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CHAPTER ONE
‘HI, MA, guess what? I think I’ve found the perfect woman for Uncle Marcus Her na dinner with his parents Suzi’s eous; tall, blonde—you know, that stylish, elegant type that Marcus always goes for And she’s the right age—late twenties—and she knows all about the hotel trade because she works for some super-exclusive American outfit in the Caribbean, and—’
‘Briony…’ Polly Fraser’s ed from the deep recess of the kitchen cupboard she had been cleaning out
Why was it one’s offspring always chose the most inauspicious of erly extricated herself from the cupboard and put its contents on the worktop which she was kneeling with one leg whilst standing on her step-ladder with the other
‘You’re going to love her; she’s just so perfect for Uncle Marcus,’ Briony continued to enthuse, adding warningly, ‘Watch out, Muht the jar of hoed as she hurriedly stepped down from the worktop
‘Mmm,’ Briony ree with ht stuff just doesn’t taste the same’
‘No, it doesn’t, does it?’ Polly agreed, shter’s injured expression ‘You know the rules,’ she reminded her firmly ‘The customers come first Which reminds me, if you want to earn a little bit of extra money whilst you’re at home that blackberry and apple jelly I one down very well…’
‘Mu about the hotel and the guests for fiveto tell you?’
Penitently Polly got down properly frohter to lead her towards the kitchen table
She had been just eighteen herself—Briony’s age—when she had met and fallen in love with Richard Fraser At twenty-two, four years her senior, he had swept her off her feet
They had met when he had called at the solicitor’s offices where she’d worked, following the death of his grandfather, General Leo Fraser, who had left jointly to both his grandsons the large Georgian house which had been in the faenerations but which neither of his sons, both army men themselves, nor their wives, had wanted to take on
It had been left to Richard to deal with most of the more mundane aspects of the formalities connected with the will since Marcus had at the tie ood deal about his slightly older cousin fro, a breathtaking three months after they had met, that she had actually seen Marcus in person for the first time Even now, all these years later, she could recall the shock that coiven her Richard, her own husband, had been good-looking and sweetly char, with the old-fashioned kind of courtesy that ca, but Marcus…To call Marcusthe sweet pleasantness of ordinary ly rich, dark, addictive flavour of plain
In other words Marcus was in a class of his own, a ly male that Polly’s mouth still went a little bit dry and her pulse-rate still rose every time he walked into the rooood-natured and physically attractive hero in the ley, then Marcus could quite definitely have been Mr Darcy—and then so of a sense of shut-down, controlled male power about Marcus that i volcano—a fierce sexual energy which, for Polly, at nineteen and a very, very new and shy bride, had been rather too much for her to contend with
And it hadn’t helped either that in those early days of herof her youth and the fact that she and Richard had h she had been sensitively aware of Marcus’s disapproval of their e, Polly had refused to let either hiuess how much it hurt her—for Richard’s sake
Right from the start, when they had met, Polly had sensed how much his older cousin’s approval one to the sarown up er of the two of thehteen months, it was perhaps natural that he should have put Marcus on so of a pedestal