Moth To The Flame. Sara Craven

      Moth to the Flame

      Sara Craven

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      Former journalist SARA CRAVEN published her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

       COVER

       TITLE PAGE

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       ENDPAGE

       COPYRIGHT

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘WELL, I can’t understand you,’ Mrs Laurence said plaintively. ‘Most girls would give their eye teeth for a week in Rome with all expenses paid.’

      Juliet Laurence repressed a sigh and gave her mother a look of affectionate resignation. ‘You make it all sound so simple,’ she said.

      ‘It is simple,’ her mother protested.

      ‘And of course Jan will welcome me with open arms, without the slightest idea that I’ve been sent out to spy on her.’

      ‘What an unpleasant way of expressing it!’ Mrs Laurence directed a quelling glance at her older daughter. ‘That is not my intention at all. I admit that I’m concerned, but …’

      ‘But you want to know what she’s doing, and why she hasn’t written to you for nearly a month, without actually asking her directly,’ Juliet supplied accurately.

      ‘But she never keeps me waiting so long for a letter,’ Mrs Laurence said defensively. ‘Something’s wrong, I know it is. I have one of my feelings …’

      ‘Oh, Mim!’ Juliet smiled ruefully. ‘You and those “feelings” of yours—the panics they’ve started! If you’re so worried, why don’t you telephone Jan? It would be cheaper than sending me to Rome to ferret out the information for you.’

      ‘I can’t phone her. I’d sound like one of those dreadful, over-protective mothers who keep dragging their fledglings back to the nest,’ Mrs Laurence said fretfully. ‘Jan would hate it. And I’ve never pestered or interfered, have I?’

      Juliet patted her hand. ‘No, Mim, love, of course not.’

      And if the thought fleetingly occurred to her that if it had been herself all those miles away in Rome instead of her younger sister, her mother’s antennae might not have been quite so sensitive to impending doom, she loyally suppressed it. After all, Jan was her last-born, and Juliet had always known, ever since her sister’s birth, that Jan was the favourite child. It was an instinctive knowledge and she had been able to absorb it without particular hurt, because she knew that she was also loved and valued, and that what favouritism there was had been wholly unconscious on her mother’s part.

      Jan, after all, was everyone’s darling. She was incredibly lovely to look at, for one thing. Strangers had hung over her pram, cooing rapturously while she accepted their homage. She had continued to accept it all through her childhood, at school and at play, and no one had been in the least surprised when a career in modelling beckoned when she was seventeen. And now she had been working in Rome for almost a year at a leading fashion house, the latest in a series of glamorous jobs.

      Juliet did not grudge her sister one iota of her almost meteoric success. No one, she had realised a long time ago, was ever likely to offer her a career in modelling, even if that had been what she wanted—unless it was to advertise tights or nail varnish. Her legs were long and shapely, and her hands small and well cared for, but her figure, although slender and rounded in the right places, would never set the world on fire, she thought judiciously, and while she shared Jan’s basic colouring, her own hair tended towards a bright copper rather than her sister’s rich red-gold colour and her eyes had more grey than green in them. Her face was thinner, too, its cheekbones more prominent and the mouth more vulnerable.

      It was odd to think of herself as the more vulnerable when she was the older by eighteen months. When they had been small, she had always been protective towards Jan, alert for the sort of mischief that could lead to danger. Jan had seemed to accept this in much the same spirit as she received admiration, but at the same time she seemed to have been born knowing exactly where she was going and what she wanted out of life, whereas Juliet had never really known where her path would lead. It had led, eventually, to training as a teacher, and she had just completed her probationary year. She was happy and settled in her post in a primary school, but was that really how she should be feeling at twenty-two? she wondered. She had never let the knowledge that Jan regarded her as a stick-in-the-mud worry her in the past, because she had never craved the sort of limelight that seemed to be her sister’s life’s blood, but just recently she had begun to ask herself whether Jan’s strictures might not have a certain justice, and whether she was not in grave danger of resigning herself to a rut.

      There was Barry Tennent for one thing. He taught at the same school, and they had been out together several times. Juliet admitted that she enjoyed his company, and she knew that Barry was ambitious, with his eye on a deputy headship before he was thirty. Nor did she find him unattractive. But was that really all there was to it—to marry a man because his prospects were sound, and he was ‘not unattractive’? Her mother too approved of Barry. She said he was ‘reliable’ as if that was the one quality that mattered, but Juliet was not so sure. It was all so safe and so humdrum.

      She had even found herself guiltily wishing of late that it could be possible to change identities with Jan just for a brief while so that she could see what another lifestyle was like. But there was no profit to be gained from that kind of daydreaming. Perhaps a change of job would provide the impetus she needed. She could even work abroad. A girl she had been at college with was now living with a family in one of the E.E.C. countries, teaching their children English. Perhaps Katie might know of a similar post that would appeal to her.

      It was this feeling of restlessness which had sorely tempted her to agree without a second thought when her mother had first suggested the trip to Rome—and if the invitation had come from Jan herself, she would not have hesitated. But Jan had never suggested that either her mother or her sister should visit her in her adopted city. She came home, of course, bringing generous presents—beautiful handbags and belts, and delicious perfume, and tossing them casual stories of parties she had attended and celebrities she had met, but her visits were never long. Jan, Juliet thought dispassionately, bored easily. She always had, even as a small child. She could remember incidents in childhood play, and even friendships disrupted by Jan’s