Breaking the Rules by Barbara Taylor Bradford Page A

sauntered into the library. This was a comfortable, charming room, and the one he used the most.
    Turning on a lamp, settling in one of the big armchairs, he took a few swallows of the milk and put the glass down on the table next to the chair. His father’s chair. No, it wasn’t his father’s chair any longer. It was his. He had bought this apartment and its contents several months ago, and it was his home now, his only home, and the first he had ever owned.
    ‘We really wanted to give you the apartment,’ his mother had told him a few weeks ago when she was in New York to pack up her belongings, clothes and other favourite possessions, as well as his father’s clothes and objects of importance. ‘But we couldn’t, because of the others. They would have kicked up a fuss. That’s why we decided to offer it to all of you at a good price. A bargain price.’
    All of us, he thought, grimacing.
    He was one of six; he had three older brothers and two older sisters. All of them were contentious, competitive, contradictory and complex. They had fought like hell when they were growing up in the big old house in Hampstead, and sometimes they stilldid, but they loved each other nonetheless. Or at least some of them did—others paid lip service to that idea. He did love his brother Horatio and his sister Portia, but Miranda was too aloof and remote for him, and by far the most snobbish woman he had ever met. His brother Edward had made his life miserable when they were kids, but now they were friendly and there was a truce between them. Well, sort of. As far as his brother Thomas was concerned, Larry respected and admired him, the first-born of the Vaughan tribe, but they had never been close. The age difference had probably been a stumbling block.
    None of his siblings had wanted to buy the apartment, mainly because they did not want to live in New York. Edward commuted between Los Angeles and London; Thomas had a manor house in Gloucestershire and a pied-à-terre in London, and Horatio was a Londoner born and bred, and would never dream of living anywhere else on earth. Portia felt the same, whilst Miranda was a country bumpkin in rural Kent when she wasn’t working on set designs up in town. She owned a small studio near Eaton Square where she stayed when she was working on a play, but mostly she preferred to muck about in the country.
    There were no two ways about it, his father had sold him the apartment at a bargain price: exactly what he himself had paid for it twenty years ago, and not a penny more. If it had gone on the market, the price would have been four times as much, if not more. But his father hadn’t been trying to make money; he had simply wanted to be rid of the apartment he no longer used, because he was rarely on Broadway these days. Larry had believed his mother when she had confided they had genuinely wanted to give him the apartment lock, stock and barrel, but had been extremely wary of his siblings, their older children.
    Quite right too, he thought, shifting his weight in the chair. The buggers would have made a hell of a stink if Dad had done that. Jealousy. He’d always been a target of their insane jealousybecause he was the youngest; they considered him the most favoured and spoilt.
    ‘You’re also the best looking of the bunch, and the most talented,’ his mother had frequently reminded him, but he did not agree, felt she was trying to make him feel better. And he had to give his siblings credit where it was due. They were all brilliant in their own way, and good looking to boot. Actors all, except for Miranda.
    ‘The Glorious Vaughans’, they had been dubbed by the press, who dubbed them the first theatrical family in the land: theatrical royalty, in fact. Six brothers and sisters who won all the prizes, took all the bows on both sides of the Atlantic.
    Larry saw Edward in his mind. Tall, slender, blond and green-eyed. He was an elegant and charming man today, with a mind like a whiplash