A Thorn In Paradise. CATHY WILLIAMS

       CHAPTER ONE

      THE grounds of Deanbridge House were magnificent. They stretched in front of Corinna, well groomed, tended as they were by countless gardeners and, in the bloom of summer, ablaze with flowers, yellow, purple, red, perfectly manicured splashes of colour which were the backdrop to the rows of trees on either side, and beyond which lay yet more grounds, all similarly impeccable, and interspersed with stone benches and fountains.

      After nine months, she still continued to be amazed and delighted by the sheer magnificence of the place. It wasn’t simply the size of the house and estate, but the fact that absolutely nothing about either jarred. Everything contained within those acres of land was pleasing to the eye.

      Benjamin Silver, though, was not so enamoured of the vista and Corinna had long concluded that a lifetime surrounded by such beauty had jaded his palate.

      Right now he was ranting on about his son, from whom he had unexpectedly received a letter, and she half listened to what he was saying, not taking in a great deal because, after all this time working for him, she knew almost as much about his son as she did about herself, and none of it was very pleasant.

      ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’ the old man was grumbling from his wheelchair. ‘Nothing from him in years, not a letter, not so much as a Christmas card, then all of a sudden he’s writing to inform me—inform me, mind!—that he’s thinking of coming across! Who does he think he is? Answer me that!’

      Corinna smiled down at the silver head, and he roared from his wheelchair, ‘And you can wipe that smile off your face!’

      ‘How did you know I was smiling?’ she asked and, if he was capable of turning around to glare at her, she knew that he would have, but age had rusted his limbs, even though he was only seventy.

      ‘Stop trying to change the subject!’

      ‘I wasn’t,’ she protested, pushing along the wheelchair to their favourite spot by one of the fountains. ‘It’s such a beautiful morning, though; why spoil it by being annoyed?’ She reached the bench by the fountain and stopped, sitting down and lifting her face to the sun.

      She was a tall, slender girl with the sort of fair complexion that didn’t tan at all. Usually she wore a wide brimmed straw hat for these mid-morning walks, but today she had forgotten and it was lovely to feel the warmth on her face, even though she might go pink from it. Her waist-length fair hair had been braided into a single plait which hung over the back of the bench.

      ‘And spin me round to face you. I don’t care to be talking to a damned fountain!’

      She obeyed and eyed him with amusement. When she had first come to work for Benjamin Silver, she had been warned by the agency that there was a good chance that she wouldn’t last a week.

      ‘None of our nurses has stayed on,’ she had been informed. ‘They might like the surroundings, Deanbridge House is a spectacular place, but old Ben Silver is a can-tankerous so-and-so. He can be downright rude when it suits him, which is most of the time, and they can’t put up with it.’

      Corinna had very quickly sized up the situation. Benjamin Silver was a lonely old man. His only child, a son, had fallen out with him years ago, and most of his relatives were dead.

      ‘The rest,’ he had told her, ‘might just as well be.’

      It had only been her sympathy for him, and her sense of humour, which had allowed her to survive his blasts of temper, and now they had become accustomed to each other. She loved him and she knew that he was fond of her, for all his occasional rages.

      ‘I won’t see him!’ he was telling her, his blue eyes fierce. ‘I won’t let him so much as set one foot through that door. I’ll set the dogs on him.’

      ‘I’m sure he’ll be scared stiff,’ she said from her reclining position on the bench. ‘Being confronted by two toothless, watery-eyed Labradors will really make him quake with fear.’

      ‘I should have got rid of those good-for-nothing hounds years ago,’ he muttered. ‘I was a sentimental old fool, and now that I need a couple of vicious animals, I’m paying for that bit of short-sightedness. Well, I’ll set Edna on him.’

      ‘That’s more like it,’ Corinna said, her full lips curving into a smile. Edna was the chief housekeeper and could be a dragon when it suited her. She was far more ferocious than the dogs.

      He