A Summer of Secrets Read online

  A SUMMER OF SECRETS

  BY

  LORNA PEEL

  Copyright © 2018 Lorna Peel

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in 2016 as New Blood

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written consent from the publisher and author, except in the instance of quotes for reviews. No part of this book may be uploaded without the permission of the publisher and author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is originally published.

  This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, actual events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters and names are products of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  The publisher and author acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks, service marks and word marks mentioned in this book.

  Cover photo credit: brianfagan on Flickr.com and is a derivative used under CC BY 4.0

  Cover by Rebecca K. Sterling, Sterling Design Studio

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  Sophia Nelson returns to her hometown in Yorkshire, England to begin a new job as tour guide at Heaton Abbey House. There, she meets the reclusive Thomas, Baron Heaton, a lonely workaholic.

  Despite having a rule never to become involved with her boss, Sophia can’t deny how she finds him incredibly attractive.

  When she overhears the secret surrounding his parentage, she is torn. But is it her attraction to him or the fear of opening a Pandora’s box that makes her keep quiet about it?

  How long can Sophia stay at Heaton Abbey knowing what she does?

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Other Books by Lorna Peel

  About The Author

  Chapter One

  Sophia knew Cathy wouldn’t like it, but instead of driving her six-year-old goddaughter to her best friend Molly’s house for a sleep-over, Sophia insisted that the two-mile walk through the frost would do them both good. It would also go some way to easing the Easter egg mountain in Cathy’s stomach, and the new job butterflies in her own.

  Walking back to town, Sophia decided to take a shortcut through the parkland of the Heaton Abbey Estate, hoping for the umpteenth time that she had done the right thing in accepting the position of tour guide there. She needed the job and she needed somewhere to live, and how many jobs came with accommodation these days? It wasn’t as if she would be cutting herself off completely from family and friends by working and living at the abbey, she reasoned with herself. She’d only be five minutes away from them by car.

  Parts of the park’s ornamental lake had frozen over, thanks to the coldest Easter in years, and Sophia stopped to watch some birds sliding about on the ice in complete bewilderment before flying away. Picking up a stone, she flung it out, watching and listening as it slid across the thawing ice, which groaned and creaked. About to return to the path, she stopped, hearing a thud from the direction of the boathouse.

  “Who’s there?” she called but, not surprisingly, no-one answered.

  Edging towards the wooden building, she peered in the window. Apart from one boat with outboard motor, it was empty. Sophia shrugged. She could have sworn she had heard something. She continued on around the building and walked straight into a man crouching down with a baseball cap covering his face and clearly hiding from her.

  “Oh, God,” she gasped, having to grab his shoulders so she wouldn’t fall over.

  “You’re trespassing,” he snapped without looking up.

  “I know,” she replied, letting him go. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, go away, then.”

  Sophia didn’t need to be told twice and hurried back to the path. She still had to buy a present for Cathy’s parents, Michelle and Tony, as a thank you for allowing her to stay with them, so she had better get on with it.

  “You’re more than welcome back, you know?” Michelle gave her a hug and a kiss as Sophia prepared to leave the following afternoon. “If it’s too bizarre. I’ve seen those programmes on television about country estates. I couldn’t put up with all the bowing and scraping.”

  “This job is perfect for me – I love tour guiding – and I get my own flat, too. I couldn’t have lived here forever.”

  “I know, but I’ve got used to you being here.”

  “Why, was I a problem in the beginning?” Sophia teased.

  Michelle just laughed. “At least you’re not going back to London.”

  “Everything depends on Mum.”

  “I know. Ring me?”

  “I will,” Sophia assured her, throwing her handbag onto the Mini’s passenger seat, and getting into the driver’s seat. “Give Cathy a kiss from me.”

  Michelle nodded and waved her off, shouting, “Remember – if it’s too bizarre – come back.”

  Leaving her boxes in the car in what had once been the abbey’s cloister garth – the grassy area around which the cloister arcades ran – she got out and took a long look around her. The grass had long been cobbled over and they were now covered with gravel. The cloisters had become stables and were now offices, while the lofts overhead had recently been converted into living accommodation. The estate manager occupied one flat, she was to occupy the second, and the third was still vacant.

  Taking the computer printout of her tour and the map – kindly drawn by Lady Heaton – out of her handbag, she set off across the now redundantly-named stable yard towards Heaton Abbey House. The heart of the sprawling house had once been the monastic church, and opening a side door, she went inside.

  This wasn’t good, she thought ten minutes later, turning down yet another similar-looking corridor in the bowels of the house. Where on earth was she? Lady Heaton hadn’t brought her down here the other day, had she? Weren’t the signs to keep the public out of certain rooms supposed to have gone up by now?

  A door to her right was ajar and she pushed it open. It was the library but the room was incredibly dark and gloomy with only one narrow window directly across from her. Anyone else would have retreated but she had always been intrigued by the contents of other people’s bookcases and she wasn’t going to resist delving into these, even if she could do with a torch. A whole room full of books – absolute paradise. The first shelf was rather disappointing containing large books on antiques, art history textbooks, a glossy coffee table-type volume on the various uses of herbs, and some new paperbacks on accounting, business management, and computers.

  Further along, the shelves housed nineteenth-century novels by authors like the Brontë sisters, Mrs Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Jane Austen. Other shelves held classical prose and poetry but there were very few twentieth or twenty-first-century novels unless they weren’t in keeping and were shelved elsewhere. Selecting a leather bound and rather dusty volume of Hardy’s The Woodlanders, she opened the cover. Oh, that dusty, old booky smell. On the flyleaf, in spidery handwriting, she could just about make out an inscription…

  “And you are…?”

  Sophia almost jumped out of her skin and peered into a dark corner. It was Lord Thomas Heaton himself. Dark-haired and in his late thirties, he was stretched out casually in a l
eather wing-backed armchair, and she watched as he savoured a mouthful of what looked like whisky. One of his hands was resting lightly on the arm of the chair while the other held the glass of golden liquid as he waited for her to reply.

  “Sophia Nelson. I’m the new tour guide.”

  His eyebrows rose in an ‘Oh, I see’ expression. “I must correct you in that you are the tour guide. We have not had a tour guide here before unless you can count the few times Lady Heaton has shown guests around the house, that is.”

  “Lady Heaton is to bring me on another tour this afternoon,” Sophia explained.

  “During which she will no doubt tell you that this wing of the house is not part of the tour you will give.”

  Sophia closed the book and raised her eyes to his face again. He stared back impassively at her and she realised she was staring rudely at him.

  “I’m sorry.” She flushed, glad now for the gloom in the room. “I was trying to familiarise myself with the house and I seem to have got lost.”

  “You start tomorrow, don’t you? As tour guide?”

  What the hell must he think of her? The tour guide getting lost. “Yes. I know the, er…history, I just need to…er…place it in context.”

  “Context?” One eyebrow rose.

  Oh, God, that had sounded better in her head. “Yes. I’m sorry that I disturbed you, my Lord.”

  Cringing, she replaced the book on the shelf and left the room. Michelle, not to mention her father, an ardent supporter of the Socialist Labour Party – ‘Not that New Labour crap’ – would have had a fit if they had heard her all but bowing and scraping. Mr Nelson was more than a little irritated at where she had found a job. Heaton Abbey House, a Cistercian monastery until King Henry VIII broke with Rome and found himself a bit strapped for cash, was situated just outside the Yorkshire town where she had been born and brought up.

  A Sir William Heaton had bought the abbey and its lands following the dissolution of the monasteries, modestly renamed the abbey after himself and remodelled the monastic buildings to suit his own domestic requirements.

  A descendant was created a Baron in the early 18th century and more rebuilding took place, reflecting the family’s elevation to the peerage. A further descendent made a fortune from coal mining, resulting in yet more rebuilding and restyling. A more recent descendent made a catastrophic business deal and had been forced to sell the mine and some land but, thankfully, the house with its mishmash of styles and five hundred acres of land remained unsold.

  These were not the type of people her father wanted her associating with at all. The town’s mining museum was more to his liking but that was before a malicious fire had burned it to the ground the previous January.

  Sophia stood in the corridor for a moment before glancing at the library door. Lord Heaton. His voice – deep and without even a hint of Yorkshire in it… He was the man hiding from her at the boathouse.

  “Ah, Sophia.” Lady Heaton closed one of the doors to the drawing room and greeted her cheerfully in the enormous hallway, once the nave of the monastic church. “Welcome. Shall I show you the flat? It’s finished at last.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Wondering what on earth Lord Heaton was doing creeping around his own estate, Sophia followed his mother out the front door, around the side of the house, and back across the stable yard.

  “Des’ office is over there in the corner,” Lady Heaton told her. “He is the estate manager. My son’s office is there, and you are up here.” Sophia followed Lady Heaton up a narrow metal staircase. The door at the top led straight into a large and airy kitchen-dining room-cum-living room. “The bathroom is through there, and the bedroom through there. The other room, you can either use as a second bedroom or a study, as it is rather on the small side.”

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Yes, they did turn out rather well, didn’t they?” Lady Heaton went to the window and opened it. “The smell of paint will go after a couple of days. If there is anything else you need, do let me know.”

  “I will.”

  “Oh, and if you happen to meet my son, I must warn you that he may be a little grumpy. He didn’t want any of this, you see, a shop and tours of the house. But the house is impossibly big, as you now know and, well, it is either this or we would be in great difficulty.”

  “I see.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you to settle in.”

  “Thank you. Oh, I did notice that the signs aren’t up yet.”

  Lady Heaton nodded. “There’s been a slight delay, they should be here and up tomorrow morning. Your keys,” she added, passing a bunch to her. “The outside door, the flat door, here, and the side door to the house.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doors closed after Lady Heaton and Sophia peered around then up at the high ceiling. Two Velux windows added to the considerable light in the flat. She went to the bedroom and was pleased to see it was a double. The small bedroom-cum-study was empty and the bathroom contained both a bath and a shower. Compared to some of the flats she had lived in over the years, this was absolute luxury.

  After sitting and then lying back on the double bed, and finding that the mattress was good and firm, she went back out to the living area. Making sure the fridge freezer had been plugged in, she attached the keys to her car key ring, then went downstairs to the stable yard.

  Walking to her car to retrieve her belongings, she heard a raised voice coming from Lord Heaton’s office.

  “…No, I don’t, and I will not lend him more money.” It was Lord Heaton’s voice and Sophia pulled an awkward face. “You’ve got a fucking nerve coming here. So take yourself, your wife, and your filthy disgusting habit back to Leeds. And you can tell your brother that he is a useless waste of space and I haven’t a bloody clue what Stephanie sees in him. And if he comes anywhere near her again I will kill him. Do I make myself clear?”

  Hurrying to her car, Sophia beeped open the central locking. She got in and belted up, watching over her shoulder as Lord Heaton threw a man out of his office. Heaton stood in the doorway, a thunderous expression on his face, as the man walked to a car before getting into the passenger side. Heaton then glanced in her direction and she flushed, started the engine, and drove out of the stable yard. It might be a good idea if she moved in later.

  Taking the opportunity to go grocery shopping, she returned to the stable yard an hour and a half later. This time she parked right outside the door to the flat and began hauling her shopping bags up the stairs. Going back downstairs to the car for more, she saw Lord Heaton crossing the yard towards her. He hadn’t got up from his chair in the library but despite this, she had seen he was at least six feet tall, with a muscular frame.

  “Thomas Heaton,” he said, halting beside the car and offering his hand. “But I think you probably already know that by now.”

  His dark brown hair was cut in a short and surprisingly modern style, not that she had expected him to be wearing a powdered wig, and his blue-grey eyes observed her with no hint of embarrassment. Now that was surprising, considering what she had seen and heard earlier, and she quickly banished her father’s comment of, ‘That sort don’t care what we think about them,’ to the back of her mind. Heaton was dressed in an impeccably neat black suit but his black silk tie looked as if it had been tugged at. Her own auburn curls were beginning to escape her ponytail and, dressed in an old pair of jeans and a polo neck jumper, she felt as if she’d just crawled through a hedge backwards in comparison.

  “Sophia Nelson. I’m sorry if I intruded earlier,” she said, shaking his hand. “I thought the signs would have been up by now but Lady Heaton told me that there’s been a slight delay and they won’t be here until tomorrow.”

  “Signs.” He pulled a disgusted expression. “No entry here, private there. Here, let me help you with your shopping.”

  “Oh?” She watched him take four bags and go inside and up the stairs before following with the remaining two. “Thank you.”
>
  “Not bad.” He put the bags on the kitchen worktop and walked across the room to the window. “I thought they might still smell of hay or something.”

  “I prefer hay to paint but I’ll leave the windows open.”

  “Do you ride?” he asked.

  “Only a bicycle,” she replied.

  He shrugged. “Just as well. This hasn’t been a stable block in the true sense of the word for some considerable time now and soon the house will be full of tourists wandering about where they shouldn’t despite all the signs.”

  “I will try to keep the visitors under control but unfortunately, the supermarket didn’t have any stun guns.”

  It was out before she realised and cringed as he turned and stared at her.

  “That’s a pity. I could lend you a tranquilliser gun? We’ve got quite a few – Des uses them with the deer. You could take your pick?”

  She just managed to keep a straight face. “Thank you, but I’d better say no. It might be less messy in the long run, litigation-wise.”

  He gave a short laugh and she blushed like a schoolgirl.

  “That’s true, but the offer is there.”

  “Thank you, I’ll bear it in mind.”

  He nodded and glanced around the room again then grimaced as he caught her looking at his hair. It was completely at odds with the rest of his rather severe appearance.

  “My sister’s to blame.”

  “Oh, she’s a hairdresser?” she asked, then winced. Stupid question.

  “No, but I wish she was, she might have done a better job.”

  “Oh, but it’s…”

  “Awful, I know.” He grimaced. “Well, I hope you have everything you need. If not, the housekeeper should be able to help you.”

  “Thank you. Would you mind if I came to the house later and walked through my tour?”

  “To put it in context?”