Stop. Stop. Stop. Just like her life had.
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Becky looked down at London and sighed.
From thirty-five thousand feet and the first-class cabin of Pan Am Flight 24, it didn’t look all that impressive. She was tired, and the grey fog that hung over the grimy city seemed to sap her energy even more. The Thames didn’t sparkle, and it wasn’t nearly as wide as the Hudson River. Becky tried to tell herself that she would be glad just to get on the ground. After an hour’s delay on the runway at JFK, condemning her to cheesy chat-up lines from the businessmen seated next to her, and the bumpy, uncomfortable flight, she felt in need of a long shower and a bubble bath. The news back home had showed Great Britain in the grip of union strikes that were causing electricity blackouts. Becky was booked into the Ritz. She vowed grimly that she would have those uniformed flunkies fanning a fire with bellows if necessary. There was going to be hot water for her in this miserable, cold city, or else there’d be hell to pay.
‘Champagne, ma’am?’
The air hostess with too much blue eyeshadow and a face that had seen too much sun leaned dutifully over her with the bottle of Mot. She hadn’t seen to Becky’s needs much during the flight, but Becky was used to that, too. Hostility from other women was as normal to her as the tired old chat-up lines from men old enough to be her father. It didn’t make any difference that these women didn’t know anything about her. The key factor wasn’t personality. It was her long, tanned limbs, golden and firm from swimming in the ocean and tennis in the Hamptons; the fountain of blonde hair, naturally pale, but streaked discreetly with platinum at Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door salon on Fifth Avenue twice a month; the nails, deliciously natural with a delicate French manicure; the high cheekbones, the slim model’s body with its lean lines and little bud breasts; the full lips and striking green eyes - in short, just about everything. On a flight like this the hostesses would normally be the centre of attention. Since when did any woman other than a society matron fly first class? But ever since Becky had walked through the airplane door and turned to the left, twenty-one years old
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and achingly beautiful, with her kitten Chanel heels and her silk Pucci wraparound dress, no man had had eyes for anyone else.
‘Sure, why not?’ Becky said, lifting her glass. The golden wine
fizzed into it, and she sipped, letting the icy bubbles play on her tongue. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t supposed to drink till she was twenty-one.
‘So where are you staying when you get to London?’
The old guy on her left leaned into her. His skin smelled unpleasantly
of the eight Scotches he’d downed since take-off. The weak sunlight
glittered on his wedding ring.
‘With my boyfriend,’ she snapped. ‘Maybe you’re staying with friends
of your wife?’
He turned away, muttering something under his breath that sounded
like ‘bitch’. Yeah, right. A bitch. Wasn’t that defined in Webster’s as ‘woman who shoots down ajerk’? She heard that a lot, too. It might be an exaggeration to say men were all the same, but a lot of them were very similar. The girls at Mount Holyoke were probably on a protest march right now. A feminist thrill ran through her. I’ll miss them, Becky thought, even Claire Hoyden, the ugly Boston Brahmin chick that had publicly burnt her bra in the courtyard and set alight a hundred-year-old chestnut tree while she was doing it. With Claire’s boobs, a generous C cup and already starting to sag, Becky thought that had been a bit unwise. But her sorority was caught up in the sexless glamour of Germaine Greet, Susan Sontag and women needing men like fish needed bicycles. Most of them had secret posters of hunky dudes up on their lockers, though. Bobby Fischer, the chess champion, was pretty popular. Becky had no posters. After P,,ichard, she was sour on all men.
Becky tried not to dwell on Richard. The bitter disappointment was
still lingering. She had wanted something special with him. After all, Rdchard was supposed to be The One. He had a skinny, intense, poetic look, floppy dark hair and a notable Connecticut family. They had dated steady for almost a full year before he’d talked her into ‘doing it’. It was supposed to be incredibly romantic, a symbol of their eternal love for each other. 1
of itchy, and not satiny like it looked, and spread her thighs, thrusting into her.
Becky had gasped in pain, which Richard had muttered something sympathetic about, but he kept thrusting. The only good thing was that it was over in two minutes … he had taken longer to find exactly where to put it in, shoving himself against her like a drunk trying to jam his key into the lock. P, ichard moaned loudly and collapsed on her, and so they’d lain there together, with Becky half-heartedly stroking his head and wishing he’d get offher so she could wash herself in the stream nearby, get dressed and never see him again.
‘Wow, that was great.’ Richard kissed clumsily at her. ‘Let’s do that again.’
Becky lay underneath him, her wonderful long, slender legs, her apple-breasts and tiny, delicate pink bud-nipples trapped beneath his pale, gangly limbs.
‘I don’t think so.’ She moved her hips firmly, pushing out, away from him. Her gorgeous platinum blonde hair caught the pale sunlight, and she wanted to cover herself with it, like Lady Godiva. ‘I’m kinda sore. We’d better get back.’
‘OK. But we have to do this again, soon.’ Richard stood up, his stick thin arms at his sides, ogling her firm ass that pointed north, the result of summer tennis matches. He reached out a hand and ran it through the silky blonde hair, not noticing her flinch.
Becky shuddered again at the memory. Ugh. She’d known she was coming to England when the news of the court case reached Aunt Mindy, but that had certainly made leaving the States a little bit easier. No tears at the airport. °
‘Please fasten your seat belts for our final descent into London. The ground temperature outside is sixty degrees and it’s a cloudy day …’
No kidding. Becky shivered and made to draw the fabric strap tight around her tiny waist.
The chauffeur was waiting for her as she came out of customs; they had taken one look at her passport and waved her through.
‘Let me get your bags, miss.’ He had an accent Becky recognized from the movies as being Cockney. ‘The car’s this way, if you’ll just follow me.’
‘Of course.’ She hoped it wasn’t too far into the city. She felt amazingly tired, and the travelling wasn’t done yet. In the chr park, the driver pulled up in a gleaming P,,olls t
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months of deportment training at Mrs Porter’s on the Upper East Side. The driver noted her slim calves with appreciation, but Becky was too exhausted to notice. They pulled into traffic and hit the motorway, the
car gliding over the road as smoothly as a gondola in Venice.
The chauffeur touched his cap in the mirror.
‘Well, Miss Lancaster,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Welcome ‘ome.’
‘When exactly is she going to get here?’
The Honourable Mrs Henry Whitlock tapped impatiently on the mahogany dining-room table in front of her and fixed her husband with a look. It was very important to know exactly when her niece was arriving. There would be nothing lacking in Fairfield, she thought bitterly. She and Henry had cleared out of the rooms she’d occupied for the last twenty years to that new and ordinary house in Gloucester; an attractive enough townhouse with a garden full of roses, but not Fairfield, her Fairfield. She still couldn’t think of the place as belonging to her niece. But it did, that was the law, and she wasn’t going to allow Christy’s daughter to have any complaints; her brother’s orphan heir, maybe, but marrying that dreadful American woman had been Robert’s mistake.
As far as Victoria Whitlock was concerned, his daughter Rebecca was just an extension of that mistake. Who knew, with Christy’s dismal record of jazz parties and martini lunches, if Rebecca was even her brother’s child? Victoria thought furiously. The snapshots she had seen showed a young woman with every indication of taking after her mother. Indecently long blonde hair and swirling print dresses - what was there of Robert in that, except maybe her almost masculine height? Rebecca was five eight and still wore heels. Obviously she liked to attract attention to herself. And that was most certaiMy not the Lancaster way.
When Lord and Lady Lancaster, Rebecca’s parents, had taken that motoring trip around the Riviera and been killed by a drunk driver it had been a black day for Victoria. Of course she mourned her brother, and even Christy hadn’t deserved to die. Divorce had been more along the lines of Victoria’s daydreams. And little Charles, just six months, strapped into the back seat of Robert’s Aston Martin and killed instantly. Leaving the direct line with no male heir. Victoria tried hard to suppress the occasional thoughts of what-if that drifted through her mind unbidden. What if the nanny bringing Rebecca out to the airport to join her parents, one year old and the apple of Robert’s eye, had not hit that traffic jam? What if she hadn’t decided to take the next flight? Of course Victoria hadn’t wished her niece dead, but there was no dewing
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that if Rebecca had been in that car, she, Robert’s only sibling, would have inherited Fairfield.
If wishing the girl had been in that car was beyond the pale, resenting her for coming home was not. Rebecca had been the owner of Fairfield, unknown to herself, as soon as her poor father’s car had smashed into that lorry. But her mother’s wretched relatives had swooped down and carted her off to New York right after the funeral. Victoria had not put up much of a fight. She blamed Christy and her fast ways for Robert’s death. The baby would only remind her of her hated sister-in-law, with those large green eyes and that mop of blonde, un-Lancaster-like hair. Victoria was good with dogs and horses, but not with babies. Certainly not one that didn’t even belong to her. So for Jack and Mindy Rogers to take their sister’s baby seemed a natural choice. If Rebecca inherited Christy’s aggressive American ways, Victoria reflected, America was the best place for her.
But now she was twenty-one, and the trust had matured. Victoria and her cousin William, the head of Lancaster Holdings PLC, were no longer the executors. Fairfield Court, the family company, and everything that went with it had passed into the teenage hands of the Hon. Rebecca Lancaster. Everything except the title. That was Rupert’s, and Victoria shuddered anew and decided not to think about that particular problem just yet.
‘She should be up around six. Barkin was to pick her up at the Ritz by two, so not later than that, I’d say.’
Henry Whitlock regarded his wife nervously. Her steel-grey hair and thick tweed skirt were especially crisp and unforgiving today. A bad sign. When Victoria dressed like this, you didn’t want to be in her way. Whitlock just liked his port, his Times crossword and being left alone. Of course it was too bad to be turfed out of Fairfield, but it wasn’t as if they hadn’t known it was coming.
‘Did you tell the maid to make up the master bedroom?’
He nodded.
‘And did you have her put roses in the vase?’
‘She picked some red ones from the garden, from the large bush as one goes into the kitchen garden.’
Victoria’s skin prickled as she remembered what those roses were called. ‘American Beauty’. An omen. As though Christy’s brat were already laughing at her.
‘Everything’s ready, then,’ she said.
Barkin glanced behind him at Miss Becky. She’d asked him to call her Becky, but he thought, for the sake of his job, it would be safer to stick
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with ‘Madam’, at least when Mrs Whitlock was in earshot. She was staring out of the window at the Cotswold countryside and didn’t seem to notice him discreetly checking her out. She was too young, too rich and too posh for him, and if his Maisie could see him now she’d be furious. But Maisie wasn’t around, was she? He was free to check out those amazing, coltish legs that poured out of a tiny white miniskirt into itsy-bitsy, strappy white leather heels, pale against her golden brown skin, and the rigid, tight white military-style jacket on top, buttoned up against the chilly English summer evening, with gold buttons and that all over it. Barkin wasn’t big on fashion but he knew when a girl looked amazing. Hair the colour of melted butter spilled all over the soft leather of the passenger seat. He couldn’t see her eyes, they were hidden behind oversized Jackie O. sunglasses. And it was a pity she was wearing that rose-scented perfume … he wanted to smell her natural skin. She was so clean and flesh, her plucked, styled eyebrows complementing her delicate hands. And no tights on those endless legs. She looked like Twiggy, but prettier. He wondered what kind of underwear a girl like that had on. If she’d shift in her seat maybe he could see it. That skirt was so damn short, but somehow she always managed to keep her legs together or at some infuriating angle so he couldn’t see. Soft lace, he was sure, a little wisp of something pink or peach …
Barkin felt himself getting hard. He swallowed and focused on the road ahead. The last thing this lass needed was another car crash. Besides, she was a nice chick. Asked him to put the radio on so she
|
could listen to the Bee Gees. She wasn’t going to like it up at Fairfield. That much he was sure of.
It wasn’t his habit to feel sorry for millionaires, but when he considered what Becky Lancaster was letting herself in for, he almost had a twang of pity.