At fifty-five he was still a strikingly attractive man with his head of thick wavy hair which had gone prematurely white in his twenties. He was a man who carried the power he wielded around with him like a banner. Dominic had once described him as a man who totally lacked caution but possessed the luck of the devil to compensate. Reluctant though Madeline was to agree with anything Dominic Stanton said, she had to agree with that particular observation. Her father took risks in business guaranteed to rock the City back on its heels in horror. The fact that he invariably made the right move placed him high on the respect rating with people in the speculative business. Few scoffed at a Gilburn idea. Nobody dared underestimate him. He was just too sharp, too shrewd.
‘And what’s this Charles Waverley like?’ she asked when her father concluded the local news without mentioning Nina’s new fiancé. ‘I can’t imagine our own little Nina getting married and leaving the fold,’ she added drily. ‘She was always such a timid little home bird.’
‘Charles is perfect for Nina,’ her father assured her. ‘He possesses a natural desire to love and cherish, which is all we can ever ask of the man who wins our Nina. Their marriage will be a good one,’ he asserted confidently.
A weight pressing down on her heart kept Madeline silent while she diminished it. It was nothing new to her to feel this terrible burden constricting her chest whenever she thought of love and marriage. It was something she’d had to learn to live with—and control so no one else knew it was there. Love held only bitter memories for her, painful experiences she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. Marriage meant commitment. An honest declaration of love undying. She had once known love, thought the offer of marriage gave her that commitment. But she had been wrong. And she never wanted Nina to know that same pain, that same anguished desolation.
‘And Louise—how is she?’ she asked next.
‘Very well,’ her father said positively. ‘Beautiful and well,’ he added with all the satisfaction of a man who adored his lovely wife to distraction. Louise suited the blustery Edward Gilburn far better than Madeline’s own mother had. With Louise he had a chance to utilise that softer side of his nature which otherwise would never be seen. No one would think of being cruel or tyrannical towards Louise. She was just too soft and vulnerable. ‘And eager to have you back home,’ he finished warmly.
Madeline didn’t doubt it. Louise had been a wonderful surrogate mother to her throughout her formative years. And she had done it without coming between daughter and father or outlawing Dee.
‘She had your rooms completely refurbished as a surprise for you—then sat down and worried herself silly that she should have left them as you remembered them, and had us all frantic in case she decided to change them back again in the hopes that you wouldn’t notice! Nina managed to stop her.’ He sounded heartily relieved. ‘She told her that the new Madeline I’ve been telling them all about would hate to sleep in a candy-pink room with frills and flounces!’
Would she? Madeline laughed dutifully, but felt a heavy sense of loss inside, as if the old Madeline had died, and this new one was just a stand-in. Would other people see her as a stranger now, someone they had to learn to know all over again? She shuddered at the thought. She had just grown up, that was all. Albeit late.
Watching her covertly, Edward Gilburn read more in his daughter’s studiously placid features than she would like. He had worried terribly about her when she first went to Boston four years ago. Dee had been marvellous with her, he had to admit. She’d refused to let their daughter mope, dragging her—literally sometimes—protesting miserably out to face the human race and learn to deal with it again. But he had feared what kind of person was going to emerge from the ashes of this brutal kind of therapy. He had been relieved to find Madeline slowly learning to cope during his regular visits to see her in Boston. But he could not say he was exactly happy with the final result of the four-year influence of her rather superficial mother.
Where had all that sparkling eagerness to meet life full on gone? he wondered in grim exasperation. That wild and wonderful love of life which made her the captivating creature she was at eighteen? Trust Dee to bleed it all out of her, he thought grimly.
And, not for the first time, he cursed Dominic Stanton for making it necessary for his baby to place herself in the hands of her mother.
‘Nina was worried you might not come,’ he put in quietly.
‘Because of Dominic, you mean?’ As usual, Madeline went directly for the point, and Edward smiled to himself. Dee obviously hadn’t managed to curb that natural habit. Then the smile went awry when he remembered how that painfully open honesty of hers had made her broken love affair with Dominic all the harder for her to bear. She had not been able to seek solace in lying to herself, and the truth had been so dreadfully hard to endure. ‘I didn’t know I’d given such a feeble impression of myself.’
‘You didn’t, darling, and you know it.’ Her father’s hand came out to take hers, squeezing it gently.
‘What Dominic did to me was cruel.’ Madeline said flatly. ‘But what I did to him was unforgivable. Neither of us came out of it well. It took me a whole year to acknowledge that,’ she admitted on a small smile. ‘And a bit of brutal talking from Mummy,’ she added drily. ‘She was brutal all around, when I come to think of it.’ She shrugged, slender shoulders moving up and down beneath the immaculate silk jacket. ‘Was that your doing?’ She looked enquiringly at her father. ‘Did you advise her not to let me wallow?’
His face gave him away, and Madeline smiled again. If anyone knew how best to deal with her, then it was this man. ‘Thank you,’ she leaned over to kiss his cheek. ‘Your instincts rarely let you down, do they?’
‘They did where Dominic was concerned,’ he muttered gruffly. He had liked and respected Dominic Stanton. So much so that he’d encouraged his love affair with Madeline from its conception. Everyone concerned had, the Stantons just as eagerly as the Gilburns. It had been a beautiful dream while it lasted. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for my part in encouraging you.’ He voiced his grim thoughts out loud.
‘You really had no say in what I did, you know,’ Madeline drily pointed out. And he grinned because he knew as well as she did that when Madeline wanted something badly enough she went all out to get it. And she had wanted Dominic, so badly that it still hurt just to remember. ‘We were simply wrong for each other,’ she stated flatly. ‘And we should perhaps be thankful that we found out soon enough. Does Charles Waverley run a successful racing stable?’ Once again, she deftly changed the subject.
‘Very. He trained last year’s Derby winner…’
There were going to be some surprised faces around Lambourn in the near future, Edward Gilburn ruefully judged as he watched the sleek mask of sophistication drop smoothly into place on his daughter’s face. And found himself yearning for a time when a black-haired, wicked-eyed gypsy had danced all over his peace of mind. A time when Nina had captivated, and Madeline shocked. While Nina had sat sewing her fine seam, filling his heart with a gentle gladness for being allowed to take the place of her dead father, Madeline would be off on some wild prank or other which would inevitably bring his wrath tumbling down on her unrepentant head—followed by his secret respect. She rode like the devil, played every sport there was going with panache. And later, when she grew into a wild and wilful young woman, she’d run rings around all the poor besotted young men who fell for a pair of wicked blue eyes and a mane of wild black hair.
Dee had despaired of ever taming her then, he recalled. She would send letters home with Madeline after one of her Boston visits, enquiring in her oh, so sarcastic way if Edward was raising their daughter as a delinquent for any specific reason. But even Dee had had to admit that Madeline drew the opposite sex to her like bees to honey, that she was exciting to be with. Madeline possessed a fierce will of her own, but she was also able to laugh at herself, and not many could do that.
Dominic hadn’t laughed, the damned fool! If he had—if only he had laughed that fateful night of the country club ball, then maybe Madeline wouldn’t have run away, and maybe she would not be sitting next to him now, talking with the bland aplomb of the well trained socialite.
He preferred the other girl, the one who would have been bouncing up and down beside him right now, brimming with excitement, plans, driving him demented with the pranks she intended pulling on her friends.
Or maybe she wouldn’t, he then revised thoughtfully. Maybe time alone would have taken the spirited child out of Madeline. Perhaps Dominic Stanton had only accelerated a natural progression—though he didn’t think so. He knew his daughter well, knew what kind of devil drove her, because the self-same one had driven him. It had taken him over forty years to learn to tame his own. He hadn’t expected Madeline to do it any quicker.
No, Dominic had done that, taught her how to think before she acted; hide instead of being her true exciting self!
* * *
They stood like a formal reception party, Madeline noted drily as the car slowed and stopped in front of the grey-stoned country manor house where Louise, Nina and a serious-faced man stood waiting for them at the bottom of the wide stone steps.
Louise looked no different than she had the last time Madeline had seen her four years ago now. Small, and neat-figured, she still had hair that shone that wonderful spun-gold colour, and her smile was still that infinitely gentle one Madeline had first encountered at the age of eight. Nina had altered, though, she noted with a small shock. Her stepsister had grown more beautiful in the four intervening years, her pale gold hair a short cap of enchanting curls around her angelic face. And that had to be Charles Waverley, she decided as she turned her attention to the only stranger in their midst. Tall, weatherbeaten, with the whipcord-lean frame of a working farmer, he stood head and shoulders above both women. There was an expression of solemn reserve about his chocolate-brown eyes.
And it was at him that she smiled first. Why, she wasn’t quite sure, except that she knew somehow that it was what Nina would want her to do, make this man she had fallen in love with know she welcomed him into their small family fold.