the speed of his own unwelcome response and the unwelcome remembrance of the staccato delivery of insults he had never forgotten:
We’re both far too young to get married.
I’m British. I couldn’t live in a culture where women are second-class citizens.
I’m not cut out to be a queen.
‘What has happened?’ he asked Yaman with his customary quietness, only the charge of sudden flaring energy lighting his dark gaze to amber belying his outer façade of cool.
* * *
Ella walked into the silent house. She was so tired that only will power was keeping her upright.
A light was burning below the living-room door: Jason was still up. She walked past quietly, unable to face another clash with her hot-tempered brother, and went into the kitchen. The room was a disaster area with abandoned plates of food still resting on the table. The chairs were still pushed back from the day before, when they had each leapt out of their seats as Jason broke his devastating news of their financial ruin during a family meal. Straightening her shoulders and reluctant to recall that dreadful lunch, Ella began to clear up, knowing that she would only feel worse if she had to face the mess in the morning.
The house didn’t feel like home without her parents. Distressing images of her mother lying still, frail and newly old in her hospital bed, and her father sobbing uncontrollably, filled Ella’s mind. Hot tears stung her eyes and she blinked them away fiercely because giving rein to self-pity and sadness wouldn’t change anything that had happened.
The horrors of the past forty-eight hours had piled up like a multiple-car road crash. The nightmare had begun when Jason admitted that the family accountancy firm was on the brink of bankruptcy and that her parents’ comfortable home, where they all lived together, was mortgaged to the hilt. Only just returned from the Mediterranean cruise that Jason had persuaded his parents to take while he looked after the business, her father had been irate and incredulous that matters could have been brought to such a desperate pass in so short a time period. Gerald Gilchrist had rushed off to the office to check the firm’s books and then consult his bank manager for advice while Jason stayed behind to explain the situation in greater detail to their mother.
Initially, Jennifer Gilchrist had remained calm, seemingly convinced that her clever, successful son would naturally be able to sort out whatever problems there were and ensure his family’s continuing prosperity. Unlike her husband she had not angrily condemned Jason for his dishonesty in forging his parents’ signatures on the document used to remortgage their home. Indeed she had forgivingly assumed that Jason had merely been trying to protect his parents from needless financial worry.
But then Jason had, from birth, been the adored centre of her parents’ world, Ella conceded wryly. Excuses had always been made when Jason lied or cheated and forgiveness and instant understanding had been offered to him on many occasions. Born both brainy and athletic, Jason had shone in every sphere and her parents’ pride in him had known no bounds. Yet her brother had always had a darker side to his character combined with a disturbing lack of concern for the well-being of others. Her parents had scrimped and saved to send Jason to an elite private school and when he had won a place at Oxford University they had been overjoyed by his achievement.
At university, Jason had made friends with much wealthier students. Was that when her sibling had begun to succumb to the kind of driving ambition and greed that would only lead him into trouble? Or had that change taken place only after Jason had become a high-flying banker with a Porsche and a strong sense of entitlement? Whatever it was, Ella thought with newly learned bitterness, Jason had always wanted more and almost inevitably that craving for easily acquired riches had tempted him down the wrong path in life. But what she would never be able to forgive her brother for was dragging their parents down with him into the mire of debt and despair.
The worst had already happened though, Ella told herself in urgent consolation. Nothing could equal the horror of her mother’s collapse. Once the shock of their disastrous financial situation had finally kicked in, her mother had suffered a heart attack. Rushed into hospital the day before, Jennifer Gilchrist had had emergency surgery and was now mercifully in the recovery ward. Her father had tried hard to adjust to his sudden change in circumstances but, ultimately, it had been too much for him once he appreciated that he would not even be able to pay his staff the wages they were owed. Shock and shame had then overwhelmed him and he had broken down in the hospital waiting room and cried in his daughter’s arms, while blaming himself for not keeping a closer eye on his son’s activities within the firm.
A slight noise sent Ella’s head whipping round. Her brother, who had the thickset build of a rugby player and the portly outline of a man who wasted little time keeping fit, stood in the kitchen doorway nursing a glass of whisky. ‘How’s Mother?’ he asked gruffly.
‘Holding her own. The prognosis is good,’ Ella told him quietly and she turned back to the sink, keen to keep busy rather than dwell on the disquieting fact that her brother had neither accompanied her to the hospital nor made the effort to visit their mother since.
‘It’s not my fault she had the heart attack,’ Jason declared in a belligerent tone.
‘I didn’t say it was,’ Ella responded, determined not to get into an argument with her sibling, who even as a child would have argued twenty-four hours straight sooner than yield a point. ‘I’m not looking to blame anyone.’
‘I mean...Mother could’ve had an attack at any time and at least the way it happened we were here to deal with it and ensure she got to hospital quickly,’ Jason pointed out glibly.
‘Yes,’ Ella agreed soothingly for the sake of peace and she paused before continuing, ‘I wanted to ask you...that massive loan that you said you took out three years ago...’
‘What about it?’ Jason prompted with a harshness that suggested that he was in no mood to answer her questions.
‘Which bank was it with?’
‘No bank would’ve given me that amount of cash without collateral,’ Jason countered with a look that scorned her ignorance of such matters. ‘Zarif gave me the money.’
When he spoke that name out loud, the sink brush fell from Ella’s hand as her fingers lost their grip and she whirled round from the sink in shock. ‘Zarif?’ she repeated in disbelief, her voice breaking on the syllables.
‘After I was made redundant at the bank, Zarif offered me the cash to start up my own business. An interest-free loan, no repayments to be made for the first three years,’ Jason explained grudgingly. ‘Only an idiot would have refused to take advantage of such a sweet deal.’
‘That was very...kind of him,’ Ella remarked tightly, her lovely face pale and tight with control while she battled the far more powerful feelings struggling inside her. Reactions she had learned to suppress during three long years of fierce self-discipline, never ever allowing herself to look back to what had been the most agonising experience of her entire life. ‘But you didn’t start up your own business...you became Dad’s partner instead.’
‘Well, home’s where the heart is, or so they say,’ her brother quipped without shame. ‘The family firm was going nowhere until I stepped in.’
Ella bit back an angry rejoinder and compressed her lips in resolute silence. She wished Jason had chosen to set up his own business. Instead he had bankrupted a stable firm that had brought in a good, if not spectacular, income. ‘I can’t believe you accepted money from Zarif.’
‘When
