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Place of Storms
Sara Craven
Former journalist SARA CRAVEN published her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
‘ANDY—please! You’ve just got to help me. There’s no one else I can turn to.’
From her seat on the Persian rug in front of the fire, Andrea Weston thought wryly that Clare’s flair for the dramatic was going to be wasted on anything so mundane as marriage. But this time—this time she was going to turn a deaf ear to it, and to that deliberate use of the diminutive of her name. She had heard it all before when Clare wanted to be rescued from some childhood or schooldays scrape of her own making.
‘No one?’ she asked caustically, letting her eyes rest on the magnificent sapphire and diamond ring adorning Clare’s left hand.
Clare noticed the direction of her gaze and shuddered.
‘Peter mustn’t know.’ She sounded genuinely panic-stricken. ‘Promise me you won’t tell him.’
‘Oh, I can safely promise that.’ Andrea pushed back her long fall of chestnut hair. ‘How can I tell him what I don’t know myself?’ She saw Clare open her mouth and hastily forestalled her. ‘And I don’t want to know either, Clare. We’re not children any longer. I may have been able to talk you out of trouble with Nanny and Sister Benedict, but you’re a big girl now. You’ve got to learn to solve your own problems.’
‘Oh, Andy!’ Clare’s shoulders drooped forlornly. ‘Don’t be hard on me.’
‘It’s time someone was,’ Andrea told her honestly. ‘Uncle Max has spoiled you rotten for years, and you know it.’
Clare nodded humbly, her enormous blue eyes filled with tears. ‘I do know—but you’ve got to help me, Andy. You’re my last hope.’
‘Nonsense!’ Andrea hoped her voice was sufficiently robust. ‘Whatever you’ve done, my advice is go to Peter and make a clean breast of it. You’re going to be married to him in six weeks and you can’t hope to hide things from him then …’ Her voice trailed away uneasily as Clare buried her face in her hands and began to cry in real earnest.
‘Oh, love!’ Andrea got up and went to sit on the big white chesterfield next to Clare, putting a comforting arm round her cousin’s heaving shoulders. ‘It can’t be as bad as all that, surely.’
‘But it can.’ Clare’s voice was choked with sobs. ‘I’m in such a mess—and there may not be any wedding, and I’ll make Daddy ill again, I know it.’
Andrea sighed. ‘Then you’d better tell me,’ she said wearily. An awful thought occurred to her. She stared at her cousin. ‘Clare—you haven’t … I mean, you aren’t …’
‘Oh, no.’ Clare shook her head vigorously. In spite of her distress a faintly dreamy look crossed her lovely features. ‘Anyway, Peter has always said he has far too much respect for me to try and anticipate our marriage vows.’
‘How—how honourable of him,’ Andrea said a little wildly. Her own private view of Clare’s fiancé was that he was a stuffed shirt, and Clare’s artless disclosure seemed to confirm this. Clare was an entrancingly beautiful girl with her shining cap of blonde hair, and a figure just verging towards the voluptuous, and Andrea could not imagine any red-blooded man being able to resist at least an attempt to make love to her. However, Clare seemed convinced that he was the only man who could make her happy and Andrea supposed that this was really all that mattered. Her own doubts about whether Peter would ever have proposed to Clare if she had not been Maxwell Weston’s daughter she kept strictly to herself.
‘All right,’ she said gently. ‘Then what is wrong?’
Clare gave a long sigh that seemed to come up from her toes. ‘There’s—there’s someone else,’ she said.
‘Another man?’ Andrea could hardly believe it. Admittedly Clare had played the field before she met Peter. Since her early teens there had hardly been a time when she was not madly in love with someone, either in the ecstatic throes of first meetings, or the tears and recriminations of parting. Yet Andrea would have been ready to swear that her devotion to Peter had been utterly single-minded. ‘Do I know him?’
Clare shook her head. ‘He’s—French.’
‘I suppose you met him when you were staying with Martine in Paris.’ Andrea racked her brains to remember some of the details of Clare’s scanty letters. ‘Surely it can’t be that appalling Jacques! Oh, Clare …’
‘No, no,’ Clare assured her hastily. ‘Though it is all his fault indirectly,’ she added, her eyes kindling with resentment. ‘If I hadn’t been so absolutely devastated about him, I’d never have contemplated getting involved with the Levallier man.’
‘So his name’s Levallier,’ Andrea persevered. ‘How did you meet him?’
‘I didn’t.’ Clare gave her a limpid look.
Andrea closed her eyes and prayed for patience. ‘You can’t possibly be in love with someone you’ve never met—not even you …’
‘But I’m not in love with him. I tell you I’ve never set eyes on him. It was just … oh, when Jacques threw me over like that for that awful Janine, I just wanted to die. I’ve never felt so wretched before. Nothing seemed to matter any more, so when he wrote and suggested we should get married, it seemed a godsend—an absolute face-saver.’
Andrea stared at her, slim arched brows raised incredulously. ‘A complete stranger wrote to you and proposed?’
‘Not exactly. I—I had been writing to him before that. He’s a cousin of Martine’s—second or third, from what she said, but her family don’t talk about him much. He’s some kind of black sheep, apparently. I think he must have been living abroad somewhere, but he’s come back because he’s inherited this chateau in Auvergne, and he wrote to Martine’s parents, extending an olive branch, I think. They were highly indignant about this,’ Clare added reflectively.