Sin Tropez Read Online Free

mobile track to refined poverty. Tara wished desperately to reverse this trend and, like
Natalya, she wanted more than she had.
    The family did at least still own Willowborough Hall, a Regency pile in Gloucestershire with six hundred acres of land. Like generations of Wittstanleys before her, Tara had grown up there.
Unlike most of her ancestors, though, Tara didn’t have a trust fund to see her through adulthood. An artistic and whimsical family, the Wittstanleys had not made the most of their
considerable acres and over the years had squandered substantial wealth through ill-fated investments and unwise marriages. By the time Tara’s father, Hugo, had been born, all that was left
was the family home and the right to the title Lord Bridges, of Bridges in Gloucestershire.
    When the time came for Hugo and his two younger brothers to make their final career choices – a day job outside the running of the estate now being, irritatingly for them, a necessity
– his brothers swallowed their pride and jumped head first into the world of commerce and City banking. Hugo, however, stubbornly decided to pursue his artistic leanings and attempt to make a
living by dealing antiques and doing equestrian paintings for friends. He travelled the world in search of sights and horses to paint, visiting some of the former colonies in Africa and Asia and,
with some help from high-powered friends in the government, even venturing into hostile territories such as the closed USSR. Life had been exciting but not lucrative, and he had failed to make good
money from his art and antiques.
    Tara often found herself musing over how her family had evolved over the years. If only they hadn’t been such suckers for aesthetics. Maybe then her father would have made a more sensible
career choice. Perhaps there would have been some sensible marriages. A strategic coupling with a rich heiress would have restored the wealth her grandfather had gambled away. Instead, both her
grandfather and her father had married ambitious young beauties with no wealth or name to speak of.
    Her own dear mother, Tina, was in fact often a source of embarrassment to Tara. Twenty years younger than Hugo, Tina had met and seduced him on a flight to India on which she’d been
working as an air-hostess.
    In those days hostesses were employed above all for their alluring looks. For Tina, who was eighteen at the time and had never left Liverpool, the job was a dream come true. She enjoyed the
travelling and loved meeting the smartly dressed, upscale passengers even more. She was awed by the women in their elegant twin-sets, with their well-behaved children who didn’t trouble her.
And the men were all so dapper, never without blazers. She liked to study the passenger list before they arrived and was excited to see that there was a lord on her first ever flight to India.
‘Can I offer you a drink, my Lord?’ she asked him when he embarked looking bored, tired and unremarkable. She wondered whether she ought to curtsey. She poured him a Martini at his seat
and then turned to offer a drink to the gentleman on the other side of the aisle. She leaned over so that her round little bottom pushed against the taut material of her navy-blue pencil skirt.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw his lordship lean forward as if to get up.
    ‘Oh, toilets at the rear,’ giggled Tina.
    ‘The only rear I’m interested in is this one,’ his lordship murmured, letting his signet-ringed hand slide across her buttock as he glided ever so slowly past her.
‘Splendid little filly aren’t you,’ he whispered in her ear. His breath was hot on the side of her face, the faint aroma of alcohol filling her nose with its intoxicating promise
of champagne, ponies and high tea with the Queen. Men were expected to be chauvinists and molesters in those days, but women were certainly not allowed to show it when they enjoyed it.
    ‘Oh, my Lord!’ she tittered, feigning shocked