The Wedding Charade Read Online Free PDF Page B

you growing up, losing your mother so young and then your brother like that.’
    Jade had perfected her back-off look over the years and yet, as she used it now, it was with shaky confidence that it would work. ‘I’d rather not talk about it. They died. Life goes on.’
    The waiter arrived to take their order, and when he left Nic shifted his mouth in a musing pose and continued to study her. She began to feel like a specimen under a powerful microscope. Nic always made her feel like that. He saw things that other people didn’t see. His eyes were too all-seeing, too penetrating. It made her feel vulnerable and exposed—something she avoided strenuously at all times and in all places.
    ‘Do you see much of your father?’ Nic asked.
    She toyed with the stem of her champagne flute, her eyes averted from his. ‘Before this latest blow up, yes. He called in occasionally with his latest girlfriend,’ she said tonelessly. ‘The last one is only a year or two older than me. I think they might eventually marry. He wants a son—to replace Jonathan. He’s been talking about it for years.’
    Nic heard the pain behind the coolly delivered statement. ‘You’ve never been close to him, have you? ‘
    She shook her head, still not meeting his eyes. ‘I think I remind him too much of my mother.’
    ‘Do you remember her?’ he asked.
    Her jade-green eyes met his, instantly lighting up as if he had pressed a switch. ‘She was so beautiful,’ she said in a dreamy tone. She picked up her glass and twirled it gently, the bubbles rising in a series of vertical lines, each one delicately exploding on the surface. ‘She was so glamorous and always smelt so divine—like honeysuckle and jasmine after a long hot day in the sun.’
    She put the glass down, and ran her finger around the rim, around and around as she spoke. ‘She was affectionate. She couldn’t walk past Jon or me without encompassing one or both of us in a crushing hug. She used to read to me. I loved that. I could listen to her voice for hours … ‘
    A little silence settled like dust motes in the space between them.
    She gave a little sigh and picked up her glass again, twirling it before she took a tentative sip. She put it back down, her mouth pursing as if the taste of the very expensive champagne had not been to her taste. ‘She loved us. She
really
loved us. I never doubted it. Not for a moment.’
    Nic knew a little of the rumours surrounding Harriet Sommerville’s death. There was some talk of an illicit affair that had gone wrong and Harriet had decided to end it all when the other man involved refused to leave his wife. Other rumours suggested Jade’s father had not been the best husband and father he could have been at the time, but it was hard to know what was true and what had been fiction.
    The press had a way of working it to their advantage: the bigger the scandal, the better the sale of the papers. Nic had experienced it himself, along with his brothers.But there was something about Jade that intrigued him. At regular intervals over the years she appeared at all the right functions, dressed to the nines, playing to the cameras, flirting with the paparazzi, but still he wondered if anyone really knew who the real Jade Sommerville was. Not the slim, beautiful and elegantly dressed and perfectly made-up young woman who sat before him now, twirling her champagne flute without drinking any more than a sip or two, who refused to speak of her dead brother, who spoke of her father with thinly disguised disgust.
    Who was she?
    Who was she
really?
    Was she the woman who had broken up the marriage of her best friend, as the papers had reported?
    Or was she someone else entirely?
    ‘Losing a parent is a big deal,’ Nic said to fill the cavernous silence. ‘I was knocked sideways by my father’s accident. Seeing him like that … ‘ he winced as he recalled it ‘ …one minute so vitally alive, the next in a coma.’ He raked his fingers through his