Vacancy: Wife of Convenience. Jessica Steele

round the room taking inventory of anything valuable.

      Had Colly secretly hoped that her father would still be as happy when Nanette backed away from whatever sort of relationship they had, then she was again staggered when, far from the relationship ending, Nanette showed her the magnificent emerald ring Joseph Gillingham had bought her, and declared, ‘We’re getting married!’

      For the moment speechless, Colly managed to find the words to congratulate them. But when, adjusting to the idea that Nanette was to be mistress of her home, Colly mentioned that she would find a place of her own, neither her father nor Nanette would hear of it.

      ‘I’d be absolutely hopeless at housekeeping,’ Nanette twittered. ‘Oh, you must stay on to be housekeeper,’ she cooed. ‘Mustn’t she, darling?’

      ‘Of course you must,’ Joseph Gillingham agreed, the most jovial Colly had ever seen him. ‘Naturally I’ll continue to pay you your allowance,’ he added, with a sly look to his intended, making it obvious to Colly that her allowance—not huge by any means and which, with increasing prices, went to supplement the housekeeping—had been discussed by them.

      The whole of it left her feeling most uncomfortable. So much so that she did go so far as to make enquiries about renting accommodation somewhere. She was left reeling at the rent demanded for even the most poky of places.

      So she stayed home. And her father and Nanette married. And over the next few months her father’s new ‘kitten’ showed—when her husband was not around—that she had some vicious claws when things were not going quite her way. But she otherwise remained sweet and adoring to her husband.

      Living in the same house, Colly could not help but be aware that Nanette had a very sneaky way with her. And within a very short space of time Colly was beginning to suspect that her new stepmother was not being true to her Joey. That Nanette plainly preferred male company to female company was not a problem to Colly. What was a problem, however, was that too often she would answer the phone to have some male voice enquire, ‘Nanette?’ or even, ‘Hello, darling.’

      ‘It isn’t Nanette,’ she would answer.

      Silence, then either, ‘I’ll call back,’ or, ‘Wrong number.’

      Colly could not avoid knowing that Nanette was having an affair when some months later she answered the phone to hear an oversexed voice intimately begin, ‘Who was the wicked creature who left me with just her earrings beneath my pillow to remind me of heaven?’

      Colly slammed down the phone. This was just too much. Nanette, who was presently out shopping, had, so she had said, been out consoling a grief-stricken girlfriend until late last night.

      When a half-hour later Nanette returned from her shopping trip Colly was in no mind to keep that phone call to herself. ‘The earrings you wore last night are beneath his pillow!’ she informed her shortly.

      ‘Oh, good,’ Nanette replied, not in the slightest taken aback to have been found out.

      ‘Don’t you care?’ Colly felt angry enough to enquire.

      Nanette placed her carriers down. ‘What about?’

      ‘My father…’

      ‘What about him?’

      Colly opened her mouth; Nanette beat her to it.

      ‘You won’t tell him,’ she jibed confidently.

      ‘Why won’t I?’

      ‘Is he unhappy?’

      He wasn’t. Never a very cheerful man, he seemed, since knowing and marrying this woman, to have had a personality transplant. ‘He’s in cloud-cukoo-land!’ Colly replied.

      Nanette picked up her clothes carriers. ‘Tell him if you wish,’ she challenged, entirely uncaring. ‘I’ve already—tearfully—told him that I don’t think you like me. Guess which one of us he’s going to believe?’

      Colly very much wanted to tell her father what was going on, but found that she could not. Not for herself and the probability that, as Nanette so confidently predicted, he would not believe her, but because he was, in essence, a much happier man.

      So, awash with guilt for not telling him, but hoping that he would not blame her too much when, as he surely must, he discovered more of the true character of the woman he had married, Colly stayed quiet.

      A year passed and her father still adored his wife. So clearly Nanette was playing a very clever game and he had no idea that his wife had a penchant for flitting from affair to affair.

      That was until—about six months before his sudden totally unexpected and fatal heart attack—Colly first saw him looking at Nanette with a little less than an utter doting look in his eyes.

      He appeared only marginally less happy than he had been, though, but did during his last months spend more time in his study than he had since his marriage.

      Her father had been a design engineer of some note and, though in the main largely retired, she knew from the top executives and first-class engineers who occasionally called at the house to ‘pick his brains’ that he was highly thought of by others in his specialised field.

      And then, completely without warning, he died. Colly, in tremendous shock, could not believe it. She questioned the doctor, and he gravely told her that her father had suffered massive heart failure and that nothing would have saved him.

      She was still in shock the next day, when Nanette sought her out to show her the will she had found when sorting through Joseph Gillingham’s papers. It was dated a month after his marriage, and Colly soon realised that Nanette had been more looking for his will than sorting through, especially when, triumphantly, Nanette declared, ‘What a little pet! He’s left me everything!’ And, without any attempt to look sorry, ‘Oh, poor you,’ she added. ‘He’s left you nothing.’

      That was another shock. Not that she had expected to be left anything in particular. Naturally Nanette, as his wife, if she were still his wife by then, would be his main heir. Colly realised she must have assumed her father would go on for ever; he was only sixty-eight, after all. And while he was not enormously wealthy, his income from some wise investing many years before was quite considerable.

      It was two days after her father’s death that Colly received a fresh shock when Nanette barged into her bedroom to coldly inform her, ‘Naturally you’ll be finding somewhere else to live.’

      Somehow, and Colly hardly knew how she managed it, she hid the fresh assault of shock that hit her to proudly retort, ‘Naturally—I wouldn’t dream of staying on here.’

      ‘Good!’ Nanette sniffed. ‘You can stay until after the funeral, then I want you out.’ And, having delivered that ultimatum, she turned about and went from whence she came.

      Feeling stunned, Colly couldn’t think straight for quite some minutes. She had no idea what she would do, but heartily wished her uncle Henry were there to advise her.

      Henry Warren was not a blood relative, but her father’s friend, the ‘uncle’ being a courtesy title. She had known him all her life. He was the same age as her father but, newly retired from his law firm, he had only last week embarked on an extended holiday. He did not even know that his friend Joseph had died.

      Not that the two had seen very much of each other since Joseph’s remarriage. Her father’s trips to his club had become less and less frequent. And Henry Warren seldom came to the house any more. It was because of their friendship that her father had always dealt with a different firm of solicitors, believing, as he did, that business and friendship did not mix. But Colly’s first instinct was to want to turn to Uncle Henry.

      But he was out of the country, and as her initial shock began to subside she realised that there was no one she could turn to for help and advice. She had to handle this on her own. She had no father, and no Uncle Henry—and Nanette wanted her out.

      Hot on the heels of that realisation came the knowledge