Figgy Pudding. PENNY JORDAN

      ‘The fact that he’s depriving not just you but also his own children of the financial comfort you’ve all every reason to expect has nothing to do with your pride and everything to do with his greed,’ Jon told her gently. ‘I just wish I hadn’t been working abroad and away so much when the divorce was going through. I’d give a lot to know just how he managed to convince the divorce judge that he didn’t have the assets to give you what you were fully entitled to.’

      ‘He manipulated me,’ Louisa admitted grimly, ‘by pretending that he was having an affair with Heaven. He tricked me into walking out on him. I should have stayed where I was. After all, it wasn’t as though she was his first affair—not that they were having an affair, of course,’ Louisa corrected herself hastily. ‘She was just as much a victim of his machinations as I was myself—even more of one, really, when I think what that poor girl suffered…’

      ‘Have you seen her at all since?’ Jon asked her casually, turning slightly to one side as he did so so that Louisa couldn’t see his face.

      ‘Only once,’ she told him. ‘Not unnaturally I don’t think she really wanted anything to do with me but we literally bumped into one another in the street. At least I was able to apologise to her. Even now, you know, I’ve still got friends who quite plainly don’t believe that she wasn’t involved with Harold even though I’ve told them that it was all a mistake. Harold treated her almost as vindictively as he did me and I’ve wondered since if he did actually make a play for her and got turned down. That would explain the obvious pleasure he took in deliberately blackening her character…

      ‘Jon, what am I going to do about this?’ she asked her brother, returning to the original subject of her urgent phone call to him. ‘If I accept this reduced level of maintenance and Harold’s refusal to pay the girls’ school fees, I just don’t know what we’re going to do.’

      ‘I’m more than happy to cover the cost of the girls’ education. After all, they are my nieces,’ Jon told her firmly.

      ‘Your nieces, yes, but one day you could well have children of your own, a wife of your own who might not look too kindly on you having to virtually support my children as well as your own.’

      ‘Any woman who felt like that would never be my wife,’ Jon told her truthfully, and Louisa hugged him.

      ‘It says in this letter that the reason Harold is seeking to reduce his payments to you is the fact that he is planning to remarry and he and his new wife intend to have their own family…’

      ‘Has he said anything to you about wanting to cut my maintenance payments?’

      ‘No,’ Jon told her, shaking his head. ‘I have managed to convince him that I’m more interested in maintaining the friendship I’ve struck up with him than I am in whatever problems you might be facing, but as yet he still hasn’t opened up to me as much as I’d hoped about how and where he’s managed to conceal so much of his wealth. But I am still trying.

      ‘He’s invited me to a pre-Christmas dinner he’s giving at the end of the week. He faxed me from New York to tell me about it. He’s over there on business at the moment.’

      ‘A pre-Christmas dinner?’ Louisa questioned.

      ‘Mmm… his new fiancée is arranging everything, apparently, and it’s being held at the house he’s been having renovated in Knightsbridge.’

      ‘The house he bought with the profit he made on selling our house,’ Louisa said fiercely.

      ‘Yes,’ Jon agreed grimly.

      ‘That poor girl. I hope that, unlike me, she finds out what he’s really like before they get married,’ Louisa told her brother bitterly. ‘Oh, Jon, what am I going to do?’ she asked him plaintively. ‘The parents have offered to help but they’ve already done more than enough, and so has Rory…’

      Jon noticed the way his sister’s skin changed colour slightly as she mentioned the old family friend who had done so much to support her both emotionally and practically since the break-up of her marriage. It was no secret to Jon that Rory Stevens loved his sister and Jon suspected that she was now beginning to return his feelings.

      ‘Do you think Harold believes that you want his friendship and that you approve of what he’s done?’

      ‘He seems to,’ Jon told her, ‘but I must admit I had hoped by now to at least have some proof for you that he deliberately concealed the major part of his assets in order to pay you far less money than he should.’