She turned a scornful smile on him. ‘It’s no mystery. You make it pretty obvious lately that you disapprove of my relationship with Tim.’
‘You surely realise why?’
‘I’ve never given it a thought,’ she told him, amazed that her nose failed to grow a couple of inches at the lie.
‘Then think about it now,’ he said crisply. ‘I’ve had to be father, mother and brother to Tim since he was ten. I don’t want to see him hurt.’
She bristled. ‘You think I’m going to hurt him?’
‘Yes.’ His eyes held hers. ‘Tim’s a one-woman man, but I know that you have other men in your life. I’d say the odds on Tim getting hurt are fairly high.’
Not for the first time in their acquaintance Harriet wanted to punch James Edward Devereux on his elegant nose. Instead she opened the door wide to speed him on his way. ‘Tim’s perfectly happy with the fact that I have friends of both sexes.’
‘In the same situation I couldn’t be happy with that.’
‘You and Tim are two very different people,’ she said coldly.
‘True. Everyone loves Tim. Goodnight, Harriet.’ James Devereux glanced back as he reached his car. ‘The offer will stay on the table for a while. Ring me if you change your mind.’
Harriet closed the door, rammed the bolts home and stormed to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee black and strong enough to counteract the effect James Devereux invariably had on her.
She’d met his brother Tim in the village post office when she first came to live with her grandmother in Upcote, and the two orphaned thirteen-year-olds had taken to each other on sight. Tim had raced back to End House with Harriet right away to ask Olivia Verney’s permission to take her granddaughter fishing in the stream that ran through Edenhurst grounds. And afterwards he’d taken Harriet off to meet his brother, who was twelve years Tim’s senior, and possessed of such striking good looks he’d seemed like a god from Olympus to the youthful Harriet.
Tim so openly worshipped his brother that for a while Harriet had found it natural to follow suit. Unlike her friends at school, who had crushes on rock stars and football players, Harriet Verney’s naive form of hero-worship had centred on James Edward Devereux. Tall, self-assured, with glossy dark hair and the tawny Devereux eyes, he was the archetypal Corsair to a teenager just introduced to Byron’s poetry.
During that first summer vacation with her grandmother, Harriet had come to terms with her first experience with grief. The double loss of her parents in a storm on a sailing holiday had broken her world in pieces, and it had taken all her grandmother’s loving care to put it back together again. The meeting with Tim accelerated the healing process. That summer Harriet spent most of her daylight hours with him. Totally comfortable in each other’s company, they ate at the kitchen table at End House with Olivia Verney, or ran free on the acres of land belonging to Edenhurst, the beautiful, but increasingly dilapidated home of the Devereux brothers.
By that time both Devereux parents had been dead for some time and life had become difficult for the heir to the estate. Crippling inheritance tax, plus school fees for Tim and wages for even the bare minimum of staff required to keep Edenhurst going had all been a huge burden for a young man only just qualified as an architect. Through Tim Harriet had learned that some of the antique furniture and the more valuable family paintings had to be sold. With the proceeds as back-up James Devereux had taken a gamble, and with a partner set up a company to convert derelict warehouses into expensive riverside apartments.
The gamble paid off, the apartments sold like hot cakes, and riding high on the success of the enterprise James Devereux eventually went on to transform Edenhurst into the first of a series of hotels with integral health spas. He married an established star in the modelling world, and the only cloud on the dynamic young entrepreneur’s horizon had been his brother’s flat refusal to join the company.
Tim Devereux insisted on taking a fine art degree instead, and went straight from college to work in a London gallery owned by Jeremy Blyth, an art dealer highly respected in his field. None of Tim’s choices had been influenced by Harriet, but James made it plain he blamed her for all of them, even though Tim was adamant that nothing would have persuaded him to go into property developing. The new job suited him down to the ground. Jeremy Blyth was charming, witty, openly gay and knew all there was to know about the art world. The job would provide invaluable experience, also allow spare time for Tim’s own painting. He shared a house with two friends from art college and he had Harriet. What else could he want in life?
‘His lordship’s blessing?’ she’d said bluntly.
‘I don’t know why you’re always so down on Jed.’ Tim had given her a coaxing smile as he put an arm round her. ‘Come on, Harry. Get if off your chest at last. You and I don’t have secrets, remember. What is it with you and my brother?’
He’d kept on about it until at last, desperate to shut him up, Harriet finally told him that one Sunday afternoon she’d stopped to stroke the dog outside the open kitchen door of Edenhurst, overheard James lecturing Tim, and suffered the usual fate of eavesdroppers.
‘He felt great sympathy for my situation, but thought you should see something of the lads from the village as well, instead of spending all your time with a girl—even one who looked just like a boy with such close cropped hair and a gruff little voice.’ She growled at the memory, which still burned. ‘I wanted to kill him with my bare hands!’
Tim had roared with laughter. ‘You’ve changed a bit since then, tiger. The hair grew, the girl equipment arrived, and that voice of yours could earn a fortune these days on one of those sexy chat lines—ouch!’ he howled as she hit him. ‘And now he’s shackled to the fair Madeleine surely you feel some sympathy for Jed.’
‘Not a scrap! He’s far too overbearing and sure of himself to merit any sympathy from me.’
From that day on Harriet never thought of or referred to James Edward Devereux as Jed, as he was known to family and friends. And she never told a soul that her teenage self-esteem had been dealt such a blow that summer afternoon it had taken years afterwards for her to think of herself as even passably attractive.
Harriet rang Dido early next morning to say she’d received an offer for End House. ‘Tim’s brother wants to add it to the Edenhurst estate, but I just can’t face giving the house up yet, so I turned him down.’
‘Good God, are you mad?’ said Dido, shocked. ‘I know your grandma left money to keep the place going for six months, but from now on you’ll have to pay running costs yourself.’
‘I know all that. But it’s been my home for the past ten years, remember. I just can’t bear to part with it yet. In fact,’ added Harriet, bracing herself, ‘I thought I might even live here myself for a bit, Dido.’
There was a pause. ‘You work in London,’ Dido reminded her, sounding close to tears.
‘I could look round for something in this area instead—Cheltenham, maybe.’
‘You really want to desert me?’
Harriet felt a guilty pang. ‘You earn serious money these days. Couldn’t you manage the mortgage on your own?’
‘I don’t care about the beastly mortgage. I just want you here with me. Besides, what about Tim?’
‘We can see each other at weekends.’
‘I think you’re making a huge mistake, Harriet. Please don’t make any snap decisions.’
Harriet spent some time reassuring her friend, then walked to the village shops to buy a newspaper, stopped to chat with a couple of people she knew, and, because it was such a beautiful day, took the longer route back along the small tributary that formed the boundary to Edenhurst. She paused