A WILD INHERITANCE

A WILD INHERITANCE Chapters 3 - 5

Chapter Three

Francesca slept very badly. The day had been emotional enough with her father's funeral, but the awkward scenario afterwards back at Hill Mead had produced the worst possible combination for insomnia: an exhausted body and an over-active brain. 

She tossed and turned, listening to the rustle of the wind in the pine trees, growing hotter and hotter until she kicked off the duvet and then finally discarded her blue cotton-jersey pyjamas in a heap on the floor and curled herself into a foetal position, slender, well-muscled arms wrapped defensively around the fullness of her breasts, dark hair spread out like a fan on the pillow. 

Her stomach felt knotted with tension. It was impossible to relax. After four long years, Saul was sleeping in the guest room just across the landing, biding a dangerous, explosive silence on the subject of Lowenna. She shuddered at the prospect of Saul's reaction, all the more daunting because of his absence of comment so far. Tomorrow would bring the inevitable interrogation, she knew. She had it all to come. The only reason she'd been spared last night was a mixture of his own iron self-control and Aunt Carol's mediating influence. 

The trouble was, she knew him too well. He might be arrogant and chauvinistic, but he wouldn't spark off a major row in front of a three-year-old child. But the fact that he'd calmly accepted Mrs Prince's offer of a bed for the night, instead of high-tailing it off to his polo yard in Berkshire again, was ominous in itself. 

She shivered, and pulled the duvet back up to cover herself, her thoughts twisting in another direction. Wasn't she assuming too much about Saul's reaction? It suddenly occurred to her that her long-ago decision not to tell him about Lowenna might have fostered all kinds of fantasies about his reactions if he knew, about his feelings towards her. 

Saul had hardly proved himself a devoted step-cousin recently, had he? He hadn't shown a scrap of interest in her life for four years, and before that he'd said some cruel, brutal things to her, things she'd never forget as long as she lived. 

Face it: wasn't it far more likely that he'd be fairly indifferent to the whole thing? That thought both comforted and tortured, and with a groan she rolled on to her stomach, burying her head in the pillow and trying to calm her confused thoughts. 

The trouble was that the past, in itself, was confusing. Nothing had ever seemed to happen calmly and rationally between herself and Saul. It had always been love-hate. There had always been an ambiguous air of competition between them. And her persistent hero-worship for Saul had always been tempered by her father's contempt. She'd seen Saul as exciting, different, blessed with almost magical powers and innate wisdom. As a child, he'd been big brother, friend, cousin, all rolled into one. She'd adored Saul's mother, Aunt Carol, with her exuberant sense of fun, her off-beat attitudes, and been devastated when she moved away just after Mother died. 

Her father, conversely, had viewed Saul with suspicion, as an unwelcome infiltrator into their family. 

He'd despised Carol for having been foolish enough to not only get pregnant during a madly romantic affair with a high-born Romany travelling through her home town, but for actually being rash enough to become the gypsy's bride as well. The fact that she was highly intelligent, a graduate social anthropologist doing a thesis on the Romany lifestyle when she met and married her gypsy lover, merely compounded the stupidity. That the ill-matched marriage failed was no surprise in his eyes, but for his respected elder brother Harry to marry a woman with a one-year-old baby, and whose previous marriage had been, according to her father, merely a private Romany ceremony without the legality of the law of the land, was the final straw for Martin St Aubyn. If she'd heard his opinion once she must have heard it a thousand times.