traumatised, had received their sympathy with a degree of guilt. After a few weeks the role of pathetic victim had begun to get wearing.
When she had said as much to her sister, Erica had said, ‘Don’t worry—in a few weeks’ time they will have a new juicy scandal to talk about.’
Neither of them had suspected at the time that it would be Erica who supplied the scandal!
Erica had told her family about her unplanned pregnancy the same day the ambulance had been called, its sirens ringing, to the neat Edwardian semi where Becca and Erica had grown up
But it had been too late to save the baby.
Later, back home, with the promise that—all being well—their youngest daughter could be discharged the next day, the Summers family had sat down in the sitting room, staring mutely at one another.
Recognising her elderly parents were still in shock—her father was ten years older than her mother, and Elspeth Summer had been forty-five when her younger daughter had been born—Becca had done the only thing she’d been able to think of: she’d made tea.
‘She’s only eighteen,’ her mother had been saying when she’d come back in, carrying the tray.
‘Well, maybe this was for the best.’
‘For the best…? For the best! How can you even suggest that losing a baby is for the best!’ Elspeth had demanded, rounding furiously on her startled husband.
‘Dad didn’t mean it that way,’ Becca had soothed. ‘Did you, Dad.’
‘No, of course not,’ her father had said, looking intensely grateful for the intervention.
‘I was just thinking that, knowing our Erica, it would have been you and Becca who ended up looking after the baby,’ he’d observed, with an affectionate watery smile.
His wife had given him a reassuring smile back and said huskily, ‘I know you didn’t mean it, love.’ She’d reached across and clasped his hand. ‘I’m just thinking if we’d been stricter with her…’
And that had been the start of a predictable orgy of self-recrimination. Recrimination! Their kind, loving parents were the very last people in the world who had anything to reproach themselves over. Going over that conversation in her head made Becca ashamed that she had almost turned back when she saw the scale of this wedding she intended to crash and disrupt. Her soft lips thinned. She just hoped that plenty of people had their video cameras handy!
Head up, she pinned on a confident smile and, picking up a corsage that someone had dropped on the floor she tucked it at a jaunty angle into her buttonhole. She intended to see to it that the society wedding of the decade didn’t go without a hitch.
CHAPTER TWO
CHRISTOS watched the irate best man vanish around the side of the building and suppressed a twinge of guilt. For a second he was tempted to follow him, but instead he blew on his fingers to revive the circulation. It struck him as faintly ludicrous that even after all that had happened his first instinct was to bail his cousin out.
What Alex needed was not someone to hold his hand and wipe his nose—he needed to take responsibility for his own actions. Christos’s attempt the previous year to instil a sense of responsibility into the younger man had failed spectacularly.
When he had spelt out the new rules to his cousin, the younger man had laughed.
‘This is a wind-up. You’re bluffing.’
Christos had shaken his head. ‘Turn up at the office more than once every six months, and when you’re there do more than drink coffee and chat up female staff.’
‘I delegate,’ Alex had protested.
‘No. I delegate; you sponge. Work, cousin—or the very healthy cheque that’s credited to your bank account every month won’t be there.’
Christos hadn’t been bluffing.
There were a number of family members who had called him a heartless monster for refusing to be swayed from his decision—though naturally not to his face. Interestingly, there had been an equal number who had said, About time too!
But Alex’s response to the challenge had not been what he’d hoped. In fact it had been something he could not have predicted.
Christos had never decided if Alex had wanted him to find out, but there was no similar ambiguity when it came to his ex-fiancée’s intentions. Melina had known Christos was coming to her flat that evening, to return the keys and pick up the laptop he’d left there.
‘Don’t be silly—there’s no reason we can’t be civilised. We have history,’ Melina had said when he’d rung to say he would send someone round with the keys. ‘You come, darling, and we can have a drink to the good times.’
The look of spiteful triumph in her eyes when he had walked in and found her and Alex naked on the floor, amidst a pile of discarded clothes and several empty wine bottles, had removed any lingering guilt Christos felt about ending their short-lived farcical engagement the previous week.
Mild disgust and contempt were not the responses a man was meant to have when he found the woman he had briefly contemplated spending the rest of his life with making love to another man!
He’d felt no desire to take violent retribution, no desire to wipe the supercilious smirk off his cousin’s face—just a compelling urge to walk away from the sordid and tasteless spectacle.
And that was what he had done. He had slung the keys on the table and left. His only regret being that he had ever been insane enough to think all right and workable were thoughts a man should have as prerequisites for marriage.
Before Christos succumbed to frostbite, or to the austerity of his own grim reflections, his great-aunt, whom he had been delegated to escort, arrived. Christos heard her before he saw her. Her bony frame was swamped by several layers of motley fur, and her grey hair was crammed into an ancient shapeless hat, but her voice was not similarly fettered. It was loud and penetrating.
‘It is not civilised. I shouldn’t be surprised if this British weather kills me!’ she was telling a fellow guest.
‘I should be very surprised.’
A smile illuminated the lined, leathery face as Theodosia Carides identified the tall figure who had materialised at her side.
‘So you did come,’ she grunted, offering her rose-scented withered cheek for her great-nephew’s respectful salute.
‘Seeing you, Aunt Theodosia, makes the effort worth while.’
‘Don’t try your charm on me,’ the old lady recommended, repressing a pleased grin as she accepted the arm her tall handsome nephew offered. ‘I’m immune.’
The still-upright septuagenarian, who did not even reach his shoulder, did not see the need to lower her voice as her favourite nephew escorted her into the hushed, vaulted interior of the Cathedral.
‘I thought you were in Australia, Christos?’
‘I was.’
