Guilty Pleasures
Packed with glamour and intrigue, Guilty Pleasures - from the Top Ten bestselling author, Tasmina Perry - is the perfect holiday read.In the ultra-chic world of the fabulously rich, fashion can have a very high price…Saul Milford, owner of one of England’s oldest and most prestigious luxury goods companies is dead, but who will inherit his estate?For years Saul's niece Cassandra, editor-in-chief of Rive, the most glamorous fashion magazine of the moment has believed that she would be the sole benefactor. But she's not the only family member with their eye on the ultimate prize. Roger, Saul's handsome brother with a demanding wife. Elizabeth the art-dealer with a dark and brooding secret, Tom the playboy nephew, and Emma, the hard–working but unlucky in love niece living and working in Boston. All have their reasons for wanting the company. But one of them will go to any lengths to secure what they believe is rightfully theirs.Once again Tasmina Perry takes us a non-stop tour of the mega-privileged, weaving a gilt-edged tale of glamour and intrigue around the world's most luxurious locations.It’s what beaches were made for.
Читать Guilty Pleasures онлайн беплатно
TASMINA PERRY
Guilty Pleasures
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishersLtd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008
Copyright © Tasmina Perry 2008
Tasmina Perry asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007264957
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007292950 Version: 2017-09-14
To Fin with love
Whenever you confront an unbridled desire you are surely in the presence of a tragedy in the making.
Quentin Crisp
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Acknowledgements
Also by Tasmina Perry
Sometime in the 1980s
The residents of the South of France are too chic to consider themselves socially competitive, but in the villas that pepper the Côte D’Azur, one-upmanship was rife. Saul Milford, a man of not inconsiderable self-assurance, liked to think that he had the best villa in the whole area. An old mas in the foothills of Provence, Les Fleurs was not the biggest house but with its turrets and bright blue shutters, it was certainly the prettiest. Already that summer he’d had Princess Margaret, Mick Jagger and various other members of London’s beau monde round the kidney-shaped swimming pool. They’d all seemed to enjoy themselves and it was easy to see why. The grounds were studded with fabulous bronzes, sculpted by his dear friend Christopher Chase, one of England’s most prominent artists. There were olive groves, an abundance of poppies on the hillside, and in the sunshine, the Mediterranean sparkled like a sapphire in the distance. This evening, as dusk was settling on the grounds with a honey glow, it looked even more spectacular. It was excellent timing: tonight there was to be another party. Staff in white suits scurried around the pool plumping up cushions and filling silver ice buckets with champagne. The smell of spices from the kitchen mingled with the strong scent of lavender and the air crackled with anticipation of a fabulous evening ahead.
Saul smiled to himself, sipping lemonade freshly made from fruit in his orchard, silently congratulating himself that his purchase of the villa the previous summer had been one of the best decisions he had ever made. He could certainly afford it. His company, the luxury goods house Milford, was doing well. For years the company’s sumptuous leather products had been the preserve of the upper classes who ordered bespoke luggage for their exotic holidays. But the Eighties had seen the rise of a new, more democratic wave of millionaires riding on stock market killings. The City was awash with money and it was making Saul rich. Very rich. And what was the point of taking money to your grave?
Saul looked down from the terrace to where his two nieces Emma Bailey and Cassandra Grand were playing. From this distance, he could just about make out the dialogue between the two cousins. It was funny how personalities were set at such a young age. While the girls were similar in many ways, their differences were equally marked. So marked in fact, that Saul felt confident he could predict how their lives would unfold and the direction in which their desires and ambitions would take them.
