pursed her lips. ‘No doubt they reminded Nigel too much of the wonderful career he’d interrupted.’
‘Career?’ Maddie repeated. ‘Was she a writer once?’ She frowned. ‘She never told me.’
‘No, that wasn’t her talent. She was a very successful editor with Penlaggan Press. She found the authors of all those books, encouraged them, and published them.
‘Your mother told me Penlaggan did their best to coax her back on numerous occasions, even offering to let her work from home.’ She shook her head. ‘But it never happened. Sylvester wives, it seems, do not work.’
‘But if she was so good at her job...’
‘That,’ said Aunt Fee somberly, ‘was probably the trouble.’
It was an insight into Aunt Beth’s marriage that Maddie had never forgotten. And now it had a renewed and unpleasing resonance.
Well, I’m good at my job too, she thought, and I’m damned if I’m giving it up whatever Jeremy or his father may say about it.
She still felt raw when she remembered how Nigel Sylvester, having mourned for barely a year, announced his engagement to a widow called Esme Hammond and married her only a month later.
But then, quite unexpectedly, she’d met Jeremy again at a party in London. He’d expressed delight at seeing her and asked for her phone number, but if she felt this was more out of politeness than serious intent, she soon discovered she was wrong. Because he’d not only called but invited her to dinner. After which, events had seemed to snowball, she remembered, smiling.
Jeremy had changed a great deal from the taciturn, aloof boy who’d so consistently avoided an annoying small girl. He seemed to have inherited much of his mother’s charm, but in spite of three years at university and a spell at the Harvard Business School before joining Sylvester and Co, he still seemed under his father’s thumb.
But while Maddie did not delude herself she would have been his daughter-in-law of choice, at least Nigel Sylvester had not openly opposed the engagement.
But she still didn’t call him ‘Uncle Nigel’, she thought, pausing at the office’s street entrance to punch in her entry code. Nor, after the wedding, would he ever morph into ‘Dad’, ‘Pa’ or ‘Pops’.
And he had put a spoke in their wheel in another way.
If Maddie had assumed that Jeremy would immediately want her to move into the company flat with him, she soon found she was wrong..
‘Dad says he needs to use the flat himself on occasion,’ he told her. ‘And it would make things—awkward if you were there. And anyway he feels we should wait to live together until we’re actually married.’
Maddie had stared at him. ‘But who on earth does that nowadays?’
Jeremy shrugged. ‘I guess he’s just old-fashioned about these things.’
But Maddie was convinced ‘hypocritical’ was a better description, and would have wagered a year’s salary that his father and the glamorous Esme had been sharing a bed even while Aunt Beth was alive.
‘And what happens after the wedding?’ she asked. ‘Because, we’ll be living there then, or will your father expect me to move out any time he plans to stay overnight?’
‘No, of course not,’ he said impatiently. ‘He’s talking of taking a suite at a hotel.’ He pulled a face. ‘And, believe me, sweetie, it could be worse. When it began, Sylvester and Co was Sylvester, Felderstein and Marchetti. You could be having all sorts of foreign directors dropping in.’
‘Might have been fun,’ Maddie said lightly. ‘So why aren’t there any now?’
Jeremy shrugged again. ‘The families died out, or started new ventures of their own. That’s what Dad said, anyway. We only became fully independent in my grandfather’s day.’
Since when Nigel Sylvester had achieved success in the corridors of power, joining various government think-tanks and advising on banking and economic affairs.
So much so that, rumour had it that he would be offered a life peerage in the next New Year Honours’ List.
I wonder if he’ll expect me to call him ‘My lord’ she mused as she took the creaky elevator to her office on the first floor. Or curtsy when we meet. While Esme will be even more insufferable when she’s Lady Sylvester.
But I’ll deal with that when I have to, she told herself. For now, I’m concentrating on this dream assignment that’s come my way.
Italy in May, she thought with an ecstatic sigh. Boy, I can hardly wait.
CHAPTER TWO
IT WASN’T UNTIL the plane had taken off that Maddie really believed she was going to Italy.
In view of the events of the past ten days, she would