The Playboy's Mistress. Kim Lawrence

is likely to drop in on us at any moment. Can you imagine what she’s going to make of this…? At the last count we were doing Christmas dinner for fifteen people that I know of, and the Aga’s gone out and I can’t light it! I never did have the knack with the darned thing like your mother has…’

      Darcy could hear him gulp down the line. She took a deep breath; desperate circumstances required drastic solutions.

      ‘Don’t panic,’ she instructed her harassed stepfather with shameless hypocrisy. ‘If I pack now I should be there about… There shouldn’t be too much traffic at this time of night, should there…?’

      ‘Your skiing holiday, Darcy!’

      Darcy recognised a token protest when she heard it.

      ‘I know how much you’ve been looking forward to it…’

      Darcy allowed herself a final indulgent moment to wistfully visualise crisp snow-covered slopes, twinkling mountain villages and the hunky outdoor type she had been destined to meet amidst the après-ski gluwein before she squared her slight shoulders.

      ‘With my luck I’d probably have come back with several limbs in plaster.’ You had to be philosophical about these things.

      Did her cancellation insurance cover family crises caused by the parent of the policy-holder unexpectedly needing to find herself…? Somehow Darcy didn’t think so.

      ‘You can’t cancel,’ Jennifer insisted a little later that evening as she sat on Darcy’s bed. Darcy smiled and continued to replace the skiing gear in her suitcase with clothes more suited to Christmas in a remote corner of the Yorkshire Dales. ‘You’ve been looking forward to it all year. I don’t see why it has to be you; why can’t Clare go home to help?’

      Darcy laughed. ‘I don’t think domesticity is really Clare’s scene,’ she responded wryly. Her beautiful, talented and slightly spoilt half-sister had a heart of gold, but she needed therapy to recover from a broken fingernail.

      ‘And it’s yours…?’

      Darcy couldn’t deny this. ‘I’ll have to learn, won’t I?’

      Jennifer, seeing her friend wasn’t to be dissuaded, sighed. ‘Well, I think you’re being a fool.’

      Darcy shrugged. ‘So what’s new?’

      Jennifer’s expression darkened. ‘That,’ she said angrily, ‘wasn’t your fault!’

      ‘Tell that to Michael’s wife and children.’

      This year Reece Erskine wasn’t taking any chances. He was going to lose himself in the wilds of deepest, darkest Yorkshire until the so-called festive season was well and truly over!

      So he didn’t like Christmas… Why was it considered a crime when a man refused to participate in the manic few weeks that culminated in several days of gluttony in the company of people you avoided for the rest of the year?

      Of course, the most insupportable part was the fact that everyone was so understanding. He refused to put on a paper party hat and suddenly he was failing to come to terms with his loss. He’d had it with pop psychology, no matter how well-intentioned!

      After the debacle last year, when the girlfriend—and he used the term in the loosest possible sense—of the moment, armed with champagne, sympathy and a criminally sexy nightie, had tracked him down to the hotel he’d holed up in, he wasn’t leaving any clues. She’d proved to be a scarily tenacious woman! She’d had her revenge, though; she’d sold the story of their so-called ‘stormy relationship’ to a tabloid.

      Whether he would have been quite so keen to avail himself of Greg’s hospitality if he’d known that the renovations of the big Victorian pile had been at such an early stage was questionable, but that was academic now he was here.

      ‘God, man, you’re getting soft,’ he told himself in disgust. His deep voice sounded eerily loud in the empty lofty-ceilinged room. ‘What’s a rat or two between friends…? A bit of good old-fashioned frontier spirit is what’s called for here. Who wants to call Room Service when he could pump up the old Primus stove?’ His tone lacked conviction even to his own ears.

      Having unrolled his sleeping bag, he made his way into the overgrown garden that stretched down towards what sounded like a river in full spate. He tightened the collar of his leather jacket around his neck; it was almost as cold out here as inside.

      From the bone-chilling temperature in the old place even after he’d lit that smoky fire in the cavernous grate, he suspected he’d need to invest in a few thick blankets to supplement his state-of-the-art bedding, which might well live up to its press and be able to withstand a night in the North Pole, but the Yorkshire Dales in December—forget it!

      He looked around in distaste at the bleak landscape. God, the place was so grey—grey and extremely wet! It was baffling when you considered how many people waxed lyrical about the area.

      The periphery of his vision picked on something that broke the dismal grey monotony. Something suspiciously like a human voice raised in song drifted across from the general direction of that fleeting glimpse of scarlet. Reece immediately felt indignant. Greg had sworn on his very alive grandmother’s grave that Reece wouldn’t see another human being unless he wanted to—and even then it wouldn’t be easy!

      Reece had come away with the distinct and very welcome impression that the natives were hostile to strangers.

      Eager to defend his solitude against intruders, Reece followed the melody to its source, wrecking his shiny new boots in the process. He discovered the clear, pure sounds actually came from just beyond the boundary of the sprawling grounds. He could no longer eject the songbird, but his curiosity was piqued.

      His days as a choirboy enabled him to correctly identify the number as The Coventry Carol. How very seasonal; how very corny, he thought, his lip curling.

      Acting on impulse—which wasn’t something he made a habit of—Reece swung himself up onto the lower bare branch of a convenient oak tree. The identity of the owner of the bell-like tones was going to bug him unless he satisfied his curiosity. Besides, if he was going to be carolled on a regular basis it was as well to be forewarned.

      From his lofty vantage point he could now see into what must be the garden of the sprawling stone-grey house that sat at the bottom of the lane that led up to Greg’s investment.

      In the summer the green-painted summer-house was a magical place, where wisteria tumbled with vigorous old-fashioned roses up the clapboarded walls and over the roof. In Darcy’s childhood it had been the place her knight in shining armour was going to propose. However, the romance was purely a seasonal thing; in the winter it became a cold, unfriendly place her childish imagination had peopled with ghouls and similar nasties—it was still private, though, hence the bit of impromptu choir practice.

      Her voice, never in her view solo material at the best of times, was every bit as rusty as she’d expected.

      ‘I can’t do it!’ she groaned.

      That new vicar, she decided darkly, was a dangerous man, who had shamelessly used his spaniel eyes and a judicious amount of moral blackmail until she had almost been falling over herself to volunteer to stand in for her musical mother and perform the solo in the Christmas carol concert.

      It wasn’t until she’d been halfway down the lane from the church that the full horror of what she’d done had hit Darcy. She’d suffered from terminal stage fright since that awful occasion in infants’ school when, after she’d been given the linchpin role of the donkey in the nativity play, the strain had proved too much! She’d frozen and had held up proceedings until she had been carried bodily off the makeshift stage.

      What’s the worst that could happen…? What’s a bit of public humiliation between friends…?

      A loud noise like a pistol shot interrupted her gloomy contemplation of her future as a figure of fun. If she hadn’t automatically taken a startled