Praise

Sinfully sexy stories from Sunday Times bestselling author Penny Jordan and one of Mills & Boon’s rising stars, USA TODAY bestselling author, India Grey!

SECRETS

“Ms Jordan produces an absorbing tale with rich characters, a layered conflict and a sensual tone.”

—RT Book Reviews on One Night in His Arms

“The revenge-is-sweet plot quickly lures readers into a dazzling story drenched in emotion and sensuality.”

—RT Book Reviews on India Grey’s Taken for Revenge, Bedded for Pleasure

Secrets

Penny Jordan

and India Grey

One Night in His Arms

Penny Jordan

Taken for Revenge, Bedded for Pleasure

India Grey

www.millsandboon.co.uk

One Night in His Arms

Penny Jordan

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eight-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan: “Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters”, and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Look out for Penny’s last books: The Price of Royal Duty launched the new continuity THE SANTINA CROWN and was available in May 2012, and her final original novel, A Secret Disgrace, became available in June 2012.

Dear Reader,

It is such a pleasure for me to have one of my books linked to a book—Taken for Revenge, Bedded for Pleasure—by fellow author India Grey. I love her books so much for their fresh, zesty approach, and for the special emotional intensity she brings to her writing, and I know that you will enjoy reading this book every bit as much as I did. She has such a wonderful and naturally talented writing voice and such an instinctive sense of what readers look for in Modern™ romance books.

I have to admit, though, that there is another reason for having a very special place on my bookshelves for India Grey’s books. She and I were members of the same writing group and, after reading her work I encouraged her, indeed bullied her almost, into sending her manuscript in to Mills & Boon. I should also admit here that when I read those opening pages, I became involved with her characters so immediately that I felt rather envious of her talent. However, happily there is room in the Mills & Boon “stable” for a wide variety of authors, each with their own distinctive voice, and it is both a pleasure and a privilege for me to have my book partnered with hers.

Happy reading to you all.

Penny Jordan

NB

Penny wrote this letter just a few weeks before she passed away.—Ed.

PROLOGUE

‘WHAT the hell are you doing, Sylvie? Just what kind of game are you playing now?’ Ran demanded angrily as he removed her hands, releasing her fingers from his shirt where she had unconsciously curled them in her attempt to get him to listen to what she wanted to say, to understand that she was no longer a child, that she was now completely and totally a woman … a woman who loved and wanted him.

‘Ran, this isn’t a game,’ she protested, her eyes starting to fill with anguished tears as he thrust her away. ‘I want—’

‘Oh, I know exactly what you want, Sylvie,’ he interrupted her savagely. ‘You want me to take you to bed. But right now what I feel more like doing—’ He broke off, said something she couldn’t quite catch under his breath and then turned to look at her so that the light fell sharply across his face, outlining the aristocratic arrogance of his profile.

‘Your stepbrother is one of my closest friends and my employer and—’

‘This doesn’t have anything to do with Alex,’ Sylvie protested frantically. ‘This is just between you and me, Ran.’

‘You and me? There is no you and me,’ he told her cruelly. ‘You are just a schoolgirl, Sylvie, whilst I am a fully adult man.’

‘But Ran, I love you,’ Sylvie pleaded desperately, throwing everything she had left into one last attempt to make him see how she felt.

‘Really?’ Ran drawled mockingly. ‘How much? As much as the pop star you were ready to die for six months ago, or the pony you wanted three months before that?’

‘That was before I was properly grown up,’ Sylvie told him.

So very little space separated them—a few feet … that was all. If she let him walk away from her now without at least trying …

Boldly she closed the distance between them, taking him off guard as she placed her body close to his and wrapped her arms possessively around him, possessively and far too tightly for him to remove them as he had done so easily a few moments ago.

‘Ran …’ She pleaded with him, lifting her face to him, her mouth trembling. ‘Ran, please …’

She felt something that could have been a shudder galvanise his body before clumsily and inexpertly she pressed her mouth against his in a closed-lipped, untutored kiss.

His mouth felt hard and hot, his skin where he had shaved thrillingly rough against her own. Fireworks ignited and exploded deep within her body; her heart was beating so fast she thought she might die of the excitement.

‘Ran,’ she moaned passionately against his mouth as she twisted with innocent provocation against his body.

Suddenly his own arms were around her, not pushing her away as he had done earlier, but holding onto her, his fingers biting hard into her slender arms as he slid one hand into the back of her hair, holding her head still whilst his mouth started to move on hers.

Sylvie felt her head start to spin and her knees go weak.

If she had thought that her heart was beating fast before, that was nothing to the way it was pounding now. Her whole body ached and pulsed with the intoxication of what was happening.

Ran! Ran! Ran!

She loved him so much, wanted him so much. Eagerly she pressed her still coltishly youthful body even closer to his. She could feel every nerve-ending in her skin aching with the intensity of her yearning for him.

The tip of his tongue was caressing the softly swollen outline of her mouth.

She wanted him to make love to her so desperately. These last few weeks, whilst they had been working together clearing the overgrown stagnant lake in the woods on her stepbrother’s estate, working on a conservation project which Ran, as her stepbrother’s estate manager, had been overseeing, she had come to see him in a new light and in doing so had fallen head over heels in love with him, with all the passion and intensity of her seventeen-year-old nature.

And now, after the corrosive hurt of all his recent rebuffs, all his painful rejections of her attempts to make him realise how she felt, here he was holding her, kissing her … wanting her …

A fiercely sharp thrill of feminine excitement spun through her. Her breasts ached for the touch of his hands, to be held and caressed by him as she had read about, seen in films. The thought of their two naked bodies entwined in the sensual privacy of Ran’s bed was almost too much for her. Eagerly she opened her mouth, inviting him to probe deeper with his tongue, but then abruptly, to her shock, Ran was suddenly pushing her away as quickly as he had taken hold of her, his face dark with anger.

‘Ran, wh-what is it … what’s wrong?’ she stammered.

‘What’s wrong? Oh, for God’s sake …’ she heard him mutter. ‘The fact that you even need to ask that kind of question shows just how … You’re a child still, Sylvie … Six months from now …’

She bit down hard on her bottom lip when she saw the irritation in his eyes as he ran his hand through his thick dark copper hair.

‘I’m sorry … I should never have done that …’ he told her tersely.

Sylvie felt her eyes fill with vulnerable tears.

‘You kissed me,’ she protested shakily. ‘You wanted me …’

‘No, Sylvie,’ she heard Ran telling her grittily. ‘What I wanted,’ he told her bluntly, ‘was not you, but what you offered. I’m a man, and when a woman comes on to me, offering me sex …’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘You’re a child still, Sylvie.’

‘I bet if we were in bed together you wouldn’t be saying that,’ Sylvie challenged him boldly, adding recklessly, ‘I’m not a child at all, Ran, and I could prove it to you …’

She heard the savage hiss as he expelled the air from his lungs.

‘Dear God,’ she heard him rasp, ‘have you the first idea of what you’re saying … suggesting …?’

‘I want you, Ran … I love you …’

‘Well, I sure as hell don’t want or love you,’ he told her ferociously, his face suddenly shockingly pale underneath its weather-beaten tan. ‘And let me give you a small warning, Sylvie: if you continue to go around offering yourself to men, sooner or later one of them’s going to take you up on your offer and I promise you that the experience won’t be a pleasant one. You’re far too young to be experimenting with sex, and when you are old enough it should be with someone of your own age and not … I’m a man, not a boy, Sylvie,’ he told her brutally, ‘and … well, let’s just say that the idea of taking some over-excited and inexperienced little virgin to bed and playing touchy-feely games with her is not my idea of a particularly satisfying relationship—not sexually, not mentally and certainly not emotionally …

‘Go and find someone your own age to play with, Sylvie,’ he told her grimly.

For a moment Sylvie was tempted to protest, to argue and plead, or even more daringly to throw herself back into his arms and prove to him that she could make him want her despite her age and her lack of experience. She was not normally so easily defeated or diminished, but something deep down inside, some very new sense of womanliness, shrank from enduring another rejection from him. And so, instead, swallowing back the tears she was aching to cry, she lifted her head and, tilting her chin to him defiantly, said, ‘Yes, I think I will …’

There had been one boy in particular in the party of co-workers involved in the conservation campaign who had shown a very marked interest in her. At the time, newly, wildly in love with Ran, she hadn’t paid him very much attention, but now …

A militant sparkle illuminated her eyes. She could see Ran beginning to frown.

‘Sylvie,’ he warned. Angrily she refused to stop and listen to him, he had no jurisdiction over her.

The bright delicacy of her newly emergent tender love was already tarnishing and fading as resentment, pride and enmity took its place.

Ran!

She loved him but now she felt as though she could very easily come to hate him—she certainly wanted to hate him.

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU’RE not serious …’

Sylvie frowned as she studied the synopsis pinned to the front of the file her employer had just handed her.

Lloyd Kelmer the fourth was the kind of eccentric billionaire who, by rights, only ought to have existed in fairy stories—as a particularly genial and indulgent godfather, Sylvie thought. She had been introduced to him at a party to which she had been invited by some acquaintances of her stepbrother’s. She had only gone to the party because she had been feeling particularly lost and insignificant, having only recently left her American college and moved to New York. They had got chatting and Lloyd had begun to tell her about the trials and traumas he had experienced in running the huge wealthy Trust set up by his grandfather.

‘The old man had this thing about stately homes, I guess I kinda feel the same. He owned a fair handful of the things himself, so he kinda had a taste for them, if you know what I mean. There was the plantation down in Carolina and then a couple of châteaux in France and a palazzo in Venice, so it just kinda happened naturally that he should have this idea of using his millions to preserve and protect big houses, and now the Trust has a whole skew of them all over the world, and more wanting to have the Trust bankroll them every day.’

Sylvie, with her own admittedly second-hand experience of her stepbrother’s problems in running and financing his own large family estate in England, had quite naturally been very interested in what Lloyd had had to say, but it had still surprised her a few days later to receive not just a telephone call from him but the offer of a job as his personal assistant.

Sylvie wasn’t seventeen any longer, nor was she the naive and perhaps over-protected girl she had once been. Lloyd might be in his early sixties and might, so far, not have done or said anything to suggest that he had any ulterior motive whatsoever in making contact with her, but nevertheless, having asked him for time to consider his unexpected offer, the first thing Sylvia had done was telephone her stepbrother in England and ask for his advice.

An unscheduled and unfortunately brief visit from Alex and his wife Mollie to vet Lloyd and talk over the situation with Sylvie had resulted in her deciding to take the job, a decision which, twelve months down the line, she regularly paused to congratulate herself on making, or at least she had done until now.

Her work was varied and fascinating, and barely left her with any time to draw breath, never mind for any personal relationships with members of the opposite sex, but that didn’t worry Sylvie. So far, what she had learned from her experiences with men was that she was a particularly poor judge of the breed. First there had been her revoltingly humiliating teenage crush on Ran and his rejection of her, then there had been the appalling danger she had put herself and her family in with her foolish involvement with Wayne.

She and Wayne might never have been lovers but she had known, from the first, of his involvement in the drug scene and, as foolishly as she had tried to convince herself that Ran would fall in love with her, she had also tried to convince herself that Wayne was simply a lost soul in need of protecting and saving.

She had been wrong on both counts. Love was the last emotion Ran had ever felt for her. And as for Wayne … Well, thankfully he was now safely out of her life.

Her new job took every minute of her time and every ounce of her energy. Each new property the Trust decided to ‘adopt’ had to be inspected, vetted and then painstakingly brought up to the same standard as all the other properties the Trust financed and opened to the general public.

Sylvie knew that her employer’s highly individualistic and personalised way of deciding which of the multitude of properties he was offered as potential new additions to the Trust’s portfolio were worth acquiring caused other organisations to eye him slightly askance. For Lloyd to accept a house it had to have what he described as the ‘right feel’, but his eccentricities tended to make Sylvie feel almost maternally protective of him.

Or at least they had until now.

To return from a six-week trip to Prague, where she had been supervising the takeover of a particularly beautiful if horrendously run-down eighteenth-century palace they had recently added to their acquisitions, to discover that in her absence Lloyd had made yet another acquisition in the form of Haverton Hall, a huge neoclassical building set in its own parkland in Derbyshire, had caused her heart to sink into her shoes.

‘But Sylvie, this place is a gem, a perfect example of English neoclassicism,’ she could hear Lloyd protesting as he studied her stubborn expression. ‘I promise you, you’ll love it. I’ve had Gena book you onto the day after tomorrow’s Concorde flight for London. I thought you’d be pleased. You were only complaining way back in the spring how much you wanted to spend more time with your stepbrother and his wife and their son …

‘This house … Did I tell you, by the way, that the guy who inherited it just happens to know your stepbrother and that’s how he’d got to hear about us? It seems that he was telling your stepbrother about the problems he was experiencing, having unexpectedly inherited this place, and Alex suggested that he should get in touch with me … I wasn’t too sure at first. After all, we’ve already got that pretty little Georgian place down near Brighton, but, well, I kinda felt I owed it to Alex, so I flew over to Britain and went to have a look.’

Sylvie closed her eyes as she listened to Lloyd extolling the virtues of Haverton Hall.

How could she admit to him that it wasn’t so much the house itself she objected to as its owner?

Its owner …

There it was on the front page of the report … Haverton Hall … Owner … Sir Ranulf Carrington. Sir Ranulf now, not just Ran any longer … Not that Sylvie was impressed by a title. How could she be when her own stepbrother was an earl?

She had known all about Ran’s unexpected inheritance of course. It had been the subject of a good deal of discussion at Christmas, when she had gone home, not least because Ran, with an estate of his own to run, quite naturally could no longer run her stepbrother’s.

No one, least of all Ran himself, had expected that he would inherit. After all, his cousin had only been in his early forties and had seemed perfectly fit. The last thing anyone imagined was that he would suffer a fatal heart attack.

Sylvie had smiled politely, but without interest. The last thing, the last person she wanted to waste time talking about was Ran.

Her memories of the way he had rejected her might have been carefully and very deeply buried but … but every time she returned to her brother’s home she was painfully reminded of her seventeen-year-old self and her vulnerability.

No question about it, she must have annoyed and aggravated Ran with her unwanted adoration, but surely he could have handled the situation and her a little more gently, let her down a bit more caringly instead of …

Sylvie was aware that Lloyd was watching her expectantly. How could she, as her instincts urged her to do, totally and flatly refuse to have anything to do with Ran? She couldn’t. She was a woman now, a woman who prided herself on her professionalism, a woman who along with her outward New York shine and gloss had also developed an inner self-worth and determination. She loved her work and she truly believed that what Lloyd and the Trust were doing was extremely worthwhile.

Secretly, there was nothing she enjoyed more than watching the houses that Lloyd rescued from their often pitiful state of decay being restored to their former glory … Perhaps it was idealistic and, yes, even foolishly romantic of her, but there was something about watching the process, of seeing these once grand homes rising phoenix-like from the ashes of their own neglect, that touched a chord within her. She could well understand what motivated Lloyd, and she suspected that, ironically, it had been that long-ago conservation scheme she had worked on under Ran’s supervision which had awakened within her the awareness of how very important it was to preserve and care for—to protect—a landscape and its architecture, which had ultimately led to her sharing Lloyd’s passion for their task.

However, Sylvie’s responsibility as an employee of the Trust included a duty not just to share Lloyd’s enthusiasm but to make sure as well that the Trust’s acquisitions were funded and run in a businesslike manner, and that the Trust’s money was used shrewdly and wisely and not wasted or squandered—a responsibility which Sylvie took very seriously. No project, and certainly no bill, was too small for Sylvie to break down and scrutinise very carefully indeed, a fact which caused the Trust’s accountants to comment approvingly on her attention to detail and her excellent bookkeeping.

It had been pointless for Lloyd to protest when they had been renovating the Venetian palazzo that he preferred the red silk to the gold which Sylvie had favoured.

‘Red is almost twice as expensive,’ she had pointed out sternly, adding as a clincher, ‘And besides, the records we’ve managed to trace all indicate that this room was originally decorated in gold and hung with gold drapes … ‘

‘Then gold it is, then.’ Lloyd had given in with a sigh, but Sylvie had been the one who had been forced to give in to him a few weeks later when, on their departure from Venice, Lloyd had presented her with a set of the most exquisite and expensive leather luggage crafted as only the Italians could craft leather.

‘Lloyd, I can’t possibly accept this,’ Sylvie had protested with a small gasp.

‘Why not? It is your birthday, isn’t it?’ Lloyd had countered, and of course he had been right, and ultimately Sylvie had given in.

Although, as she had told her stepbrother defensively at Christmas when Mollie had marvelled enviously at the luggage, ‘I didn’t want to accept it but Lloyd would have been hurt if I hadn’t.’ She’d added worriedly, ‘Alex, do you think I should have refused …? If you …’ ‘Sylvie, the luggage is beautiful and you did the right thing to accept it,’ Alex had reassured her gently. ‘Stop worrying, little one,’ he had commanded her.

‘Little one’! Only Alex ever called her that, and it made her feel so … so protected and safe.

Protected and safe? She was an adult, a woman, for heaven’s sake, and more than capable of protecting herself, of keeping herself safe. Irritably she dragged her attention back to the file she was holding.

‘You don’t approve, do you?’ Lloyd demanded, shaking his head ruefully. ‘Just wait until you see it, though, Sylvie. You’ll love it. It’s a perfect example of …’

‘We’re already very close to the limit of this year’s budget,’ Sylvie warned him sternly, ‘and—’

‘So what? We’ll just have to increase this year’s funding,’ Lloyd told her with typical laid-back geniality.

‘Lloyd,’ Sylvie protested, ‘you’re talking about an increase of heaven alone knows how many million dollars … The Trust …’

‘I am the Trust,’ Lloyd reminded her gently, and Sylvie had to acknowledge that he spoke the truth. Even so, she gave him an ironic look to which he responded by informing her loftily, ‘I’m just doing what I know the old man would have wanted me to do …’

‘By buying a decaying neoclassical pile in the middle of Derbyshire?’ Sylvie asked him dryly.

And she was still shaking her head as Lloyd told her winningly, ‘You’ll love it, Sylvie … I promise you!’

Cravenly Sylvie was tempted to tell him that she was far too busy and that he would have to find someone else to take charge of this particular project, but her pride—the same pride which had kept her going, kept her head held high and her spirit strong through Ran’s rejection of her and everything that had followed—refused to allow her to do so.

This time she and Ran would be meeting on equal ground—as adults—and this time … this time …

This time what? This time she wasn’t going to let him hurt her. This time her attitude towards him would be cool, distant and totally businesslike.

This time …

Sylvie closed her eyes as she felt the tiny shivers of apprehension icing down her spine. The last time she had seen Ran had been when he had unexpectedly turned up at the airport three years ago when she had been leaving England to finish her degree course in America. She could still remember the shock it had given her to see him there, the shock and the sharply sweet surge of helpless pleasure and longing.

She had still been so vulnerable and naive then, a part of her still hoping that maybe, just maybe, he had changed his mind … his heart … But of course he had not. He had been there simply to assure himself that she was actually leaving the country and his life.

Alex knew, of course, that she had once had a foolish adolescent crush on his friend and employee but, thankfully, that was all he did know; thankfully, he had no knowledge of that shaming and searingly painful, never to be thought about, never mind talked about incident that had taken place when she had still been at university in England.

No one knew about that. Only she and Ran. But that was all in the past now, and she was determined that this time when she and Ran met, as meet they would surely have to, she would be the one who would have the upper hand and he would be the one who would be the supplicant; she would have the power to deny and refuse him what he wanted and he would have to beg and plead with her.

Immediately Sylvie opened her eyes. What on earth had got into her? That kind of warped, vengeful thinking was, to her mind, as foolish and adolescent as her youthful infatuation with Ran had been. She was above all that kind of thing. She had to be; her job demanded it. No, she would make no distinction between Ran and all the other clients she had had to deal with. The fact that Ran had once cruelly and uncaringly turned down her pleas for his love, for his lovemaking, the fact that he had once rejected and demeaned her, would make no difference to the way she treated him. She was above all that kind of small-mindedness. Proudly she lifted her head as she continued to listen to Lloyd enthusiastically telling her the virtues of his latest ‘find’.

Ran stared grimly around the unfurnished, dusty and cobweb-festooned hallway of Haverton Hall. The smell of neglect and the much more ominous dry rot hung malodorously on the still, late afternoon air. The large room, in common with the rest of the Hall, had a desolate, down-at-heel air of weariness which reminded him uncomfortably of the elderly great-uncle who had owned the property when Ran was growing up. Visits to see him had been something which Ran had always dreaded and, ironically, he could remember how relieved he had been to discover that it was not he but an older cousin who would ultimately inherit the responsibility for the vast, empty, neglected house.

But now that cousin was dead and he, Ran, was Haverton’s owner, or at least he had been until a week or so ago, when he had finally and thankfully signed the papers which would convey legal ownership of Haverton and all the problems that went with it into the hands of Lloyd Kelmer.

His initial reaction when he had unexpectedly and unwontedly inherited the place had been to make enquiries to see if any of the British trusts could be persuaded to take it over, but, as their representatives had quickly and wryly explained, the trusts were awash with unwanted properties and deluged with despairing owners wanting them to take on even more.

Faced with the prospect of having to stand aside and watch as the house and its lands fell into an even greater state of decay, Ran hadn’t known what on earth he was going to do—his inheritance had been the house and the land; there hadn’t been any money to leave for its upkeep—and then Alex had happened to mention the existence of an eccentric American billionaire whose main vocation and purpose in life was the buying up and restoring of old properties which he then opened to the public, and Ran had lost no time in getting in touch with him.

To his relief Lloyd had flown over to England to view the house and promptly declared that he loved it.

That relief had turned to something very different, though, when he had received a fax from Lloyd advising him that his assistant, Ms Sylvie Bennett, would be flying over to Britain to act as his representative over the repair and renovation of the property. He could, of course, have simply chosen to turn his back, walk away, and leave someone else to liaise with Sylvie, but Ran wasn’t like that. If he had a job to do he preferred to see it through for himself, no matter how unwanted or potentially problematic that task might be.

Potentially problematic! A bitter half-smile curled his mouth. There was nothing potential about the problems that Sylvie was likely to cause him … Nothing potential at all.

He had heard scraps of news about her over the years, of course, mainly from Alex and Mollie. Sylvie had completed her degree course and majored summa cum laude … Sylvie was living in New York and looking for a job … Sylvie had got a job … Sylvie was working in Venice … In Rome … In Prague … Sylvie … Sylvie … Sylvie …

Alex and Mollie weren’t his only sources of information, though. Only the previous winter in London, Ran had unexpectedly bumped into Sylvie’s mother, Alex’s stepmother, predictably just outside Harvey Nichols.

Belinda had gushed enthusiastically over his recent elevation to the peerage. She had always been the most appalling snob and Ran could still remember how bitterly she had opposed Alex’s request to her after his father had died that Sylvie be allowed to stay on at Otel Place with him instead of being sent to boarding school.

‘Sylvie cannot possibly live with you, Alex,’ she had told him sharply. ‘For one thing it simply wouldn’t be proper. There is, after all, no blood relationship between you. And for another … Sylvie has been spending far too much time with the wrong sort of people.’

Ran, who had been standing outside Alex’s library whilst this conversation had been taking place, had turned round and been about to walk away when, to his disgust, he had suddenly heard his own name mentioned. Alex had demanded of his stepmother, ‘What wrong sort of people …?’

‘Well, Ran for a start … Oh, I know you count him as one of your friends, but he’s still merely an employee and—’

Alex had immediately exploded, informing his stepmother, much to Ran’s chagrin, ‘Ran is a friend and, as for anything else, he happens to be far better born than either you or I.’

‘Really?’ had come back the acid retort. ‘He might be better born, Alex, but he still doesn’t have any money. Sylvie is very much in danger of developing the sort of crush on him that could totally ruin her reputation if she’s to make the right sort of marriage.’

‘‘‘The right sort of marriage’’?’ Alex had retorted angrily. ‘For heaven’s sake, what century are you living in …?’

‘Sylvie is my daughter and there’s no way I want her mixing with the estate workers … and that includes Ran … And whilst we’re on the subject, Alex, I really do think that as Sylvie’s stepbrother you do have a responsibility to her to protect her from unsuitable … friendships …’

Ran could still remember how bitterly, furiously angry he had been, how humiliated he had felt … He had made sure that he kept his distance from Sylvie after that, even if Sylvie herself had not made that particularly easy. He had been twenty-seven then, ten years older than Sylvie. A man, whilst she was still only a child.

A child … A child who had told him passionately that she loved and wanted him; a child who had demanded even more passionately that he love her back, that he make love to her … with her … that he show her … teach her … take her …

He could have wrung her pretty little neck for that … wrung it or— He could still remember how she had defied him, flinging herself into his arms, wrapping them round him, pressing her soft lips against him …

Then, he had managed to resist her … just … that time …

She had always been so passionately intense. It was perhaps no wonder that the love she had professed to feel for him had ultimately turned to loathing and hatred.

And now she was coming back. Not just to England but here, to Haverton, into his home … his life …

What would she be like? Beautiful, of course; that went without saying … Her mother had told him as much when he had bumped into her—not that he needed telling; it had been blindingly obvious even when she was a child that ultimately she would be an extraordinarily beautiful woman.

‘You’ll know, of course, that Sylvie is working in New York … for a billionaire …’ Belinda had cooed happily at him, smiling with satisfaction.

‘He’s totally besotted with her of course,’ she had added, and though it hadn’t been put into as many words Ran had gained the distinct impression from Sylvie’s mother that the relationship between Sylvie and Lloyd was rather more than that of merely employer and employee …

It had come as something of a shock to him later, when he met Lloyd, to recognise how much older than Sylvie he actually was, but he had told himself that if Sylvie chose to have as her lover a man who was plainly so much older than her then that was her business and no one else’s.

Sylvie … In another few hours she would be here, their roles in many ways reversed.

‘I despise you, Ran, I hate you,’ she had hissed at him between gritted teeth when she had first left for New York, averting her face when he had leaned forward to kiss her cheek.

‘I hate you …’ She had said it with almost as much passion as she had once cried out to him that she loved him. Almost as much …

CHAPTER TWO

FIVE miles or so before her ultimate destination Sylvie pulled the car she had hired at the airport over to the side of the road and switched off the engine—not because she was unsure of where she was going, not even because she wanted to absorb the beauty of the Derbyshire countryside around her, magnificent though it was as it basked warmly in the mid-afternoon sunshine, devoid of any sign of human occupation apart from her own.

No, the reason she had stopped was that she had been tellingly aware for the last few miles not just of the slight dampness of her hands on the steering wheel but, even more betrayingly, of the increasing turmoil of her thoughts and the nervous butterflies churning her stomach.

When she finally met … confronted … Ran, she wanted to be calm and in control of both herself and the situation. She was not, she reminded herself sternly, meeting him as an idealistic teenager who had fallen so disastrously and desperately in love with him, but as a woman, a woman who had a job to do. She would not, must not allow her own personal feelings to affect her judgement or her professionalism.

In the eyes of other people, her job might appear to be an enviable sinecure, travelling the world, living and breathing the air of some of its most beautiful buildings, able to afford to commission its very best workmen, but there was far more to it than that.

As Lloyd had remarked admiringly to her the previous year, when he had viewed the finished work on the Venetian palazzo, Sylvie didn’t just possess the most marvellous and accurate eye for correct period detail, for harmony and colour, for the subtlety that meant she could hold in her mind’s eye the entire finished concept of how an original period room must have looked, she also had an extremely shrewd and practical side to her nature which ensured that with every project she had worked on so far she had managed to bring the work to completion on time and under budget.

This was something that didn’t just ‘happen’. It involved hours and hours spent poring over costings and budgets, more hours and hours tramping around warehouses, inspecting fabrics and furniture, and in many cases, because of the age of the houses, it also meant actually finding and commissioning workmen to make new ‘aged’ copies of the pieces she required. Italy, as she had quickly discovered, was a treasure house for such craftsmen and so, oddly, was London, but always at a price, and Sylvie had surprised herself a little at her ability to haggle and bargain for days if necessary, until she had got what she wanted and at a price she considered to be fair.

This had, of course, led to her often having to take an extremely firm line, not just with the craftspeople she dealt with but very often with the original owners of their properties as well, who very often retained life tenancy in the houses and quite naturally wanted to have their say in how they were restored and furnished.

Oh, yes, Sylvie was used to dealing with sometimes difficult ex-owners, and situations where she had to use both patience and tact to ensure that no one’s pride was hurt.

It was a very definite skill to be able to walk the tightrope between avoiding hurting a prior owner’s often sensitive pride and ensuring that the house was restored as she knew Lloyd would want it to be.

But this time it wasn’t just the sensitive feelings of a property’s ex-owner she was going to need to consider. No, this time the person whose feelings, whose emotions were going to need careful handling was herself.

Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply and calmly several times and then opened them again, wiping her hands on a tissue and then re-starting the Discovery’s engine.

She had hired a four-wheel drive, not just because she suspected from the plans and other papers Lloyd had given her to study that it would be useful for travelling over the rugged terrain and the no doubt overgrown driveways that surrounded Haverton Hall, but also because, as she had discovered in the past, a large sturdy off-road vehicle often provided a boon for transporting the odd ‘find’ she came across when scouting around looking for materials for the restoration work to a property.

The statue she had found for the secluded enclosed garden of the Italian palazzo had been one such find, bought and paid for on the spot before the vendor could change his mind, and loaded immediately into her car.

Ten minutes later she was driving through the open gates to Haverton Hall. The twin lodges at either side of the gate, joined by a pretty spanning ‘archway’, had both looked run-down and in need of repair.

Sylvie knew from her homework that they had been constructed at the same time as the main house—and the house, like them, had been designed by one of the country’s foremost architects in the Palladian manner favoured by the likes of Inigo Jones.

Theatrically, the drive to the house curved through flanking trees, several of which were missing, spoiling its original symmetry, although those which remained were so heavily in leaf that they still obscured all her attempts to glimpse the house until she had driven past the final curve in the drive.

Sylvie caught her breath. Used as she was to beautiful properties—after all, Alex’s ancestral home was renowned for its elegant grace—this one, despite the shabbiness of its fading elegance, was something very special and she could see instantly why Lloyd had fallen so immediately and completely in love with it.

Set on a small incline, so that it could overlook its surrounding gardens and parklands, it was everything that the neoclassicist architects had decreed their houses should be and then some more, Sylvie acknowledged as she drove slowly towards the gravelled parking area in front of the massive columned portico to the house. Stopping the Discovery, she opened the door and started to get out.

Ran had seen her drive up from an upstairs window. She was just a few seconds short of five minutes early. Remembering a younger Sylvie, and her apparent total inability to arrive anywhere on time, he grimaced ruefully to himself before making his way downstairs.

They met on the paved portico. Ran opened the massive front door just as Sylvie mounted the last step. She stopped the minute she saw him, freezing instinctively like a gazelle scenting the presence of a leopard.

He hadn’t changed, but then why should he have? He still looked exactly the same. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the smooth warm skin of a countryman, his jeans clinging softly to the taut muscles of his long legs, his forearms bare and bronzed, the soft checked shirt he was wearing exactly the same kind of shirt she could remember seeing him wearing all the years she had been growing up. His hair was still as thick and darkly rich as ever, his jaw just as chiselled—no signs of soft, rich living there, despite the odd snippets of gossip she had picked up from her mother and from Mollie about the discreet parade of elegant, wealthy women who had passed through his life—Ran had always had a penchant for that type, women in the main who were slightly older than himself, soignée, knowing … all the things that an adoring, unknowing seventeen-year-old was not.

Only his eyes had changed, Sylvie noticed, with a sudden sharp flicker of sensation which she immediately suppressed. Oh, they were still the same incredible colour, somewhere between onyx and gold, still flecked with those heart-dizzying little specks of lighter colour and still surrounded by those unfairly long, thick dark lashes.

Yes, all that was still familiar to her, but the lazily sensual way they were studying her, the subtle but very male message she could read in them as Ran’s gaze flicked over her T-shirt-covered breasts and her slim waist in the plain blue jeans … that was most certainly not familiar to her, at least not from Ran.

And it was only then, when she countered that look with an instinctive and automatically female one of cool reproval, that Sylvie realised that one of them had closed the distance between them from its original safe several metres to a much, much less secure three or four feet.

One of them … To her chagrin Sylvie recognised that it was not only Ran who had moved so much closer and that she herself was halfway towards the front door now instead of on the perimeter of the portico … When had she moved … and how, without knowing what she was doing …? Ran had always had that kind of effect on her … Had had … All that was in the past now, she reminded herself fiercely. And just to ensure that Ran knew it too she held out her hand to him and, raising her voice slightly, smiled with cool authority as she greeted him.

‘Ran, good, I’m glad you’re here. We can get straight down to work. I’ve studied the plans of the house, but I always find that it makes an enormous difference to actually walk over a property, so …’

God, but she was so incredibly sexy, Ran acknowledged. He could feel the heat, the reaction, the response surging through his veins. He had been prepared to find her beautiful. She had always been that. But in the past it had been almost a sexless, childish kind of beauty … Now her sensuality, and his own reaction to it, hit him in the solar plexus like a blow.

As for that cool little voice of authoritative superiority, that distancing little outstretched hand … Later Ran was to ask himself what on earth he had thought he was doing and if he had gone completely mad, but at the time …

Ignoring her outstretched hand, he covered the distance between them and before Sylvie could even begin to guess what he intended doing his hands were resting either side of her waist, his scent, his heat filling her nostrils, his body and his mouth less than inches away from her own.

‘Ran!’

Was that really her own voice, that soft, husky, and, yes, somehow invitingly sensual little thread of sound, gasping his name in a slow-drawn-out moan that was more invitation than protest?

But it was too late to correct the erroneous message she knew instinctively she had given; Ran was already acting on what he had obviously interpreted her ‘protest’ to mean, his hands lifting from her waist to her arms, her shoulders, as he drew her closer, his mouth fastening on hers as he kissed her, not as an old acquaintance or a friend of her brother’s, Sylvie recognised, her senses reeling, but in all the ways she had dreamed of him kissing her all those years ago, as a man kissed a woman.

Despairingly she struggled valiantly to resist but it was useless. Her own foolish senses were doing far more to aid Ran than to support her, turning traitor and welcoming his sensual assault of her mouth with the eagerness of parched land greedily soaking up a heavy rainfall.

‘Ran …’

She tried weakly to summon her flagging defences, but the objection she tried to make was lost beneath Ran’s kiss and all the ineffectual parting of her lips did was to allow Ran’s tongue to slip masterfully into the sweet moistness of her mouth.

Briefly she tried to challenge its entry, but what should have been the rejecting thrust of her own tongue against his swiftly became, under Ran’s sensually skilful manipulation and expertise, more the intimate sparring of lovers rather than the defensive rejection of adversaries.

‘Mmm …’ Instinctively Sylvie moved closer, close enough to lean her body fully against Ran’s and let his strength support her weakness as delicious tremors of sensation skidded dangerously over her.

‘Mmm …’

Beneath her hands Ran’s back felt so broad, so firm, so …

Eagerly she tugged his shirt free of his waistband, glorying in the sensation of sliding her hands beneath it and onto the hard heat of his skin.

She felt him shudder responsively as she traced his spine and her own body jolted fiercely in excited reaction.

Beneath her white T-shirt she could feel her suddenly swollen breasts pressing eagerly against her bra. Her nipples ached and even without being able to see them she knew the crests would be hard and erect, the soft flesh around them flooded with aroused dark colour.

Ran could not see what he was doing to her, though … what effect he was having on her as his tongue slid erotically against her own, no longer coaxing but openly, fiercely demanding from her the response his sexuality wanted.

Only one man had seen her body naked and aroused, to only one man had she willingly and, yes, almost wantonly exposed the full femaleness of herself, glorying in her sexuality, in her response to him, her need for him, not fearing … not imagining that he would reject her.

Reject her!

Immediately Sylvie stiffened, her nails momentarily digging into Ran’s back as she recognised with shocking abruptness just what she was doing and, even worse, whom she was doing it with.

‘Let go of me …’ she demanded furiously, fiercely pushing him away, her face bright with mortification and confusion as Ran immediately stepped back from her and then, without taking his eyes off her face, casually unfastened his belt and started to push his shirt back inside his jeans.

If her face had been pink with self-consciousness before, that was nothing to the heat she could feel burning off it now, Sylvie recognised as she refused to give in to the silent visual challenge Ran was giving her and forced herself to keep her gaze locked on his as he slowly and tauntingly completed his task.

Why, oh, why should it be that when a woman disturbed a man’s clothing in the heat of passion he could make her feel so self-conscious and femininely vulnerable whilst he repaired the dishevelment she had caused, but when it had been a man who had disturbed a woman’s clothing she was still the one to feel shy and self-conscious when she re-dressed herself?

No wonder the Victorians had considered modesty to be a feminine virtue.

His shirt rearranged to his satisfaction, Ran refastened his belt and then, without taking his eyes off her face, greeted her ironically.

‘Welcome to Haverton Hall …’

Sylvie would have given the earth to be able to make a suitably withering response but she could think of none. The shaming fact was that, no matter how she tried to convince herself otherwise, she had done exactly what she had promised herself she would not do and allowed him to take the upper hand. And worse than that … far worse … she had … Quickly she swallowed the frighteningly familiar and painful lump of aching emptiness she could feel blocking the back of her throat. No way … She was not going down that road again … not for a king’s ransom. The arrogant, selfish, almost cruel way Ran had just behaved towards her proved everything she had ever learned about him. She was under no illusions about why he had kissed her like that … It was his way of reminding her not just of the past, but also of his superiority … of telling her that, whilst she might be the one who was in charge of the project they were going to be working on together, he still had the power to control her … to control her and to hurt her.

Sylvie turned swiftly on her heel, not waiting for him to see the emotions she knew were clouding her eyes.

‘The lake needs dredging,’ she commented crisply as she shuttered her eyes and stared out towards the large ornamental lake several hundred yards away from the house.

It was the wrong thing to say. She could hear the mocking amusement in Ran’s voice as he drawled, ‘Well, yes, it does, but let’s hope this time you don’t end up head-first in the mud. We’ll have to hose you down out here if you do. There’s no way Mrs Elliott is going to let you into the Rectory smelling of stagnant lake water and covered in mud and weed …’

Sylvie stiffened, for the moment ignoring his reference to the ignominious fate which had overtaken her as an over-eager teenager when she had missed her footing and fallen head-first into the pond they had been cleaning out on Alex’s estate.

‘The Rectory?’ she questioned him with ominous calm.

She knew from the reports she had read before leaving New York that Ran was presently living in the eighteenth-century Rectory which was part of the estate and which, like the living which had originally gone with it, was in the gift of the owner of the Hall. To judge from the plans and photographs which Sylvie had seen, it was a very, very substantial and handsome property, surrounded by particularly attractive grounds, and she had not been in the least bit surprised to read that it had originally been built for a younger son of the family who had chosen to go into holy orders.

‘Mmm … you won’t have seen it as you drove in. It’s on the other side of the estate. I’m living there at the moment and I’ve arranged with Mrs Elliott, who used to be my cousin’s housekeeper when he lived there, for a room to be prepared for you. Lloyd mentioned that you’d probably be working here for a number of months and he and I agreed that in view of Haverton’s distance from the nearest town, and the fact that Lloyd has warned me that you like to keep a very keen eye on the budgets, it makes sense for you to stay at the Rectory rather than waste time and money hunting around for alternative accommodation. Especially since it seems that there could be occasions when you might have to travel abroad to check on work you’ve set in progress at other Trust properties.’

What he said made sense, but still—she wasn’t a child any longer; what she did not need to have was Ran telling her what to do!

‘But you live at the Rectory,’ Sylvie commented quickly.

Immediately Ran’s eyebrows rose and he told her laconically, ‘It’s got ten bedrooms, Sylvie, excluding the upper attics—more than enough space for both of us, I should have thought.’

‘Does this Mrs Elliott live in?’ Sylvie asked him stiffly.

Ran stared at her for a moment and then burst out laughing.

‘No, she doesn’t,’ he told her coolly, ‘although I’m not sure why it should make any difference. You and I have lived under the same roof before, after all, Sylvie, and if it’s the thought of any unplanned nocturnal wanderings that’s worrying you …’ He gave her a wolfish grin and to her fury actually reached out and patted her tauntingly on the arm as he told her, still laughing, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make sure I get a lock put on my door so that you don’t come wandering in …’

Sylvie was too speechless with anger to be able to respond.

‘What’s wrong now?’ Ran challenged her mock-innocently. ‘There’s no need to be embarrassed at the fact that you occasionally sleepwalk … Of course, it might be an idea to make sure you go to bed wearing something, but I’ll warn Mrs Elliott and …’

He stopped as Sylvie made a female growl of frustration deep in her throat.

‘That was years ago, when I was a child,’ she told him defensively, ‘and it only happened once … I don’t sleepwalk now …’

What was she doing? What was she saying? Why was she letting him do this to her? Sylvie ground her teeth. Yes, once, when she had been initially disoriented and upset at her mother marrying again, she had actually sleepwalked, and might, in fact, have suffered a nasty accident if Ran hadn’t happened to see her on his way up to bed. But it had happened once, that was all, and, even after she had eventually developed a massive crush on him, surreptitiously creeping into his bedroom had been the last thing on her mind then. She had been far too unworldly, far too naive even to think of such a thing.

‘No! Then what are you worrying about?’ Ran challenged her, his expression suddenly hardening as he demanded, ‘If it’s the fact that you’ll be living under my roof whilst Lloyd is in New York—’

‘Your roof?’ Sylvie interrupted him quickly, suddenly recognising a way of turning the tables on him and regaining control of the situation, of showing him who was boss. She gave him an acid-sweet smile. ‘The Rectory may have been yours, Ran, but as part of the estate it is now owned by the Trust and—’

‘Not so.’ Ran stopped her even faster than she had him. ‘I have retained ownership of the Rectory and the land. I intend to farm it and to develop the fishing and shooting rights.’

Sylvie was momentarily caught off guard. It was most unusual for Lloyd to allow something like that. He normally insisted on buying whatever land went with a property, if only to ensure that as much of its natural background and surroundings as possible were retained.

‘If you’d like to follow me we can drive over to the Rectory now,’ Ran offered coolly.

Immediately Sylvie shook her head. ‘No … I want to see over the house first,’ she told him crisply.

Ran stared at her and then looked at his watch before telling her softly, ‘That will take at least two hours, possibly longer; it’s now five o’clock in the afternoon.’

Sylvie raised her eyebrows. ‘So …?’ she challenged.

Ran shrugged.

‘I should have thought after a transatlantic flight and the drive here from the airport that you’d have wanted a rest before touring the house, if only so that you can view it with a fresh eye and a clear head.’

‘You’re out of touch, Ran,’ Sylvie told him with a small, superior smile. ‘These are the nineties. Crossing the Atlantic for a power breakfast and then re-crossing it for another meeting is nothing,’ she boasted.

Ran shrugged again and then waved one hand in the direction of the main doorway as he drawled laconically, ‘Very well … after you …’

As he walked towards the door behind her, Ran paused. The sight of her had given him much more of a shock than he liked. He had prepared himself for the fact that he would be meeting her as a woman, and not as the girl he had watched boarding the flight for America, but womanhood came in many different guises and took many different forms. However, none of them could possibly come anywhere near causing the kind of devastating effect on his senses that Sylvie’s was creating.

Her hair, long and thick, hung down to her shoulders in an immaculately groomed swathe of molten honey-gold. Just looking at it, at her, made him ache to run his fingers through it, to watch its silken weight sliding through his hands …

His stomach muscles tensed. The brilliantly white T-shirt she was wearing hugged the soft shape of her breasts before disappearing into her jeans. The T-shirts he remembered her wearing had been big and baggy and invariably slightly grubby as she happily trotted after him whilst he worked.

Even to his male uneducated eyes, this T-shirt was plainly not the kind one wore to work outdoors in.

And as for her jeans …!

Ran closed his eyes. What was it about the sight of a pair of plain blue jeans lovingly hugging the soft, shapely contours of a woman’s behind that had such an evocative, such a provocative effect on a man’s male instincts?

Unabashedly he acknowledged that had Sylvie been a complete stranger to him, and had he been walking down the street behind her, he would have instinctively increased his pace to walk past her so that he could see if she looked as good from the front as she did from the rear.

But she wasn’t a stranger, she was Sylvie.

‘I’ve told Alex that if you don’t keep away from Sylvie he must make you,’ Sylvie’s mother had once warned him haughtily, shortly after her husband’s death.

She had caught Ran at a bad moment and he had reacted instinctively and immediately regretted it as he’d thrown back at her bluntly, ‘It’s Sylvie you should be warning to keep away from me. She’s the one doing the chasing. Teenage girls are like that,’ he had added unkindly, watching as Sylvie’s mother pursed her lips in shock.

It had been then that he had seen Sylvie slipping past the open doorway of Alex’s estate office. Had she overheard them? He’d hoped not. Difficult though her unwanted crush on him sometimes had been, the last thing he’d wanted to do was to hurt her. But now, as he watched her, Ran acknowledged that these days if anyone was going to be hurt it was far more likely to be him! Why had she taken as her lover and her intended partner for life a man more than old enough to be her father? Ran couldn’t begin to understand. Unless it was because she had lost her father at such a young and vulnerable age.

Sylvie had pulled open the house’s unlocked door and disappeared inside. Sombrely Ran followed her.

CHAPTER THREE

THEY had covered the ground floor of the house, walked the length of the elegant gallery, with its windows overlooking the parkland and the distant vista of the Derbyshire hills, and were just inspecting the enormous ballroom which opened off it when Sylvie acknowledged inwardly that Ran might have been right to advise her to wait until after she had rested to inspect the house.

Haverton Hall’s rooms might not possess quite the vastness of the palazzo’s marble-floored rooms, nor the fading grandeur of the Prague palace, but Sylvie had already lost count of the number of salons and antechambers they had walked through on the lower floor. The gallery felt as though it stretched for miles, and as she studied the dusty wooden floor of the ballroom her heart sank at the thought of inspecting its lofty plasterwork ceiling and its elegantly inlaid panelling. And they still had the upper floors to go over! But she couldn’t afford to show any weakness in front of Ran and have him crowing over her. No way. And so, ignoring the warning beginnings of a throbbing headache, she took a deep breath and began to inspect the panelling.

‘The first thing we’re going to need to do is to get a report on the extent of the dry rot,’ she told Ran in a firmly businesslike voice.

He stopped her. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

Sylvie paused and turned to look angrily at him.

‘Ran, there’s something you have to understand,’ she told him pointedly. ‘I am in charge here now. I wasn’t asking for your approval,’ she told him gently. ‘The house has dry rot. We need a specialist’s report on the extent of the damage.’

‘I already have one.’

Sylvie started to frown.

‘When …?’ she began.

But before she could continue Ran told her coolly, ‘It was obvious that the Trust would need to commission a full structural survey of the place to assess it, so in order to save time I commissioned one. You should have had a copy. I had one faxed to the Trust’s New York office last week when I received it.’

Sylvie could feel her heart starting to beat just a little bit too fast as the angry colour burned her face.

‘You commissioned a survey?’ she questioned with dangerous calmness. ‘May I ask who gave you that authority?’

‘Lloyd,’ came back the prompt and stingingly dismissive reply.

Sylvie opened her mouth and then closed it again. It was quite typical of Lloyd that he should have done such a thing and she knew it. He would only have been thinking of saving time in getting his latest pet project under way; he would not have seen, as she so clearly did, that what Ran was actually doing was not trying to be helpful but deliberately trying to upstage her and challenge her authority.

‘I take it you haven’t read the report,’ Ran was continuing, talking to her as though she were some kind of errant pupil who had failed to turn in a piece of homework, Sylvie decided as she silently ground her firm white teeth.

‘I haven’t received any report to read,’ she corrected him acidly.

Ran shrugged.

‘Well, I’ve got a copy here. Do you want to continue with your inspection or would you prefer to wait until you’ve had a chance to read through it?’

Had the question been put by anyone else, Sylvie knew that she would have gratefully seized on the excuse to defer her self-imposed task until after she had had a rest and the opportunity to do something about the increasingly painful pressure of her headache, but because it was Ran who asked her, Ran whom she was fiercely determined not to allow to have any advantage over her, she shook her head and told him aggressively, ‘When I want to change any of my plans, Ran, I’ll let you know. But until I do I think you can safely take it that I don’t …’

She saw his eyebrows lift a little but he made no comment.

It had been a hot week and the air in the ballroom was stifling, the dust thick and choking as it lay heavily all around them.

Sylvie sneezed and winced as the pounding in her head increased. The bright early evening sunlight streaming in through the windows was making her feel oddly dizzy and faintly nauseous … She tried to look away from it and gave a small gasp of pain as the act of moving her head made the blood pound agonisingly against her temples.

Only rarely did she suffer these enervating headaches. They were brought on by stress and tension. Turning away so that Ran wouldn’t see her, she tried to massage the pain away discreetly.

‘Careful …’ Ran warned her tersely.

‘What?’ Sylvie spun round, colour flaring up under her skin as Ran motioned towards a piece of fallen plasterwork she had almost walked over.

She was feeling increasingly sick and dizzy in the sharp bright light. Despairingly she closed her eyes and then wished she hadn’t as the room started to spin dangerously around her.

‘Sylvie …’

Quickly she opened her eyes.

‘You’re not well; what is it?’ she heard Ran demanding tersely.

‘Nothing,’ she denied angrily. ‘A headache, that’s all.’

‘A headache …?’ His eyebrows shot up as Ran studied her now far too pale face and saw the tell-tale beading of sweat on her forehead.

‘That’s it,’ he told her forcefully. ‘We can finish this tomorrow. You need to rest.’

‘I need to do my job,’ Sylvie protested shakily, but Ran quite obviously wasn’t going to listen to her.

‘Can you make it back to the car?’ he was asking her. ‘Or shall I carry you?’

Carry her … Sylvie gave him a furiously outraged look.

‘Ran, there’s nothing wrong with me,’ she lied, and then gave a small gasp as the quick movement of her head as she shook it in denial of his suggestion caused nauseating arrows of pain to savage her aching head.

The next thing she knew, Ran was taking her very firmly by the arm and propelling her towards the door, ignoring her protests to leave her alone.

At the top of the stairs, to her infuriated chagrin, he turned round and swung her up into his arms, telling her through gritted teeth, ‘If you’re going to faint on me, Sylvie, then here’s the best place to do it.’

She wanted to tell him that fainting was the last thing she intended to do, but her face was pressed against the warm flesh of his throat and if she tried to speak her lips would be touching his skin and then …

Swallowing hard, Sylvie tried to concentrate on banishing the agonising pain in her head but it was something that she couldn’t just will away. As she knew from past experience, the only way of getting rid of it was for her to go to bed and sleep it off.

They were downstairs now and Ran was crossing the hallway, thrusting open the door and carrying her out into the fresh air.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded as he walked past her Discovery towards his own car.

‘I’m taking you home … to the Rectory,’ he told her promptly.

‘I can drive,’ Sylvie protested, but to her annoyance Ran simply gave a brief derogatory laugh.

He told her dismissively, ‘No way …’ And then she was being bundled into the passenger seat of a Land Rover nearly as ancient as the one she remembered him driving around her stepbrother’s estate, and as she struggled to sit up Ran was jumping into the driver’s seat next to her and turning the key in the ignition.

‘Ran … my luggage …’ She was protesting, but he obviously had no intention of listening to her. With the Land Rover’s engine noise making it virtually impossible for her to speak over it, Sylvie gave up her attempt to stop him and subsided weakly into her seat, hunching her shoulders as she deliberately turned her head away and refused to look at him.

As he glanced at her hunched shoulders and averted profile, Ran’s frown deepened. In that pose she looked so defenceless and vulnerable, so different from the professional, high-powered businesswoman she had just shown herself to be and much more like the girl he remembered.

The Land Rover kicked up a trail of dust as he turned off the drive and onto the track that led to the Rectory.

Girl or woman, what did it matter so far as he was concerned? He cursed under his breath, his attention suddenly caught by the sight of several deer grazing placidly beside the track. They were supposed to be confined to the park area surrounding the house and not cropping the grazing he needed for his sheep. There must be a break in the fence somewhere—the new fence which he had just severely depleted his carefully hoarded bank balance to buy—which meant … There had been rumours about rustlers being in the area; other farmers had reported break-ins and losses.

Once he had seen Sylvie settled at the house he would have to come back out and check the fencing.

Sylvie winced as the Land Rover hit a rut in the road, sitting up and just about managing to suppress a sharp cry of pain—or at least she thought she had suppressed it until she heard Ran asking her curtly, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing … I’ve got a headache, that’s all,’ she stressed offhandedly, but her face flushed as she saw the look he was giving her and she realised that he wasn’t deceived.

‘A headache?’ he queried dryly. ‘It looks more like a migraine to me. Have you got some medication for it or …?’

‘It isn’t a migraine,’ Sylvie denied, adding reluctantly, ‘It’s … I … It’s a stress headache,’ she admitted in an angry rush of words. ‘I … I get them occasionally. The travel … flying …’

Ran’s mouth hardened as he listened to her.

‘What’s happened to you, Sylvie?’ he asked her quietly. ‘Why should it be so difficult for you to admit to being vulnerable … human …? What is it that pushes you, drives you, forces you to make such almost superhuman demands on yourself? Anyone else, having flown across the Atlantic and driven close on fifty miles without a break, would have chosen to rest and relax a little bit before starting to work, but not you …’

‘That may be the British way, but it’s different in America,’ Sylvie told him sharply. ‘There, people are rewarded, praised, for fulfilling their potential and for—’

‘Driving themselves into such a state of exhaustion that they make themselves ill?’ Ran challenged her. ‘I thought that Lloyd was supposed to …’ He stopped, not wanting to put into words, to make a reality, the true relationship he knew existed between Sylvie and her boss. ‘I thought he cared about you … valued you …’ he finished carefully instead.

Sylvie was sitting upright now, ignoring the pounding pain in her head as she glared belligerently at Ran.

‘Lloyd doesn’t … he isn’t …’

She stopped, shaking her head. How could she explain to Ran of all people about the thing that drove her, the memories and the fears? As a teenager she had done so many foolish things, and even let down the people who had loved and supported her; her involvement with Wayne was something she knew she would always regret.

She hadn’t known at the time, of course, just what he was. In her innocent naiveté she had never guessed that he was anything other than someone who had bought a handful of recreational drugs to pass on to people at rave parties.

When she had run away from university, though, to join Wayne and the band of New Age travellers who had invaded her stepbrother’s lands, she had quickly learned just what a mistake she had made, and she knew that she would always be grateful to Alex and his wife Mollie, not just for the fact that they had helped her to extricate herself from a situation she had very quickly grown to fear, but also for the fact that they had supported her, believed in her, accepted her acknowledgement that she had made a mistake and given her the opportunity to get her life back on track.

She and Wayne had never actually been lovers, although she knew that very few people would believe that, nor had she ever used drugs; but she had been tainted by his lifestyle, had had her eyes opened painfully to certain harsh realities of life, and after Alex had interceded for her with her mother and with the university authorities, getting her a place at Vassar where she had been able to complete her education, she had promised herself that she would pay him and Mollie back for their kindness and their love and support by showing the world and her detractors just how worthy of that support she was.

At Vassar she had gained a reputation as something of a recluse and a swot; dates and parties had been strictly out of bounds so far as she was concerned and her dedication had paid off with excellent exam results.

And now, just as she had once felt the need to prove herself to Alex and Mollie, she felt a corresponding need to prove herself worthy of Lloyd’s trust in her professional abilities. It was true that sometimes she did drive herself too hard … but the scornful verbal sketch of herself that Ran had just drawn for her quite illogically hurt.

Given that she had striven so hard to be considered wholly professional, to be capable and strong, it was quite definitely illogical, she knew, to wish forlornly that Ran might have adopted a more protective and less critical attitude towards her, that he might have shown more concern, some tenderness, some …

‘Why the hell didn’t you say you weren’t feeling well?’

Ran’s curt demand broke into her thoughts, underlining their implausibility, their stupidity, their dangerous vulnerability.

‘Why should I have done?’ Sylvie countered defensively, adding tersely, ‘I hardly think that either the Trust or the owners of the properties it acquires would thank me for wasting both time and consequently money by bringing up the subject of my own health during business discussions. You and I may know one another from the past, Ran, but so far as I am concerned the fact that we have dealings with one another in the present is entirely down to the business and professional relationship between us.’

It was several seconds before Ran bothered to respond to her unrehearsed but determinedly distancing little speech, and for a moment Sylvie thought that he was actually going to ignore what she had said, but then he turned towards her and said, ‘So what you’re saying is that it’s to be purely business between us, is that it?’

It took every ounce of courage that Sylvie possessed, and then some, for her to be able to meet the look he was giving her full-on, but somehow or other she managed to do so, even if the effort left her perilously short of breath and with her heart pounding almost as painfully as her head, She agreed coolly, ‘Yes.’

Ran was the one to look away first, his face hardening as he glanced briefly at her mouth before doing so.

‘Well, if that’s what you want, so be it,’ he told her crisply, returning his attention to his driving.

His response, instead of making her feel relieved, left her feeling … What? Disappointed that he hadn’t challenged her, hadn’t given her the opportunity to … to what? Argue with him? Why should she want to? What was it she felt she had to prove? What was it she wanted to be given the opportunity to prove?

Angry with herself, Sylvie shook her head. There was nothing, of course. She had made her point, said what she wanted to say and now Ran knew exactly how she viewed their working relationship and exactly how she viewed him. He could be in no doubt that, were it not for the fact that he was the owner of a property the Trust had decided to acquire, she would have no cause, nor any wish, to be involved with him.

Up ahead of her she could see a grove, a small wooded area; Ran drove into it and through it towards the mellow high red-brick wall and through its open gates.

The house which lay beyond them took Sylvie’s breath away.

She was used to grand and beautiful properties, to elegance of design, to scenery and settings so spectacular that one had to blink and look again, but this was something else.

This was a house as familiar to her as though she had already walked every one of its floors, as though she knew each and every single one of its rooms, its corners. This was a house, the house she had created for herself as a girlhood fantasy. A house, the house, the home which would house and protect the family she so much longed to be a part of.

Totally bemused, she couldn’t drag her gaze away from its red-brick walls, her professional eye automatically noting the symmetrical perfection of its Georgian windows and the delicacy of the pretty fanlight above the doorway. An ancient wisteria clothed the facing wall, its trunk and branches silvery grey against the rich warmth of the brick; its flowering season was now over but its soft green tendrils of leaves were coolly restful to her aching eyes.

Prior to her mother’s second marriage to Alex’s father, they had lived in a smart apartment in Belgravia—her mother had been a very social person, involved, as she still was, in a good many charities and a keen bridge player, but Sylvie had never really felt comfortable or at home in the elegant London flat. Before his death her father had owned a large house in one of London’s squares and Sylvie still missed the freedom that living there had given her.

To comfort herself she had created her perfect house and the perfect family to go with it, mother, father, daughter—herself, plus a sister for her to play with and a brother too, along with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. It had been the house that she had given most of her mental energy and imagination to lovingly creating, though. A house for a family, a house that wrapped itself lovingly and protectively around you … a house with enough land for her to have a pony. A house … The house … This house..!

Ran had stopped the Land Rover. Shakily she got out, unable to take her eyes off the house, barely aware of Ran’s expression as he watched her.

Just for a second, seeing that luminous bemused expression on her face, he had been transported back in time … to a time when she had looked at him like that, a time when …

Grimly he reminded himself of what Sylvie had just said, of the terms she had just set between them. She had made it more than plain, if he had needed it underlining, which he had not, that the only reason she was here in his life was because of her job and that, given the choice, she would far rather be working alongside someone else … anyone else.

The gravel crunched beneath Sylvie’s feet as she walked slowly, as if in a dream, towards the Rectory’s front door.

Already she knew what would lie beyond it—the soft-toned walls of the hallway with its highly polished antique furniture, its glowing wooden floors, its rugs and bowls of country-garden flowers. In her mind’s eye she could see it all as she herself had created it, smell the scent of the flowers … see the contented look in the eyes of the cat who basked illegally on the rug, lying there sunning himself in a warm beam of sunshine, ignoring the fact that his place and his basket were not here but in the kitchen.

Automatically her hand reached out for the door handle and then she realised what she was doing. Self-consciously she stepped back, turning her head away so that she didn’t have to look at Ran as he stepped past her to unlock the door.

It was cruelly ironic that Ran, of all people, should own this house that so closely epitomised all that she herself had longed for in a home as a young girl.

The front door was open. Ran paused to allow her to precede him inside but, as she did so, Sylvie came to an abrupt halt. Faded, unattractive wallpaper and chipped dark brown paint assaulted her disbelieving gaze. In place of the polished mellow wooden floor she had expected was a carpet, so old and faded that it was no longer possible to even guess at its original colour, but Sylvie suspected with disgust that it must have been the same horrendous brown as the paintwork.

True, there was some furniture, old rather than antique, dusted rather than polished, but there were certainly no flowers, no perfumed scent, nor, not surprisingly, was there any cat.

‘What is it?’ Ran asked her.

Hard on the heels of the acute envy she had felt when she had first seen the exterior of the house came a pang of sadness for its inner neglect. Oh, it was clean enough, if you discounted the air possessing a sharp, almost chemical smell that made her wrinkle her nose a little, but it was a long, long way from the home she had so lovingly mentally created.

She heard Ran moving around in the hall behind her.

‘I’ll take you up to your room,’ he told her. ‘Have you got something for your headache?’

‘Yes, but they’re in my luggage which is in my hire car,’ Sylvie told him grimly.

In the excitement of seeing the house her headache had abated slightly, but now the strong smell in the hallway had made it return and with interest. She could no longer deny that lying down somewhere dark and quiet had become a necessity.

‘It’s this way,’ Ran told her unnecessarily as he headed towards the stairs.

Once they might have been elegant, although now it was hard to know; the original staircase no longer existed and the monstrosity which had replaced it made Sylvie shudder in distaste.

The house had a sad, forlorn air about it, she recognised as she reached the large rectangular landing, carpeted again in the same revolting dun-brown as the hallway below.

‘Did your great-uncle live here?’ Sylvie asked him curiously.

‘No. It was let out to tenants. When my cousin inherited he moved in here, and after his death … I thought about selling it, but it’s too far off the beaten track to attract the interest of a buyer, and then once I’d made the decision to hang onto the land and farm it seemed to make sense to move into the house myself. It needs some work doing on it, of course …’

Sylvie said nothing but her expressive eyes gave her away and Ran continued coldly, ‘Well, yes, I can see that to someone such as yourself, used to only the very best that money can provide, it must be rather a comedown. I’m sorry if the only accommodation I can offer you isn’t up to your usual standards …’ Ran’s eyes darkened as he reflected on the elegance of Alex’s home and the luxury she must have enjoyed with Lloyd, but to Sylvie, who was remembering how Ran had once seen her living in the most basic and primitive conditions, when she had been part of the group of New Age travellers who had set up camp on Alex’s estate, the look he was giving her seemed to be one of taunting mockery.

‘You’re down here,’ Ran was saying as he led the way down a corridor with doors off either side of it, pushing one of them open and then standing to one side as he waited for her to enter.

The bedroom was large, with two long windows that let in the glowing evening sunlight. The old-fashioned wooden furniture, like the tables in the hallway, was spotlessly clean but lacked the warm lustre that it would once have had from being lovingly polished by several generations of female hands. The empty grate in the pretty fireplace, which she would have filled with a collection of dried flowers or covered with an embroidered firescreen, was simply that—an empty grate. The curtains and the bedding were modern and, she suspected, newly purchased for her visit. The same depressing brown carpet as downstairs covered the floor.

‘You’ve got your own bathroom,’ Ran told her as he crossed the floor to push open another door. ‘It’s old-fashioned but it works.’

As she looked into the bathroom past him, Sylvie said wryly, ‘It may be old-fashioned to you, Ran, but this type of plain white Edwardian sanitaryware is very much in vogue right now.’

‘There are wardrobes and cupboards on that wall,’ he told her unnecessarily, indicating the bank of built-in furniture. ‘I haven’t had the chance yet, but tomorrow I’ll bring up a desk from downstairs.’

‘I’ll certainly need somewhere to put my laptop,’ Sylvie agreed. ‘But I will also need to have a room somewhere, I think preferably up at the Hall itself, to work officially from. But that’s something we can discuss later.

‘Where’s your housekeeper?’ she asked him. ‘I’d like to meet her …’

‘Mrs Elliott … She’ll be here in the morning. I can introduce you then.

‘Look.’ He glanced at his watch and then told her, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you. I have to go out, but if you’d like something for that headache …’

‘What I’d like is my own medication,’ Sylvie told him acidly, ‘but, since that’s not available, thanks but no, thanks. I need my luggage,’ she added pointedly.

‘If you give me the keys to your Discovery, I’ll go and get it for you,’ Ran told her promptly. ‘Just give me ten minutes to make a couple of phone calls.’

As she handed over the keys to her car Sylvie wondered where it was he was going to be spending the evening and with whom.

Ran was a very masculinely attractive man; even she had to admit that.

‘I doubt that Ran will ever marry,’ Alex had once commented.

‘Why not?’ Sylvie had questioned curiously, her adoring teenage heart thumping frantically at the thought of being married to Ran, of being his wife, of sharing his life, his bed … A delicious shiver of anticipatory pleasure had run through her as she’d willed her stepbrother to say that there was a mysterious someone in Ran’s life, far too young for him as yet, a special someone … herself …

But instead, disappointingly, prosaically, Alex had told her, ‘An estate manager’s salary and tied accommodation in a small cottage are hardly up to the standard or style of living that the women Ran dates are used to, and he’s far too proud to want to live off his wife …’

‘The women …?’ Sylvie had flared unhappily, whilst her mother, who had been listening to their conversation, had chipped in disparagingly.

‘Ran would be far better off marrying some farmer’s daughter, a girl who’s been brought up for that kind of lifestyle …’

Sylvie remembered how Alex’s eyebrows had risen at this display of snobbery from her mother. But now, of course, Ran’s prospects had changed. She knew how much Lloyd had paid him for the house and the estate. There had been death duties and other commitments to meet, of course, but even so he would have been left with a sizeable sum, much larger than the inheritance she had received from her father, which her over-anxious mother had been convinced would make her a target for potential fortune-hunters.

Yes, with the money he had at his disposal, and the living he would no doubt make out of the land, Ran would financially have a great deal to offer a woman.

Not that a man’s financial status had ever counted for anything with her. Love in a cottage might be an ideal, a daydream, a fantasy now relegated to her childhood, but secretly Sylvie still adhered to the belief ‘Better a humble home where love is than a mansion without it’— and, of course, there had never been any doubt in her mind whatsoever that when it came to the material things in life what Ran had to offer the woman he loved …

The woman he loved.

She bit her lip as Ran started to walk away from her. Once he had gone she stared out of the bedroom window. It overlooked the formal gardens to one side of the house. Like the house, they had an air of neglect; of being unloved. Sylvie’s vivid imagination soon filled the neglected borders with lush herbaceous plants and restored the overgrown rose garden to what must have been a haven of peace and perfume.

The air in the bedroom felt stale, but when she tried to open one of the sash windows all she managed to do was to break one of her nails. Cursing herself under her breath, she winced as the pain inside her head increased. Perhaps she had been rash in refusing Ran’s offer of some headache tablets.

Quickly she opened the bedroom door and hurried back down the stairs.

She found Ran in a huge ill equipped kitchen at the back of the house. As she pushed open the door he was heading towards it carrying a tray of tea.

‘Who’s that for?’ Sylvie demanded suspiciously.

‘You,’ Ran told her promptly. On the tray Sylvie could see a small packet of a familiar brand of headache tablets. The temptation to tell him that she didn’t want either his tea or his tablets was so strong that she had to fight hard to ignore it. Where on earth had such perversity come from—and when she had come downstairs especially to ask him for them?

‘I can manage it for myself,’ she told him ungraciously, and she held out her hands for the tray. The look he gave her made her flush but doggedly she stood her ground. Even so, she doubted that he would have handed the tray over to her if the telephone in the hallway had not rung.

As he went to answer it Sylvie headed for the stairs.

‘Vicky …’ she heard him saying warmly, and then, ‘Yes … it’s still on … I’m looking forward to it too,’ he confirmed, his voice dropping and deepening. ‘Look, I have to go …’

Sylvie was halfway up the stairs when she heard him replacing the telephone receiver.

‘Sylvie—’ he began.

But she cut him short, turning round and telling him crisply, ‘Don’t let me delay you if you’ve got a date, Ran. I’ve got plenty of work to read up on.’

‘You need to sleep off your headache,’ Ran told her curtly.

‘On the contrary. I need to work,’ Sylvie corrected him sharply as she continued on her way upstairs.

Ran stood and watched her. God, but she got under his skin. Why did he let her? Why hadn’t he simply told her that the only date he had this evening was with a damaged fence?

Angrily he turned on his heel and strode towards the front door.

As he closed it behind him Sylvie’s body slumped slightly; tension had invaded each and every one of her muscles and it wasn’t just her head that pounded with stress now, it was her whole body. Wearily she made her way to her bedroom, took two of the tablets, drank her tea and then, having removed her outer clothes, crawled into bed in her underwear. It was only when she was on the verge of sleep that she remembered that she had neglected to ask Ran to do something about the window she had been unable to open.

CHAPTER FOUR

RAN grimaced as he studied the very obviously cut-through pieces of fencing wire. No accident, that. Someone had quite definitely used wire cutters on them, which meant …

The lambs which had been born early in the spring had all gone now, his breeding stock the only flock that remained. It was an unpalatable thought though, that the deer roaming the home park made a tempting target for rustlers, all the more so because those animals were tame and not used to being hunted.

The last time he had seen Alex, the two of them had discussed the pros and cons of tagging their deer. Like him, Alex had a small herd on his estate, but since their marriage Mollie, his wife, had added a new strain to them in the shape of the same miniature deer that the Duchess of Devonshire had bred so successfully.

As Ran glanced towards the ha-ha which separated the parkland from the main gardens to the Hall he could hear the peacocks screeching their warning that someone was approaching the house.

Frowning, he got up, dusting the twigs and grass from his jeans as he headed back to the Land Rover.

It was almost ten o’clock, hardly the time for anyone to be visiting the Hall for any legitimate reason. Still frowning, he started the Land Rover’s engine.

Sylvie had woken up abruptly, wondering where on earth she was and why she couldn’t breathe properly. The dying sun had heated the already stuffy air in her bedroom to the point where she could actually taste its staleness in her mouth. The sharp intensity of her earlier headache had, thankfully, eased, but she knew there was no guarantee of its not returning if she continued to breathe such unhealthy air.

What she needed was some fresh air. After sluicing her face with cold water she pulled on her jeans and T-shirt, grimacing slightly as she did so. New York had effected some changes in her, she reflected wryly. Once she would have been quite happy in grubby clothes, but now …

Lloyd often teased her for the preppy look of loafers, jeans and white T-shirts which had become her trademark, but, as she had loftily told him, they made good sense for her job in that they always looked workmanlike and enabled her to climb scaffolding and straddle platforms whilst at the same time looking smart and businesslike enough to command the respect of the sometimes very chauvinistic men she had to deal with. Women too, especially in Italy, the home of style with a capital S, had been discreetly impressed with her working ‘uniform’, she had noticed. Now it was second nature to her always to wear immaculate white T-shirts and equally immaculate jeans, and the act of putting on clothes she had already been wearing all day was not one she enjoyed.

She had a spare set of car keys in her purse—another trick she had learned from her work. Spare keys to anything and everything were a necessity, as she had quickly discovered the first time she had allowed one of the workmen to accidentally lock her out of a building and then go home with the keys—it would be a simple enough matter for her to walk back to Haverton Hall and pick up her Discovery. The last thing she wanted was to be dependent on Ran for a lift to the place in the morning, and besides—a small triumphant smile curved her full mouth—it would be good to be able to point out haughtily to him that whilst he had been out enjoying himself with his girlfriend she had been working.

She had a well-developed sense of direction and the walk to the Hall, which someone else might have found a daunting prospect, was nothing to her.

Humming happily to herself, Sylvie set out.

It was a warm summer’s evening, with just enough remaining light for her to avoid the occasional cloud of midges hovering on the still air.

Being on foot gave her the opportunity to assess the land far better than she had been able to do from inside Ran’s Land Rover. She had spent enough time on Alex’s estate to appreciate that it was going to take a considerable amount of good husbandry on Ran’s part to bring this land into the same productive state as her stepbrother’s. Oddly, she envied him the challenge, but not so much as she envied his wife the pleasure she would have in lovingly restoring the Rectory; in making it the home that Sylvie knew it could be. Oh, yes, she envied her that.

Only that? Sylvie paused, shaking her thick hair back from her head. Of course only that. She couldn’t possibly envy her Ran, could she—Ran and the children he would give her? No, of course she couldn’t.

It was almost dark when Sylvie eventually reached the Hall, its bulk throwing long shadows across the gravel, cloaking both her and the Discovery as she walked towards it.

The sound of other feet on the gravel momentarily made her freeze until she recognised the familiar shapes of half a dozen inquisitive peacocks and peahens. The cocks were sending their shrill cries of warning up into the still night air.

Sylvie laughed as she heard them, relieved, and shook her head at them as she told them cheerfully, ‘Yes, I may be an intruder now, but you’re going to have to get used to me. You and I shall be seeing an awful lot of one another, you know.’

She stayed with them for several minutes, watching them and talking to them. Soon, no doubt, when it became fully dark, they would be roosting somewhere out of the way of any predatory hunting foxes.

Turning her back on them, Sylvie stared thoughtfully at the house, trying to visualise how it would look once the stone had been cleaned. That alone would cost a small fortune and would, no doubt, take almost as long as it would take for the interior to be renovated. She must ask Ran to give her any formal records from when the hall had originally been built and the work done on it since then. She wasn’t sure, but she suspected that the stairway she had seen had been, if not the work of Grinling Gibbons, then certainly the work of one of his more innovative apprentices.

The tiny sprays of coral, the seashells and unbelievably realistic fish carved into the wood related, no doubt, to the fact that the money for the original house had come from the very profitable overseas trading its owner had been involved in. As a prominent member of King Charles II’s court, and one of his favourites, he undoubtedly had had access to many money-making activities.

Idly Sylvie wondered what it would have been like to live in such a time and in such a house. It was one of her indulgences that whenever she became involved with a new property she couldn’t help daydreaming about its past, its history, picturing herself as part of it … imagining how and what she would have chosen had she been its chatelaine and then translating that into …

Ran parked his Land Rover out of sight and sound of the house. The peafowl, on their way to their roosting place, saw him and started to flap their wings until he threw down the grain he had brought with him to silence them. No point in giving the intruders the same warning he himself had so helpfully received.

Abandoning her study of the Hall, Sylvie stepped back into the shadows and made her way back towards her parked car. As he rounded the corner of the building, for a moment Ran thought that its frontage was deserted, and then he saw someone moving in the semi-darkness.

Immediately he acted, crouching down low and using the shadows to conceal his presence as he ran light-footed and quietly towards Sylvie’s car and whoever it was who was trying to break into it. There wasn’t any time to waste—the Discovery’s driver’s door was already open. Launching himself towards the figure about to climb into it, Ran brought the thief down in a rugby tackle, pinning him down on the ground beneath him as he grunted, ‘Got you.’

Sylvie didn’t see her assailant spring out at her but she certainly felt him as the speed of his attack carried her to the ground, his weight keeping her there as his hands moved quickly and lightly over her body.

Frantically she tried to struggle, kicking out at him, clawing his back as he pinned her legs, imprisoning her beneath his own, and then reached out to imprison her hands. As she twisted and turned beneath him, trying to throw off his weight, Sylvie felt too furiously angry to be afraid, but then, suddenly, as he secured both her hands in one of his and ran his free one experimentally over her body, she froze, all her feminine instincts and fears awakened.

‘Keep still,’ Ran warned his quarry abruptly. It had come as a shock to discover that she was female. He had assumed that the attempted theft of the car was being carried out by a young boy.

As she heard and recognised Ran’s voice, Sylvie’s fear immediately changed to a mixture of relief and fury.

‘Let go of me,’ she demanded immediately.

‘Sylvie …?’ Ran stared at her in disbelief. ‘What the hell …?’

He had relaxed his grip on her hands but his weight was still holding her pinned to the ground and Sylvie wriggled protestingly beneath him, complaining.

‘Sylvie,’ Ran repeated, still obviously shocked by her presence. ‘I thought … I heard the peafowl and thought someone was … I thought you were trying to steal the car … I couldn’t tell who you were in the dark,’ Ran told her curtly as he read the disbelief in her eyes, her expression revealed to him as the moon grew in strength now that the dusk had given way to proper darkness.

‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he demanded sharply.

‘I needed some fresh air; the windows in my room won’t open and I … I decided I might as well walk over here and collect my car … And what about you? I thought you were supposed to be going on a date, not creeping around frightening people to death,’ Sylvie accused him angrily.

She was becoming acutely and very uncomfortably conscious of the way he was lying on top of her, her legs still entangled with his from when she had tried to escape from him, but now …

Sylvie drew a sharp self-admonitory breath at the direction her thoughts were taking. It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to breathe and not just because of Ran’s weight on top of her. She was all too aware of how, when she did breathe, her breasts were pressing against his chest and even more dangerously conscious of the way her pelvis was accommodating itself to the shape of him. She could smell the warm summer night air on his skin and with it the much, much more intimate musky male scent that was him. Somehow or other during their struggle her T-shirt had become separated from her jeans and she was hideously aware that it was too late to regret now the fact that in redressing herself she had not bothered to put back on the sensible white bra she had discarded when she had gone to bed. Instinctively her free hand went to her body to check just how far up her T-shirt had ridden.

‘What is it?’ Ran asked her, his attention caught by the movement of her hand.

‘You’re heavy, Ran, you’re hurting me,’ Sylvie told him, not entirely truthfully, as she tried to bury herself in the night’s cloaking shadows, but it was too late and she could see from the sudden narrowing of his gaze as it followed the action of her hand that he realised, as she had just done herself, that her wretched T-shirt had ridden up far enough to expose the lower curve of her breasts.

The last thing, the very last thing she wanted was for Ran to study her body in any way at all, so why … why, the moment his gaze fell to her breasts, did they suddenly decide to react to his presence by swelling and firming, her nipples sensually flaunting peaks of explicit womanhood?

‘You’re not wearing a bra …’

‘Thank you, Ran, but I am already aware of that fact,’ Sylvie snapped at him through gritted teeth, her face hot with colour as she tried to reach the edge of her T-shirt to tug it down. But before she could do so Ran forestalled her, his own fingers curling round the thin white fabric.

Sylvie was in no doubt that Ran did intend to pull it down to cover her breasts. She could read his intentions quite plainly in his eyes. So how on earth what happened next did happen she was at a complete loss to know.

She moved, and so did Ran’s hand. Sylvie froze tensely as she felt his knuckles brush the underside of her breasts; immediately she made an awkward lunging movement away from his touch, forgetting that Ran had hold of the edge of her T-shirt. As she moved Ran tugged and then Sylvie tugged back and Ran let go.

Sylvie wasn’t sure which of them it was that made the small hissing sound, expelling their breath as her T-shirt, Lycra added to the cotton to ensure its smooth neat fit, reacted automatically to their tugging action and shot upwards, fully exposing her naked breasts.

Sylvie heard Ran curse and then saw him go very still; motionless herself, Sylvie waited. The sensation of Ran’s hand gently cupping her naked breast made her close her eyes in self-defence as she tried to stem the rapture that flooded through her. It wasn’t just what he was doing, it was the fact that she had once longed for him to touch her, to hold her like this so very, very much, and it was as though all that long-ago feeling and all that long-ago need had suddenly risen up inside her.

‘Ran …’ She heard herself whisper his name, but the hands she put out to him were there to hold him, not to push him away, and as she felt him lower himself slowly against her again the shudder that ran through her was one of desire and not rejection.

Very slowly and gently his fingertips stroked her breasts, shaping them, exploring them. The night air felt velvet soft and sensual against them but nowhere near as soft nor as sensual as Ran’s hands.

Carefully he caressed her and she could see the fierce gleam in his eyes as he looked briefly into hers and then he was bending his head towards her, kissing her with a fierce, passionate intensity that left her totally defenceless. Helplessly she opened her mouth to the hungry demand of his, making a tiny soft keening sound deep in her throat as she responded and matched his passion.

There was something earthy, primitive, inevitable and unstoppable about what was happening. A soft breeze whispered through the trees bordering the gravel and hypersensitively Sylvie heard it, felt its warmth against her skin. The rough cloth of Ran’s shirt teased her breasts, making her ache for the feel of his hands against them again. His hands … his mouth … She heard him groan, his fingers biting into her skin as he drew her close, so close that she could feel the hard, aroused pulse of his body. Instinctively her own rose up as though seeking even closer contact with him. His mouth burned hotly against her throat as he kissed it, his head moving lower and lower still until she could feel its demanding heat against her breast.

Sylvie whispered in need, arching up towards him, almost sobbing in relief as his mouth finally closed over her nipple, caressing it gently, his tongue laving it and then flicking erotically against it before he started to suck on it with a rhythmic urgency that echoed the pulsing heat of his arousal.

Once, long ago, she had dreamt of Ran wanting her like this, needing her like this, all aching, fierce, demanding male passion. Tiny shock waves of desire were flooding sensuously through her, she wanted him so badly; eagerly she drew him closer and then froze as somewhere in the woods a fox screamed noisily to the moon.

Ran too tensed, lifting his mouth from her body as he turned his head in the direction of the noise.

Suddenly, abruptly, protected no longer by the heat of his passion nor the warmth of his body, Sylvie realised what she was doing. The gravel of the drive which previously she had not even noticed pressed sharply into her skin, and her face flushed with mortification as she realised how she must look, how she must seem to Ran, so pathetically eager for his kisses, for him, that she …

‘Don’t touch me,’ she warned him shakily as she yanked down her top and struggled to her feet. ‘I feel sorry for your … for Vicky … if all it takes to make you unfaithful to her is …’

‘You?’ Ran supplied tersely for her.

Sylvie’s flush deepened, pain filling her body as she turned away from him so that he wouldn’t see how much he was hurting her.

‘We both know that what just happened had nothing to do with … That it wasn’t me … I could have been anyone. My body could have been anyone’s. You were …’

‘So turned on by the sight of your semi-naked breasts that I couldn’t resist seeing if they felt and tasted as good as they looked,’ Ran told her softly. ‘You forget, Sylvie … I’ve seen them before, and not just seen them but—’

‘Stop it, stop it,’ Sylvie begged him, instinctively placing her hands over her ears to blot out the sound of his taunting words. That was the last thing she wanted to be reminded about now … the very last … Tears blurred her vision. Frantically she blinked them away; she wasn’t going to let Ran see her crying … No way …

Shakily she made her way towards the Discovery whilst Ran watched her broodingly. What the hell could he say to her? She had every right to be furiously angry with him. That gibe about Vicky had been uncalled for, though. Vicky wasn’t his love … he didn’t have a love … There was no relationship, no commitment in his life … unlike her.

Did she respond to Lloyd the same way she had to him, with that aching, intoxicating blend of female need and almost out-of-control hunger?

Ran closed his eyes as he heard Sylvie start the engine of her car.

He had made his fair share of mistakes in his life and had his due portion of regrets, but there was nothing he regretted more than … He swallowed and looked out into the darkness. He hadn’t needed what had happened tonight to tell him that there was unfinished business between him and Sylvie.

As he started to walk towards where he had left his car the fierce male ache in his body made him clench his teeth. Right now there was nothing, nothing, he wanted more than to finish what they had started. Nothing he wanted more and no one he could have less.

Sylvie’s body might still be responsive to him, but Sylvie herself hated him. He knew that. She had told him so often enough.

‘Wayne’s the man I love,’ she had said, throwing the words at him like weapons, and he, too furious, too jealous to respond, had simply walked away without explaining to her that she was a wealthy man’s daughter and he might have nothing, but at least, unlike her precious Wayne, he genuinely cared about her, hadn’t just been using her!

He had spent the next two days searching Oxford from top to bottom for her, but by then it was too late—she had disappeared. The next time he had seen her she had been with the band of New Age travellers who had invaded Alex’s land, quite plainly enjoying flaunting her relationship with its leader in front of him.

‘What’s wrong?’ she had taunted him. ‘You didn’t want me … you told me so and you were right, Ran, you’re not the one for me … not very much of a man at all compared with Wayne,’ she had purred with a sensuously knowing look that had made him feel as if someone was ripping out his guts.

‘She and Wayne seem to be lovers,’ Alex had confided to him unhappily, and now another man had taken over that role in her life, that place in her bed, and he had no right …

Helplessly he stared at the stars. Why the hell had he done it, given in to the temptation to resurrect for himself all the old ghosts, all the old pain? Hadn’t he already spent enough nights lying alone in his bed, aching for her, wanting her?

Perhaps Alex was right; perhaps it was time that he looked around for a woman to settle down with, and perhaps once this business was finished and Sylvie was finally out of his life that was exactly what he would do … Perhaps …

CHAPTER FIVE

SYLVIE frowned as she started to double-check what she had just been reading. In a detailed account for the work involved in treating both the wet and dry rot to Haverton Hall, she had only just noticed that slipped in at the back was an additional sheet reporting on some dry rot infestation in the Rectory, Ran’s private property, and with it was a brief note confirming that the work on the Rectory would be put in hand before the contractors started working on Haverton Hall itself.

Sylvie could feel her heart starting to thump heavily with a mixture of anger and pain as she re-read the sheet. It wasn’t unknown for the owners of the properties the Trust took over to try to drive as hard a bargain as they possibly could. It had fallen to Sylvie on more than one occasion to tactfully inform very grand personages that odd pieces of furniture they had listed as antiques had turned out, on further inspection, to be in fact extremely good copies and therefore not worth the value which had originally been attributed to them. On such occasions a very large supply of tact plus an even larger helping of erring on the side of generosity was called for, but for some reason the possibility of having caught Ran out in such a way evoked within her such strong and confusing emotions that she had to get up from her makeshift desk in front of her bedroom window to pace her bedroom floor whilst she mentally rehearsed exactly how she was going to confront him with her discovery of what he had done. The sum involved wasn’t particularly large—and, had Ran gone about things in a different way, she knew perfectly well that the Trust would probably have large-mindedly and generously offered to bear the cost of the work on the Rectory. It was the fact that he had tried to cheat them … to deceive and trick her … that Sylvie found so unacceptable, the fact that he probably thought he had deceived her, the fact that he was probably secretly laughing at her behind her back. Well, he wasn’t going to be laughing when she confronted him, she decided angrily.

A knock on her bedroom door stopped her in her tracks, her body tensing as she called out tersely, ‘Come in,’ whilst mentally deciding how to mount her attack. But when the door opened it wasn’t Ran who walked into her room but the housekeeper, Mrs Elliott.

‘Oh, Mrs Elliott,’ Sylvie faltered.

‘Ran asked me to check with you what you would like for dinner this evening,’ the woman told her. ‘He landed a fine wild salmon this morning and he said it was a particular favourite of yours … ‘

Sylvie closed her eyes.

Damn Ran. What was he trying to do to her reminding her, of things, of a past, she would much rather forget?

‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Elliott,’ she told the other woman crisply, ‘but I shall be eating out this evening.’

Previously she had not given the least thought to where she might eat her evening meal, and she knew that her behaviour in refusing Ran’s salmon was both illogical and slightly childish, but she hadn’t been able to help herself.

Where was Ran anyway … strategically keeping out of her way? Well, he couldn’t do that for ever, and she certainly intended to tell him what she had discovered and to demand an explanation of his misuse of the Trust’s funds. No doubt he had imagined that he could slip the bill for the work on his own property through with the bill for the cost of the work on Haverton Hall without anyone being any the wiser. Well, he was going to learn very quickly his error. Which reminded her—she really ought to go up to the house and have a word with whoever was in charge of the company he had hired to deal with the dry rot. Sylvie pursed her lips. By rights the contract ought to have been put out to tender, but she had to admit that by acting so promptly and getting both the report compiled and the work started Ran had saved her a good deal of groundwork—and enabled work to be done on the Rectory at the Trust’s expense?

Ten minutes later Sylvie was on her way downstairs when she heard voices in the hallway, and as she rounded the curve of the staircase she could see Mrs Elliott talking with a tall, elegant woman in her late thirties.

‘So you’ll tell Ran that I called,’ she was saying to Mrs Elliott.

‘Yes, I will, Mrs Edwards,’ the other woman was responding respectfully.

Thoughtfully and discreetly Sylvie studied her. Tall, slender, expensively dressed, immaculately made up, she was the type of woman whom Sylvie could remember Ran favouring and she immediately guessed that she must be Ran’s current woman-friend. There was certainly that very confident, almost proprietorial air about her that suggested she was far more than simply a mere visitor to the house. She turned away from Mrs Elliott and then saw Sylvie, her expression changing slightly and becoming, if not challenging then certainly assessing, Sylvie recognised as she continued on her way downstairs.

‘I’m just on my way to Haverton Hall, Mrs Elliott,’ she told Ran’s daily calmly, adding with an impetuosity she later refused to examine or analyse, ‘Please thank Ran for his offer of dinner.’

Out of the corner of her eye she could see the way Ran’s woman-friend’s eyes darkened as she watched her, and she had just reached the front door when Mrs Elliott stopped her, announcing, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I almost forgot; Ran asked me to tell you that if you wanted to finish going over the big house he’d be back around three.’

‘Did he? That’s very thoughtful of him. How very obliging of him,’ Sylvie responded acidly. ‘When he does return, Mrs Elliott, please tell him that there’s no need for him to put himself to so much trouble. I have my own set of keys to Haverton Hall.’

Without waiting for the older woman to make any further response, Sylvie pulled open the front door. How dared he? she fumed as she hurried towards her hire car. She had no need of either his company or his permission to view the Hall. Furiously she started the Discovery, sending up an angry spray of gravel as she reversed and then headed for the drive.

She was over halfway to Haverton Hall before she felt calm enough to slow down a little, her face burning as hotly as her temper. It was not up to Ran to tell her what she could and could not do—not any longer.

As she brought the Discovery to a halt outside the house she hastily averted her eyes from the spot where last night … What had happened last night was something she had no intention of dwelling on nor trying to analyse; it had been a mistake, an error of judgement, a total and complete aberration and something which had, no doubt, been brought on by some kind of jet lag, some kind of inexplicable imbalance, and it really wasn’t worthy of having her waste any time agonising over it.

Unlocking the huge door, she turned the handle and took a deep breath as she pushed it open and stepped inside. Resolutely ignoring the echoing sound of her own footsteps, she hurried to where she and Ran had left off their inspection the previous day. In her bag she had an inventory and a plan of the house, but an hour later she was forced to admit that it was proving far less interesting inspecting the rooms on her own than it had been yesterday, with Ran’s informative descriptions of the rooms and their original uses.

From previous experience she knew that in a very short space of time she herself would be completely familiar with the house’s layout and its history, but right now … She gave a small scream as a mouse scuttled across the floor right in front of her. She had always had an irrational fear of them—they moved so fast and so far, and she had never totally got over an unpleasant childhood experience of having one jump towards her as it ran from one of the stable cats.

She was working her way along the upper floor when she suddenly heard Ran calling her name. Stiffening, she stood where she was. Mrs Elliott must have told him that he would find her here. In her bag she had the report and the costings he had commissioned for treatment of the wet and dry rot. Firmly she walked towards the door, opened it and called out, ‘I’m up here, Ran …’

‘You shouldn’t have come here on your own,’ he cautioned her as he came down the corridor towards her.

‘Why not? The house isn’t haunted, is it?’ she mocked him sarcastically.

‘Not as far as I know,’ he agreed, ‘but the floors, especially on these upper two floors, aren’t totally to be trusted, and if you should have had an accident—’

‘How very thoughtful of you to be concerned, Ran,’ Sylvie interrupted him. ‘Almost as thoughtful as it was of you to commission these reports.’

As she spoke she removed the reports from her bag and waved them under his nose. ‘Or am I being naive and would ‘‘self-interested’’ be a much truer description?’

Ran started to frown.

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, Sylvie,’ he began, but she wouldn’t let him go any further, challenging him immediately,

‘Don’t you, Ran? I read the reports from the surveyors this morning. Tucked in at the back of the estimates you’d obtained was this …’

Coolly she handed him the costing for the work on the Rectory.

‘So?’ Ran shrugged after he had scanned the piece of paper she proffered.

‘This particular costing relates to work that needs to be carried out on the Rectory, your own private house,’ Sylvie pointed out patiently.

‘And …?’ Ran demanded, frowning at her before telling her, ‘I’m sorry, Sylvie, but I’m afraid I’m at a loss to understand exactly what it is you’re driving at. The Rectory needed some work doing on it to put right the dry rot the surveyors found, and—’

‘You decided to slip the bill for that work in amongst the bills for the work that was needed on Haverton Hall, to lose it amongst the admittedly far greater cost of the work needed here!’

‘What?’ Ran demanded ominously quietly, his expression as well as his voice betraying his outrage.

‘I don’t like what you’re trying to suggest, Sylvie,’ he told her sharply.

She shook her head and told him thinly, ‘Neither do I, Ran. But the facts speak for themselves.’

‘Do they?’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘I rather think it’s your overheated imagination that’s doing the ‘‘speaking’’ through your totally erroneous interpretation of them,’ he told her through gritted teeth.

‘You can’t deny the evidence of this report,’ Sylvie reminded him sternly.

‘What evidence?’ Ran demanded. ‘This is a report and an estimate for work on the Rectory—work which I have had carried out at my own expense; the only reason the report and costing is there at all is because I omitted to remove it when I had the documents copied for you …’

‘You’ve paid for the work on the Rectory yourself?’ Sylvie queried in disbelief.

Ran’s mouth thinned.

‘Perhaps you’d like to see the receipts,’ he challenged her.

‘Yes, I would,’ Sylvie responded doggedly, refusing to let him cow her even though she could feel her face starting to burn self-consciously and her stomach beginning to churn as she contemplated just how foolish she was going to look if Ran did produce such receipts.

‘Mrs Elliott tells me that you’re going out for dinner this evening.’

Sylvie stared at him, thrown by his abrupt change of subject.

‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ she agreed.

‘There isn’t a decent restaurant for miles,’ he told her, ‘and certainly not one that offers fresh wild salmon; it’s always been one of your favourites … ‘

‘Perhaps my tastes have changed,’ Sylvie said a little loftily, adding robustly, ‘Unlike yours …’

As he started to frown she explained sweetly, ‘I saw your … friend. She called at the Rectory just as I was leaving. I’m sure she’d be more than delighted to share your salmon with you, Ran,’ she told him coolly. ‘Now, about those receipts …’

Inwardly Sylvie shivered a bit as she saw the anger flare in his eyes but outwardly she stood her ground. It was, after all, her job to make sure that the Trust wasn’t cheated—by anyone.

‘Of course,’ Ran told her formally, inclining his head as though in defeat, but then, just as Sylvie started to draw a relieved breath, he gave her a dangerously vulpine smile and told her softly, ‘But I’m afraid it will have to be this evening as I have a business meeting tomorrow morning and then I shall probably be away for several days …’

‘With your … friend …?’

Later Sylvie could only despair over whatever it was that had led her to make such a dangerously betraying and provocative remark, but inexplicably the words were out before she could stop them, causing Ran, who had been on the point of turning away from her, to turn back and slowly scrutinise her from head to foot before asking her softly, ‘If you mean Vicky, is that really any of your business … or the Trust’s …?’

He had caught her out and Sylvie knew it. It most certainly was not part of her duty as the Trust’s representative to ask any questions about his personal life, and she was mortified that she had done so.

‘If you want to see the receipts for the work on the Rectory then it will have to be this evening, Sylvie,’ Ran was repeating briskly. ‘Shall we say about eight-thirty?’

Before she could say anything else he had gone, striding across the dusty floor and leaving her to watch his departing back.

It was a good ten minutes after she had heard the noise of his Land Rover engine die away before Sylvie felt able to continue with her work. Her intelligence told her that their antagonism was coming between her and the normally wisely efficient way in which she dealt with even the most awkward of the Trust’s clients, but her emotions refused to allow her to back down, to climb down. If she was wary of him, suspicious of him, then she had every right to be.

And every right to as good as accuse him of trying to defraud the Trust?

She started to nibble anxiously at her bottom lip. If she was wrong about him trying to get the Trust to cover the cost of work he had had done on his own home, and if he chose to complain to Lloyd—

Irritably Sylvie reminded herself why she was here.

Although the house wasn’t any larger than others she had dealt with, it certainly seemed to possess far more small interconnecting rooms here on its upper storeys. She rubbed the dust from the window of one of them and peered out at the countryside spread all around her. From here she could see the river where Ran must have caught his fish. It wound lazily in a long half-loop through the parkland which surrounded the house. Although the terrain here in Derbyshire was very different from that which surrounded Alex’s home, it was disturbingly easy, looking down towards the river, to remember the many happy hours she had spent with Alex and Ran as a young girl, watching them as they worked together, helping them fish and later learning from them their countryside skills.

One of the ways in which, hopefully, ultimately, Haverton Hall could generate its own income would be, as Ran had suggested in the initial approach he had made to the Trust, for the house to be let out to large corporations and groups along with its fishing and shooting rights. The Trust adopted a policy that no game existing on its lands could be killed simply for sport—a very strict culling programme was put in place where necessary and the art of tracking animals was taught as a skill for its own sake rather than with a view to killing. That had been a condition which she herself had insisted on persuading the trustees to adopt, and it made her stop and frown slightly to herself now as she was forced to remember how it had been Ran who had first shown her that it was not necessary to kill to enjoy such traditional country sports.

Ran …

Sylvie was still thinking about him some time later when an exhausting drive through the virtually uninhabited countryside which surrounded the house had only produced three small villages, not one of which boasted a restaurant.

In the small pub in the third village the landlord shook his head when she asked about food and apologised.

‘We don’t have the trade for it round here, although I could perhaps see if there’s any sandwiches left over from lunchtime.’

Smiling wanly, Sylvie shook her head. She was hungry, very hungry in fact, and had been looking forward to sitting down to a proper hot meal.

‘There’s a good place over Lintwell way,’ the pub manager was continuing helpfully, ‘but that’s a good twenty-five miles from here.’

Twenty-five miles. Sylvie’s stomach was already starting to rumble. Against her will she had a mental vision of Ran’s salmon, pink and poached, served with delicious home-grown baby new potatoes and fresh vegetables and, of course, a proper hollandaise sauce. Her mouth watered.

It was gone seven o’clock now, though, and if she were to drive to Lintwell and back and eat as well that would mean she would be late for her meeting with Ran and there was no way she was going to allow him the opportunity to accuse her of being unprofessional.

Refusing the landlord’s offer of the afternoon’s leftover sandwiches, she made her way back to her car. She would just have to go without a meal tonight, she told herself firmly; after all, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. She was hardly going to starve … But oh, that salmon and … Ran was quite right. It was her favourite.

It was almost eight when Sylvie pulled up outside the Rectory’s front door.

Her earlier hunger had turned into a gnawing irritation that was making her head ache and her temper on edge. Low blood sugar, she told herself sternly. All you need is a sweet drink.

All she needed maybe, but not all she wanted. What she wanted …

What on earth was the matter with her? she derided herself as she opened the front door. Other women her age daydreamed and fantasised about having men, not meals.

Eight o’clock. She just had time to get showered and changed before her meeting with Ran. She wanted to run through her figures again, but if, as he said, he had paid for the work himself and he had the receipts to prove it … Perhaps she had been too quick to accuse him …

‘Sylvie …’

She froze at the bottom of the stairs as she heard Ran’s voice. When she turned her head he was standing in an open doorway several feet away from her.

‘Mrs Elliott is going to serve dinner at eight-thirty so you’ve got half an hour to get ready … ‘

A dozen questions and just as many denials and arguments sprang immediately to Sylvie’s lips, but somehow she managed not to utter them and she was at the top of the stairs before she managed to ask herself why she had not simply told Ran that she had eaten already.

Why? The audible rumble of her stomach as she opened her bedroom door gave its own answer. Even so, it galled her to know that Ran had guessed she would have to return to the house without having found somewhere to eat. But just let him try to make something of it, Sylvie decided fiercely as, having had her shower, she changed into a long silky black jersey dress, brushing her hair and quickly re-doing her make-up before checking the time.

Almost eight-thirty. Taking a deep breath, Sylvie checked her appearance in the mirror and then, holding her head high, headed for the bedroom door.

Her jersey dress, plain black and unadorned, might not, to anyone but the cognoscente, reveal the fact that it had cost her the best part of a month’s wages and carried the label of one of New York’s top designers—the uninitiated might be deceived by the simple design and the way the heavy fabric discreetly hinted at rather than clung more obviously to Sylvie’s slender figure. But even the most self-confessed sartorial ignoramus would have reacted to the way Ran looked when Sylvie saw him waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.

Used as she was to seeing him wearing casual work clothes, and perhaps because that was the image she held engraved in her mind’s eye—jeans fitting snugly against the hard muscle of his thighs, checked work shirt rolled up at the sleeves and just open enough at the neck to reveal the silky dark expanse of body hair which so temptingly and tormentingly made one’s fingers long to unfasten a few more buttons and explore just how thick, just how silky that soft dark hair actually was—Sylvie had forgotten how very male Ran could look in formal clothes.

And although he hadn’t gone so far as to change into a dinner suit he was wearing a pair of well-cut dark trousers and a crisp white shirt.

The fact that he was just shrugging on his jacket as she came down the stairs afforded Sylvie an unwanted glimpse of the lethal maleness of the muscles in his torso and made her hesitate betrayingly just for a second before continuing her journey downwards.

He had changed his clothes simply to have dinner with her.

Why? Because he knew very well the effect his appearance would have on any susceptible woman and because he intended to use that fact to distract her, confuse her when she needed all her attention, all her concentration to ascertain the truth about that invoice? Or was she letting her imagination run away with her? Was the woman he had dressed so elegantly for not her but—?

Was he perhaps seeing the other woman after their meeting had finished?

‘We’ve just got time for a drink before dinner if you’d like one,’ Ran told her calmly, but his glance, Sylvie was sure, had rested for just a betraying fraction of a second on the soft thrust of her breasts before it had lifted to her face. Her heart started to thump giddily.

‘No … No drink, thanks,’ she refused, giving him a thin smile as she added deliberately, ‘I generally find that alcohol and business don’t mix. ‘

Giving a small shrug, Ran opened the dining-room door for her and waited for her to precede him inside. As she did so, Sylvie caught the clean, sharp scent of his freshly showered body and the giddying thump of her vulnerable heart became a frighteningly heavy ache.

‘I … I’ve brought the estimates down with me,’ she told him quickly, lifting the papers she was holding in front of him, but Ran shook his head.

‘After dinner,’ he told her dismissively, adding, ‘I generally find that good food and poor communication don’t mix.’

Poor communication. Sylvie gave him a fulminating look before taking the chair he had pulled out for her.

The salmon was every bit as delicious as Sylvie had imagined and so, too, was the home-made summer pudding served with fresh cream that followed it. The cheese they ate to finish the meal was made locally, Ran informed her, adding that he had been wondering if he might not produce something similar himself, but that he had decided the costs involved were prohibitive.

To have dinner alone with Ran like this would once have made her feel so excited, so … so thrilled because she had been so besottedly in love with him. Of course, she would hardly have been able to do justice to the meal because then her fevered imagination would have been thrilling her with images of the two of them together alone, after dinner, Ran taking her in his arms and …

‘I’ve asked Mrs Elliott to serve coffee in the library … ‘

The crisp, businesslike tone of Ran’s voice cut across her treacherous thoughts. Guiltily, Sylvie pushed them away, reminding herself severely of just why she was here.

‘Here is the separate estimate I asked for, for the work which needed doing here, and here is the receipt I obtained for that work.’

Her facial muscles rigid, Sylvie willed her hand not to tremble betrayingly as she took the papers from Ran and then looked at them. She was furious with herself for giving him the opportunity to put her in the wrong.

Her eyes strayed to the date at the top of the receipted invoice. She wasn’t going to give in yet. Standing up, she handed the papers back to Ran and told him dismissively, ‘What I can see is a signed and dated receipt, Ran.’

‘Showing that the invoice was settled several weeks ago …’

‘Purporting to show that it was settled several weeks ago,’ Sylvie pointed out stubbornly. ‘For all I know this date could have been written on the invoice last week … or …’ She paused meaningfully before adding with a triumphant smile, ‘Or even today …’

She had started to walk away when Ran stopped her, grabbing hold of her arm and swinging her round to face him as he exploded, ‘Are you really trying to accuse me of falsifying this receipt? For God’s sake, Sylvie, what the hell kind of man do you think I am?’

Pointedly Sylvie ignored his question and stared down at where he was still holding onto her arm instead as she demanded icily, ‘Let go of me, Ran.’

‘Let go of you …? Do you realise what you’re saying, what you’re accusing me of doing? You’re not a teenager any more, Sylvie, and if this is some kind of petty attempt to—’

‘No, I’m not.’ Sylvie interrupted him furiously. ‘I’m the Trust’s representative here at Haverton and as such it’s my job to protect the Trust’s interests and its investments … If I think that someone, anyone, is trying to cheat the Trust or misuse its funds, then it’s my job to—’

‘Your job …?’ Ran laughed savagely. ‘You sound very high-minded for someone who’s slept her way into her ‘‘job’’ via her boss’s bed.’

There was a second’s pause and then a white heat, a zigzag of pure fury and frustrated womanly pride, hit Sylvie like a bolt of lightning. Immediately she reacted in the only way her outraged female instincts knew, lifting her hand and slapping Ran’s face in furious rejection of his insult.

Sylvie didn’t know which of them was the more shocked—she who had delivered the blow or Ran who had received it. For a single beat of time they both stood completely still, staring at one another. Sylvie could feel her heart racing, she could see the white, slowly reddening imprint of her hand against Ran’s dark skin and she could see too the vengeful male fury darkening his eyes. Too late to regret her behaviour, or to turn and run; Ran was still holding onto her arm, and as she tried to pull away he dragged her towards him, his eyes glittering with fevered rage.

Sylvie knew, even before it happened, just what he was going to do. She was already closing her eyes and whispering helplessly, ‘No,’ as she felt the hard, bruising pressure of his mouth against her own.

To be kissed like this, in fury, in punishment, and with a blind, searing male desire to dominate, was something totally outside all her experience. Her body had no defences against it, no knowledge of how to deal with it. Panic and anger surged through her body. She was no helpless Victorian virgin, she was a modern woman, able to give as good as she got. Fiercely she returned the anger of Ran’s furious kiss. He was already prising apart her closed lips with his tongue, demanding entry to the intimacy of her mouth, not with the tender touch of a lover but with the forceful pressure of a warrior, a victor. Wildly Sylvie tried to evade him, but he was holding onto her too strongly and all her attempts to break free did was to bring her body into even closer contact with his. She still fought to break free, pummelling his chest with her fists and then, when that did no good and there was no longer any space between their bodies for her to do so, angrily raking her nails down his back.

Somewhere, deep down, in the murkiest of murky waters of her subconscious, lay the knowledge that this wasn’t just about the insult he had given her, nor her angry reaction to it; that this explosion of furious emotion this need to reach out and hurt him, to damage and destroy what was left of the love she had once felt for him, had its roots, its being, in something very, very different from mere insulted female pride.

‘Little vixen,’ she heard Ran muttering thickly against her mouth as he caught hold of her hand. ‘Your elderly lover might need the stimulus of having his back scratched raw when you make love but I certainly don’t.’

Shocked into awareness of what she was doing by his words, Sylvie went still.

Lloyd might not be her lover, but that didn’t really matter; it was the impact of what Ran had just said to her that hurt and wounded so badly, the fact that he was comparing the anger and mutual hatred they were both expressing with an act that, to Sylvie, was one which should be highlighted and hallmarked with tenderness and true emotional love. Suddenly all the anger drained out of her. She felt sickened, not just by Ran’s words but more importantly by what she herself had done. A vixen, Ran had called her, but when animals mated they did so for a specific purpose; their coming together was never an act of cruelty or cynical disregard for everything that sharing the intimacy of one’s body with another should be.

Sylvie could feel her eyes starting to fill with tears. Ran had pulled back from her to look at her, and, taking advantage of his slackened grip, she pulled herself free of him and started to walk quickly, if a little unsteadily, towards the library door.

Startled, Ran called out to her, following her out into the hallway, watching as she disappeared up the stairs. Should he go after her, apologise, explain …? That look he had just seen in her eyes had shocked him. It was more the look of a hurt child than a mature, experienced, worldly woman, and besides … There had been no call for him to make that remark to her about Lloyd. Her relationship with the other man was, after all, her own affair, even if he … God … For a moment there the feeling, the sharp dig of her nails into his skin through the fabric of his shirt, had made him ache so badly for the feel of her naked body beneath his own, the feel, the scent, the taste of her. And if he could have his time again … But what was the point in thinking about, reliving old memories, old mistakes?

He had done what he had thought was best at the time, the honourable thing to do …

CHAPTER SIX

WEARILY Sylvie looked at the luminous face of her watch. Half past one in the morning. She had been awake for the last hour, stubbornly courting sleep, angrily refusing to allow her thoughts to take control, to force her to remember.

She was too hyped up for sleep, too afraid to sleep just in case she … She what? Dreamed of Ran?

She looked across at the desk in front of the window. One of the small pleasures of living in the depths of the country was that one did not need to close the curtains at night. There was nothing Sylvie liked more than being able to see the night sky.

When her mother had first married Alex’s father and they had gone to live in his ancestral home, she had been overwhelmed at first by the darkness of the huge house. It had been Ran who had guessed her fears and apprehensions after he had found her sleepwalking that night. Ran who had been staying at the house instead of his cottage one weekend, ‘babysitting’ her in the absence of her mother, and who had taken her, not back to bed, but to his own room where he had made her a hot drink and talked to her, showing her the telescope he used to watch the night sky.

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