lifted ironic eyes. ‘The family bit cuts both ways,’ she said lightly, hiding even from herself her instinctive rejection of the idea of taking money from him. ‘You don’t pay family for coming to the rescue. It isn’t done.’
The cold fire of his gaze held hers for a pulse-thudding moment. He meant to ride roughshod over her; she could see his intention as clearly as though he had spoken the words.
Then something changed his mind and his expression altered into the chilly impersonality she was beginning to dislike. With a narrow, sharp-edged smile, he said, ‘Very well.’
Oddly enough, she resented his easy capitulation. She had, she realised, looked forward to crossing swords with him. Something told her that he would be a good enemy, hard but just, and that there would be an intense exhilaration in battling him. Minerva rather enjoyed a fair fight; in that she was completely different from Stella, who had hated quarrels and been unable to cope with them.
It seemed suddenly disloyal to bandy words and fence for position with the man who had been instrumental in some way for her sister’s death. Her lips tightened. She said too loudly, ‘Well, that’s settled then. I’d better unpack.’
When he had left the room she stood for a moment, her eyes fixed on the door, before breathing out with a sudden, explosive sound. Then she walked across to the wide bed and sat down on it, her eyes troubled.
He was too much, too tall, too good-looking, with eyes that saw too much and a mouth that promised too much, and a voice that sent too many shivers down her spine. Yet that uncompromising dominance wasn’t entirely physical; even curbed by will-power, the dark force of his personality blazed forth with an indelible impact. No wonder Stella had been overwhelmed.
More than anything, Minerva wanted to understand her stepsister’s state of mind in those last months before her death. Oh, she hadn’t come up here deliberately to spy and poke and probe, but that had to be part of the reason she had turned off Highway 10 and headed up the hill. For a year Stella’s death had nagged at her, demanding that she do something about it, that she make someone suffer for it.
She needed to find out what had driven her stepsister to take that final, irrevocable step into the darkness. If they knew, Ruth and her father could pick up the threads of their lives and find some measure of serenity and acceptance.
Initially she had blamed Nick, but now it seemed fairly clear that like Ruth, like them all, he was living in one of the darker corners of hell.
Minerva sighed, looking around with a troubled frown.
Perhaps Stella should be allowed to rest in peace, that lovely phrase which promised so much.
Biting her lip, Minerva stared down at the faded hues of the Persian carpet, watching the wonderful coppery red and brilliant blue blur through her tears into a jumble of undefined hues.
What had been Stella’s thoughts during the last night she had spent here?
No one, she thought sadly, would ever know. Stella had made sure of that by not asking for help, by giving no reason. Sometimes Minerva wondered whether she would have made a difference; whether, if she’d been home, Stella would have confided in her.
Although Minerva was a year younger, she had been the stronger, treading through the minefields of adolescence with a light foot and comparative ease, whereas Stella had made hard weather of it.
When Stella got drunk it had been Minerva who had smuggled her into the house and dealt with the aftermath, just as she had coped the time Stella had tried marijuana. Later, realising that Stella had embarked on the first of a series of affairs, it was Minerva who had expostulated. Stella had listened, said airily that making love with someone you liked was no big deal, and not let Minerva’s reasoned arguments affect her behaviour at all.
In spite of her light-heartedness and her fragility, Stella had never been one for confidences. Minerva’s hands clenched on her lap as she fought guilt and pain and a wasteland of emotions. Why should she think that she might have made a difference if Ruth hadn’t seen anything, if Nick had been unable to help the woman he had married, the woman who had loved him so desperately? Although it hurt to accept that there was probably nothing she could have done, she had to, or risk spending the rest of her life haunted by regret.
It was time to let the past bury its dead.
Wearily, she went into the bathroom, a room of Victorian splendour, claw-footed bath and all, only modernised in the most essential ways. As warm and dry as the rest of the house, it breathed the same indefinable air of luxury.
Staring into the well-lit mirror, she saw no ghosts, just her own somewhat plain reflection, its only claims to beauty a heart-shaped face and a pair of large, dark blue eyes set in thick black lashes.
Stella had been a golden girl, with skin that tanned easily into a warm brilliance, set off by soft blue eyes and curly amber hair.
When Minerva was growing up she had hated her pallor and the sudden contrast of eyes and lashes and full, red mouth. After the affair with Paul she’d become reconciled to her lack of beauty. Her first and only romance had taught her that, when it came to looks versus character in women, looks won out every time.
Her hands fell to her side. Mouth twisting into a cynical little smile, she recalled unflinchingly Paul’s voice as he had pointed out her deficiencies in that department. She only had herself to blame; stupidly, she had pleaded with him to tell her why he was leaving. So he had.
‘Don’t you ever look at yourself in the mirror? You’re too thin, and you don’t make enough of what you have got—you dress as though you’re ashamed of being a woman.’
Stung, she had countered, ‘Just because I don’t wear plunging necklines—’
‘Well, darling, you haven’t got anything to plunge to, have you? Nice enough in their little way, but it’s a very little way, isn’t it?’
She understood now that he had been angry because she had forced him to justify his betrayal, but then his acid irritation had humiliated her.
He had looked at her white face and said shamefacedly, ‘I’m sorry, Minerva, I don’t want to hurt you, we’ve had some good times together, but when I saw Cass again, I knew that—well, that’s all they were, good times.’
She had thought Paul loved her as much as she loved him. Lord, but she’d been green, too green to realise that Paul had been using her to make his girlfriend jealous. Even more than his casual dismissal of her physical attributes and the lovemaking they had shared, she’d been wounded by her own stupidity.
The humiliation had long gone; within three months his pretty, voluptuous Cass had dumped him for a tall footballer. Now Minerva knew he’d been immature and cruelly spoilt, but the whole episode had left her with a cynicism that her life cooking meals for the rich had intensified.
Oh, she believed in love; only death had severed her father’s love for her mother, and his second marriage was truly happy, too. But if and when she married it would not be under the spell of a chemistry so intense she mistook it for love.
‘Never,’ she said, shaking her head.
The forgotten locks of hair moved in a rippling mass. She pulled a face at the determined woman in the mirror and set to tidying herself. Her long-fingered hands moved swiftly, pinning the strands to the back of her head. Although the
