Emerald Mistress by Lynne Graham

really felt that she belonged anywhere. In the same way she had never known what it was to have a parent who was absolutely hers…at least not for long. As a child she had been hurt and confused, because she’d rarely seen the mother she adored. She had then had to adjust to the cruel reality that Eva could somehow manage to be a full time parent for her younger son and daughter. But perhaps it had hurt most of all when Harriet had finally discovered that the man she had grown up believing to be her father was not her biological father after all.
    Eva had been six months pregnant when she’d married Will Carmichael, a research scientist a decade older. Seemingly she had snatched at the chance of a wedding ring and a name for her unbornchild. A quiet, studious man, Will had been besotted with his youthful Irish bride, but the union had been a disastrous mismatch. Walking down a London street one day, Eva had been stopped by a talent scout and discovered as a fashion model. Hiring a nanny to take care of her baby, Eva had flung herself into the excitement of fame, fortune and foreign travel. The unequal marriage had disintegrated without fanfare.
    Even after the divorce Will had been left to shoulder the burden of raising Harriet while Eva concentrated on her career. And when Harriet was five years old her mother had remarried and become a society wife. The wealthy English businessman with whom Eva had had her younger children, Alice and Boyce, had not encouraged Harriet’s visits to his country home in Surrey. He had disliked such an obvious reminder that his beautiful wife’s past had featured other men, and in the interests of marital harmony Harriet had been virtually airbrushed out of her mother’s life.
    Harriet had been thirteen years old when she’d overheard a devastating exchange between Eva and Will on the phone.
    ‘I wanted to tell Harriet the truth years ago, but you wouldn’t agree,’ Will had been saying, with unusual curtness of tone for so mild-mannered a man.‘She thinks of
me
as her father, and finding out that I’m no more her father than the Easter bunny will be a nasty shock! Teenagers are vulnerable, Eva. I don’t care if your therapist believes that coming clean on that score will benefit you; I’m more concerned about how it might affect Harriet.’
    Harriet had been shattered by the revelation that the father who had brought her up with so much apparent love and sacrifice was not even a blood relation. Even though Will had repeatedly assured her that he loved her just as much as any biological parent, Harriet had still felt like a cuckoo abandoned in his nest. In her heart, where she had used the salve of her father’s love to compensate for her more distant bonds with her mother, she had felt utterly crushed. A kind and gentle man, Will Carmichael had taken on a responsibility that was not his and done his best by her principally because he had had no other choice. Her mother’s refusal to finish the story by telling Harriet exactly who her birth father was had not helped.
    The following morning dawned bright and breezy, and Harriet scrambled out of bed with a little frisson of anticipation: it was an absolutely perfect day for the races. A veteran of such country pursuits in her early teen years, and well aware of how rough and ready such events could be, she dug out warm comfyclothes and thermal socks to go with her Wellington boots.
    Samson trotted round her feet and fussed until she set out his breakfast.
    ‘You’re a real little tyrant,’ she told him fondly.
    Out in the yard it was all go, and Harriet resolved to rise from her bed earlier. Fergal was cleaning up a dilapidated horse trailer and Una Donnelly was busy in Tailwind’s box, engaged in plaiting his mane into intricate knots. Harriet leant on the stall door to watch. ‘I was never very good at plaiting.’
    The teenager looked across at her with a surprisingly ready smile, her liquid dark eyes full of pleasure, as if