Kindness was not something that she had been on the receiving end of much, actually not at all, once the tabloids had portrayed her as a cold-hearted, manipulative, gold-digging bitch who had married a wealthy dying man for his money. The scarlet widow, they had labelled her. It could have been worse, her brother Charlie had joked at the time—they could, he pointed out, have called her ginger.
Initially there had been a few people inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, but they had faded away after an enterprising journalist had dug deeper and found out about the money Charlie had embezzled from James’s firm.
Neve had not tried to defend herself. How could she? The fact was she had married a dying man who had left her pots of money and Charlie had embezzled a small fortune.
Nobody wanted to know she had not touched the money or that she’d agreed to James’s proposal as a way of finally repaying the incredible kindness he’d shown both her and Charlie.
‘And we have all made allowances for Hannah, but there is a limit. A child needs boundaries to feel safe.’
Neve accepted the not-so-subtle reprimand and gave a guilty nod, thinking boundaries only worked if the child involved listened to a word you said. If she had half the natural authority that this woman projected there wouldn’t be a problem.
‘I have the impression that Hannah views this new suspension before the holidays as a joke. May I make a suggestion?’
‘Of course.’
‘She will be spending the holidays skiing with the Palmer girl and her family?’
Neve nodded cautiously, because she was pretty sure she knew where the older woman was going with this and it would not make her life any easier.
It hadn’t. Her stepdaughter’s response to news that she was to spend the holiday at home with Neve and not in a fashionable ski resort with her friends had gone down pretty much the way Neve had anticipated—namely there had been shouting, abuse and finally sulky, sullen silence.
She had become enemy number one—so no change there—and the cause of every bad thing that had ever happened in her stepdaughter’s life, responsible for everything, it seemed, including the weather.
She had to be doing something wrong. It wasn’t meant to be this difficult, was it? Neve wondered wearily.
What had James said?
At twenty-three you haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager.
Well, she hadn’t, but she had never been a teenager like Hannah.
I’m not asking you to be her mother, Neve. Be her friend. She’ll need one.
Need maybe, but not want! Not sharing James’s optimism, she hadn’t really expected Hannah to look on her as a best friend, but she hadn’t anticipated being the unwavering focus of all that youthful frustration and simmering hatred.
It was grueling, exhausting, and deeply depressing.
She thought things might not have been so bad if it hadn’t been for the generous provision James had made for her in the will. She knew he was only trying to be kind, but that kindness had backfired big time even before the press got hold of the story.
Hannah had already considered her young stepmother a gold-digger, and the money had merely confirmed her suspicions.
Neve felt like a total failure. James had trusted her, God knew why. The truth was she wasn’t qualified to look after a puppy, let alone an adolescent girl, and goodness knew what had made her agree to this in the first place.
‘Worried? I’m not worried, I’m bored. With you,’ Hannah added just in case Neve had not got the message.
It would have been hard not to. It was becoming clear to Neve that the cheek-turning she had been doing was not working, but the tough love alternative wasn’t exactly proving to be a massive success either. There had to be some middle ground of parenting…didn’t there?
‘I’ve got some things planned for your break. I thought we could go shopping, and maybe if you like we could—’
The teenager cut across her. ‘Thanks, but I’m not into charity shops,’ she drawled, rolling her eyes. ‘You do know that shocking pink clashes with ginger hair.’ She gave a visible shudder as her contemptuous glance moved from Neve’s sweater to her unruly auburn curls.
Neve, who owned a shop selling vintage clothes—the sweater, which she had loved on sight, had never made it to the shelves—refused to take offence. The criticism was to some extent valid: before her marriage she had shopped in charity shops, developing what kinder friends called an individual style and the less kind called weird.
Her style had not changed even after her finances had. James had given her credit cards and a very generous allowance, but she had always felt uneasy accepting his generosity. It wasn’t as if they had had marriage in anything but name.
‘Vintage is very in, haven’t you heard?’ Her customers had—business was thriving.
‘That was never in.’
Encouraged by the grin Hannah visibly fought as she looked at the sweater in question, Neve smiled and suggested, ‘You could always show me what I should be wearing?’
‘Look, there’s no one here to see your saintly act so why don’t you just drop it, Neve? It’s not as if you’re fooling anyone anyway. Everyone knows why you married Dad.’
‘I was very fond of your father, Hannah,’ Neve said quietly.
‘Fond of his money, you mean,’ the youngster hit back. ‘Or are you trying to tell me you’d have married him for love?’
Neve’s eyes dropped guiltily. ‘Your dad was a lovely man.’
‘And you are a gold-digging bitch!’
This last observation was made loudly enough for the people at the next table to hear it. While her stepdaughter stormed off, she sat wishing the floor would open up and swallow her.
When it became clear that nothing short of a miracle was going to get him to his meeting on time Severo was irritated but philosophical. The very real possibility he would be forced to spend the night in his four-wheel drive was not a pleasant one, but to his mind it constituted inconvenience rather than disaster.
He rounded a bend and swore softly under his breath as he just managed to stop before he collided with the car that was slewed half across the road. Dark head bowed against the driving snow, he got out to check out the abandoned vehicle. The fact the car was locked made it seem likely that the occupants had escaped relatively unscathed.
Continuing in these weather conditions was clearly no longer a viable option. According to the last news bulletin he had heard half of the West Country was snowed in and the police were appealing to motorists to make only urgent journeys.
Stay at home, they urged. You had to get there first, he mused as he tramped back to his own vehicle. He had almost reached it when he spotted the lights in the distance. It took him another ten minutes of painful progress before he reached them.
From the look of the snow-covered vehicles in the car park of the roadside inn he had not been the only snow-bound traveller that had chanced upon this sanctuary in the middle of the bleak moor.
He was reaching for the door when his phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID and was tempted not to respond; the last time his stepmother had contacted him she had just been arrested for shoplifting.
The time before when he hadn’t picked up she had raised the money she had wanted him to supply by selling off a piece of family jewellery that wasn’t hers to sell, and buying it back discreetly had been time consuming.
His stepmother was time consuming, but it was dangerous to ignore her.