Craving the Forbidden (Mills & Boon Modern) (The Fitzroy Legacy - Book 1) by India Grey Read Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t that bad.’
    ‘What then?’
    Jasper was her best friend. Over the years she’d told him lots of funny stories about her childhood, and when you’d grown up living in a converted bus painted with flowers and peace slogans, with a mother who had inch-long purple hair, had changed her name to Rainbow and given up wearing a bra, there were lots of those.
    There were also lots of bits that weren’t funny at all, but she kept those to herself. The years when she’d been taken in by Aunt Janet and had been sent to an exclusive girls’ boarding school in the hope of ‘civilising’ her. Years when she’d been at the mercy of Olympia Rothwell-Hyde and her friends …
    She shook her head and smiled. ‘Just tired. Honest.’
    ‘Come on, then.’ He set off again along the corridor, rubbing his arms vigorously. ‘God, if you stand still for a second in this place you run the risk of turning into a pillar of ice. I hope you brought your thermal underwear.’
    ‘Please, can you not mention underwear,’ Sophie said with a bleak laugh. ‘The contents of my knicker drawer have played far too much of a starring role in this weekend already and I’ve only been here a couple of hours.’ Her heart lurched as she remembered again the phone conversation Kit had overheard on the train. ‘I’m afraid I got off on completely the wrong foot with your brother.’
    ‘Half-brother,’ Jasper corrected, bitterly. ‘And don’t worry about Kit. He doesn’t approve of anyone. He just sits in judgment on the rest of us.’
    ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’ said Sophie. ‘It’s Kit’s opinion you’re worried about, not your parents’.’
    ‘Are you kidding?’ Jasper said ironically. ‘You’ve met my father. He’s from the generation and background that call gay men “nancy boys” and assume they all wear pink scarves and carry handbags.’
    ‘And what’s Kit’s excuse?’
    Pausing in front of a closed door, Jasper bowed his head. Without the hair gel and eyeliner he always wore in London his fine-boned face looked younger and oddly vulnerable.
    ‘Kit’s never liked me. I’ve always known that, growing up. He never said anything unkind or did anything horrible to me, but he didn’t have to. I always felt this … coldness from him, which was almost worse.’
    Sophie could identify with that.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he went on, ‘now I’m older I can understand that it must have been difficult for him, growing up without his mother when I still had mine.’ He cast her a rueful look. ‘As you’ll have noticed, my mother isn’t exactly cosy—I don’t think she particularly went out of her way to make sure he was OK, but because I was her only child I did get rather spoiled, I guess …’
    Sophie widened her eyes. ‘You? Surely not!’
    Jasper grinned. ‘This is the part of the castle that’s supposed to be haunted by the mad countess’s ghost, you know, so you’d better watch it, or I’ll run away and leave you here …’
    ‘Don’t you dare!’
    Laughing, he opened the door. ‘This is my room. Damn, the fire’s gone out. Come in and shut the door to keep any lingering traces of warmth in.’
    Sophie did as she was told. The room was huge, and filled with the kind of dark, heavy furniture that looked as if it had come from a giant’s house. A sleigh bed roughly the size of the bus that had formed Sophie’s childhood home stood in the centre of the room, piled high with several duvets. Jasper’s personal stamp was evident in the tatty posters on the walls, a polystyrene reproduction of Michelangelo’s David , which was rakishly draped in an old school tie, a silk dressing gown and a battered trilby. As he poked at the ashes in the grate Sophie picked her way through the clothes on the floor and went over to the window.
    ‘So what happened to Kit’s mother?’
    Jasper piled coal into the grate. ‘She left. When he was about six, I think. It’s a bit of a taboo subject around here,