Claiming His Shock Heir

CHAPTER ONE

WITH a thankful sigh Philippa sank back on her heels, surveying the stacked boxes and paper sacks, quickly stifling an unanticipated stab of pain as she looked at what was after all the accumulation of sixty odd years of living. How little she had really known about her aunt, and all that was left of her now was the faded photograph album Philippa had decided to keep. She hadn’t wanted to come back to Garston, but she had been Jane Cromwell’s only living relative.

Getting to her feet and dusting down her jeans she bent to pick up one of Simon’s motorbike magazines. Her ten-year-old son was motorbike mad at the moment. Even from being quite small he had shown a decidedly mechanical turn of mind. At the moment it was fixed with equal concentration on motorbikes and computers.

Thinking of Simon made her glance at her watch and frown. It was gone five and she had told him to be back at four. She planned for them to have an early meal and then leave to go back to London. Where on earth was he? They had only been in Garston for a week but it was long enough for Simon, with his outgoing extrovert nature, to make friends. Several of them had called for him this morning. Unlike herself Simon made friends easily. There must still be people living in the village who remembered her, but apart from the vicar no one had come to call.

Of course her aunt had always kept herself very much to herself. Living as she did in what was virtually a ‘grace and favour’ house on the Garston estate, her isolation from the rest of the village had tended to set her apart from the villagers, just as it had set Philippa apart during those years when she lived with her aunt. It couldn’t have been easy for her, Philippa now recognised, to accept the responsibility of a fourteen-year-old girl, still shocked by the sudden death of her parents, and inclined to be rebellious and withdrawn because of it. Her father, Jane Cromwell’s cousin, had been a diplomat, and he and her mother had been killed during a terrorist raid whilst Philippa was at school in England.

Their death had brought many changes to Philippa’s life, not the least of which was the discovery that there was no longer enough money for her to continue at the exclusive girls’ school her parents had sent her to. Her father’s salary had been generous but it had died with him, leaving only the proceeds of two small insurance policies. Her aunt had been a teacher and during the last ten years of her career had had only one pupil—Edward Garston, because of which she had been gifted a lifetime’s occupation of the small cottage which became home to Philippa, and which stood just within the boundary of the Garston family’s estate. Once they had owned vast acres of Yorkshire, including the village named after the family, but gradually over the years their land had been eroded away with their wealth until all that was left was the house itself, the parkland it stood in and the home farm. And then further tragedy had struck. Edward Garston had been killed in a car accident and his inheritance passed to a cousin, Scott.

Philippa could remember the day Scott and his mother arrived at Garston quite vividly. Scott’s father had been the second son, the black sheep of the family and there was gossip in the village that his grandfather had sworn he would rather see the house and the estate pass to a stranger than go to his son’s child. Scott had been twenty to her fourteen when he first came to live at Garston. Away at Oxford most of the time, Philippa could remember catching brief glimpses of him during the holidays, when invariably he arrived riding a large and noisy motorbike, his arrival always increasing his grandfather’s already irrascible temper. Jeffrey Garston was a proud, and Philippa had sometimes thought, very lonely old man, very bitter in his resentment of Edward’s death at eighteen and of the cousin who had taken his place. Edward had been reputed to be brilliant and it was no secret in the area that Jeffrey Gaston had looked to his grandson to somehow recoup the family losses and restore Garston Hall to what it had once been. The Garston family fortune had been founded on coal and railways during the Victorian era, but now they were reduced to living on a rapidly dwindling income.

After what she had heard about the family Philippa had been rather surprised that Jeffrey Garston allowed his daughter-in-law and grandson to come and live with him, but he had done so and moreover seemed to be training Scott to take over what was left of the estate, because Philippa often saw him in the holidays working at the farm, or supervising the shoots which still took place in the autumn, when large parties of businessmen would descend on the Hall, and the narrow road that led past the cottage to it would be busy with large, expensive cars.

Where was Scott now? Philippa had only had one letter from her aunt after she left and that had simply told her that Jeffrey Garston had died and that Scott had shut up the house and left the area. That alone had surprised her. Scott had been almost obsessed by his plans to make the estate a viable commercial enterprise once more, and to restore his home to what it had once been. She had replied to her aunt’s letter, telling her about Simon’s birth, but there had been no further correspondence between them. A niece who bore an illegitimate child had been so far outside Jane Cromwell’s own rigid moral code that there was no question that there would ever be forgiveness or acceptance, and certainly never a welcome in her home for either Philippa or Simon. How dramatic and terrifying it had all seemed eleven years ago!

Philippa suppressed a faint sigh. Who would have dreamed then that now women would choose to bear their children alone without the support of the child’s father? Simon’s lack of a father didn’t even cause so much as a faintly raised eyebrow these days. Her own single-parent status was so commonplace that more than half of Simon’s friends at his London school also lived with only one of their parents. Eleven years ago when she discovered she was pregnant she had been terror-struck.

She grimaced as she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror hanging on the wall. How very young and naive she had been. Seventeen and as green as grass. Well, she had learned, and now at twenty-eight, she knew without false modesty that she was an intelligent and even shrewd woman, who had learned about life the hard way.

What she failed to recognise in her own reflection was the vulnerability of her softly curved mouth; the shadows that darkened her grey eyes, the hint of pain that still lingered beneath the cool outer shell of reserve in which she cloaked her true feelings.

Her hair had been short when she left Garston. Her aunt had insisted that it was tidier that way. Now she wore it up in a nest chignon in keeping with her image as the efficient secretary to Sir Nigel Barnes, the Chairman of Merrit Plastics, but once released from its imprisonment it curled halfway down her back in honey-gold waves, si

lky soft and so directly in contrast to Simon’s straight coal-black hair that people often did a double take when they were introduced as mother and son. Like his hair, Simon had inherited his height and breadth of shoulder from his father. At ten he looked closer to thirteen and was maturing quickly, too quickly, Philippa acknowledged, subduing the faint feeling of dismay she always felt when she contrasted Simon’s upbringing with her own. Children were not allowed to remain naive for very long at the large London school Simon attended; sometimes she felt he was growing up too fast.