort of code so I had a rough idea of what was going on. If he told me he was ‘off for a couple of days’, even if it was longer than that, I’d know he was staying on home soil. If he was ‘going for a while’, he was overseas.

  He was ‘going for a while’ more and more often now and that worried me. He, Cavendish and the others were working to bring the Polzin organisation down, and as well as it being a dangerous job it was also an endless battle and, as Trent and I had discussed, it wasn’t as if bringing them down would be the end of anything anyway. There would always be another scummy organisation waiting to fill the gap should one arise. But they had to tackle what was in front of them, and in this case the heads of the Polzin family needed to be taken out to stand any chance of the organisation crumbling. That was proving hard to achieve. The senior Polzin brothers kept themselves behind the scenes; it was only the youngest, Anatoly, who took an active role in the business. Being visible made him the easiest target, but since the attack on the estate he had gone into hiding – both him and his right-hand man, Orlov, and it was Orlov I wanted put away.

  I knew no progress had been made against those two whenever Trent returned. I only had to look at him to receive the subtlest shake of the head. No words were needed. He knew the news I was after.

  However, what I did know was as well as trying to get close to the leaders of the Polzin family they set out to cause as much devastation to the organisation as they could along the way. It was the trouble they’d caused previously that had brought Anatoly and Orlov out of the woodwork before and it was hoped it would have the same effect again.

  Two things happened to brighten our lives a week or so before Christmas. The first was Turner’s return to the estate. He’d been gone since just after our wedding, having booked himself into a residential centre for some intensive psychotherapy to help him recover from ‘the incident’. During the attack Anatoly and his men had abducted him off the estate, badly beaten him, and used him to get their troops onto the estate and to take a plane from RAF Loreley. Turner had been humiliated, but even worse than the beating had been the fact that he thought he’d let everyone down, though there wasn’t anything he could have done about it. It had changed him. From being the light-hearted boy I’d known since I’d come to the estate, he’d become angry, brooding and withdrawn. He’d started to spend more and more time at the gym, and hanging out around the stables. It had been this that had first raised Trent’s concerns, but the catalyst for the extended trip away had been the night he’d attacked me when we were sparring at kickboxing. It had been my fault: I’d goaded him, pushed every button until he exploded, and I felt guilty for what I had so stupidly done.

  My heart lifted, though, the morning I looked up from my mucking out to see him approach the post-and-rail fence that ran round the yard. I kept my face neutral, not sure how he’d be.

  He stopped at the open stable door, his breath misting on the cold morning air, and planted his hands deep in his jeans pockets as he lifted his chin. “Hey.”

  I leaned on my fork as I took a breather.

  “Hey yourself.” I studied him for a moment. He’d filled out – hours at the gym, I guessed – and he looked older, more like the other boys on the estate; more experienced, less filled with the exuberance of youth and innocence. “How’re you doing, Turner?”

  “Pretty good, and you?”

  I lifted my hand and tilted it from side to side. “So-so.”

  “I hear congratulations are in order.”

  “Thanks.” Good to hear the estate telegraph was spreading the word.

  “You look tired, Grayson, and too thin.” Nothing like getting straight to it.

  “Yeah, I’ve not been feeling too great.”

  “Sorry, that was clumsy of me. I heard you’d been having a rough time. Can I give you a hand?” I shrugged. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea.

  “I don’t know, Turner, is it okay you being here?”

  He shrugged and grinned. “I’ve been given the all-clear and told it’s absolutely fine for me to be here.” Somehow I doubted that, but I smiled as I handed him the fork, all help being much appreciated, and went to get on with the next stable.

  We finished a while later and as the horses hadn’t come back from exercise yet I offered him a coffee and we wandered over to the cottage. It briefly crossed my mind as we went into the kitchen if it was a good idea, but by then I was committed and could hardly change my mind without coming up with a good reason, which I didn’t have – and anyway I felt perfectly comfortable in his presence.

  He asked after Susie and I told him she was fine and out on the ride with Carlton and Greene. He seemed relaxed as he sat at the kitchen table and I pushed the biscuit tin across the table, telling him to help himself.

  “You look good, Turner – working out as hard as ever I take it.”

  “Thanks, yeah it’s all part of my anger management.”

  “Oh right.” I remembered Trent telling me he had been through the same thing. Using exercise to dispel the anger he felt. He’d made me laugh when he’d said that some days all he did was exercise. He’d mellowed since and I hoped Turner would eventually too. As I passed him his coffee he surprised me.

  “Do you feel okay with me being here, Emma? Do you feel safe?” He looked unsettled for a moment, awkward and embarrassed. Distracted briefly by seeing the horses arriving in the yard I glanced back at him.

  “Yeah, I do, Turner, I feel completely okay with it,” and I smiled, pleased to see him respond with a grin. It was good to have him back.

  The second thing that made our lives considerably brighter was that I stopped suffering from morning sickness. One day I was bad, and the next I got to lunchtime and suddenly realised the nausea hadn’t kicked in. I ate my crackers and cheese as usual, not wanting to tempt fate, and they settled in my stomach without any problems. I even felt less tired that afternoon, and by dinnertime I was still awake. Dinner that evening tasted like normal food again – no odd metallic tastes, no weird smells
putting me off – and I even managed some green stuff.

  Mrs F had sent two cherry tarts home with Trent. She had been relentless in her sending of provisions ever since I’d broken the news, but most of them had gone into Trent. I’d thanked her and let her know the situation, but she hadn’t given up, forever hopeful. Now that resilience of hers was repaid. I eyed the tarts hungrily and wolfed mine down before Trent had even made a start on his. With a smile he slid his tart over onto my plate. I made a half-hearted objection before demolishing it and was still clearing my mouth as I looked over at him.

  “God, that was good. What a relief. Though you can’t keep passing your food over to me, I’ll end up huge.”

  “I think you can cope with it for the time being, Em. You’re nearly five months pregnant and you can hardly tell.” He was right: my stomach was barely rounded between hips that were too prominent.

  I found more of the tarts in the fridge the next day, and the next, and the next, and they never lasted long. I supposed it was a craving of sorts, or my body needing to make up for lost time.

  While enjoying a decent meal at last was wonderful, the best part of that evening, the very best part, was getting to go to bed at the same time as my husband. I curled into him, feeling his warmth radiate into my body. His arm went around me as he held me close.

  “How are you feeling, Em?”

  “Terrific. I think it’s finally over.” I could feel myself smiling with the relief.

  “So…you’re up for some fun?”

  “Absolutely.” The word breathed against lips which brushed mine softly, tenderly, the gentlest touch of his tongue on mine all that was required to make me hot and needy. His hands travelled their way across my body, his lips caressing my skin, his tongue leaving a trail of fire in its wake. Desire grew as he teased his way down my neck, across my shoulders, lingering on my breasts, tasting, touching and sucking on nipples that begged for attention. It had been a while, a long while. The romantic side of our life had suffered while I’d felt so ill and although I’d kept him satisfied with early-morning sex, it hadn’t been nearly enough.