‘I’ll kill him,’ he said at last. ‘I will personally wring his stupid neck, and then I’ll boot his rear from here to kingdom come.’

‘Who?’

‘Ferdy Ashton. I recognise his writing and his turn of phrase.’

A cold hand was beginning to clutch Meryl’s stomach. There was something horribly convincing about his exasperation. She’d come all this way-

‘Are you telling me someone else wrote this in your name?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t believe it. Nobody would do such a stupid thing.’

‘Then you don’t know Ferdy,’ Jarvis Larne said bitterly. ‘There’s nothing that idiot wouldn’t get up to. I told him I wanted nothing to do with it-or with you.’

‘For a man who needs money as badly as you do, you’re very high-handed.’

‘My need for money is my business and certainly none of yours. I don’t believe a word of this nonsense. You’re a journalist, aren’t you? Well, you’ll not get a story out of me. I don’t like you. I don’t want you here, and the sooner you’re gone the better I’ll be pleased.’

‘A journalist? Me?’ He was briefly taken aback by the fierceness of her outrage, but his face remained unyielding. ‘My name,’ she said emphatically, ‘is Meryl Winters.’

‘So?’

‘My father was Craddock Winters.’

He still looked blank. ‘Of whom the world says-?’

‘He drilled a few oil wells.’

‘And that made him rich enough for his daughter to act like a headless chicken?’

‘Yes!’

‘All right, we’ll assume that I believe you. I’m not saying I do, but let’s pretend. Why find a husband this way? I’d have thought the world was full of fortune-hunters without having to advertise your desperation. And you don’t look too bad.’

Meryl stared at him, almost beyond speech. ‘Not too bad?’

‘OK, you’re passable-for a man whose taste runs to brunettes. Mine doesn’t, and even if it did you’re the last woman I’d want.’

She breathed hard. ‘I was not proposing a love match-’