CHELSEA frowned thoughtfully as she parked her small car carefully behind her sister’s BMW. Ann had sounded worried and anxious on the telephone, unusually so, and she sighed a little as she slid long slender legs out of her car. Parenthood brought many perils, if Ann was to be believed, but none more burdensome than those engendered by a seventeen-year-old daughter.

As she had expected she found her sister in her large modern kitchen busily engaged in mixing fruit in a huge bowl.

‘Cake for tomorrow,’ Ann told her, reaching out automatically to slap away her hand as Chelsea filched a small amount of the raw mixture. ‘You’re as bad as Kirsty,’ she complained, tempering the criticism with a warm kiss on her sister’s cheek, as she added, ‘Thanks for coming. Did I drag you away from anything important?’

‘Only a sixteenth-century chair cover,’ Chelsea replied humorously, referring to her work as a restorer of mediaeval embroidery. ‘And speaking of Kirsty, what’s the problem this time? Not threatening to run off with her favourite pop singer again, is she?’

Ann Stannard shot her sister an exasperated glance. With the fourteen years’ difference in their age, Ann sometimes felt more like Chelsea’s mother than her sister. Their parents had died when Ann was just twenty-two and on the brink of marriage to Ralph Stannard, and for all her teasing of her sister, Chelsea never forgot Ralph’s generosity in giving his orphaned sister-in-law a home. It couldn’t have been easy, she recognised from the vantage viewpoint of twenty-six, for the newly married pair to make a precocious and inquisitive teenager welcome.

Kirsty was the Stannards’ only child, a spirited and attractive teenager, currently still at school, but as Chelsea well knew, rebelliously determined to leave just as soon as she possibly could.

‘She’s not still got this bee in her bonnet about becoming an actress, has she?’ Chelsea queried.

‘I wish that was all we had to contend with. I’m afraid it’s far more serious than that. We’re both at our wits’ end, Chelsea. You’re our last hope. You’ve always been so close to her. Ralph and I were hoping you could make her see sense …’

‘About what?’

‘About Slade Ashford,’ Ann said grimly. ‘She’s absolutely infatuated with him. Nothing either Ralph or I say to her makes the slightest difference.’

‘Calf-love,’ Chelsea informed her, trying not to smile. Ralph and Ann were extremely protective of their daughter, and a high-spirited girl like Kirsty was bound to rebel. They had been the same with her. Ann, for all her placid nature, seemed to have an imagination that worked overtime when it came to the fates that could befall an unprotected girl. In Chelsea’s view, Ann was almost an anachronism in this day and age; a woman who was quite content to be a stop-at-home wife and mother, and who moreover was still as deeply in love with her equally staid husband as she had been when she first met him.

‘Look, I know you don’t want to admit your little girl has grown up, but girls do fall madly in love at seventeen …’

‘I’m well aware of that, Chelsea.’ Ann eyed her sister frowningly. ‘If it was a boy her own age, another teenager, it wouldn’t matter, but Slade is far from being that. He’s in his early thirties at least.’

‘And Kirsty worships him from afar,’ Chelsea grinned, still refusing to take her sister seriously. ‘Look, love, I know Kirsty is a very pretty girl and the apple of your eye, but a man of thirty-odd isn’t going to be interested in a schoolgirl.’

‘You wouldn’t think so,’ Ann agreed, ‘but he is—and interested enough to keep her out until two in the morning the other night. Ralph was furious!’

‘Has he tackled him about it?’ Chelsea asked frowningly. ‘Does he know how young Kirsty is?’

‘The situation’s a very difficult one,’ Ann told her. ‘Slade’s company has just bought out Lutons.’

Lutons Engineering was the largest firm in the small town of Melchester, and Ralph had been the Works Manager there for several years. Chelsea could quite see, without her sister needing to put it in as many words, that her gentle brother-in-law might find it rather difficult to tackle his new boss on the subject of his liaison with his young daughter. But surely the man himself must realise … Contempt darkened Chelsea’s long blue eyes. Surely the man must know that Kirsty, for all her prettiness, was no more than a child … a little girl still, despite her frequent attempts to appear more sophisticated – far more sophisticated than she had been at seventeen, Chelsea thought wryly. But then at that age she had not had the advantage of Kirsty’s ripe prettiness. Well could she remember her too thin body and straight dark red hair. But at seventeen girls didn’t consider themselves children. She could remember that.

‘How about sending Kirsty off to stay with Ralph’s parents for a while?’ she suggested.

‘Not possible, I’m afraid. Ralph’s father’s heart is troubling him again, and besides, I don’t think Kirsty would go. She’s changed, Chelsea. I barely recognise her,’ Ann admitted. ‘And I’m so afraid for her. Slade isn’t a boy … he’s a grown man, who could never be satisfied with the sort of innocent relationship …’ Her voice trailed away and she looked helplessly at her younger sister.

‘You want me to talk to Kirsty? Do you think she’d listen?’

‘No. And I don’t want you to talk to her exactly.’ For the first time that she could remember, Chelsea saw that her sister couldn’t quite meet her eyes. ‘Chelsea, I hate reminding you of this’ Ann began in a low voice, ‘but …’

‘But if anyone can speak from experience, it has to be me,’ Chelsea supplied for her in a bitter voice. ‘I agree, but experience is something everyone has to learn for themselves. God knows there were people enough to warn

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Rescue Operation Penny Jordan

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

Rescue Operation

Penny Jordan