Lansdowne

When eighteen-year-old Isobel Fairfax runs for a lift in the lobby of Lansdowne House, she has no idea the man holding the gate for her is Marcus Lansdowne, the corporation's forty-year-old chairman and one of the most powerful men in London.What begins as an accidental meeting becomes an intense, consuming attraction neither of them expected. Marcus, a widower still quietly scarred by a loveless marriage, finds in Isobel the first woman in years who wanted him before she knew his name. Isobel, raised by a kind aunt in a village an hour from anywhere, finds in Marcus a man unlike any boy she's ever known, someone whose loneliness matches her own in ways she's only beginning to understand.But their worlds could not be further apart. He dines at restaurants where the staff know him by name. She shares a flat with no private bathroom and takes the bus to work. When office gossip and a jealous secretary conspire to poison what's barely begun, Marcus makes the devastating decision to end things, convinced that Isobel is too young to know her own heart.Heartbroken and adrift, Isobel finds unexpected comfort in the company of Robert Lansdowne, Marcus's university-age son, who knows nothing of her history with his father. As weeks turn to months and Robert's feelings deepen into something Isobel cannot honestly return, she finds herself trapped in a web of her own making, wearing a platinum bracelet on her wrist that she refused from one man and accepted from another, unable to tell either of them the truth.Set against the fog-bound streets of late 1960s London and the sweeping grounds of an English country house, Lansdowne is a story about pride, jealousy, and the terrible clarity that comes when you've almost lost everything. It asks whether love can survive the distance between two people who want each other but cannot stop getting in their own way.