She’d already put her foot on the first step when she heard the unmistakable sound of a glass being set on a table.
‘Daddy!’ she exclaimed, and rushed into the sitting room. ‘Daddy, it’s me—’
A man was standing by the fireplace with his back to the door.
‘I’m afraid he’s not here,’ he said. ‘I got here this morning and there was no sign of him.’
Tasha stared speechlessly as the man turned to face her and give her a familiar sardonic smile. She’d come four miles by bike, two hundred and twenty miles by train and two miles on foot in the pouring rain to be all alone with Bad Cousin Chaz.
Chase Adam Zachary Taggart looked as though he’d stepped out of the kind of ad where tall, loose-limbed, impossibly handsome men run through the streets of Paris at dawn with a good-looking double bass. He was standing with his weight on one leg, hands in his pockets, with loose-limbed easy grace; he was wearing a suit which managed, for all its ravishing dark elegance, to look like a careless afterthought, something to throw on if you had to open a West End show or pick up an Oscar or improvise jazz in a backroom bar—he’d done all three. Black hair swept back from a sardonic face; black eyes looked cynically out at the world from under hooked black brows; a finely carved yet sensuous mouth curved in a faint, cynical smile. He was instinctively graceful, terrifyingly elegant, impossibly handsome and, unlike her bedraggled self, dry.
He was also, Tasha thought resentfully, supposed to be several thousand miles away. She’d done the decent thing and sent him an invitation six months ago to the wedding. Bad Cousin Chaz had replied that, much as he’d love to come, business commitments would make it impossible to get away from New York at that particular time. Company A was going to be taking over Company B, or Company C was launching a flotation of shares, or maybe Chaz had just scheduled the assassination of the director of Company D for the day of the wedding—Tasha couldn’t remember precisely which flimsy excuse had formed the substance of the calculated rudeness of the reply. She’d been too relieved. The wedding was to be her special day; it had been wonderful to know for sure that, on that day of all days, Bad Cousin Chaz would not be there.
Except that he was here, now, of all impossible times—
‘What are you doing here?’ she managed to say at last. ‘I thought you were in New York.’
‘I was.’
‘I thought you couldn’t leave New York,’ Tasha said pointedly. ‘I thought the reason you couldn’t come to the wedding was that you were going to be expectedly detained on urgent business that couldn’t spare you for two hours let alone two days.’
Chaz shrugged. ‘Deal’s off. Something I wanted to discuss with the professor. I’ll have to get back soon, though; ’fraid I can’t stay for the wedding.’
He raised a sardonic black eyebrow in a gesture she knew and loathed. ‘Speaking of which, what are you doing here? You should be ticking off items on “101 Things Every Bride Should Do For a Perfect Wedding”, not gallivanting around the countryside.’
Tasha gritted her teeth. He was going to have to know sooner or later; no point fighting off the inevitable.
‘Deal’s off,’ she said curtly.
Chaz had never made any secret of despising Jeremy; she braced herself for some acerbic remark.
He was frowning. ‘Off? You mean as in bridesmaids dismissed, cancel the cake?’
‘That’s right,’ said Tasha.
Chaz whistled softly, then grinned. ‘Well, let me be the first to congratulate you, Tash, I couldn’t be more pleased. What exactly made you change your mind?’
Tasha gritted her teeth again.
‘I didn’t,’ she said.
An astonished swoop of eyebrow met this new development. ‘You mean it was Jeremy’s idea?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, don’t stop there,’ said her abominable cousin. ‘Tell me all about it, or, no, wait, let me get you a drink and then tell me all about it. What are you having?’
‘Scotch,’ said Tasha. ‘And it’s none of your business.’
Chaz crossed the room to the drinks cupboard. ‘Just as you like,’ he said, filling two glasses. ‘Depends whether you want me to hear your version or someone else’s.’ He put the drink in her hand, then gestured towards the sofa. ‘Come and get dry.’
Tasha sank wearily to the sofa. Chaz sat down beside her, one leg crossed over the other, an arm along the back of the sofa.
‘Well, you may as well know,’ she said dully. ‘You know how Daddy has all those investments?’
‘Yes?’
‘But he’s not one of those rich men people have heard of, and I didn’t realise Jeremy knew.’
‘Yes?’
‘But he did, only he didn’t realise—what I mean is, I told him Daddy had decided to give each of us now the money he would have left to us in his will, but I never said he was going to give most of it to that educational trust because it didn’t seem relevant. I didn’t know Jeremy knew how much Daddy had so I didn’t know how much he thought I’d be getting.’
‘So he’d done his homework and thought he’d be on first name terms with five or six million pounds instead of a couple of hundred grand?’
‘And he said he needed the money to do what he wanted to do, it wasn’t for him it was for us, if he couldn’t do the things he’d dreamed of accomplishing he wouldn’t be the man I thought I was marrying and we’d both be diminished—’
She turned her head away. She wasn’t going to cry in front of Chaz.
When her voice was steady again she said, ‘It’s stupid. I feel ashamed even though I didn’t do anything wrong. I feel sick inside. It’s as if I’ve lost someone who never even existed, and I keep seeing his face and hearing his voice saying those things and they won’t go away and nothing makes it any better. I don’t know what would make it better.’
As long as her head was turned away she could say the things she would have said to her father. Her father would have said something philosophical.
Chaz said, ‘Well, I know what I’d do, but it probably isn’t your style.’
‘What’s that?’ said Tasha drearily. ‘Puncture his tyres?’
‘I was thinking more in terms of violent physical exercise,’ said Chaz.
‘I’ve already ridden four miles by bicycle and walked two miles in the rain,’ said Tasha.
‘That wasn’t quite the kind of exercise I had in mind,’ said Chaz.
Something in his tone of voice made Tasha lift her head. There was a lurking spark of mischief in her cousin’s eyes.
‘Oh, you mean sleep with someone,’ she said baldly. ‘I should have known—when do you ever think of anything else?’
‘Once in a while,’ said Chaz. ‘I did say I thought it wasn’t your style.’
‘It’s just that it’s such a stupid idea,’ said