Helen Brooks - Ruthless Tycoon, Innocent Wife

By the time Marianne had persuaded Crystal to go to bed and taken the older woman a mug of hot, sweet milk and a couple of aspirin, she felt exhausted. Her head was spinning, she felt physically sick and stress was causing her temples to throb. Nevertheless, she sat down at the coffee table and began to work through the papers Tom had left for her.

There was no escaping the truth.

Tears streaming down her face, she opened the french windows and stepped into the garden, which was bathed in the mauve shadows of twilight. Immediately the scent from the hedge of China roses close to the house wafted in the warm breeze and, as she walked on in the violet dusk, pinks, sweet peas and honeysuckle competed for her attention, their fragrance filling the air. A blackbird was singing its heart out somewhere close, the pure notes hanging on the breeze, and far below the house she could hear the whisper of the sea on the rocks below the cliff.

This was her home. She had always known she would come back here one day. Boyfriends had come and gone and she had nearly had her heart broken once or twice, but deep inside she had always imagined coming back to the area she had grown up in, meeting someone local who would be able to love Seacrest like she did and settling down somewhere close. And then one day, when she was much older and her parents had had the joy of watching grandchildren grow up, she would inherit the house she loved with all her heart. And hold it in trust for her children…

Sinking down onto a sun-warmed bench which had retained the day’s heat, she shut her eyes against the pain. If she lost Seacrest, then she would really lose her parents; that was how she felt. She couldn’t explain it because of course they were gone, but here, in the house and garden which had nurtured so many generations of her family, she still felt close to them.

She sat on in the quiet of the night until it was quite dark, the leaves on the trees surrounding the grounds of Seacrest trembling slightly in the summer breeze. The moon had risen with silvery hauteur in the velvet-black sky, the stars twinkling in deference to their sovereign. It was a beautiful night. It was always a beautiful night at Seacrest, even in the midst of winter when harsh angry winds whistled over the vast cliffs, melancholy and haunting as they rattled the old windows and moaned down the chimneys.

Be it in the spring, when the swallows began to build their nests under the eaves; summer, when wild rabbits brought their babies onto the smooth lawns to eat grass that was sweeter than on the cliffs beyond Seacrest’s boundary; autumn, when the trees were a blaze of colour and squirrels darted here and there anxiously burying nuts; or winter, when the sound of the sea crashing on the rocks filtered through shut windows and flavoured dreams, Seacrest was possessed of her own magic. The house was more than a house; it always had been.

She had to do something, but what? Marianne held her aching head in her hands, bewildered at how quickly her calm, happy life had been turned upside down. She didn’t know which way to turn.

At midnight she walked back to the house, turning off the lights downstairs before retiring to her room. As she opened the door and looked at the room which had been hers as long as she could remember, desolation claimed her anew.

‘Sleep.’ She said the word out loud into the stillness. She needed to sleep and then she would be fresher to think of a way round this. This was the twenty-first century, an age of miracles when things were happening which would have been considered unthinkable a century before. It couldn’t be beyond the wit of man—or woman in this case—to think of a way to keep Seacrest. She’d work twenty-four hours a day if necessary.

Stripping off her charcoal-grey dress, she threw it into a corner of the room. She would never wear it again. Nor the black shoes and jacket she had bought specially for the funeral.

Without bothering to brush her teeth or shower, she crawled into bed in her slip, an exhaustion that rendered her limbs like lead taking over. In contrast to the last few nights after Crystal’s shocking telephone call, she was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

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