Margaret Way - Guardian to the Heiress

A faint grimace spread across his dynamic features. “I didn’t have your advantages, Carol, but I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer. I was ambitious, an inherited trait. Then I, too, lost my dad, a geologist, when I was twelve.”

So both of them had lost their fathers at an early age. He at twelve, she at age five. That made a bond.

“It was just my mother and me,” he was saying. “I determined after that, it was my job to look after her, when she knew perfectly well how to look after both of us. She’s a strong woman. She ran a very successful catering business until she sold out a year ago. These days she and her sister, my aunt Terri, travel the world.”

“That’s good. There would be so much to see.” She hesitated for a moment before asking. “How did your father die? He wouldn’t have been very old.”

He told her, although he didn’t talk much about the premature death of his father. “He died in a mine explosion in Chile where he had been sent by his company to explore copper deposits in the region. He was able to help get a lot of the men out. He wasn’t so lucky. He was forty-one.”

“Oh, Damon, I’m so sorry.”

There was such a compassionate look on her face, he wanted to pull her to him.

Steady on!

Physical contact of the order he was thinking was out of the question. But even the thought gave him a strange pleasure that was very unsettling at the same time. He hadn’t anticipated this feeling of urgency. Anyone would think he had been appointed her knight in shining armour.

“The long summer vacation is coming up,” she said with a slight frown. “My Uncle Maurice made no attempt to see me in all these long years.”

“No.” She had been deprived of family.

“It’s a heavy burden having a lot of money,” she commented gravely.

“It is indeed. People don’t always realize that. Money can’t buy happiness. I’ve seen that time and time again. Too much money in a family can bring about a lot of internal conflict.” A prominent family’s feud was being publicly waged in the press at that point of time.

“Did my grandfather leave any instructions for me?” She hoped it was so.

“I’m glad you asked, Carol, because he did,” he answered gently. “He wanted you to know how things were. He wanted you to know why certain decisions had to be made. I guess he wanted pardon.”

“Then he’s got it,” she answered quietly. “I could never learn to hate my grandfather no matter what my mother tried to drum into me. I was a rebellious child, not easy to handle. Not cute at all. One thing in my favour—hate was left out of me, when sadly it defined my mother.”

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