Fantasy For Two
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‘Belinda, she’s twenty and an adult,’ Alex had wearily reminded her, forbearing to mention that the main cause of Sylvie’s rebellion was her own mother, and the clinging possessiveness with which she had always treated her, refusing to allow her to grow up and be properly independent.
Sylvie, in his opinion, was a very unfortunate young woman, and his stepmother would have been the first person to complain if Alex had tried to interfere in their relationship—as had been proved in the past.
And then there had been an equally lengthy telephone call from the charitable trust, to whom his father had handed over the family’s ancestral castle in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands. They had wanted to know the possible history of a tapestry which had just been discovered hidden behind a piece of Victorian panelling.
In the end Alex had had to refer them to the archivist of the family, a second cousin of his father’s who was currently living in a house on another of the family’s estates in Lincolnshire.
Like a good many other of the properties he owned, it was let out at a laughably nominal peppercorn rent. His financial advisors were constantly reminding him that by being so soft-hearted and housing not only several members of his family, including his stepmother, who lived in a very grand and expensive-tokeep apartment in London, but also various retired employees, and by paying for the upkeep of the properties they inhabited, he was depriving himself and, more importantly, the estate of income that was badly needed.
Very grimly Alex had had to remind them that so far as he was concerned there were more important things in life than money—and far more important duties and responsibilities.
The now retired employees living all but rent-free in his properties had, as he had explained to the accountants, served his family virtually all of their working lives and deserved some comfort and security in their retirement.
‘But, my lord, surely you can see how advantageous it would be if you were to revoke their tenancy agreements and either let out the properties on short-term leases at much higher rentals or simply sell them.
‘It isn’t just a matter of the revenue you are losing by allowing these people to live in them at such ridiculously low rents, there’s the additional fact that you are maintaining the properties for them. Only last year you paid for a full row of terraced farmworkers’ cottages on your Yorkshire estate to be completely modernised.’
‘I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to accept that I’ve made my decision so far as the tenancies are concerned and I don’t intend to change it,’ Alex had told them crisply.
The days when inheriting an earldom had meant inheriting a life of ease and indolence were long gone—if they had ever existed. Running large tracts of land, not to mention the properties and farms that stood on them, was, these days, sometimes a nightmare of complex legislation and red tape coupled with a never-ending battle to make financial ends meet.
Without the benefit of some very shrewd investments made by his great-grandfather, he doubted that he would have been able to afford the luxury of keeping the elegant Palladian mansion, Otel Place, which had been his father’s and was now his own principle dwelling. His great-grandfather’s money, though it might not make him wealthy, had certainly made the vital difference between his being able to keep most of his inheritance and potentially having to sell off a major part of it.
In fact, Alex now thought, the only bright spot in an otherwise extremely fraught day had been the run-in with his fiery, feisty redhead.
His? Momentarily he checked, and then frowned. She had certainly been furious with him, and perhaps with good reason, he acknowledged ruefully. He could have set her right earlier and explained who he was instead of helping her to dig the trap she had hurled herself into so recklessly.
Had her eyes been topaz or gold? He closed his own eyes—the smell of her perfume, light and tantalising, still clung to his shirt. She had felt good in his arms, against his body, beneath his mouth—warm and curvaceous, vibrant and alive.
He had known who she was, of course. Pat Lawson had told him that she was coming to interview her and he would probably have guessed anyway. Bob Fleury had informed him of her appointment when he had asked him if she could take up the tenancy of the empty cottage in the square he owned down by the river.
He had behaved rather badly, he acknowledged, even if she had invited him to do it, and there had certainly been no excuse for the way he had reacted to her idiotic charge of him using any kind of right to droit du seigneur. No, kissing her like that had been wholly out of order—and wholly enjoyable. More, in fact, than merely enjoyable.
She had had an effect on him that... Hastily he reassembled his thoughts. He was thirty-three, for heaven’s sake, and certainly a long way from allowing his hormones to dictate his behaviour to him.
No. He quite definitely owed her an apology and an explanation. He glanced at his watch. It was too late to call on her now, but he had to go into town later and he would call on her then to apologise.
CHAPTER TWO
‘GOOD.’
Feeling highly satisfied with herself, Mollie put down the pages she had just been reading of the piece she had written following her meeting with Pat Lawson, pausing to study the view from her sitting-room window. Beyond her tiny front garden lay a well-maintained and very pretty town square, complete with its own private garden for which only the occupants of the houses around the square had keys.
The neat early Georgian cottages had, so Mollie had learned from Bob Fleury, a certain cachet to them, and she should consider herself very fortunate to be able to rent one of them.
The cottage certainly had a lot to recommend itself, Mollie had to acknowledge. Its location, with its long back garden backing onto the river and its frontage onto the small square, gave it an almost country feel, and its interior decoration showed not only good taste and a respect for maintaining period detail but a thorough awareness of the needs of modern life as well.
Her mother had been extremely impressed with the kitchen and bathroom when she and Mollie’s father had driven down to Fordcaster with Mollie to help her get settled in.
‘It’s got a proper oven and not just a microwave,’ her mother had approved. ‘And everywhere’s so clean.’
‘Mmm... Apparently, according to Bob Fleury, the landlord is very particular about that sort of thing, and about who he takes on as tenants. Initially I’ve only been granted a lease for three months.’
‘Well, I can see his point,’ her mother had commented. ‘If this was my house I certainly wouldn’t want just anyone living here.’
Walking into the kitchen now, Mollie went to fill her kettle and make herself a hot drink.
Surprisingly Pat Lawson had proved to be extremely interesting to talk to, or rather to listen to, and in no time at all she had furnished Mollie not just with her great-grandmother’s much prized recipe for her famous chutney but in addition a good deal of crisply informative and very witty background information about the history of the town, including some interesting facts about its foremost family—the Villiers of St Otel—both past and present.
‘They go back right to the times of William the Conqueror,’ she had told Mollie. ‘The first earl came over from Normandy, although he wasn’t an earl then, just one of William’s knights. William gave him the earldom in return for his loyalty to him.
‘Things haven’t always been easy for them, of course. There was an earl beheaded in the time of Henry the Eighth, for supporting Anne Boleyn, and another during the Civil War; the most famous of them all, though, was probably the Black Earl—Rake-hell St Otel, they called him. He made a fortune gaming in the clubs in London and then lost it again and ended up abducting an heiress so that he could marry her for her money.
‘When, after six unsuccessful attempts to present him with an heir, his countess finally gave birth to a much wanted son there was a rumour abroad that her child had been another girl and that she had been exchanged at birth for a boy child fathered on one of the serving wenches by her husband...’
Pat Lawson shook her head at this point, but Mollie was more interested in learning about the vices of the current Earl rather than his long-dead ancestor.
‘What about the present Earl?’ she pressed her, eager to gather ammunition against her adversary.
‘Alex?’ Pat responded, with an affectionate warmth and an easy familiarity which both surprised and displeased Mollie somewhat, causing her to scowl horribly and Pat to break off from what she had been about to say and enquire, ‘Are you feeling quite well...?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine,’ Mollie assured her hastily. ‘Please go on. You were saying about Alex...about the Earl...’
Had Pat heard the angry note of censure and dislike in her voice as she’d said the word ‘Earl’? Mollie shot the older woman a quick look. There was no point in alienating her by allowing her own feelings about the man to show, not when it was obvious both from Pat’s doting tone of voice and the indulgent look on her face that she held a vastly different opinion of him.
‘Oh, yes, Alex... He’s had a hard time of it; there’s no doubt about that.’
She paused whilst Mollie attempted to look duly sympathetic, although inwardly she was silently raging. ‘A hard time of it’. Not from what she had seen, he hadn’t. Oh, yes, she could really buy into that one.
‘His father was killed hunting—which is one of the reasons that Alex has banned it on his land—and his unexpected death left Alex with huge death duties to pay. Luckily he’s managed to keep most of the land, even if he’s had to cut down on staff.’
‘I’ve read that more and more farmers and farmworkers are leaving the land,’ Mollie commented.
An idea was beginning to take shape in her mind, the seeds of what she knew in her bones would make a truly controversial piece starting to germinate in the warm, receptive atmosphere of her own instinctive sympathy for the underdog and her equally instinctive dislike of Alexander, Earl of St Otel, and all that he stood for.
‘Yes. Yes, some are.’ Pat was agreeing sombrely with her. ‘We’ve all had so many problems to face recently with there being so many food scares and new EC laws are coming into force.’
‘I was thinking more specifically of the problems that occur when farmers and farmworkers who have devoted the whole of their working lives to their farms discover, when they come to retire, that they are expected to vacate properties which have probably been their homes for most of their lives. Tenanted farms and tied cottages...’
‘Oh, yes, problems can and do occur,’ Pat agreed readily. ‘Often with tragic results.’
‘Like the woman in the north of England who was evicted from the home she had lived in all her life after her husband’s death, and expected to adapt to city life, living in a high-rise council block at eighty-two years of age,’ Mollie supplemented for her, really beginning to warm to her theme. This was an area she had researched extensively as a student, and such injustices were very close to her heart.
‘Yes, the law can be very unfair,’ Pat acknowledged.
‘Not the law, the landlords who implement it,’ Mollie corrected her firmly. ‘I know that the Earl is your landlord. I expect he owns a great deal of property, both locally and elsewhere.’
‘Yes. Yes, he does, but...’
Mollie could see the headline now, hear the plaudits ringing in her ears as she exposed Alexander, Earl of St Otel, for the selfish, greedy monster that he undoubtedly was. Heavens, such a story might even attract the interest of a television documentary team, and then...
Not that she would ever write a single word motivated by self-interest, she told herself sternly. That simply wasn’t her style. No, what she wanted to do was to draw people’s attention to social injustices, to right wrongs, to slay dragons, and if one of those dragons should just happen to be the Earl of St Otel, then...then that only went to prove how right she had been to...to... Well, anyway, he had had no right to kiss her like that.
Thanking Pat for her time, she hurried back to the Gazette’s offices, where she diligently produced an article including the recipe for Pat’s great-grandmother’s famous chutney. But once she left work and got home she looked out her earlier research and seated herself in front of her own computer, where she set to work producing a far more controversial and explosive piece.
It was an exposé of the way wealthy and uncaring land-owners treated their employees, and although she was scrupulously careful about not naming the Earl of St Otel—after all, she had nothing concrete in evidence against him yet—it was him Mollie had in mind as she worked on her article. He was, she had decided, the epitome of the greedy and uncaring land-owner, and a man too proud and arrogant, too selfish, to have a thought in his head for anyone other than himself.
Writing the article was one thing, she admitted, getting Bob Fleury to print it was quite another, but somehow she would find a way. She was determined. What she had to say, what she had to reveal and unmask about this nationwide issue was far too important not to be brought to people’s attention.
The country’s farmland was quickly becoming one vast mechanised food-production plant over which a small number of ever increasingly vastly wealthy individuals were acquiring total control—a business based merely on profits with no room in it for humanity nor for humans.
Sombrely Mollie watched now as a pair of geese flew over the river. Pat Lawson had mentioned during their conversation that there was a small nature reserve several miles away, the land and the small lake it included having been donated by a local philanthropist—some kindly elderly person, Mollie decided absently as she watched the geese disappear out of sight.
Alex grimaced as the Land Rover jolted out of a pothole in the road with a teeth-clenching rattle. He would dearly love to be able to replace it but he simply couldn’t afford to. For him to spend money on a new vehicle for himself would mean that he would have to take money from some other project, such as replacing an essential piece of farm equipment or ensuring that all his tenanted cottages were properly repaired.
He frowned briefly and then made a determined effort to switch off from thinking about the problems that came from trying to turn ancient privilege and everything that went with it into a modern, self-financing environment fit to go forward into the new millennium—something which hopefully his children would inherit with serenity and joy instead of the grim near despair which he had had to take on with his inheritance following his father’s unexpectedly early death. Death duties had been only the start of his problems, but hopefully they were now through the worst of things... Hopefully.
He looked ruefully at the small peace-offering on the passenger seat—a basket of peaches from the orangery that was the focal point of the house’s kitchen garden. Built at the time of the original mansion, and modernised early on in the Edwardian era, its heating was provided by a complicated labyrinth of pipes and hot water fuelled by an ancient and temperamental boiler.
He himself had been on the point of deciding that the place would have to be emptied and closed down when a retired local gardener had come forward with the proposal that a local group of amateur enthusiasts take over not just the orangery and the succession houses that lined the south wall of the kitchen garden, but also the kitchen garden itself.
This collective, of which he himself was now a part, in that he was an honorary member of their group, shared the produce which the garden gave. The peaches he had packed carefully in a basket surrounded by tissue paper were his share of this season’s.
For reasons which he had no intention of going into, their lush promise reminded him very much of the person for whom his gift was intended. Their fruit would be sweet and juicy but with an explosive and challenging sharpness. Deftly he swung the Land Rover over to the side of the road and parked it.
Mollie frowned as she heard the knock on her front door. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She had not had any time to make any friends in the town as yet, and virtually the only two people she knew were Bob Fleury and his wife.
Switching off the kettle, she went to answer the door. When she opened it her eyes widened in wary suspicion as she saw who was standing there.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded challengingly, before adding, ‘If you’ve come to apologise...’
‘I haven’t,’ Alex replied coolly. What was it about her, this five-foot-nothing bundle of aggressive womanhood with her tangle of curls and her amazingly coloured eyes, that somehow set his pulses racing and despite all his good intentions made him feel... made him react...?
‘Then what do you want?’ Mollie demanded.
Heavens, what was the matter with her? What was it about the man that made her behave so...so femininely...? She could actually feel her toes curling inside her shoes as she fought valiantly to control the dangerously awakening flood of awareness that swamped her as she stood there on her doorstep.
He represented everything she most disliked in a man, and yet here was her body telling her the opposite, luring her. Even more angry with herself than she was with him, Mollie took a step backwards, intending to close the door, but to her chagrin Alex had stepped inside before she could do so.
‘How dare you? This is my house—’ she began, only to have him cut her short.
‘No, it isn’t, it’s mine,’ he said cynically.
Mollie gaped at him.
‘You’re my landlord?’ she guessed, determined not to be caught out the same way again.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am,’ Alex agreed. ‘But...’
What on earth was going on? The whole situation was rapidly getting totally out of hand. He hadn’t come here to argue with her, dammit. He had come to...
To Mollie, his arrival so soon after she had finished writing her article only served to add fuel to her already turbulent emotions.
‘You might be able to browbeat and...and terrorise your other tenants, especially those unfortunate enough to owe their living to you, but I’m not—’ she began, but Alex had heard enough. He had never known a woman get under his skin so quickly or so thoroughly, and of all the wrong-headed and totally unjust accusations he had ever heard hers certainly took some beating.
‘Now just a minute—’ he began, but Mollie was in no mood to listen to him.
‘You’re trespassing,’ she told him dangerously. ‘And if you don’t leave immediately I shall...’
Alex, she realised, wasn’t listening to her. He was staring at the article she had so recently finished printing out and which she had left on the table in front of which he was now standing.
Attached to the front of it was a boldly handwritten note bearing his name, which she had underlined thickly, adding three heavily drawn exclamation marks. His earlier frown had become a black-browed scowl, and the very air around them in the small room seemed to have taken on a thunderous, sulphurous atmosphere.
‘Would you mind explaining to me what the hell this is supposed to be?’ she heard him demanding slowly as he spaced out each separate word with infinite care and ice-cold fury.
‘I should have thought it was obvious. It’s an article I’ve just written on the dreadful and iniquitous way farmworkers are treated at the end of their working lives...’ Mollie responded, determinedly tilting her chin as she met his furious glare head-on. She refused to give way either to his very obvious ire or her own quivering inner reaction of excitement and alarm at what she had caused.
‘Are you trying to imply that my farmworkers are badly treated?’ Alex asked her.
Mollie’s chin lifted even higher.
‘And if I am,’ she demanded. ‘Are you going to deny that you have turned people out of their homes to make room for new, younger employees?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Mollie blinked. She hadn’t been expecting such a categoric and totally barefaced misappropriation of the truth.
‘You’re lying,’ she told him positively.
Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Her accusations were so ludicrous and so far off the truth that if they hadn’t been such a damned insult, and if she hadn’t been so positive that she was right, then he would have been more inclined to laugh than get angry. However...! Clenching his jaw, he told her ominously quietly, ‘I do not lie.’
‘Liars always say that,’ Mollie replied sweetly.
‘This is impossible. You are impossible,’ Alex retorted. ‘And if you think for one moment that anyone with a shred of intelligence is going to publish this...this rubbish, then...’
As he spoke he was reaching for the article. Instinctively Mollie acted to protect it, to stop him reaching out. Alex got there first, crumpling up the sheets in his fist as Mollie tried to tear his fingers from around them.
Instinctively Alex started to turn away from her, but Mollie, who had reached up on her toes, stretching her body out precariously to try to retrieve the article, started to lose her balance, causing Alex to do the only possible thing he could do.
Mollie’s small, instinctive cry of alarm was smothered against the solid wall of his chest as he dropped the article and reached instead for her.
‘Let me go. Let me go,’ Mollie demanded, hammering hard against his chest with two small bunched fists, oblivious to the fact that but for his chivalrous gesture she would probably have been lying ignominiously in a heap at his feet instead of being held protectively and safely against the marginally less ungiving hardness of his body.
Both the floor and his muscles might be equally tough, but her body was certainly reacting very, very differently to the muscles than it would have done to the floor. The quivering, jelly-like shakiness which had invaded her limbs was certainly not the kind of reaction she could ever remember having after coming into contact with any kind of inanimate object. Come to think of it she couldn’t remember ever having experienced such a mind-boggling reaction to coming into contact with anything or anyone at any time in her whole life before. It really was too bad of her body to react to him in this wretchedly puerile fashion, she told herself sternly. He was, after all, only a man.
‘I hate you. Let me go at once,’ she told him furiously—just to make sure that he understood that the by now openly visible trembling of her body meant nothing whatsoever, and that if he was unwise enough to think that it did...
‘Likewise,’ she heard him telling her through gritted teeth.
So, given that both of them had expressed their dislike of one another so plainly, why was it that they were now locked in one another’s arms, kissing like a pair of starving lovers who had been apart for centuries?
Mollie had no idea. She only knew that the angry, passionate, devouring kisses their mouths were hungrily demanding from one another seemed to feed the need she could feel boiling up inside her rather than satiate it.
She had never dreamed that she could feel like this about anyone, that she could desire anyone so passionately, so intensely, so...so insanely...and so compulsively that she knew that if she didn’t somehow find a way to put a brake on what she was experiencing it wouldn’t be Alex who might be tearing off her clothes in order to make love to her, but she who was tearing off his.
That was what he did to her... That was how he made her feel. It wasn’t love; it wasn’t even lust... What exactly it was she couldn’t even begin to put a name to... She only knew it was something explosive. Something dangerous... Something over which she was totally without controt—a starving, famished, aching need that twisted tormentedly through her as she alternately pushed him away and then pulled him closer, her mouth biting hungrily at his, her lips closing around his hot, hard tongue, her hips grinding into his as he grasped them and held her, his body mirroring the fiercely sensual movements of hers.