Free Lord and Master by Kait Jagger Page B

Guerlain.
    â€˜Cousin Stefan,’ she squealed, leaping toward him and throwing her arms around his neck. Luna was briefly gratified to see Stefan stagger back slightly before returning the embrace. ‘Mummy tells me you’ve been here for
weeks
and you haven’t bothered to call me.’ Isabelle’s slightly feline features arranged themselves into a pout.
    Isabelle bore a passing resemblance to her elder sister, in the way a thoroughbred horse looked like a Dartmoor pony. She was a very beautiful girl. To Luna, she took after her father more than Helen, with his large hazel eyes and appearance of a permanent tan. Isabelle’s natural hair colour was light brown, like her sister’s, but hers was tinted and sliced to a warm honey that she wore loose, in artfully artless waves that fell to her shoulders.
    Her clothes, too, were all designer. Luna had often thought that Patrice and Kayla would have a field day in Isabelle’s closet. The only thing that let her down was her taste for bling. She was wearing a large gold necklace with matching earrings and cuff that served to detract from her beauty and were at odds with her exquisitely cut Roland Mouret dress.
    â€˜It’s only been two weeks, cousin,’ Stefan was saying. ‘I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other from now on.’
    â€˜But you can’t stay for lunch?’ Isabelle asked piteously, widening her eyes like Regina the spaniel.
    â€˜I’m afraid not,’ he smiled apologetically. ‘Luna and I have another appointment in Shoreditch after this.’ Luna glanced at him sharply; it wasn’t strictly true that they had to rush off to Jem and Rod’s office, and far be it from her to stand in the way of the Marchioness’s carefully laid plans for Stefan and Isabelle. But before Luna could correct him, Isabelle clapped her hands together and cried, ‘Wait! I’m coming out to the house for the weekend with a few friends to do a bit of shooting, a bit of drinking. You must join us! You’re staying at the Dower House, aren’t you? You must come up to the house tonight and have a few drinks with us.’
    â€˜That sounds—’ Stefan began.
    â€˜I won’t take no for an answer,’ Isabelle interrupted. ‘I’ll see you tonight at eight. Don’t make me come down to the Dower House to fetch you.’
    Meanwhile, Luna stood in silence, ignored by Isabelle as she knew she would be. That they had known each other for years, had once even nominally been friends, counted for nothing now. In Isabelle’s eyes, Luna was her mother’s secretary and nothing more. Oh, occasionally, when the two of them were alone in Luna’s office while Isabelle was waiting for her mother, and if Isabelle was feeling chatty, she might mention their long-distant schooldays. ‘Remember Hester? Prim old Hester? I saw her in Mayfair last week. Pregnant with her third child, if you can believe it…’ To be honest, Luna preferred being blanked. She knew where she stood when Isabelle ignored her.
    She wondered if Isabelle remembered the time she, Luna and Stefan had briefly crossed paths twelve years earlier. Luna rather imagined that she did, but she had few qualms that Isabelle would reveal as much to Stefan. Isabelle had almost as much vested in keeping the past in the past as Luna did…

    *
    A strange thing happened after Luna’s father died just before her thirteenth birthday. Whereas her mother’s death the previous year had turned her into a bit of an outcast at the private girls school she attended in Chieveley – what teenage girl, after all, knows how to deal with the recently bereaved? – the subsequent demise of her father in even more tragic circumstances transformed her into something of a cult figure. An emotional grotesque, as it were, who attracted the attentions of morbid goths and earnest do-gooders in equal measure. Isabelle