Someone to Love

1 Margate, England The house was enormous, frighteningly ugly, and Jace Montgomery had just paid four and a half million dollars for it. As he drove his car slowly through the wrought-iron gates that were set inside square brick pillars topped by stone lions, he dreaded seeing the house. Priory House was his now, but he could remember little from his one-time viewing with the realtor. The graveled road meandered through parkland that was quite pretty. He'd been told that the gardens had been laid out in 1910 by some famous landscape architect. The trees were now mature, the flowering shrubs were well established, and the grass perfect. If Jace were a horseman, which he wasn't, the parkland would have been a dream come true. As he neared a big oak tree, he pulled over, stopped the car, and got out. In a moment the house would come into view, and he needed to prepare himself for it. To keep himself solvent, he'd borrowed the purchase price from his billionaire uncle. Since the house had been on the market for over three years, Jace knew that when the time came to sell the house, it would be a pain to unload. He'd tried to rent the house, but the owner wouldn't consider it. The man wanted to get rid of the monstrosity free and clear. "All right," Jace said to the realtor, or estate agent as they were called in England, "what's wrong with the house? Other than being ugly, that is." He imagined plumbing that was perpetually clogged, low-flying jets, murderous neighbors. At the very least, dry rot. "It seems that there's a ghost," Nigel Smith-Thompson said with the air of a man who doesn't believe in such things. "Don't all old houses in England have a ghost?" Jace asked. "We were told that this ghost is particularly persistent. She appears rather often and it annoys the owners." Scares the hell out of them is what you mean, Jace thought. "Is that why the house has changed hands so often?" When Jace asked to borrow the money from his uncle to buy the house, Uncle Frank had had it thoroughly researched. Since the late nineteenth century, the house had never been owned by anyone for more than three years. Uncle Frank's conclusion was that the house was a bad investment and Jace shouldn't buy it. Jace hadn't said a word, just handed his uncle the envelope he'd found inside a book that had belonged to Stacy. Frank took the photo of the house out of the envelope, looked at it in distaste, then turned the picture over. On the back someone had written "Ours again. Together forever. See you there on 11 May 2002." It took Frank a moment to put it all together. "Stacy died on...'" "The next day." Jace took a breath. "On the twelfth of May, Stacy Evans, my fiancee, committed suicide in a room over a pub in Margate, England." Frank picked up the envelope and read the postmark. "This was sent from Margate and the postmark is the eighth of April." Jace nodded. "Someone sent that to her before we left for England." He thought back to the trip that had changed his life. Jace had worked in the family business of buying and selling companies since the day he graduated from college. Less than a week before he was to marry Stacy, his uncle Mike, Frank's brother, had called and said that the owner of an English tool manufacturing plant was pulling out of the sale. If that happened, three export deals would fall through and about a hundred people would be out of work. Since it had been Jace who'd negotiated the deal, he'd been the only one who could put it back together. He told Stacy he was sorry but he was going to have to fly to England. He promised that he'd work night and day and be back as soon as possible. But Stacy had surprised him by asking to go with him. "I told her I didn't think it was a good idea for her to go," Jace said. "The truth was, I didn't want to have to deal with her stepDeveraux, Jude is the author of 'Someone to Love ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743267663 and ISBN 0743267664.