Dark Obsession Read Online Free Page B

to change the subject. ‘He’s the Honourable Crispian Corbett-Wynne, heir to Leyton Hall. Tania, his stepsister, is Lady Corbett-Wynne’s daughter by her first marriage. That husband died or got himself killed jumping a hedge, something like that.’
    ‘If you stayed there you must have been a friend of theirs, so why aren’t you doing the Hall for them?’ asked Annabel.
    ‘I’m tired,’ said David shortly. ‘I’ll leave you two to finish your drinks and lock up. Sleep well, Annabel.’
    After he’d gone she turned to Martin in surprise. ‘What’s all that about?’
    Martin laughed. ‘David’s embarrassed. He used to know James – that’s Lord Corbett-Wynne – quite well, which is why we were invited there soon after he remarried for the third time. Unfortunately it was a disaster.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because no one had told Tania about David and me. She thought we were just business partners and made a very blatant and somewhat drunken pass at him. Before he could explain, her stepbrother was trying to make something out of it, threatening to take David outside and thrash him with a riding crop, all very melodramatic!’
    Annabel laughed too. ‘I can’t imagine David being threatened with a thrashing!’
    ‘We left the next morning. David said we’d been called back to London unexpectedly, and everyone accepted that. Probably Tania had been told the truth by that time and they were all glad to see us go.’
    ‘But it didn’t stop Lady Corbett-Wynne asking David to do the Hall for her.’
    ‘She might not have known what went on. Even then, which was early on in the marriage, she seemed to be quite separate from the rest of them. She was always retreating to her own rooms. I liked her but thought she’d made a disastrous marriage. They were the most mismatched pair I’ve ever come across.’
    Annabel wrapped her arms round her knees. ‘It’s beginning to sound more interesting now. I wish David had told me earlier.’
    ‘He really does want you to start taking on some work of your own,’ explained Martin. ‘I suppose he thought that if he told you about our social disaster you’d think you hadn’t been given the job on merit.’
    ‘Maybe. Anyway, now that I know more about them all it makes it more real. I think I’m beginning to look forward to it, although that might be the champagne and brandy!’
    ‘It will certainly be an experience for you,’ said Martin. He looked thoughtful.
    Annabel nodded happily, blithely unaware of exactly what kind of an experience it would turn out to be.

Chapter Two
    IT TOOK ANNABEL over an hour and a half to drive from London to Wiltshire, and then a further half-hour to find Leyton Hall. David’s sense of direction was never good, and as far as Leyton Hall was concerned he seemed to have tried to put its location entirely out of his mind. As a result she was more than three-quarters of an hour late arriving.
    She was agreeably surprised by the Hall itself. Having expected a dilapidated and conventional country house she was taken aback to discover that it was a large, well-maintained home built at the end of the eighteenth century in the Palladian style of architecture. The south-facing front of the house had beautiful flanking pavilions and, although it was clear that there had been renovations from time to time, the occupants had maintained the harled walls with stone dressings round the windows and doors.
    On the ground floor there were two three-light Venetian windows with traditional low-pitched triangular gables above them. The normal mouldings were well represented by bands of stone set flush with the wallface. The West Wing had corbelled turrets at the corners of the roof while wisteria and honeysuckle grew up the walls.
    All this, together with the profusion of rhododendrons, azaleas and orange-stemmed birch trees that she had driven past along the approach to the Hall, cheered Annabel up. If the exterior had been so lovingly and tastefully