Married To A Mistress

Outside the door, Maxie had frozen, unnerved by the biting hostility she had heard in Darcy’s cuttingly well-bred voice. So Darcy still hadn’t managed to forgive her, and yet what had destroyed their friendship three years earlier had been in no way Maxie’s fault. Darcy had been jilted at the altar. Her bridegroom had waited until the eleventh hour to confess that he had fallen in love with one of her bridesmaids. That bridesmaid, entirely innocent of the smallest instant of flirtation with or indeed interest in the bridegroom, had unfortunately been Maxie.

‘Does that somehow excuse her for stealing someone else’s husband?’

‘I don’t think any of us get to choose who we fall in love with,’ Polly stressed with a surprising amount of emotion. ‘And Maxie must be devastated now that he’s gone back to his wife.’

‘If Maxie ever falls in love, it won’t be with an ancient old bloke like that,’ Darcy scorned. ‘She wouldn’t have looked twice at Leland Coulter if he hadn’t been loaded! Surely you haven’t forgotten what her father was like? Greed is in Maxie’s bloodstream. Don’t you remember the way Russ was always trying to touch poor Nancy for a loan?’

‘I remember how much his behaviour embarrassed and upset Maxie,’ Polly responded tautly, her dismay at the other woman’s attitude audible.

In the awful pool of silence that followed Maxie wrapped her arms round herself. She felt gutted, totally gutted. So nothing had changed. Darcy was stubborn and never admitted herself in the wrong. Maxie had, however, hoped that time would’ve lessened the other woman’s antagonism to the point where they could at least make peace.

‘She is stunningly beautiful. Who can really blame her for taking advantage of that?’ Darcy breathed in a grudging effort at placation. ‘But then what else has Maxie got? I never did think she had much in the way of brains—’

‘How can you say that, Darcy? Maxie is severely dyslexic,’ Polly reminded her companion reproachfully.

Maxie lost all her natural colour, cringing at even this whispered reference to her biggest secret.

The tense silence in the drawing-room lingered.

‘And in spite of that she’s so wonderfully famous now,’ Polly sighed.

‘Well, if your idea of fame is playing Goldilocks in shampoo commercials, I suppose she is,’ Darcy shot back crushingly.

Unfreezing, Maxie tiptoed back down the corridor and then walked with brisk, firm steps back again. She pushed wide the door with a light smile pasted to her unwittingly pale face.

‘Maxie!’ Polly carolled, and rose rather awkwardly to her feet.

Halfway towards her, Maxie stopped dead. Tiny dark-haired Polly was pregnant.

‘When did you get married?’ Maxie demanded with a grin.

Polly turned brick-red. ‘I didn’t...I mean, I’m not...’

Maxie was stunned. Polly had been raised by a fire-breathing puritanical father. The teenager Maxie recalled had been wonderfully kind and caring, but also extremely prim and proper as a result. Horribly aware that she had embarrassed Polly, she forced a laugh. ‘So what?’ she said lightly.

‘I’m afraid the event of a child without a husband is not something as easily shrugged off in Polly’s world as in yours.’ Darcy stood by the window, her boyishly short auburn hair catching fire from the light behind her, aggressive green eyes challenging on the point.

Maxie stiffened at the reminder that Darcy had a child of her own but she refused to rise to that bait. Poor Polly looked trained enough as it was. ‘Polly knows what I meant—’

‘Does she—?’ Darcy began.

‘I feel dizzy!’ Polly announced with startling abruptness.

Instantly Darcy stopped glaring at Maxie and both women anxiously converged on the tiny brunette. Maxie was the more efficient helper. Gently easing Polly down into the nearest armchair, she fetched a footstool because the smaller woman’s ankles looked painfully swollen. Then, noting the untouched tea trolley nearby, she poured Polly a cup of tea and urged her to eat a digestive biscuit.

‘Do you think you should see a doctor?’ Darcy asked ruefully. ‘I suppose I was lucky. I was never ill when I was expecting Zia.’

‘What do you think, Polly?’ Maxie prompted.

‘I’m fine...saw one yesterday,’ Polly muttered. ‘I’m just tired.

At that point, a middle-aged man in a dark suit was shown in with great ceremony by the housekeeper. Introducing himself as Edward Hartley, their godmother’s solicitor, he took a seat, politely turned down the offer of refreshment and briskly extracted a document from his briefcase.

‘Before I commence the reading of the will, I feel that I should warn you all beforehand that the respective monies will only be advanced if the strict conditions laid down by my late client are met—’

‘Put that in English,’ Darcy interrupted impatiently.

Mr Hartley removed his spectacles with a faint sigh. ‘I assume that you are all aware that Mrs Leeward enjoyed a very happy but tragically brief marriage when she was in her twenties, and that the premature death of her husband was a lifelong source of sorrow and regret to her.’

‘Yes,’ Polly confirmed warmly. ‘Our godmother often talked to us about Robbie.’

‘He died in a car crash six months after they married,’ Maxie continued ruefully. ‘As time went on he became pretty much a saint in her memory. She used to talk to us about marriage as if it was some kind of Holy Grail and a woman’s only hope of happiness.’

‘Before her death, Mrs Leeward made it her business to visit each one of you. After completing those visits, she altered her will,’ Edward Hartley informed them in a tone of wry regret. ‘I advised her that the conditions of inheritance she chose to include might be very difficult, if not impossible for any one of you to fulfil. However, Mrs Leeward was a lady who knew her own mind, and she had made her decision.’

Maxie was holding her breath, her bemused gaze skimming over the faces of her companions. Polly wore an expression of blank exhaustion but Darcy, never able to hide her feelings, now looked worried sick.

In the pin-dropping silence, the solicitor began to read the will. Nancy Leeward had left her entire and extremely substantial estate evenly divided between her three goddaughters on condition that each of them married within a year and remained married for a minimum of six months. Only then would they qualify to inherit a portion of the estate. In the event of any one of them failing to meet the terms of the will, that person’s share would revert to the Crown.

By the time the older man had finished speaking, Maxie was in shock. Every scrap of colour had drained from her face. She had hoped, she had prayed that she might be released from the burden of debt that had almost destroyed her life. And now she had learnt that, like everything else over the past twenty-two years, from the death of her mother when she was a toddler to her father’s compulsive gambling addiction, nothing was going to be that easy.

A jagged laugh broke from Darcy. ‘You’ve just got to be kidding,’ she said incredulously.

‘There’s no chance of me fulfilling those conditions,’ Polly confided chokily, glancing at her swollen stomach and looking away again with open embarrassment.

‘Nor I...’ Maxie admitted flatly, her attention resting on Polly and her heart sinking for her. She should have guessed there would be no supportive male in the picture. Trusting, sweet-natured Polly had obviously been seduced and dumped.

Darcy shot Maxie an exasperated look. ‘They’ll be queuing up for you, Maxie—

‘With my colourful reputation?’

Darcy flushed. ‘All any one of us requires is a man and a wedding ring. Personally speaking, I’ll only attract either by advertising and offering a share of the proceeds as a bribe!’

‘While I am sure that that is a purely facetious comment, made, as it were, in the heat of the moment, I must point out that the discovery of any such artificial arrangement would automatically disqualify you from inheriting any part of your godmother’s estate,’ Edward Hartley asserted with extreme gravity.

‘You may say our godmother knew her own mind...but I think...well, I’d better not say what I think,’ Darcy gritted, respect for a much loved godmother evidently haltering her abrasive tongue.

Simultaneously, a shaken little laugh of reluctant appreciation was dredged from Maxie. She was not in the dark. The reasoning behind Nancy Leeward’s will was as clear as daylight to her. Within recent months their godmother had visited each one of them...and what a severe disappointment they must all have been.

She had found Maxie apparently living in sin with an older married man. She had discovered that Polly was well on the road to becoming an unmarried mother. And Darcy? Maxie’s stomach twisted with guilt. Some months after that day of cruel humiliation in the church, Darcy had given birth to a baby. Was it any wonder that the redhead had been a vehement man-hater ever since?

‘It’s such a shame that your godmother tied her estate up like that,’ Maxie’s friend, Liz, lamented the following afternoon as the two women discussed the solicitor’s letter which had bluntly demanded the immediate settlement of Leland Coulter’s loan. ‘If she hadn’t, all your problems would’ve been solved.’

‘Maybe I should have told Nancy the real reason why I was living in Leland’s house...but I couldn’t have stood her thinking that I was expecting her to buy me out of trouble. It wouldn’t have been fair to put her in that position either. She really did detest my father.’ Maxie gave a fatalistic shrug. She had suffered too many disappointments in life to waste time crying over spilt milk.

‘Well, what you need now is some good legal advice. You were only nineteen when you signed that loan agreement and you were under tremendous pressure. You were genuinely afraid for your father’s life.’ Liz’s freckled face below her mop of greying sandy hair looked hopeful. ‘Surely that has to make a difference?’

From the other side of the kitchen table, casually clad in faded jeans and a loose shirt, Maxie studied the friend who had without question taken her in off the street and freely offered her a bed for as long as she needed it. Liz Blake was the only person she trusted with her secrets. Liz, bless her heart, had never been influenced by the looks that so often made other women hostile or uneasy in Maxie’s company. Blind from birth and fiercely independent, Liz made a comfortable living as a potter and enjoyed a wide and varied social circle.