Kristen Ashley - Sommersgate House

What Monique didn’t know about Sean, and probably, Douglas thought, wouldn’t have cared about, was that Sean made a pass at anything in a skirt, including Tamsin.

Tamsin never told Gavin, but she told Douglas.

His sister had always been a smart girl. Gavin, being Gavin, mellow and good-natured most of the time, but fiercely loyal and, in Tamsin and Julia’s case, protective, would have immediately lost his mind and done something immensely stupid.

Douglas wasn’t so impetuous.

Julia may have been blinded by love (or, more likely, from Douglas’s vast experience of women, money) to fall for Sean Webster, but Douglas was counting on the fact that she was smart enough or, at the very least proud enough, not to keep him around.

She didn’t.

Everyone was surprised at Sean’s accident three months after the divorce was final.

Douglas was not.

He felt no remorse. He had ordered that Webster would not sustain a lasting injury. But there was only one human being that Douglas Ashton had ever loved in his thirty-eight years and that was his sister. He could not allow anyone to make her even the slightest bit uncomfortable.

Sean Webster had made that mistake therefore Douglas had made him uncomfortable.

Smoothly negotiating a deserted roundabout, Douglas allowed his thoughts, as they had for obvious reasons of late, to move to his sister.

Growing up, Tamsin had been the only bit of warmth in their cold home, save the Kilpatricks but they were servants and therefore, it had been drilled into Douglas and Tamsin at an early age, had their place and that place was not a familial one.

But Tamsin, she was like a changeling, not born of their family. Sweet-tempered, kind-natured and she loved Douglas openly. She thought he could move mountains, she thought he could rule worlds. Until Gavin, the sun rose and set for Tamsin through Douglas.

She saw the best in him even when Mother ignored him or after one of Father’s fierce tirades. Douglas rarely permitted his thoughts to turn to his father, mainly because there was no purpose to it. Maxwell Ashton was dead, but he had been dead to Douglas years before his father’s heart exploded. This, Douglas thought, was the ultimate irony because he’d always thought his father hadn’t had a heart.

His sister’s death meant certain unbidden, long-buried memories resurfaced, though Douglas had long since grown too detached for them to affect him. He allowed them to drift through his consciousness now but he was, as always, immune.

If Douglas brought home a poor grade (anything less than a first was an excuse for a screaming, red-faced lecture that lasted at least an hour) or he had not been made captain of the rugby or cricket teams (no matter that he was the best player at both) or any of number of the myriad other ways Douglas disappointed his father, Maxwell would unleash a verbal fury on Douglas that shook the windows.

And Douglas disappointed his father often.

Maxwell had never once used his fists on his son but back then Douglas often wished he would. Douglas had seen, and done, violence in his life and those kinds of wounds healed a great deal more quickly.

“Jesus, I look at you and wonder if you’re even my son,” Maxwell spat at him once, his eyes narrowed with contempt.

It was a ridiculous pronouncement. Douglas looked almost exactly like his father, except he was three inches taller and ten pounds leaner.

At first Douglas worked to prove his worth to his father, to make him proud, exhausting himself in the effort.

He’d stopped doing that somewhere in his teens, learning the lesson that no matter what, no matter how much, no matter how well, nothing would make his father proud.

Through all of this, Monique blithely went her way, never once defending her son (but often defending Maxwell), never once dirtying her hands with the sordid little secret their family shared (but often accepting bribes to keep her silence or to encourage her to go on her way).

After he’d given up on his father, the only thing Douglas had to prove was Tamsin’s faith in him.

Through all these times, Tamsin had been there. She soothed his brow when they were children and she cheered him on when they were older. After an episode, she’d seek him out and try to make him smile or she’d defend him fiercely in whispers, hidden away from Maxwell or Monique’s ears.

“Doug, you’re worth ten of him! Maybe fifteen! Don’t listen to a word he says,” she would say.

Douglas never knew what he’d done to deserve such devotion from his sister.

On the other hand, Maxwell had adored his beautiful daughter. She’d never borne the brunt of his anger and scorn. She had her own tortures to endure from a Mother who simply didn’t care. But Tamsin held little love for her father, always loyal to Douglas and the two of them grew up like children without parents. The adults who bore and sired them being necessary evils on a path that they both hoped would lead to freedom.

Douglas allowed himself a rare moment to feel pleased that Tamsin enjoyed a taste of that freedom if only for awhile.

For his part, he had found his own escape. If Tamsin had known what he did or how he spent a great deal of his time, Douglas had no idea how she would react. Perhaps proud, he thought, and frightened, to be certain. She, and everyone else, thought he was bent on money and power, and this was true, he enjoyed the tactics of business. But it was not a challenge and Douglas was very like his father in many ways, he enjoyed a challenge.

Now Tamsin would never know (not that he would have ever told her, he wasn’t free to tell anyone).

His sister was dead and she left him responsible for a mess. What possessed her, he’d never know. Tamsin’s mind worked in mysterious ways and her wishes for her children, Julia and Sommersgate was just another one of those mysteries.

Or perhaps, Douglas thought absently, not so much of a mystery.

Tamsin had always been a hopeless romantic and since she was a little girl she believed in the legendary Myth of Sommersgate, its awful history and its alleged curse. She’d told him more than once she’d hoped he’d free the house she loved from the curse and free the long line of barons who presided over it from the tragedy and unhappiness that plagued them.

In other words, his sister desperately wanted Douglas to fall in love.

This desire increased substantially after she’d found Gavin, wanting some of the bounty she had for her beloved brother. Douglas thought this had to be her reasoning, throwing Julia into his life. Douglas had little doubt that in Tamsin’s romantic imaginings he would fall for Julia and end the curse she foolishly believed rested on Sommersgate and, in so doing, afflicted Douglas himself.

Driving by a still-lit country pub going about its business of closing down for the night, he turned his thoughts to his current challenge.

Julia Fairfax.

He was surprised Julia hadn’t remarried. It couldn’t be for lack of offers.

He wished she had. If she’d had a loving home with two parental substitutes to offer the children, no doubt Tamsin and Gavin would have left them to Julia alone.

Douglas would have accepted that, unless she’d made another foolhardy choice in husbands, which seemed to run in her family. Patricia Fairfax had married a philanderer who had run off with an heiress but he continued to work as a surgeon at the same hospital where Patricia was a nurse. Trevor Fairfax set up house with his new woman, having three more children and daily rubbing his former wife’s face in it until Patricia had become fed up and moved to other employment.

Gavin and Julia rarely saw their father when they were growing up; Trevor Fairfax was so consumed with his other family. By the time Gavin had his assignment in England as an electrical engineer with a multi-national construction company, his brother-in-law hadn’t seen his father in years.