Modern Romance Collection: March 2018 Books 5 - 8. Robyn Donald

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       CHAPTER ONE

      A FINE DRIZZLE was threatening. Low cloud loured over the country churchyard and the wintry air was damp and chill as Christine stood beside the freshly dug grave. Grief tore at her for the kindly man who had come to her rescue when the one man on earth she’d most craved had been lost to her. But now Vasilis Kyrgiakis was gone, his heart having finally failed as it had long threatened to do. Turning her from wife to widow.

      The word tolled in her mind as she stood, head bowed, a lonely figure. Everyone had been very kind to her for Vasilis had been well regarded, even though she was aware that it had been cause for comment that she had been so much younger than her middle-aged husband. But since the most prominent family in the neighbourhood, the Barcourts, had accepted their Greek-born neighbour and his young wife, so had everyone else.

      For her part, Christine had been fiercely loyal—grateful—to her husband, even at this final office for him, and felt her eyes misting with tears as the vicar spoke the words of the committal and the coffin was lowered slowly into the grave.

      ‘We therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection...’

      The vicar gave his final blessing and then he was guiding her away, with the soft thud of earth falling on wood behind her.

      Eyes blurred, she felt herself stumble suddenly, lifting her head to steady herself. Her gaze darted outwards, to the lychgate across the churchyard, where so lately her husband’s body had rested before its slow procession from the hearse beyond into the church.

      And she froze, with a sense of arctic chill.

      A car had drawn up beside the hearse—black, too, with dark-tinted windows. And standing beside it, his suit as black as the hearse, his figure tall, unmoving, was a man she knew well. A man she had not seen for five long years.

      The last man in the world she wanted to see again.

      * * *

      Anatole stood motionless, watching the scene play out in the churchyard. Emotions churned within him, but his gaze was fixed only on the slight, slender figure, all in black, standing beside the priest in his long white robe at the open grave of his uncle. The uncle he had not seen—had refused to see—since the unbelievable folly of his marriage.

      Anger stabbed at him.

      At himself.

      At the woman who had trapped his vulnerable uncle into marrying her.

      He still did not know how, and it had been his fault that she had done so.

      I did not see what ambition I was engendering.

      It was an ambition that had spawned her own attempt to trap him—when thwarted, she had catastrophically turned on his hapless uncle. The uncle who—a life-long bachelor, СКАЧАТЬ