The other was Freya, Janine’s daughter by an earlier marriage. A trained nurse, she’d recently come to stay at her mother’s request.
‘He doesn’t want a nurse there in case it makes him look weak,’ Janine pleaded, ‘but if I invite my daughter he can’t refuse.’
‘But he knows I’m a nurse,’ Freya had pointed out.
‘Yes, but we don’t have to talk about it, and you can keep an eye on him discreetly. It helps that you don’t look like a nurse.’
This was an understatement. Freya was delicately built with elegant movements, a pretty face and a cheeky demeanour. She might have been a dancer, a nightclub hostess, or anything except a medical expert with an impressive list of letters after her name.
An adventurous spirit had made her leave her last job in response to her mother’s request.
‘I was getting bored,’ she said. ‘Same thing day after day.’
‘You certainly won’t get that with Amos,’ Janine had remarked.
She was right. After only a few days Freya remarked, ‘It’s like dealing with a spoilt child. Don’t worry. I can do what’s necessary.’
Luckily, Amos liked his stepdaughter and under her care his health improved. It was she who now came bouncing out onto the balcony and said, ‘Time for your nap.’
‘Not for another ten minutes,’ he growled.
She smiled. ‘No, it’s now. No argument.’
He grinned. ‘You’re a bully, you know that?’
‘Of course I know that. I work at it. Get going.’
He shrugged, resigned and good-natured, and let her escort him as far as his bedroom door. Janine would have gone in with him, but he waved her away.
‘I can manage without supervision. Just keep your eyes open for Darius. I can’t think what’s keeping him.’ He closed the door.
‘What’s going on?’ Freya asked as the two women walked away.
‘Goodness knows. He was supposed to arrive this morning but he called to say there’d been an unexpected delay.’
‘And then all the other sons, Leonid, Marcel, Travis, Jackson, just a few days apart. Why is Amos suddenly doing this?’
‘I can only guess,’ Janine said sadly. ‘He puts on this big act of being fully recovered, but he had a scare. He’s seen that his life could end at any time, and he’s…getting things sorted out, is how he puts it, starting with changes to his will.’
‘Funny, he’s so organised that you’d think he’d have fixed that ages ago.’
‘He did, but I believe he’s taking another look at all of his lads and deciding—I don’t know—which one will manage best—’
‘Which one is most like him,’ Freya said shrewdly.
‘You’re very hard on him,’ Janine protested.
‘No more than he deserves. Of all the arrogant—’
‘But he’s very fond of you. You’re the daughter he never had and he’d love you to be really part of the family.’ She paused delicately.
‘You mean he wants me to be his daughter-in-law?’ Freya demanded, aghast. ‘The cheeky crook.’
‘Don’t call him a crook,’ Janine protested.
‘Why not? No man builds up the kind of fortune he did by honest means. And he’s taught his sons to be the same. Anything for money, that’s how they all think. So if one of them can talk me into marriage he’ll cop the lot. Was Amos mad when he thought of that? Nothing on this earth would persuade me—there isn’t one of them I’d ever dream of—ye gods and little fishes!’
‘Don’t tell him I told you,’ Janine begged.
‘Don’t worry. Not a word.’ Suddenly her temper faded, replaced by wicked mischief. ‘But I might enjoy a good laugh. Yes, I think it deserves that.’
As she hurried away her mother heard the laughter echoing back, and sighed. She couldn’t blame Freya one bit. She, of all people, knew what madness it was to marry into this family.
Darius arrived the next day, apologising with a fictional tale of business dealings. Not for the world would he have admitted that he’d been forced to leave Herringdean, return to the mainland and check into a hotel to put on a fresh suit. Normally, no power on earth could force him to change his plans and he resented it. Another thing for which Harriet Connor was to blame.
He found her mysteriously disturbing because she seemed to haunt him as two people. There was the girl who’d briefly charmed him with her instinctive empathy for his feelings about the isolated place. And there was the other one who’d interfered with his plans, destroyed his dignity with her stupid hound, and committed the unforgivable crime of seeing him at a disadvantage. He had dismissed her from his mind but she seemed unaware of that fact and popped up repeatedly in one guise or another.
A fanciful man might have defined her two aspects as the Good Fairy and the Bad Fairy. Darius, who wasn’t fanciful, simply called her ‘that wretched female’.
His father greeted him in typical fashion. ‘So there you are at last. About time too.’
‘An unexpected matter that required my attention.’
Amos grunted. ‘As long as you sorted it out to your advantage.’
‘Naturally,’ Darius said, brushing aside the memory of lying on the sand. ‘Then I got here as soon as I could. I’m glad to see you looking better, Father.’
‘I am better. I keep saying so but my womenfolk won’t believe me. I suppose Freya talked a lot when she collected you from the airport.’
‘I asked her questions and, like a good nurse, she answered them.’
‘Nurse be damned. She’s here as my stepdaughter.’
‘If you say so.’
‘What do you think of her?’
‘She seems a nice girl, what little I’ve seen of her.’
‘She cheers the place up. And she’s a good cook. Better than that so-called professional I employ. She’s doing supper for us tonight. You’ll enjoy it.’
He did enjoy it. Freya produced excellent food, and could crack jokes that lightened the atmosphere. She was pleasant to have around, and Darius found himself wondering why more women couldn’t be like her instead of invading other people’s private property with their sharp remarks and their dangerous dogs.
Awkward. She’d said it herself, and that was exactly right.
After supper, in his father’s study, the two men confronted each other.
‘I gather things aren’t too good?’ Amos grunted.
‘Not for me or anyone else,’ Darius retorted. ‘There’s a global crisis, hadn’t you heard?’
‘Yes, and some are weathering it better than others. That contract you had the big fight over, I warned you how to word the get-out clause, and if you’d listened to me you could have told them where to stuff their legal action.’
‘But they’re decent people,’ Darius protested. ‘They knew very little about business—’
‘All the better. You could have done as you liked and they wouldn’t have found out until too late. You’re soft, that’s your trouble.’
Darius grimaced. In the financial world, his reputation was far from soft. Cold, unyielding, power-hungry, that was what people said of him. But he drew the line