Passionate Scandal. Michelle Reid

her. His air of high breeding and easy sophistication showed clearly. His smooth fairness complemented her dark sleekness. Two very sophisticated people.

      ‘Madeline!’

      Her head twisted, blue eyes alighting on the tall distinguished figure of her father, and on a soft cry she moved eagerly into his arms.

      ‘You’re late,’ he complained after releasing her from a suffocating bear-hug of an embrace. ‘Over an hour late coming in, and another hour getting through those infernal Customs!’

      Madeline smiled and kissed his cheek. ‘Don’t knock the tight security,’ she scolded him. ‘It’s all done for our own safety.’

      ‘Hmph,’ was his only answer to that as he held her out at arm’s length so he could look at her. ‘You’re looking good enough to eat,’ he decided, ‘though how you manage to after that lousy journey confounds me.’

      ‘Mummy comes in useful for some things, you know,’ she grinned. Expecting and getting another disparaging ‘Hmph’.

      There was very little love lost between her parents. Her father saw Dee as a very beautiful but empty-headed social doll, and Dee saw her father as a brusque, insensitive tyrant. The only place they met in any harmony was where their daughter was concerned, and even there they begged to differ—over all points but her happiness.

      ‘Now, where’s this young man your mother’s been telling me so much about?’

      Turning in her father’s arms, Madeline searched Perry out, to find he had been joined by a big dark-haired man who was greeting him like an old friend.

      ‘Forman!’ she cried in surprise.

      The newcomer grinned and came over to kiss her cheek. She had met Forman Goulding several times in Boston. He was a big dark man with the kind of hard masculine looks she tended to shy away from these days. He was also Perry’s cousin and the member of the family who took care of their European interests.

      It was with Forman that Perry was going to stay during his stay in London, coming to Madeline in Lambourn during the weekends only. By the time all the introductions had been made, her father had invited Forman down to Lambourn with Perry whenever he wished to join them, then they were all moving outside to her father’s Bentley, with Rogers his chauffeur standing by the boot waiting to receive her luggage, and in front of it a long low growling monster of a car which could only belong to Forman Goulding.

      Perry took Madeline in his arms and kissed her gently, promising to be with her in Lambourn by Saturday lunchtime.

      ‘That was a fine show of affection,’ her father commented once they were seated in the car and on their way.

      ‘Was it?’ Madeline murmured, then subtly turned the conversation by demanding to know how everyone was, her eyes warm on him as she listened to all the latest news.

      At fifty-five he was still a strikingly attractive man with his head of thick wavy hair which had gone prematurely white in his twenties. He was a man who carried the power he wielded around with him like a banner. Dominic had once described him as a man who totally lacked caution but possessed the luck of the devil to compensate. Reluctant though Madeline was to agree with anything Dominic Stanton said, she had to agree with that particular observation. Her father took risks in business guaranteed to rock the City back on its heels in horror. The fact that he invariably made the right move placed him high on the respect rating with people in the speculative business. Few scoffed at a Gilburn idea. Nobody dared underestimate him. He was just too sharp, too shrewd.

      ‘And what’s this Charles Waverley like?’ she asked when her father concluded the local news without mentioning Nina’s new fiancé. ‘I can’t imagine our own little Nina getting married and leaving the fold,’ she added drily. ‘She was always such a timid little home bird.’

      ‘Charles is perfect for Nina,’ her father assured her. ‘He possesses a natural desire to love and cherish, which is all we can ever ask of the man who wins our Nina. Their marriage will be a good one,’ he asserted confidently.

      A weight pressing down on her heart kept Madeline silent while she diminished it. It was nothing new to her to feel this terrible burden constricting her chest whenever she thought of love and marriage. It was something she’d had to learn to live with—and control so no one else knew it was there. Love held only bitter memories for her, painful experiences she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. Marriage meant commitment. An honest declaration of love undying. She had once known love, thought the offer of marriage gave her that commitment. But she had been wrong. And she never wanted Nina to know that same pain, that same anguished desolation.

      ‘And Louise—how is she?’ she asked next.

      ‘Very well,’ her father said positively. ‘Beautiful and well,’ he added with all the satisfaction of a man who adored his lovely wife to distraction. Louise suited the blustery Edward Gilburn far better than Madeline’s own mother had. With Louise he had a chance to utilise that softer side of his nature which otherwise would never be seen. No one would think of being cruel or tyrannical towards Louise. She was just too soft and vulnerable. ‘And eager to have you back home,’ he finished warmly.

      Madeline didn’t doubt it. Louise had been a wonderful surrogate mother to her throughout her formative years. And she had done it without coming between daughter and father or outlawing Dee.

      ‘She had your rooms completely refurbished as a surprise for you—then sat down and worried herself silly that she should have left them as you remembered them, and had us all frantic in case she decided to change them back again in the hopes that you wouldn’t notice! Nina managed to stop her.’ He sounded heartily relieved. ‘She told her that the new Madeline I’ve been telling them all about would hate to sleep in a candy-pink room with frills and flounces!’

      Would she? Madeline laughed dutifully, but felt a heavy sense of loss inside, as if the old Madeline had died, and this new one was just a stand-in. Would other people see her as a stranger now, someone they had to learn to know all over again? She shuddered at the thought. She had just grown up, that was all. Albeit late.

      Watching her covertly, Edward Gilburn read more in his daughter’s studiously placid features than she would like. He had worried terribly about her when she first went to Boston four years ago. Dee had been marvellous with her, he had to admit. She’d refused to let their daughter mope, dragging her—literally sometimes—protesting miserably out to face the human race and learn to deal with it again. But he had feared what kind of person was going to emerge from the ashes of this brutal kind of therapy. He had been relieved to find Madeline slowly learning to cope during his regular visits to see her in Boston. But he could not say he was exactly happy with the final result of the four-year influence of her rather superficial mother.

      Where had all that sparkling eagerness to meet life full on gone? he wondered in grim exasperation. That wild and wonderful love of life which made her the captivating creature she was at eighteen? Trust Dee to bleed it all out of her, he thought grimly.

      And, not for the first time, he cursed Dominic Stanton for making it necessary for his baby to place herself in the hands of her mother.

      ‘Nina was worried you might not come,’ he put in quietly.

      ‘Because of Dominic, you mean?’ As usual, Madeline went directly for the point, and Edward smiled to himself. Dee obviously hadn’t managed to curb that natural habit. Then the smile went awry when he remembered how that painfully open honesty of hers had made her broken love affair with Dominic all the harder for her to bear. She had not been able to seek solace in lying to herself, and the truth had been so dreadfully hard to endure. ‘I didn’t know I’d given such a feeble impression of myself.’

      ‘You didn’t, darling, and you know it.’ Her father’s hand came out to take hers, squeezing it gently.

      ‘What Dominic did to me was cruel.’ Madeline said flatly. ‘But what I did to him was unforgivable. Neither of us came out of it well. It took me a whole year to acknowledge that,’ she admitted on a small