EVELYN HARRISON

Founder of Arlington Hall

Before the Harrison brothers, there was Evelyn. 🖤

Before Arlington Hall opened its doors as one of England’s most luxurious hotels, it was nothing more than a derelict old building hidden deep in the Oxfordshire countryside. Crumbling walls. Broken windows. Silence.

But Evelyn Harrison saw something else. She saw beauty beneath the ruin. Life where everyone else saw decay.

This prologue takes us back to the very beginning, to the exact day Evelyn discovered the building that would one day become Arlington Hall. The dream started with her, even if she never lived to see it completed.

The Arlington Hall series follows the lives and loves of her sons, the Harrison brothers, though their stories are told through the eyes of the women who fall for them. We first met Jude Harrison through Amelia in The Invitation, before their story concluded in The Surrender. And in November, we return to Arlington Hall for Casey Harrison’s story in The Seduction, told through Amelia’s best friend Abbie.

Every Harrison love story begins at Arlington Hall. But so do the secrets.

ARLINGTON HALL

PROLOGUE

Oxfordshire – Ten Years Ago

 

The sun was strong, even past her shades, the ends of her scarf flapping behind her as she raced through the countryside in her 1936 Jaguar SS100. The thrill would usually have her beaming from ear to ear. Not today. Today, her smile was hardly seen. She shouldn’t have been behind the wheel.

Evelyn glanced across to the passenger seat. Empty, except for her handbag. That’s where she should be. Laughing, admiring the rolling fields, appreciating Kent’s profile while he drove her and filled her mind with all of the exciting things ahead of them. Their children, three boys, had all flown the nest, and her husband knew Evelyn would feel the force of that emptiness. He was a master at distracting her, and he would devote all of his time outside of work keeping her busy. Entertained. Making her feel like she was the be all and end all for him. Because she was. Kent was an old romantic—tall, distinguished, and wise. He adored his wife and children. No one knew that more than Evelyn herself.

She breathed in deeply, fighting back the emotion, and gripped the steering wheel harder with her gloved hands, her attention to the road. The old church was coming up on the left, and she indicated, slowing, taking the turning just before the red pillar post box. The lane down by the village church was riddled with potholes, so she was forced to a crawl to avoid damaging the suspension of her husband’s pride and joy, or kicking up stones that could chip the paintwork. Lord knows, Kent had spent an arm and a leg on the restoration of the vintage Jag. He always claimed to love it nearly as much as his wife. Everyone knew that to be a bare-faced lie.

Evelyn smiled, and once again it was only a fraction of what she was capable of. But she wondered if she’d ever truly smile again now Kent was gone.

Pulling up by the dilapidated old fence, she grabbed the bunch of Peonies and slid out, pushing the door gently closed before pulling her shades off and removing her leather driving gloves. She looked across the wild meadow toward the graveyard and took a deep breath, opening the gate and starting to step through the overgrowth where bees buzzed, butterflies flapped, and dragonflies hovered. The kitten heels of her emerald green mules—a gift from Kent when he visited Paris for business without her—sunk into the ground as she walked, her cream, tight, capped-sleeve pencil dress not allowing her to take longer strides.

She eventually made it to Kent’s graveside and reached down to rub at the itch around her ankles. “I know,” she breathed, certain Kent would be laughing at her choice of footwear. But the mules were her favorites, and so comfortable. She pulled her headscarf off and dropped it to the grass with her gloves before reaching forward and dusting the top of Kent’s headstone.

Then she set about replacing last week’s Peony’s with the new ones, getting some fresh rainwater from the water butt in the corner. She gazed around the graveyard as she waited for the metal vase to fill, taking in all of the overgrown mounds, none with flowers decorating them. She never saw anyone in that graveyard. She cast her gaze over to the bench her eldest son had put under the willow tree for her. “If you’re going to visit him every day, you need somewhere to sit,” he’d said. “Especially if you insist on wearing bloody heels.” Jude had never seen his mother in anything but heels. They were a part of her makeup. Even her slippers had a dainty kitten heel.

“Shit,” Evelyn cursed, water overflowing from the vase and drenching her hands. She tipped half out and wandered back over to Kent, popping the Peonies in the vase and arranging them just so, inevitably thinking about all of the Fridays when Kent was alive and she would do the same. He would walk through the front door with a bouquet and a bottle every Friday without fail, smiling, eyes twinkling, the dimple on his left cheek deep and utterly adorable. He’d take her in, admire her, listen for the sound of the children. And smile if he couldn’t hear them, jerking his head toward the stairs.

It was ritual. Eventually, he didn’t need to listen for the children because they’d all left home. So he’d place down the bouquet and the bottle of Chablis, swoop up Evelyn, and kiss her all the way to their bedroom.

Evelyn swallowed. “Oh, Kent,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I still don’t know what to do without you.” There was no time for goodbyes. No opportunity for Kent to give Evelyn a pep-talk and tell her exactly how she would cope without him. One day he was there, the next he was gone. And the hole in her heart was infinite. She wasn’t sure it would ever heal. She wasn’t sure she would ever feel complete again.

She braved lowering her bottom to the grass, unbothered that she may get grass stains on her lovely cream dress. He’d been gone just a year. It felt like one thousand, every day long and unbearable. Empty.

Evelyn could get out of bed in the morning. She could put on her face, make herself presentable, but it all felt wasted without Kent around to tell her how beautiful she was. And yet she carried on, because to succumb to the stomach wrenching grief would not only annoy Kent, it would worry her children. She did not want to be a burden. Never. A brave face in front of her boys had become instinctual. But when she was alone, the strain of being strong for them would leave her exhausted. She knew her youngest two boys weren’t as aware of her heartache as her eldest. They asked her if she was okay, and even when she assured them she was and they knew she wasn’t, they wouldn’t push it. Her eldest boy, Jude, however, was fully aware. And always worried. He’d call her every day, three times mostly. Morning, noon, and night. He’d ask her how she was, and she’d tell him she was fine. He’d then tell her to shut up and she’d smile. He’d cancel his plans so he could have dinner with her, and she’d feel terrible about that. He was twenty-five, in a serious relationship with a lovely girl, Janine, and she felt like a weight around his neck that he didn’t need. But Jude wouldn’t have it. She knew Kent’s love for her was boundless. She knew her eldest boy would always be there for her, but he was young, had his whole life ahead of him. She didn’t want to get in the way of his dreams.

Feeling a bit defeated, Evelyn said goodbye to her husband’s headstone and started to wander out of the graveyard, deciding she wasn’t going to sit down on her bench and have a few quiet moments, as she did each day. Her whole life was quiet now. No more quiet. It was screaming at her.

She got in the Jag and drove slowly away, and when she got to the junction, she stopped, looking left and right for traffic. Naturally, she tugged the steering wheel to the right to pull out and head back to town.

Turn left. 

Evelyn frowned at the sound of her husband’s voice in her head, again looking left and right. Right leads home. Left leads to . . . nowhere. Miles and miles of road to just . . . drive. She quickly checked the fuel gage, concluded she had enough to listen to the odd demand of her husband, before tying her headscarf, slipping her shades onto her face and her gloves onto her hands, and pulling off.

Heading left.

Evelyn drove for miles and didn’t see one person. It was exhilarating, spontaneous, if really rather silly. But she was enjoying heading for nowhere. She passed a few small villages, many farms, and overtook endless tractors. She drove until her foot ached from working the clutch and she decided she had driven far enough.

But she needed to get back.

Evelyn pulled over on the roadside and turned a full circle, driving back the way she came, but ten minutes into her return drive, she came to a crossroad. She stopped, frowning, unable to remember seeing the junction before.  And now she had no idea which way to turn. She looked at the dashboard for the Sat Nav, and then laughed loudly. “You fool,” she murmured, getting her phone from her handbag. Of course, she had no service. “Darn it.” Getting out of the Jag, she walked up and down holding her mobile phone high, trying to catch some network to enable her to check the fancy map app Kent had downloaded onto her phone. No service.

On her low heels, she tottered back to the Jag on a sing of delight, remembering Kent always kept a map in the trunk of all his cars. A back-up, just in case technology let him down. He thought of everything. Evelyn would be buggered right now if it wasn’t for Kent’s forward thinking.

She opened the trunk and rummaged through a few files, and her heart sank when she saw some blueprints and drawings by her husband, all architectural masterpieces that he never got to see come to life. Her lip wobbled as she pushed them aside and found the map, laying it on the bonnet of the car. Within two minutes, Evelyn had figured out where she was—the middle of nowhere, it seemed—and worked out her route back to town. She hopped in and turned right, driving slowly, mesmerized by the bullets of light breaking through the canopy of trees above the narrow road, making the concrete sparkle. “Beautiful,” she murmured. So beautiful, she couldn’t possibly forget it, which told her she was on a different route back home to when she drove away from town.

Odd.

But she carried on driving, the turns in the road becoming sharp, the roads tight, the visibility terrible, so she was forced to a crawl again to navigate the twists and turns, while hoping she didn’t meet any oncoming traffic, because there wouldn’t be a chance in hell two cars were passing each other on these roads.

The lane eventually opened up again, and Evelyn breathed out her relief, laughing when a tractor appeared in the distance, a big yellow thing with wheels the size of a small truck. The driver put his hand up as he rumbled past, not looking up past his green bucket hat. Evelyn caught sight of a stem of wheat hanging out of his mouth and laughed. “How very country,” she mused as she took the next corner, slowing again before seeing the road straighten up ahead. She prepared to speed up, but something out the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she slammed her brakes on, apologizing out loud to her dead husband for putting his precious Jag under that kind of strain.

She took off her shades and looked over her shoulder, seeing what had caught her eye. Old stones, hardly visible past the ivy crawling all over them. She reversed the car back and tucked it in on the bend, getting out and approaching the bricks that were peeking out from the dense overgrowth. Reaching in, she brushed some branches aside, revealing a rusty old plaque.

 

ARLINGTON HALL

 

“Oh my,” she whispered, stepping back and looking up the towering wall of ivy. Intrigued, she walked the face of it for a few hundred yards, trying to find an opening. She found one, just a small hole, but Evelyn was a slight woman. She pushed her hands through and pulled the vines apart, venturing in. “If you could see me, Kent,” she mumbled, feeling twigs and leaves getting caught up in her perfect French pleat as she wriggled her way through.

Very unladylike, she staggered and struggled to push her way through the jungle, eventually emerging from the darkness into daylight. She flapped her hands at her face and blew cobwebs and bugs away. “Oh bugger,” she said, noticing a shoe missing. She was about to turn back and go find her precious green mule, but something quite extraordinary stopped her dead in her tracks, all missing shoes and twigs in her perfect hair forgotten.

Her heart started to hammer wildly at the sight in the distance.

A structure that looked haunting and foreboding, the front half concealed by more ivy than she’d ever seen, the windows blocked, the centered, double doors boarded up. It was a handsome building, even Evelyn could see that past the overgrowth. Kent had always had an eye for architecture, naturally, and Evelyn was certain she was looking at something very special.

And unloved, unkept, and unhabitable.

But magnificent.

She turned and looked behind her, seeing the dull gold bars of a gate poking out from the wall of green, then she started toward the house in one shoe, mesmerized by the beauty. There was a stream, stretching the distance toward the house on her left, and an orchard on her right. Both looked sad, the stream full of algae, the wildlife probably dead, the orchard dull and sparse, no apples in sights.

With every step she made toward the house, her heart beat that little bit faster, until she was at the door, feeling at the sandstone brickwork, smelling the history. She smiled and looked at her mobile when it started ringing, Jude’s name lighting up her screen as much as he lit up her heart. “Darling,” Evelyn answered, walking the length of the building to the edge and turning the corner, finding a glass conservatory, not one window intact. She looked down at her one bare foot, her nose wrinkling.

“Where are you?” he asked, and Evelyn laughed.

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“Try me,” he countered, sounding curious.

“I’ve stumbled upon an estate.”

“Stumbled?”

“Literally,” she said over a laugh. “Oh, Jude, darling, it’s the most breathtaking thing I have ever seen.” Her imagination was in overdrive as she stepped tentatively toward the broken conservatory, trying to see into the darkness of the house through the broken glass.

“Mum, where are you?” Jude pressed, his curiosity now mixing with a little worry. He could hear the passion in his mother’s voice that she lost a year ago, but it had come from nowhere.

“I don’t know,” she said, still laughing. “I truly don’t.” She spotted a grand, sweeping staircase in the distance, but it had half collapsed. She inhaled her awe. “I went to see your father,” she explained. “And when I left, something told me to turn left instead of right.” She didn’t mention to Jude that it was his father’s voice. Evelyn was certain he would be off the charts worried about her impulsiveness already. “So I turned left, Jude, and now I have found this amazing house and…” she paused, not daring to say it.

“Mum?”

“I want to buy it, Jude.” She bit her lip, knowing how crazy that sounded, carrying on her way to the back of the house. A maze greeted her, all overgrown and neglected, the box plants sparse and parched. She closed her eyes briefly and imagined it in its raw, natural state, green and lush and grand.

“What?”

“Do you remember that Christmas two years ago?”

“The one when you burnt the turkey?”

“Yes, that one.” She smiled. No one liked turkey anyway. “We did dreams instead of crackers, remember?”

“I remember,” Jude said quietly.

“And what did your father dream of?”

There was a beat of silence, and Evelyn knew it wasn’t because Jude was trying to recall. He was merely bracing himself to say it. “He dreamed of designing the most prestigious hotel in all of England.”

“And he did, didn’t he?”

“He did drawings, yes, Mum.”

Evelyn looked at the back of the house. She’d seen the drawings. Kent wasn’t a modern architect. He was a designer obsessed with old British architecture, and it was evident in his design feats. Some district councils in London would only accept planning submissions based on drawings by Kent Harrison to ensure the grand architectural beauty of some London boroughs was maintained. And as Evelyn looked at this magnificent house, she knew Kent would fall all over it. She could hear him now in her head. Buy it. Buy it. You must buy it, Evelyn. “Darling,” she said quietly. “I have to buy this place and make it your father’s dream.”

“Oh Jesus,” Jude breathed. “Mum, you shouldn’t be taking on projects like that at—”

“Don’t you dare say at my time of life, Jude.” She snorted, indignant. “I’m fifty-one, darling. I’m not quite ready for the grave ye…” She faded off, feeling her son’s flinch as well as she felt her own. “I have to do it, Jude. Because what else am I to do?”

She heard him sigh. Jude was Kent’s biggest champion, an architect himself, albeit his signature look was modern – all concrete and glass. At twenty-five, he was making waves in the world, and Evelyn couldn’t be prouder. “And whatever am I going to do with all the money your father left us?”

“Buy shoes.” Jude said dryly, and Evelyn rolled her eyes.

“I might have to,” she murmured, looking down at her bare foot. “Please say you’ll come see it.”

“I’ll come see it,” he whispered, and Evelyn squealed, thrilled to have him onboard. Or as good as. She’d need his help, no doubt. His skills, his patience, his level head. Of all her children, Jude was the sensible, studious, calming one. Casey, her middle boy, was a free spirit, travelling the world and making his mark. Rhys, her youngest, was…a worry at times, she admitted. But a typical youngest child. Spoilt.

“Bring Janine,” Evelyn ordered, hoping another woman in Jude’s ear would help her cause. But she knew deep down she didn’t need help convincing Jude. He wanted her to smile like she used to smile when his father was alive. She wished he could see her face right now. She was beaming, her excitement through the roof.

“Okay,” he agreed on an airy breath. “But just remember something.”

“What?”

“It might not be for sale.”

She couldn’t believe it. Why ever would someone want to keep something so beautiful if they were going to let it go to rack and ruin? Surely anyone would wish for this magnificent manor house to be restored for people to enjoy. Evelyn felt a new lease for life creeping into her bones. “You’re such a party pooper.”

“Just managing your expectations,” Jude replied.

“Oh, do shut up and get your handsome arse here,” she muttered, venturing further into the grounds, seeing a treehouse and a woodland. She couldn’t help but wonder who owned it. Who had lived here? She was so excited, she was sure it was the cause of the headache she had coming on.

“Yes, Mum,” Jude quipped sarcastically. “But where exactly is here?”

“Paradise,” she replied on a smile, looking back at the building. “It’s paradise, darling. Just you wait and see.”