Midsummer Star. Betty Neels

      

      She said in a rigid voice,

      “Thank you for my day out,”

      and then, the manners forgotten, hurled herself at him and buried her head against his shoulder.

      He caught her deftly and held her close. Presently she pulled away and raised her eyes to his.

      “I must be mad,” she told him, “after what you did this evening.” She drew a deep breath and then rushed on in a rather loud voice, “I said I didn’t want to see you ever again, and I meant it!”

      “That’s a perfectly natural reaction.” Oliver opened the door for her.

      She brushed past him with a muttered good-night and once in her room tore off her clothes and jumped into bed. She wouldn’t sleep, of that she was certain. Her head was seething with odds and ends of thoughts which needed sorting out before morning. “Nicky, oh, Nicky!” she said to the dark room, but it was Oliver’s calm face which her mind’s eye saw before she fell into exhausted, dreamless sleep.

      Romance readers around the world were sad to note the passing of Betty Neels in June 2001. Her career spanned thirty years, and she continued to write into her ninetieth year. To her millions of fans, Betty epitomized the romance writer, and yet she began writing almost by accident. She had retired from nursing, but her inquiring mind still sought stimulation. Her new career was born when she heard a lady in her local library bemoaning the lack of good romance novels. Betty’s first book, Sister Peters in Amsterdam, was published in 1969, and she eventually completed 134 books. Her novels offer a reassuring warmth that was very much a part of her own personality. She was a wonderful writer, and she will be greatly missed. Her spirit and genuine talent will live on in all her stories.

      Midsummer Star

      Betty Neels

      MILLS & BOON

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      Contents

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER ONE

      THE MAY SUN, bright but still tepid so early in the morning, shone down on the old house, so that the rose brickwork and the tilted gables glowed; it shone on the Albertine roses, already in bud, climbing its walls, and on the large neglected garden around it. And it shone too on the girl, idling to and fro on the swing under the great mulberry tree on the edge of the lawn at one side of the house.

      She was a big girl, splendidly built, with a lovely face framed by dark curling hair, her creamy skin already faintly tanned by the spring sunshine. She was wearing beautifully cut slacks which had seen better days and a silk shirt with its sleeves rolled up above her elbows. That was well worn too but of excellent cut. She swung slowly to and fro, her dark brows drawn together in a frown, for once unaware of her beautiful surroundings. She said softly: ‘Something will have to be done.’ And the elderly labrador lying beside the swing cocked an ear and turned mild brown eyes to look at her.

      The girl put up a shapely hand to push the hair away from her face. She looked around her, at the herbaceous border on the far side of a lawn which badly needed mowing, the hedge of lavender, the paved path leading to a half hidden pond, and beyond to the tumbledown fence and the fields. She sighed and allowed her gaze to dwell on the house, quite enchanting in the sunshine; a small Elizabethan manor house, a jewel of a place to the casual eye, but to those who lived in it a constant source of anxiety, with its leaky roof, woodworm in the beams, damp seeping up into the passages and old-fashioned kitchen. Nothing, she reflected bitterly, that couldn’t be put right with money. Only there wasn’t any of that; her father, absentminded scholar that he was, had drawn steadily on his capital for years now, and her mother, her dear, charming mother, hadn’t economised; she had tried, with the best will in the world, but she had no idea how to set about it, and if Celine suggested that they should have a casserole instead of roast pheasant or salmon trout, her parent always had a ready answer, even if an illogical one.

      Celine got off the swing and strolled back to the house and opened the door in the kitchen garden wall and went through to see how things were growing. Thomas, the very old gardener, did very little now, but he was still paid his full wages, it would never have entered anyone’s head to have done otherwise, but they badly needed help. Celine did her best, but she was still the veriest amateur. The expensive boarding school she had been to and the finishing school in Switzerland hadn’t taught gardening, and when she came home, it was taken for granted that she would stay there, doing the flowers, playing tennis with numerous friends in the neighbourhood, helping with the annual Garden Party and the Church whist drives, and going occasionally to London with her mother to buy clothes. Expensive clothes too, Jaeger and the better class boutiques, and Raynes or Gucci for shoes. And she hadn’t given it a thought; her father had lived all his life in the old house, and his father and grandfather before him, and heaven knows how many forebears, she had rather taken it for granted that there was money enough, and when occasionally she had mentioned the leaky roof and the peeling paint, her father had looked vaguely surprised for a moment and had remarked that he really must do something about them. But he never had; she realised with a shock of surprise that she had been home for three years; it was only during the last few months that she had begun to notice things. Old Barney was still with them, but then he had been her father’s batman during the war, and Angela, their cook, who had always been there too, but when Joan the maid had left to get married, she had been replaced by Mrs Stokes from the village who obliged twice a week, and several bedrooms had been shut up.

      She bent and pulled a couple of radishes, rubbed the earth off them, and crunched into them. She should have done something about it, of course, and she felt bitterly ashamed. Here she was, twenty-two years old, nicely up in the social graces but a complete stranger to shorthand and typing, nursing, teaching the young, or even serving in a shop, and without any of these skills how was she to get money, because money was what was needed; her home had to be kept from falling to the ground. It was a pity that she had refused the wholesale manufacturer of cotton goods who had wanted to marry her; he was a rich man. Indeed, now she came to think about it, she had refused several comfortably off young men, under the impression—mistaken, she now saw—that one should marry for love.

      She whistled to Dusty, stretched out on the grass path, and turned back to the house. Mr Timms, the family solicitor, was coming to see her father that morning; her mother had mentioned it and looked worried, but when Celine had asked what was the matter, she wasn’t told anything. That was the trouble, she thought unhappily; she had been born unexpectedly when her parents were verging on middle age, and they still thought of her as a child to be shielded from anything unpleasant. Not that they had spoiled her, but she had been brought up in a kind of effortless comfort; money was never mentioned and she hadn’t bothered over-much about it. She loved her home dearly. If she hadn’t