Wicked Surrender: Ruthless Awakening / The Multi-Millionaire's Virgin Mistress / The Timber Baron's Virgin Bride

‘His boat.’ Carrie rolled her eyes. ‘Windhover the Wonder Yacht. Or that’s how Dad describes it. Like the best kind of floating hotel suite, but powered by a massive engine and moored down at Polkernick. He brought it round from Falmouth the day before yesterday and he’s sleeping on board, which has saved Ma having hysterics over the bedroom arrangements here, because usually it’s all change when Diaz comes to stay, and as he wasn’t expected there’d have been uproar.’

‘Of course,’ Rhianna said. ‘The master must have the master bedroom—however inconvenient.’

But at least this boat might keep him at a distance, she thought. Maybe that’s where he was driving off to just now? I can but hope.

‘Well,’ Carrie said tolerantly, ‘you can hardly blame him for wanting his own space. It is his home, after all, even if he hasn’t spent that much time here in the past. And now, to Ma’s horror, he wants it back, and she’ll have to give up being Lady of the Manor.’ She grimaced. ‘Which she’ll hate.’

But she’ll go down fighting, Rhianna thought, remembering Moira Seymour’s bleak gaze meeting hers a short while ago, from the sofa in the drawing room where she’d sat, poised and chilly as ever, in a silence that had been almost tangible.

‘Ah, Miss Carlow.’ The cut-glass voice had not changed either. ‘I trust you had a pleasant journey?’ She’d added coldly, ‘Caroline tells me she has put you in the primrose room.’

All the attics full, are they? Rhianna had asked silently. The oubliette filled in?

However, she’d smiled, and said, with her best Lady Ariadne drawl, ‘It sounds delightful, Mrs Seymour. I’m so glad to be here.’

Then she had turned, still smiling, to the woman sitting opposite. ‘Mrs Rawlins, how lovely to see you again. You’re looking well.’

Not that it was true. Widowhood had put years and weight on Simon’s mother, and given her mouth a sour turn.

‘I hear you’re making a name for yourself on television, Rhianna?’ As opposed to soliciting at Kings Cross, her tone suggested. ‘I find so few programmes of any substance these days that I tend to watch very rarely, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Rhianna had echoed gently.

‘Tea will be served in half an hour, Caroline,’ her mother had said. ‘Please bring your guest to join us,’ she’d added, after a brief hesitation.

Rhianna had been glad to escape upstairs to the designated ‘primrose room’, which turned out to be as charming as its name suggested, its creamy wallpaper and curtains patterned with sprigs of the tiny flowers, and the bed covered in a pretty shade of leaf-green.

Moira Seymour might not be her favourite person, but Rhianna couldn’t fault her choice of décor.

Now, she said slowly, ‘Your mother’s bound to find leaving here a wrench. But it’s an awfully big house for two people.’

‘True,’ Carrie agreed. ‘But an even bigger one for a determined bachelor like Diaz. Unless, of course, he does intend to bite the bullet and become a family man.’ She paused. ‘Did you ever see him with anyone in particular? The times you ran across him in London, that is?’

Rhianna stared at her. She said jerkily, ‘Did he tell you we’d met there?’

‘He mentioned you’d been at some bash together.’ Carrie shrugged. ‘Something to do with insurance?’

‘Apex, the company sponsoring Castle Pride.’ Rhianna nodded. ‘But it was a very crowded room, so I didn’t notice if he had a companion.’ My first lie.

‘And you were both at a first night party for a new play, weren’t you?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t recall.’ Rhianna was casually dismissive as she put away the last of her things. She looked at her watch. ‘Now, I suppose we’d better go down to the promised tea. But you’d better explain to me first why the swords are crossed and the daggers drawn. I thought Margaret Rawlins and your mother were friends?’

Carrie sighed. ‘They were never that close,’ she admitted. ‘You see, the Rawlins’ cottage was originally a second home, and Ma doesn’t approve of such things. Cornwall for the Cornish and all that—even though she and Aunt Esther were both Londoners. And the fact that Mrs Rawlins has now moved down here permanently hasn’t altered a thing.’

‘But that can’t be all, surely?’

‘No.’ Carrie pulled a face. ‘When we began discussing wedding plans Margaret opted out completely. Said that whatever we decided would be fine with her. So—we went ahead.’

‘Except she changed her mind?’ Rhianna guessed.

‘And how,’ Carrie said fervently. She began to tick off on her fingers. ‘We agreed on the guest lists ages ago, but each time we put the numbers in to the caterers she came up with someone else who simply must be invited. That’s probably why she’s here today—with yet another afterthought. And that’s not all. She thought the charge for the marquee was extortionate and insisted we get another quote from a firm she knew, with the result that someone else hired the one I really wanted. Then, last week, Margaret asked with a sad smile if “Lead Kindly Light” could be one of the hymns, because it was “my poor Clive’s favourite.”‘ She shook her head. ‘It’s beautiful, I know, but hardly celebratory. Besides which, all the Order of Service booklets were printed ages ago.’

She took a deep breath. ‘There—that’s off my chest. Until the next instalment, anyway. And I know there’s going to be one. I feel it.’

‘Oh God.’ Rhianna looked at her with fascinated horror. ‘Couldn’t Simon have a word with her?’

Carrie sighed again. ‘I asked, but Simon’s very defensive about his mother. Says she’s still mourning his father, which I’m sure is true, and that we must make allowances—especially as we’ll be moving so far away.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, as I said, he seems in a world of his own these days.’

‘Oh?’ Rhianna picked up her brush and stroked it carefully through her hair, meeting her own watchful gaze in the mirror. ‘In what way?’

‘Like nearly missing today’s hair appointment, for one thing,’ Carrie said ruefully. ‘And a few times lately I’ve arranged to ring him at his flat, only he hasn’t been there. Says he forgot, and has stuff of his own to do, anyway.’

‘Probably hung over after his stag night and doesn’t want to admit it,’ Rhianna said lightly.

Carrie stared at her. ‘But his stag party was ages ago. He went to Nassau with a bunch of guys from work. They got this special deal and stayed for a couple of extra days. Surely I told you?’

‘Yes,’ Rhianna said. ‘Yes, of course you did. I’m an idiot.’

How could I forget? How could I possibly forget the trip to Nassau, when it was only a couple of days later that I found out about the baby?

She put down the brush, aware that her colour had risen swiftly, guiltily, again.

‘I keep telling myself that it doesn’t matter,’ Carrie went on. ‘That it will all be over soon and Simon and I will be on our own, making a new life for ourselves. That I’ll look back and laugh at all these niggles. Only…’

‘Only just for now you’d like to punch Mrs Rawlins’ lights out,’ Rhianna supplied briskly. ‘Perfectly understandable—even commendable.’

‘Oh, Rhianna.’ Smiling, Carrie slipped an arm through hers. ‘Thank heavens you’re here. Nothing is going to seem as bad from now on.’

Oh, God, Rhianna thought, her stomach churning as they went downstairs. I just hope and pray that’s true.

Her uneasiness increased when the first person she saw in the drawing room was Diaz, lounging in a chair by the open French windows, glancing through a magazine. The new toy, apparently, wasn’t as compelling as she’d hoped.

As they came in he rose politely and smiled, but his eyes, slanting a glance at Rhianna, were as hard a grey as Cornish granite. She made herself walk calmly past him, choosing a deep easy chair where he’d be out of her sightline.

But not, unfortunately, eliminated from her consciousness. She was still as aware of him, of his silent, forbidding presence, as if he’d come to stand beside her, his hand on her shoulder.

She had also placed herself at a deliberately discreet distance from the sofas, where the two mothers were ensconced opposite each other—tacitly acknowledging her position as the outsider in this family gathering, but not so far away that she didn’t notice there was now a large, flat box beside Margaret Rawlins and wonder about it. But not for long.

‘Caroline, dear,’ Mrs Rawlins said, as her future daughter-in-law obediently took a seat beside her mother. ‘I was thinking the other day of that old rhyme, “Something old, something new…” and I remembered the very thing. I wore it at my wedding and kept it ever since—thinking, I suppose, that one day I’d have a daughter. But that wasn’t to be, of course. So I’d like you to carry on the tradition instead.’

She lifted the lid of the box and carefully extracted from the folds of tissue paper inside a mass of white tulle, layer after layer of it, and a headdress shaped like an elaborate coronet, each of its ornamental stems crowned by a large artificial pearl.

It looked, Rhianna thought dispassionately, like something the Wicked Queen might wear in a remake of Disney’s Snow White. Only not as good.

In the terrible silence that followed, she did not dare look at Carrie.

Eventually, Carrie said slowly, ‘Well, it’s a lovely thought, but I wasn’t actually intending to wear a veil, just some fresh flowers in my hair. Didn’t I explain that?’