Sommersgate House (Ghosts and Reincarnation #2)(11)

But, despite all this, Patricia had made a happy home, full of laughter, good times and support (with a great deal of meddling). She tried to fill the void (although sometimes failed) of an absent, careless father.

And as the years went by, Patricia and Julia’s relationship had changed from mother and daughter to confidants and friends.

Julia needed that. After she’d left Sean, her heart in tatters and her self-esteem so low she had to dig a ditch to drag it around after her, with the added burden of living a life as the unwanted daughter, Julia had decided she did not ever want another man. The men in her life had torn her heart out and kicked it around. Her father by not wanting her. In Sean’s case, four years she suffered his bad moods, cruel words, relentless attacks on her confidence, flirtations and infidelities. She figured she might find someone else eventually (although she didn’t really look). But Julia had rules. Whoever that someone would be, he wasn’t going to be handsome, wealthy or accomplished. He just had to be there. There to listen to her when she had a bad day. There to help her unpack the groceries. There to drive the car every once in awhile.

She was tired of always having to be the one to drive the car. She just wanted to get in and let someone else drive.

But now, any thought of that was far away. Now she had the children and this inconceivable situation and would likely be driving the car forever.

On that thought, she felt it and her head come up as her hand dropped.

What it was, she didn’t know. A draught against her ankles, but not just any draught, this was intensely cold and felt, somehow, menacing. She had kept the door to her room open just in case one of the children called, maybe it came from there.

She felt it again. It wasn’t a chill throughout the room, just a draught at her ankles. It was mid-October, and cold, but even the chill outside was not of the fierce arctic of the draught at her ankles.

She looked around the room and saw nothing. She’d turned on most of the lights but had not drawn the drapes. She stared out into the dark night wondering if Douglas had come home and opened the front door letting in the cold. Surely she’d have seen the lights of his car as the length of her suite ran along the front drive.

She got up to look out the windows and then she saw them, two headlights coming down the hill and around the bend where the Chapel was ensconced. Douglas was just arriving home, Julia watched him park by the fountain.

Then she heard it.

A scream.

A frightening, terrible, blood-curdling, high-pitched woman’s scream.

“Dear God, the children…” Julia whispered and she ran out into the hallway as fast as she could in the direction of the scream.

Chapter Three

The Problem

Douglas Ashton drove his Jaguar through the winding country roads outside Bristol Airport.

Normally Carter would have collected him from the airport. However that morning when he left, Carter had to get to Heathrow to pick up Julia.

Douglas thought, at the time, this was likely the first in a long line of inconveniences he’d have to put up with concerning Julia.

Now he was glad for the chance to be alone, behind the wheel of the car, on the dark, deserted roads.

He thought ahead to the call he’d be getting from Japan in a few hours time, to his trip to Munich tomorrow, the meeting there in the afternoon and then on to the business he needed to see to in St. Petersburg. When he was certain that all plans were in place and nothing had been left to chance, he let his mind turn to Sommersgate and what awaited him there.

Julia Fairfax.

She’d changed her name back after she’d divorced her ass of a husband.

Douglas’s mother had loved Sean Webster. “How she would even dream of finding someone better than him is beyond me. She doesn’t know how lucky she was to trap him in the first place,” Monique had declared when she’d heard the divorce was made final.

Douglas had wondered distractedly why Julia had settled for the bastard in the first place. He was from money, as Monique mentioned more than once, but Julia very obviously outclassed him from the first.

What Monique didn’t know about Sean, and probably, Douglas thought, wouldn’t have cared about, was that Sean made a pass at anything in a skirt, including Tamsin.

Tamsin never told Gavin, but she told Douglas.

His sister had always been a smart girl. Gavin, being Gavin, mellow and good-natured most of the time, but fiercely loyal and, in Tamsin and Julia’s case, protective, would have immediately lost his mind and done something immensely stupid.

Douglas wasn’t so impetuous.

Julia may have been blinded by love (or, more likely, from Douglas’s vast experience of women, money) to fall for Sean Webster, but Douglas was counting on the fact that she was smart enough or, at the very least proud enough, not to keep him around.

She didn’t.

Everyone was surprised at Sean’s accident three months after the divorce was final.

Douglas was not.

He felt no remorse. He had ordered that Webster would not sustain a lasting injury. But there was only one human being that Douglas Ashton had ever loved in his thirty-eight years and that was his sister. He could not allow anyone to make her even the slightest bit uncomfortable.

Sean Webster had made that mistake therefore Douglas had made him uncomfortable.

Smoothly negotiating a deserted roundabout, Douglas allowed his thoughts, as they had for obvious reasons of late, to move to his sister.