more trouble had seemed to be heading their way when, again clearing up after her father, she’d found a letter he had left lying around. It had come from the Broadlands estate, and was less of a letter but more of a formal notice that some effort must be made to pay the rent arrears and that the farm must be ‘tidied up’—otherwise legal proceedings would have to be initiated.
Feeling staggered—she’d had no idea that her father had not been paying the rent—Phinn had gone in search of him.
‘Ignore it,’ he had advised.
‘Ignore it?’ she’d gasped.
‘Not worth the paper it’s written on,’ he had assured her, and had gone back to tinkering with an old, un-roadworthy, un-fieldworthy quad bike he had found somewhere.
Knowing that she would get no sense out of him until his mind-set was ready to think of other things, Phinn had waited until he came into supper that night.
‘I was thinking of going down to the Cat for a pint—’ he began.
‘I was thinking we might discuss that letter,’ Phinn interrupted.
He looked at her, smiled because he adored her, and said, ‘You know, little flower, you’ve more than a touch of your mother about you.’
She couldn’t ignore it. One of them had to be practical. ‘What will we do if—er—things get nasty—if we have to leave here? Ruby…’
‘It won’t come to that,’ he’d assured her, undaunted. ‘It’s just the new owner flexing a bit of muscle, that’s all.’
‘The letter’s from Ashley Allardyce…’
‘He may have written it, but he will have been instructed by his big brother.’
‘Tyrell Allardyce.’ She remembered him very clearly. Oddly, while Ashley Allardyce was only a vague figure in her mind, his elder brother Ty seemed to be etched in her head. She was starting to dislike the man.
‘It’s the way they do things in London,’ Ewart had replied confidently. ‘They just need all the paperwork neatly documented in case there’s a court case. But—’ as she went a shade pale ‘—it won’t come to that,’ he repeated. ‘Honeysuckle Farm has been in Hawkins care for generations. Nobody’s going to throw us off this land, I promise you.’
Sadly, it had not been the first letter of that sort. The next one she had seen had come from a London firm of lawyers, giving them formal notice to quit by September. And Phinn, who had already started to dislike Tyrell Allardyce, and although she had never hated anyone in her life, had known that she hated Ty that he could do this to them. Old Mr Caldicott would never, ever have instructed such a letter.
But again her father had been unconcerned, and told her to ignore the notice to quit. And while Phinn had spent a worrying time—expecting the bailiffs to turn up at any moment to turf then out—her father had appeared to not have a care in the world.
And then it had been September, and Phinn had had something else to worry about that had pushed her fear of the bailiffs into second place. Ruby had become quite ill.
Kit Peverill had come out to her in the middle of the night, and it had been touch and go if Ruby would make it. Phinn, forgetting she had a job to go to, had stayed with her and nursed her, watched her like a hawk—and the geriatric mare had pulled through.
When Phinn had gone back to work and, unable to lie, told her boss that her mare had been ill, she had been told in return that they were experiencing a business downturn and were looking to make redundancies. Was it likely, should her horse again be ill, that she would again take time off?
Again she had not been able to lie. ‘I’ll go and clear my desk,’ she’d offered.
‘You don’t have to go straight way,’ her employer had told her kindly. ‘Let’s say in a month’s time.’
Because she’d known she would need the money, Phinn had not argued. But she never did work that full month. Because a couple of weeks later her world had fallen apart when her father, haring around the fields, showing a couple of his pals what a reconstructed quad bike could do, had upended it, gone over and under it—and come off worst.
He had died before Phinn could get to the hospital. Her mother had come to her straight away, and it had been Hester who, practical to the last, had made all the arrangements.
Devastated, having to look after Ruby had been the only thing that kept Phinn on anything resembling an even keel. And Ruby, as if she understood, would gently nuzzle into her neck and cuddle up close.
Her father had been popular but, when the day of his funeral had arrived, Phinn had never known he had so many friends. Or relatives, either. Aunts and uncles she had heard of but had seen only on the rarest of occasions had come to pay their respects. Even her cousin Leanne, a Hawkins several times removed, had arrived with her parents.
Leanne was tall, dark, pretty—and with eyes that seemed to instantly put a price on everything. But since the family antiques had been sold one by one after Hester had left, there had been very little at Honeysuckle Farm that was worth the ink on a price ticket. Thereafter Leanne had behaved as decorously as her parents would wish.
That was she’d behaved very nicely until—to his credit—Ashley Allardyce had come to the funeral to pay his respects too. Phinn had not been feeling too friendly to him, but because she did not wish to mar the solemnity of the occasion with any undignified outburst—and in any case it was not him but his elder brother Ty who was the villain who went around instigating notices to quit—she’d greeted Ashley calmly, and politely thanked him for coming.
Leanne, noticing the expensive cut of the clothes the tall, fair-haired man was wearing, had immediately been attracted.
‘Who’s he?’ she’d asked, sidling up when Ashley Allardyce had gone over to have a word with Nesta and Noel Jarvis, the tenants of Yew Tree Farm.
‘Ashley Allardyce,’ Phinn had answered, and, as she’d suspected, it had not ended there.
‘He lives around here?’
‘At Broadlands Hall.’
‘That massive house in acres of grounds we passed on the way here?’
The next thing Phinn knew was that Leanne, on her behalf, had invited Ash Allardyce back to the farmhouse for refreshments.
Any notion Phinn might have had that he would refuse the invitation had disappeared when she’d seen the look on his face. He was clearly captivated by her cousin!
The days that had followed had gone by in a numbed kind of shock for Phinn as she’d tried to come to terms with her father’s death. Her mother had wanted her to go back to Gloucester and live with her and Clive. Phinn had found the idea unthinkable. Besides, there was Ruby.
Phinn had been glad to have Ruby to care for. Glad too that her cousin Leanne frequently drove the forty or so miles from her own home to see her.
In fact, by the time Christmas had come, Phinn had seen more of her cousin than she had during the whole of her life. Leanne had come, she would say, to spend time with her, so she would not be too lonely. But most of Leanne’s time, from
