Free Adored by Tilly Bagshawe Page A

something like full command of his senses.
    “Well, Mr. Lyle, I think it might be better if you and your friends went outside to play, don’t you? I’m sure Mr. McMahon would appreciate it if at least some of his furniture were still intact by the time he got home.”
    “Yes, yes, of course, I’m . . . we’re all terribly sorry, aren’t we?”
    Skinny looked slightly shamefaced, but both girls had given in to the uncontrollable laughter of the irreparably stoned. None of them looked terribly sorry to Minnie.
    “Just go, please,” she said.
    Mercifully, they did.
    Once the group had shuffled back out to the pool, she sank down wearily to her knees and examined the mahogany shards that were all that was left of the leg. Honestly, this really was the last straw. She would tackle Duke about it tonight, once and for all. Having that dreadful girl here was surely bad enough, without allowing her appalling, insolent, platform-shoe-wearing, drug-taking, long-haired hippie friends to treat the estate like a hotel.
    Caroline’s first year at Hancock Park had been a living nightmare for Minnie. It was not her husband’s infidelity that bothered her so much as Caroline’s attempted assumption of the role of lady of the house. Only last week, Minnie had caught her haranguing Conchita in a
most
unladylike manner over some trifling offense or other. (She was sure that Duke must be wrong about Caroline’s aristocratic lineage. Minnie had come across hobos in Connecticut with better language.) Day after day, Caroline filled the house with her brash, braying English friends, who thought nothing of eating Minnie out of house and home, or lounging all around the house in their frightful bell-bottoms, smoking marijuana. And they didn’t restrict their shocking behavior to the public rooms either. Heavens alone knew what went on up in the south-wing bedrooms, between her beautifully laundered linen sheets!
    So far, whenever Minnie had complained to Duke about these riff-raff, he had been noncommittal. He had held back from openly supporting his girlfriend over his wife, but neither would he reprimand Caroline, or do anything to ease the almost unbearable tension caused by her increasingly insensitive and tactless behavior. Minnie suspected, accurately, that he derived a powerful sense of pleasure from watching the friction between the two of them.
    Nevertheless, she thought as she grimly swept up the splinters of wood, she would tackle him again about it this evening. It was her fifty-fifth birthday tomorrow and a celebration dinner had been planned for tonight, a long-standing McMahon tradition. Perhaps, on her birthday, he would be in a slightly more receptive mood.
    Duke returned home earlier than usual and was relieved to find the house free of hangers-on. He had taken to spending increasing amounts of time away from home recently, either at the country club in Bel Air or at mysterious “meetings.” He found Caroline’s parasitic social set every bit as grating as his wife did, and intensely disliked returning to a houseful of strangers—although he was damned if he was going to give Minnie the satisfaction of admitting as much to her. Despite his lack of solidarity with her over Caroline’s friends, his absences nevertheless encouraged Minnie, who hoped he might be beginning a new affair. The sooner he tired of Caroline, the better for all of them.
    Strolling into his study, he poured himself three fingers of bourbon and sank into his leather armchair, eyes closed, savoring this rare moment of peace. It was soon to be shattered, however, by the unwelcome arrival of an apoplectic Pete.
    “I suppose it’s too much to expect that you actually remembered Mother’s birthday?” Pete himself was laden with ostentatiously wrapped packages, a walking tower of bright metallic paper and bows.
    Duke found few things in life more objectionable than his son’s belligerent, whining voice, so full of hatred and yet its owner so utterly