friends. Their lives were very regimented, Lark now realised. It was something which she hadn’t really been aware of before, but then, of course, she had been living away from home for some considerable time, first at university and then later in her bedsit.
Gary, too, had moved out of the parental home, but unlike her he had found a job in the local market town where his parents still lived. Crichtons had opened up there several years ago, with brand new offices, all based on computer technology, and Gary had soon found a niche for himself there, with his skill as an advanced computer operator. Quite where and when he had met Lydia Meadows, Lark didn’t know.
When she had asked her aunt and uncle about Gary’s relationship with the other woman, they had denied vigorously that he had ever known her, but that seemed improbable because Lydia was a local girl, albeit one who was several years older than both herself and Gary. Even so, Lark remembered reading several years ago in their local newspaper that Lydia won a nationwide beauty competition. She had gone from there to modelling, her name cropping up regularly in the local paper.
Her marriage to Ross Wycliffe, a local businessman, had been widely publicised. Ross was many years her senior, a widower with grown-up children of his own. He also had a reputation for being very shrewd and hard-headed in business. He was reputed to be a millionaire. Certainly the photographs that Lark had seen of Lydia showed a very soignée young woman dressed expensively in furs and jewellery. How on earth had Gary got involved with her, if involved he had been? He had been in love with her, that much had been obvious on the one occasion when Lark had seen them together.
She had gone home unannounced for the weekend, wanting to collect some books that were still in her bedroom at her aunt and uncle’s. Her visit had just happened to coincide with a time when her aunt and uncle themselves were away on holiday, and so she had gone round to Gary’s to ask him if she could borrow his key to his parents’ house.
His car had been parked outside. When no one had responded to her knock, she had gone round to the back of the small, semi-detached house. Neither of the participants in the passionate embrace she had witnessed through the window of Gary’s dining-room had been aware of her presence for several seconds. Indeed, she herself had been so stunned that it had taken her that length of time to realise that she was intruding, and she was just about to whisk herself away when Lydia Meadows had turned around and seen her.
Neither of them had been very pleased by her presence, and initially she had put that down to the fact that she had interrupted them. It wasn’t until later that she realised exactly who Lydia was, and why she would not be too happy about someone seeing her making love with a man other than her husband.
She had tried to talk to Gary about it, knowing how his parents would feel about his involvement with a married woman, but their relationship was such that they had never been close, and he had brushed her off with a curt refusal to discuss the matter.
It had been obvious that he had loved Lydia, but had she loved him in return? And had it been for her sake that he had been stealing money from his company?
Sighing faintly, Lark reminded herself that it was pointless going over and over this old ground again and again, that nothing was to be gained from living in the past. It was over, and she would have to find a way of putting it behind her. She could never go back. Her aunt and uncle would never forgive her for what had happened. Both of them blamed her for Gary’s death—perhaps in their shoes she would have felt the same, although she hoped she would have had more compassion, more insight into other people’s feelings.
Over the years there had been many, many occasions when she had desperately longed for her own parents, but to long for them so desperately at twenty-two, when she was supposedly an adult, seemed rather ridiculous. But long for them she most certainly did.
Her thoughts switched abruptly from her cousin to James Wolfe. It was odd the way she couldn’t get him out of her mind, couldn’t quite prevent herself from thinking about him in unguarded moments, remembering the cool timbre of his voice, the reasoned logic of his arguments, the overwhelming, overpowering and illogical emotional turbulence he had aroused in her. Her passionate outburst in the court room still had the power to make her flinch inwardly, and to wonder at the way he had broken through her defences.
She had sworn to herself that she would never betray herself in that way, and yet, with a few well-chosen words, he had caused her to forget that promise and to cry out to the world how badly she felt it was treating her. Did he ever feel the guilt and compunction he had accused her of not feeling? Did he ever wonder what happened to the victims of his savage cross-examinations? Victims who, like her, could quite easily have been innocent. No, of course he wouldn’t. Men like him never did, did they? Men like him … She shivered slightly.
There had been very few men in her life, and certainly none like James Wolfe. So why was it that the very thought of him caused this frisson of sensation to race across her skin, almost as though in some primitive way she feared him on a level that had nothing to do with their meeting in court? On a level that was purely emotional, and had to do with her being a woman and him being a man.
She told herself that she was being ridiculous, that she had allowed the atmosphere in the court to disturb her far too deeply, and that was why she was still so vulnerable at the mere thought of the man. But somehow the excuse didn’t quite ring true.
James Wolfe had made an impression on her which no amount of stern self-lecturing could entirely dismiss. There had been something so male and vigorous about him, something that aroused and piqued her feminine curiosity. That was what one got for being a virgin at twenty-two, she mocked herself. Idiotic fantasies about strange men.
CHAPTER TWO
LARK was still thinking about James Wolfe when she walked from the tube station to her solicitor’s office on the morning of her interview. A chance sighting of a dark-haired man sitting in an expensive car at the traffic lights caught her attention, and it wasn’t until he turned his head to return her look that she realised that it wasn’t James and that she was staring at him quite blatantly. She blushed and walked on, angry with herself; angry and disturbed.
It was time she put James Wolfe out of her mind. There was no point in dwelling on what had happened. No point in reliving the torment of those long minutes in court.
Oddly, it didn’t help much telling herself that he was the one who had been vanquished. Over the recent months her solicitor’s offices had become as familiar to her as her own shabby bedsit. They were up three flights of stairs in an ancient building that didn’t possess a lift other than one that rather reminded Lark of a creaking, terrifying cage.
She had lost weight; the need to economise had meant that she had cut down on her food. It was quite frightening to realise how lacking in energy she was by the time she reached the third floor.
Her solicitor himself opened the door to her, which rather surprised her. Normally, she was made to wait a good fifteen minutes before being shown into the inner sanctum. But today the outer office was empty. The secretary had gone to lunch, he told her, noticing her curious glance.
‘Lunch, at eleven o’clock in the morning?’ Still, it was hardly any business of hers, although she did notice that her solicitor seemed rather flustered and uncomfortable. She had had that effect on him ever since Crichton International had decided to pull out of the case, and she wasn’t quite sure why.
‘Sit down,’ he told her, beaming at her and picking up a pile of manuscripts from the chair opposite his desk.
She did so unwillingly, wondering what on earth it was he wanted to discuss with her. By rights she ought to be out looking for another
