She got up to look out the windows and then she saw them, two headlights coming down the hill and around the bend where the Chapel was ensconced. Douglas was just arriving home, Julia watched him park by the fountain.
Then she heard it.
A scream.
A frightening, terrible, blood-curdling, high-pitched woman’s scream.
“Dear God, the children…” Julia whispered and she ran out into the hallway as fast as she could in the direction of the scream.
Chapter Three
The Problem
Douglas Ashton drove his Jaguar through the winding country roads outside Bristol Airport.
Normally Carter would have collected him from the airport. However that morning when he left, Carter had to get to Heathrow to pick up Julia.
Douglas thought, at the time, this was likely the first in a long line of inconveniences he’d have to put up with concerning Julia.
Now he was glad for the chance to be alone, behind the wheel of the car, on the dark, deserted roads.
He thought ahead to the call he’d be getting from Japan in a few hours time, to his trip to Munich tomorrow, the meeting there in the afternoon and then on to the business he needed to see to in St. Petersburg. When he was certain that all plans were in place and nothing had been left to chance, he let his mind turn to Sommersgate and what awaited him there.
Julia Fairfax.
She’d changed her name back after she’d divorced her ass of a husband.
Douglas’s mother had loved Sean Webster. “How she would even dream of finding someone better than him is beyond me. She doesn’t know how lucky she was to trap him in the first place,” Monique had declared when she’d heard the divorce was made final.
Douglas had wondered distractedly why Julia had settled for the bastard in the first place. He was from money, as Monique mentioned more than once, but Julia very obviously outclassed him from the first.
What Monique didn’t know about Sean, and probably, Douglas thought, wouldn’t have cared about, was that Sean made a pass at anything in a skirt, including Tamsin.
Tamsin never told Gavin, but she told Douglas.
His sister had always been a smart girl. Gavin, being Gavin, mellow and good-natured most of the time, but fiercely loyal and, in Tamsin and Julia’s case, protective, would have immediately lost his mind and done something immensely stupid.
Douglas wasn’t so impetuous.
Julia may have been blinded by love (or, more likely, from Douglas’s vast experience of women, money) to fall for Sean Webster, but Douglas was counting on the fact that she was smart enough or, at the very least proud enough, not to keep him around.
She didn’t.
Everyone was surprised at Sean’s accident three months after the divorce was final.
Douglas was not.
He felt no remorse. He had ordered that Webster would not sustain a lasting injury. But there was only one human being that Douglas Ashton had ever loved in his thirty-eight years and that was his sister. He could not allow anyone to make her even the slightest bit uncomfortable.
Sean Webster had made that mistake therefore Douglas had made him uncomfortable.
Smoothly negotiating a deserted roundabout, Douglas allowed his thoughts, as they had for obvious reasons of late, to move to his sister.
Growing up, Tamsin had been the only bit of warmth in their cold home, save the Kilpatricks but they were servants and therefore, it had been drilled into Douglas and Tamsin at an early age, had their place and that place was not a familial one.
But Tamsin, she was like a changeling, not born of their family. Sweet-tempered, kind-natured and she loved Douglas openly. She thought he could move mountains, she thought he could rule worlds. Until Gavin, the sun rose and set for Tamsin through Douglas.
She saw the best in him even when Mother ignored him or after one of Father’s fierce tirades. Douglas rarely permitted his thoughts to turn to his father, mainly because there was no purpose to it. Maxwell Ashton was dead, but he had been dead to Douglas years before his father’s heart exploded. This, Douglas thought, was the ultimate irony because he’d always thought his father hadn’t had a heart.