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.
His sister’s
death meant certain unbidden, long-buried memories resurfaced,
though Douglas had long since grown too detached for them to affect
him. He allowed them to drift through his consciousness now but he
was, as always, immune.
If Douglas
brought home a poor grade (anything less than a first was an excuse
for a screaming, red-faced lecture that lasted at least an hour) or
he had not been made captain of the rugby or cricket teams (no
matter that he was the best player at both) or any of number of the
myriad other ways Douglas
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