Into Temptation (Spoils of Time 03) by Penny Vincenzi Read Free Book Online Page A

her. She supposed it was partly because of their similar circumstances . . . lone parents, in the face of dreadful grief. Only Barty had adored Jenna from the beginning; she had not set her apart, to spend her earliest years in an atmosphere of isolation and dislike . . .
    Thank goodness, just thank goodness, Izzie thought, as she started up her small Austin Seven, she didn’t work at Lyttons. Just thinking about the torn loyalties made her shudder. She almost had; there had been a lot of pressure on her, after Oxford, to join the firm. Celia had been very keen and so had her father. But she had resisted, wanting (like Barty she supposed) to make her own way.
    She worked for Michael Joseph where she was the publicity manager and showed considerable flair; she was rather a pet of the great Michael Joseph (known in the firm as MJ), and spent quite a lot of time in his office, at the back of the house in Bloomsbury Street being briefed on various projects. ‘We want elegant copy,’ he would say, and elegant copy Izzie produced, for book jackets and catalogues, and for advertisements which she secretly thought should be much more lively, but which said things like ‘The New Monica Dickens’ or ‘C.S. Forester. His new book.’ What Izzie secretly yearned to write was the kind of advertising copy so popular in the United States, hard-hitting plays on words. But there was no way anything like that was going to come out of her department at Michael Joseph.
    Still, it was a wonderful first job, and she was very happy there. She was already a modestly well-known figure in the publishing world. Although this was due in part, as she was the first to admit, to being the great Sebastian Brooke’s daughter, she had won a place in it in her own right, through her own talent and her own graceful way with words. She was also very popular; everyone loved her, she was so gentle and sweet-natured and, with her long golden-brown hair and her huge dreamy eyes, she looked rather like a poet herself. And of course like her mother, as those in the literary world who had met Pandora during her brief marriage to Sebastian, frequently remarked.
     
    Izzie was terribly pleased that Barty was coming to the wedding. She adored her. She had been one of the people who had been kindest to her and shown her affection during the first few lonely years of her life; when she had gone away to New York for the first time, Izzie had felt her heart would break. She could still remember standing at the window with her nanny, watching Barty walk down the road after saying goodbye and crying until she could cry no more and then falling asleep on Nanny’s lap.
    Her joy when Barty had – well – taken the Lyttons on and beaten them at their own game had been intense. Not that she wasn’t fond of the Lyttons, she was, she had adored Wol, as Barty had called Oliver, and she loved the twins, especially Adele, and of course Noni. They had all lived together for a while, during the war, at Ashingham, Celia’s parents’ estate, and Adele had stood up for her when Kit was being so unkind to her, when he had first come back from the war. And had helped her through the other most difficult time in her life . . . which even now she could hardly bear to think about.
    She was going to supper with Adele that evening; it would be fun. She loved them all; Adele and Noni were both like sisters to her, and Geordie – well, she adored Geordie, had a bit of a crush on him in fact. He was so charming and handsome, and he had such gorgeous clothes, and he flirted with her just about enough, not so that she got embarrassed, but so that she felt attractive and interesting. And he still looked so young – younger than Adele, if the truth were told. She just hoped Lucas wouldn’t be too much in evidence. He cast such a blight over everything. Beastly little boy.
     
    ‘I’m going to change publishers,’ said Kit. He smiled in Sebastian’s direction: it was not an entirely