Free Innocent on Her Wedding Night by Sara Craven Page B

you?’
    ‘No, he’s off to the Cairngorms, climbing.’ He pulled a face. ‘The ruling passion, once again. I’m here in his place.’
    ‘Didn’t you want to go with him?’ she asked shyly. Simon might not be here, she thought, but neither was the horrible Candida. The Daniel she knew was back, and she wanted to turn a cartwheel in sheer joy.
    ‘God, no.’ He shuddered. ‘I get vertigo if I climb a ladder. Now, are you coming out to tea, or not? It’s all fixed. We have your principal’s blessing.’
    ‘But how? I don’t understand.’
    ‘Friends in high places, sweetheart.’ He swept her out to the long, low sports car waiting on the drive. ‘My father just happens to be on the board of governors. Mrs H can refuse me nothing. Anyway, I want to know how you’re getting on.’
    Over sandwiches, scones with jam and cream, and rich chocolate cake served in the hushed and luxurious environs of a nearby country house hotel, she told him everything, her face glowing. Told him about the challenge of the work, her favourite teachers, the ghastly savoury mince served on Mondays that she hated, the friends she’d already made, and the possibility that next term she might get
    into the junior swimming team.
    ‘And Celia Welton has asked her mother if I can stay with them during the Christmas holidays,’ she ended in triumph, adding breathlessly, ‘Coming here is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’
    ‘Well,’ he said lightly, and smiled at her across the teatime debris. ‘That’s all right, then.’
    Rules and regulations notwithstanding, his visits had become a regular and anticipated feature of her life at Randalls, and Laine had soon found herself being quizzed about him by some of the senior girls, who tended to be much in evidence when he was expected.
    ‘A kind of brother?’ one of them had echoed enviously after her stumbling explanation. ‘Daniel Flynn, no less. My God, I should be so lucky. Sex on legs, and rich with it.’
    Was that when it had started—when her ideas about him had begun to change? Perhaps. All she could remember, as she’d progressed into her teens, was suddenly finding herself awkward and tongue-tied whenever he was around.
    Fantasising about him in ways she was ashamed to recall. Longing desperately to see him, but crippled with shyness when he appeared.
    And eventually, unable to deal with the confused riot of emotion inside her, making excuses not to see him at all—citing too much work, an extra games practice. She had not, of course, been able to totally avoid him at Abbotsbrook, where she’d had less control over the matter.
    But when he’d been there, he’d had little time to spare for her, anyway. When he and Simon had visited they’d invariably been on their way somewhere else, and accompanied by an ever-changing—and interchangeable—series of girls, usually blonde. Laine had privately and contemptuously dismissed them as ‘The Clones’, even while she had secretly bitten her nails down to the quick with the most savage and primitive form of jealousy, and despised herself for it.
    But that had by no means been her only problem. Her mother had become more anxious about money, and more discontented all the time, and her complaints had made Laine feel embarrassed and inadequate.
    ‘You’d think Simon would help out more,’ Angela had said bitterly on that last occasion. ‘I thought that’s why he’d abandoned his plan to join the Forestry Commission and taken that job at the bank.’
    Laine said nothing. She knew how much it had cost Simon to give up his cherished dream and work in the City instead. Small wonder he was devoting so much of his free time to his beloved climbing, she thought. He was now becoming known as a mountaineer, and had already been on a number of expeditions to the Alps and the Dolomites. But Laine knew that his sights were set on more distant horizons than that, and it worried her a little.
    And, on a more personal level,