CHAPTER 2

“You’re kidding, J.J. You didn’t...”

          Veronica frowned as she studied the synopsis pinned to the front of the file her employer had just handed her. John-James Creed IV (the fourth), J.J for his friends, was the kind of eccentric billionaire who, by rights, only ought to have existed in fairytales… as a particularly genial and indulgent godfather, Veronica thought.

          She had been introduced to him at a party to which she had been invited by some acquaintances of Henry, her stepbrother. She had only gone to the party because she had been feeling particularly lost and insignificant, having only recently moved to New York.

          They had got chatting and John-James had begun to tell her about the trials and traumas he had experienced in running the huge wealthy Trust set up by his grandfather.

“The old man had this thing about stately homes… I guess I kinda feel the same. He owned a fair handful of the things himself, so he kinda had a taste for them, if you know what I mean. There was the plantation down in Carolina and then a couple of châteaux in France and a palazzo in Venice. So, it just kinda happened naturally that he should have this idea of using his millions to preserve and protect big houses, and now the Trust has a whole bunch of them all over the world, and more wanting to have the Trust bankroll them every day.”

          Veronica, with her own admittedly second-hand experience of her stepbrother’s problems in running and financing his own large family estate in England, had quite naturally been very interested in what J.J. had had to say.

          Still, it had surprised her a few days later to receive not just a phone call from him but the offer of a job as his personal assistant. Veronica wasn’t seventeen any longer, nor was she the naive and perhaps overprotected girl she had once been.

          J.J. was in his early sixties and, so far, he hasn’t done or said anything to suggest that he had any ulterior motive whatsoever in making contact with her. Nevertheless, she asked him for time to consider his unexpected offer.

          The first thing Veronica had done was to call her stepbrother in England and ask for his advice. An unscheduled and unfortunately brief visit from Henry and his wife Mollie to see J.J. and talk over the situation with Veronica had resulted in her deciding to take the job, a decision which, twelve months down the line, she regularly paused to congratulate herself on making, or at least she had done until now.

          Her work was varied and fascinating, and barely left her with any time to draw breath, never mind for any personal relationships with members of the opposite sex, but that didn’t worry Veronica.

          So far, what she had learned from her experiences with men was that she was a particularly poor judge of the breed. First, there had been her revoltingly humiliating teenage crush on Sasha Neville-Talbott and his rejection of her. Then there had been the appalling danger she had put herself and her family in with her foolish involvement with Wayne.

          She and Wayne might never have been lovers but she had known, from the first, of his involvement in the drug scene and, as foolishly as she had tried to convince herself that Sasha would fall in love with her, she had also tried to convince herself that Wayne was simply a lost soul in need of protecting and saving.

          Veronica had been wrong on both counts. Love was the last emotion Sasha had ever felt for her. As for Wayne... Well, thankfully, he was now safely out of her life. Her new job took every minute of her time and every ounce of her energy.

          Each new property the Trust decided to ‘adopt’ had to be inspected, vetted, and then painstakingly brought up to the same standard as all the other properties the Trust financed and opened to the general public.

          She knew that her employer’s highly individualistic and personalized way of deciding which of the multitude of properties, he was offered as potential new additions to the Trust’s portfolio were worth acquiring caused other organizations to eye him slightly askance.

          For J.J. to accept a house it had to have what he described as the ‘right feel’, but his eccentricities tended to make Veronica feel almost maternally protective of him. Or at least they had, until now.

          To return from a six-week trip to Prague, where she had been supervising the takeover of a particularly beautiful if horrendously run-down eighteenth-century palace they had recently added to their acquisitions, to discover that in her absence, J.J. had made yet another acquisition in the form of Elsinore Hall, a huge neoclassical building set in its own parkland in Derbyshire, had caused her heart to sink into her shoes.

“But Ronnie, this place is a gem! A perfect example of English neoclassicism,” J.J. countered as he studied her stubborn expression. “I promise you, Ronnie, you’ll love it as much as me. I’ve had Gena book you onto the day after tomorrow’s flight for London. I thought you’d be pleased. You were only complaining way back in the spring how much you wanted to spend more time with Henry, his wife, and their son...”

“But J.J., this house…”

“By the way, did I tell you that the guy who inherited it just happens to know your stepbrother and that’s how he’d got to hear about us? It seems that he was telling Henry about the problems he was experiencing, having unexpectedly inherited this place, and Henry suggested that he should get in touch with me...”

          She swallowed hard. This was a nightmare…

“I wasn’t too sure at first. After all, we’ve already got that pretty little Georgian place down near Brighton. But I kinda felt I owed it to Henry, so I flew over and went to have a look.”

          Veronica closed her eyes as she listened to J.J. praising the virtues of Elsinore Hall. How could she confess to him that it wasn’t so much the house itself she objected to as its owner?

          Its owner... There it was on the front page of the report... Elsinore Hall. Owned by Sir Sasha Neville-Talbott. Sir Sasha now... Not that Veronica was impressed by a title. How could she be when her own stepbrother was an earl?

          She had known all about Sasha’s unexpected inheritance, of course. It had been the subject of a good deal of discussion at Christmas when she had gone home. With a huge estate of his own to run, quite naturally, Sasha could no longer run her stepbrother’s.

          No one, least of all Sasha himself, had expected that he would inherit. After all, his cousin had only been in his early forties and had seemed perfectly fit. The last thing anyone imagined was that he would suffer a fatal heart attack.

          Veronica had smiled politely but without interest. The last thing, the last person she wanted to waste time talking about was Sasha. Her memories of the way he had rejected her might’ve been carefully and very deeply buried...

          But every time she returned to her brother’s home, she was painfully reminded of her seventeen-year-old self and her vulnerability. No question about it, she must’ve annoyed and aggravated Sasha with her unwanted adoration, but surely, he could’ve handled the situation and her a little more gently, let her down a bit more caringly instead of...

          Veronica was aware that J.J. was watching her expectantly. How could she, as her instincts urged her to do, totally and flatly refuse to have anything to do with Sasha? She couldn’t. She was a woman now, a woman who prided herself on her professionalism, a woman who along with her outward New York shine and gloss had also developed an inner self-worth and determination.

          She loved her work and she truly believed that what J.J. and the Trust were doing was extremely worthwhile. Secretly, there was nothing she enjoyed more than watching the houses that J.J. rescued from their often-pitiful state of decay being restored to their former glory...

          Perhaps it was idealistic and, yes, even foolishly romantic of her, but there was something about watching the process, of seeing these once-grand homes rising phoenix-like from the ashes of their own neglect, that touched a chord within her.

          She could well understand what motivated her boss, and she suspected that, ironically, it had been that long-ago conservation scheme she had worked on under Sasha’s supervision which had awakened within her the awareness of how very important it was to preserve, care and protect a landscape and its architecture, which had ultimately led to her sharing J.J.’s passion for their task.

          However, Veronica’s responsibility as an employee of the Trust included a duty not just to share J.J.’s enthusiasm but to make sure as well that the Trust’s acquisitions were funded and run in a businesslike manner, and that the Trust’s money was used shrewdly and wisely and not wasted or squandered.

          It was a responsibility that she took very seriously. No project, and certainly no bill, was too small for Veronica to break down and scrutinize very carefully indeed, a fact which caused the Trust’s accountants to comment approvingly on her attention to detail and her excellent bookkeeping.

          It had been pointless for J.J. to protest when they had been renovating the Venetian palazzo that he preferred the red silk to the gold which Veronica had favored.

‘Red is almost twice as expensive,’ she had pointed out sternly, adding as a clincher, ‘And besides, the records we’ve managed to trace all indicate that this room was originally decorated in gold and hung with gold drapes...’

‘Well… gold it is, then,’ J.J. had given in with a sigh.

          But Veronica had been the one who had been forced to give in to him a few weeks later when, on their departure from Venice, J.J. had presented her with a set of the most exquisite and expensive leather luggage crafted as only the Italians could craft leather.

‘J.J., I can’t possibly accept this,’ Veronica had protested with a small gasp.

‘Why not, dear? It’s your birthday, isn’t it?’ he had countered.

          And of course, he had been right, and ultimately, Veronica had given in. During her Christmas vacation, Mollie saw the luggage and enviously complimented her, so Veronica had to tell Henry everything about it.

‘I didn’t want to accept it but J.J. would’ve been hurt if I hadn’t. Henry, do you think I should have refused...? she’d said worriedly.

‘Ronnie, the luggage is beautiful and you did the right thing to accept it,’ Henry had reassured her gently. ‘Stop worrying, little one,’ he had commanded her.

          ‘Little one’! Henry was the only one calling her that, and it made her feel so... so protected and safe. Protected and safe? She was an adult, a woman, for heaven’s sake, and more than capable of protecting herself, of keeping herself safe.

          Irritably she dragged her attention back to the file she was holding.

“You don’t approve…” J.J. said, shaking his head ruefully. “Dear, just wait until you see it. You’ll love it! It’s a perfect example of...”

“We’re already very close to the limit of this year’s budget…” she warned him sternly, “and…”

“So what? We’ll just have to increase this year’s funding,” J.J. told her with typical laid-back geniality.

“But... The Trust...” she protested.

“Dear, I’m the Trust!” he reminded her gently.