Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

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 eighty-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.

Mistaken Adversary
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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CHAPTER ONE

SHE was late. She always seemed to be running late these days, Georgia reflected tiredly, as she checked the traffic and then hurried across the road.

The problem was that she hadn’t been able to park her car close enough to the agency who supplied her with the computer programming work she did at home, which meant she had had to walk right across town—not a very long way, but it all added extra time to her schedule, time she could barely afford to lose, time when she wasn’t earning money, when she wasn’t—

She checked herself with a small grim exclamation. She had a very strict rule which meant that, once she was out of the house and on her way to visit Aunt May, she did not allow her growing anxiety over money to show in any way which might alert her aunt to what was happening and so destroy the concentration that she so desperately needed if she was to get well.

If she was... There was no if about it, Georgia told herself fiercely. Aunt May was going to get better. Hadn’t they said at the hospice only last week how well she was doing, what a wonderful patient she was?

Georgia stopped walking, her expression of stern concentration softening as she thought about her aunt. Her great-aunt, really: an indomitable lady of seventy-odd, who had stepped in and filled the gaping chasm left in her life when her parents were so tragically killed in a plane crash, who had filled her life and her world so completely and so lovingly, who had helped her to overcome the trauma of losing her parents, and who had brought her up so wisely and so caringly that she considered herself to be far better loved, far better understood, than many of her contemporaries. And even when the time had come for her to spread her wings, to leave school, and her home, to go on to university and from there to London and her first job, her aunt had encouraged her every step of the way.

Keen, ambitious, intelligent and adaptable: those had been only some of the compliments and praise Georgia had received as she climbed the corporate ladder, determinedly reaching towards the goals she had set herself. A real high-flyer was how others described her, and she had been proud of that title, single-mindedly telling herself that there would be time—once she was established in her career, once she had achieved all that she wanted to achieve, seen and done all she wanted to see and do—to take life at an easier pace, to think about a serious relationship with someone and perhaps about children of her own.

Of course she had still kept in touch with her aunt, spent Christmases with her, and some of her other holidays, encouraged her to come up to London for brief stays in the tiny flat she had bought in one of the prestigious dockland developments, unfortunately just when their price was at its highest...

Yes, she had seen her path so clearly ahead of her, with no obstacles in her way, nothing to impede her progress, and then the blow had fallen.

Having an unexpected few days extra leave with nothing planned, she had gone north to the Manchester suburb where she had grown up, and discovered the shocking truth of her aunt’s illness. A ‘growth’. A ‘tumour’. So many, many different polite ways of describing the indescribable, but no real escape, no nice polite way of covering up what was actually happening.

She had taken extra leave, ignoring her aunt’s insistent command that she return to London and her own life. With her aunt she had seen doctors, specialists, made hospital visits, and then, once all the facts were known, she had gone back to London—but not for long. Just for long enough to hand in her resignation and to put the flat up for sale—which went through, but at a price which had left her with no financial margin at all.

Then had come the move out here to one of her aunt’s favourite small Cheshire towns, and the purchase of the cottage, with what had been a horrendously large mortgage even before the recent interest rate increases. The work she received from the agency, no matter how many hours she worked, could never ever bring in anything like the salary her skills had commanded in London. And now added to those other burdens was the cost of ensuring that her aunt could continue to receive treatment at the very special hospice, only a handful of miles away from the cottage.

Today, as she did every day and every evening, Georgia was on her way to see her aunt, to spend time with her, achingly conscious of how frail she was, frantically sick inside with anxiety for her, desperately praying that she would keep on fighting...that she would get better...

It was only with the discovery of her aunt’s illness that Georgia had realised that without her she would be completely alone in the world. That knowledge had bred inside her an anguish, a fear, which she was totally at a loss to control. It was, moreover, an emotion which was totally out of place in an adult woman of close to thirty. Of course she loved Aunt May, of course she desperately wanted her to get better—but to experience this despairing, consuming sense of desertion and fear... What she was going through now was worse, far worse, than the emotions she had experienced when she’d lost her parents. She was, she sometimes thought, getting dangerously close to going completely out of control, to giving in utterly and wholly to the maelstrom of emotions threatening her.

And yet, until now, she had prided herself on being a sensible, mature woman, a woman not given to the wilder impulses of emotionalism. Yet here she was, virtually trying to make a bargain with the gods, feverishly begging for her aunt’s recovery. And still, on some days, her very bad days, it seemed to her that, no matter how hard she willed it to be different, her aunt was slowly slipping away from her...

And now, if she didn’t hurry, she would be late for visiting time. Her arms were beginning to ache with the weight of the paperwork she was carrying. The woman who ran the agency had looked askance at her when she had asked her for extra work. They had the work, plenty of it, she had told Georgia, adding that people as skilled and dedicated as her were hard to come by—but was she really wise to overload herself to such an extent?

Georgia grimaced to herself. She needed the money and needed it desperately. The mortgage alone... When she had visited the building society last week, to see if there was any way of alleviating the crippling burden the mortgage had become, the manager had been sympathetic to her plight.

Had she thought of taking in a lodger? he had suggested. With a variety of new industries springing up locally, many of them offshoots of international concerns, there was a growing demand for such a service.

A lodger was the very last thing Georgia really wanted. She had bought the cottage for her aunt, knowing how much the latter had always dreamed of just such a quiet retreat, and she wasn’t going to sell it or give up. Just as Aunt May wasn’t going to give up her fight to hold on to life.

Tonight, before evening visiting time, she had someone coming round to see her—the prospective lodger she did not want. A male lodger at that. Not that the sex of the potential intruder made much difference; Georgia had lived in London for long enough to know that it was perfectly feasible for male and female to live together, sharing a roof, without there having to be any hint of a sexual relationship between them.

In fact she herself had been for a time the third member of just such a trio, and had found that, of her two co-habitees, Sam had been the easier to get along with. No, it wasn’t her potential lodger’s sex that put her off him, it was the necessity of having a lodger at all.

As the parish church bells rang out the hour, she suddenly realised that standing still was wasting precious time. Hurriedly, she stepped forward, almost cannoning into the man coming in the opposite direction.

As he took evasive action, so did she, thus beginning one of those familiar patterns of attempted avoidance of one another, so amusing to the onlooker and so time-consuming to the participants, whereby both of them, in trying to avoid the other, made the same move at the same time, thus prolonging the delay in what looked like some kind of complicated dance-step.

In the end it was the man who put an end to it, standing still and smiling ruefully as he suggested, ‘Perhaps if I just stand still and you walk round me?’

He was a very tall man, and very well built as well, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, the kind of man who looked as though he either worked out of doors or engaged in some kind of outdoor physical activity. Certainly he was very fit, very lithe, because he moved easily and speedily, putting out a steadying hand as Georgia’s impatience both with him and with herself boiled over, and her too tense body reacted to that impatience, almost causing her to stumble as she tried to avoid him.

His touch was brief and non-sexual, and yet it set off inside her the oddest of reactions, causing her to stiffen and look directly at him, unaware of the mixture of panic and anger flashing their twin messages from her eyes.

He was still smiling, a rueful curling of a very masculine mouth that matched the amusement in the sun-speckled golden eyes. He had a tan, the kind that came from being out of doors over a long period of time. His dark hair was thick, touched with gold where the sun warmed it.

He was good-looking—if you were the kind of woman who appreciated that kind of male machismo, Georgia acknowledged grudgingly. Personally, she had always preferred brains to brawn, and right at this moment she wasn’t interested in either.

Irritated, and at the same time both defensive and vulnerable without knowing why she should be, instead of returning his smile with the friendly warmth it invited and deserved, she over-reacted, glowering at him, as she demanded grimly, ‘Will you please let go of me and get out of my way?’

* * *

Later, five minutes down the road, still feeling hot and bothered, still anxiously aware of how much time she had lost, she waited for the lights to change so that she could cross the road to the car park, and she happened to turn round and catch sight of her own expression in a shop window. She was frowning: a cross, bitter expression pursed her lips, her body so tense and strained that she automatically tried to relax it.

She didn’t, she recognised as the lights changed and she crossed the road, like the image she had just seen. It had shocked her into realising how much these last few months had changed her, draining her of her sense of humour, her optimism.

As she reached the car park, she remembered uncomfortably how she had reacted to the man in the street, someone who had cheerfully and pleasantly tried to turn a moment of irritation for them both into a light-hearted and warm exchange of good-humoured smiles. Her aunt would have been shocked by her behaviour to him; she had always stressed not just the importance of good manners, but the necessity of treating others with warmth and kindness. Her aunt was of the old school, and she had imbued in Georgia a set of values and a pattern of behaviour which was perhaps a little out of step with modern-day living.

Rather to her shame, Georgia recognised that her time in London, and the stress of the last few months, was beginning to wear down that caring attitude to others which her aunt had always believed was so important. Too late now to wish she had been less abrasive with that unknown man, to wish that she had responded to his pleasant good manners with equal good humour, instead of reacting so rudely. Still, she was hardly likely to run into him again, which was perhaps just as well: she hadn’t missed the way his friendly smile had hardened a little when she had reacted so unpleasantly to him, to be replaced by a very grim look of cool withdrawal—of sternness almost.

* * *

Tiredly, Georgia unlocked her front door. The visit to the hospice had left her feeling drained and very, very afraid. No matter how much she tried to deny herself the knowledge, she could see how frail her aunt was growing, how terrifyingly fragile—so that in some odd way it was almost as though her very skin was becoming transparent. And yet at the same time she was so calm, so at peace with herself, so elevated almost, as though—and this was what terrified Georgia more than anything else—as though she was already distancing herself from her, from the world, from life...

‘No! No!’ Georgia bit her lip as she realised she had cried the protest out aloud. She didn’t want to lose her aunt, didn’t want...

Didn’t want to be left alone like a child crying in the dark. She was being selfish, she told herself critically; she was thinking of her own emotions, her own needs, and not her aunt’s...

All through the visit she had talked with desperate cheerfulness of the cottage and the garden, telling her aunt that she would soon be coming home to see everything for herself, telling her—as though the words were some kind of special mantra—about the cat who had adopted the cottage as its home, about the special rose bushes they had planted together in the autumn, which were now producing the buds which would soon be a magnificent display of flowers. Her aunt was the one who was the keen gardener, who had always yearned to return to her roots, to the small-town atmosphere, in which she herself had grown up. That was why Georgia had bought the cottage in the first place—for her aunt...her aunt, who wasn’t living here any more, her aunt who...

Georgia could feel the ball of panic and dread snowballing up inside her and, as always, she was afraid of it, trying to push it down and out of the way, totally unable to allow it to gather momentum, to force herself to confront it. She was so desperately afraid of losing her aunt, so mortally afraid.

The cottage was only small: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a tiny boxroom which she was using as her office, and then downstairs a comfortably sized living-kitchen area, a small cosy sitting-room and a dining-room which they never used, preferring the comfort of the kitchen. Its garden was large and overgrown: a gardener’s paradise, with its rows of fruit bushes, its well-stocked borders, its small fishpond and its vegetable beds. But it was Aunt May who was the gardener, not her, and Aunt May—

Georgia swallowed the angry tears gathering in her throat as she remembered the look on her aunt’s face when they had first come to look at the cottage. It had been that look of almost childlike wonder and pleasure which had pushed Georgia into taking the final step of committing herself to buy the cottage, even though she knew she could barely afford it. She had bought it for Aunt May. They had had nearly three months in it before Aunt May’s health had started to deteriorate, before the doctors had started talking about a further operation, before it had become necessary for Aunt May to have far more intense nursing than Georgia could provide.

Refusing to allow what she knew to be tears of self-pity to fall, Georgia headed for the stairs, carrying the work she had collected. She knew without looking at it that it would keep her busy for the rest of the afternoon and for long into the night, but she didn’t care. She needed the money if she was to keep on the cottage, and she had to keep on the cottage for somewhere for Aunt May to come home to when she was eventually able to leave the hospice. And she would leave it. She would come home. She had to.

Tiredly, Georgia went upstairs to the small boxroom which housed her computer. The cottage was old, and its loft space had been home to many hundreds of generations of house martins. The latest occupants scratched busily and noisily above her head while she worked. At first they had disturbed and alarmed her, but now she had grown used to the noise, and almost found it companionable. The cottage had originally been used to house agricultural workers, but had been sold off by its original owner, together with the land on which it stood. A prime site for development, the estate agents had told her. With so much land the cottage could be extended. Its privacy was virtually guaranteed, surrounded as it was by farmland, and at the bottom of a track which went virtually nowhere. But Georgia couldn’t have afforded to extend it even if she had wanted to. She could barely afford the mortgage repayments, and then there was the cost of the hospice and her own living expenses, plus running the small car which was an absolute necessity now with Aunt May in the hospice.

Her head was beginning to ache, the letters on the screen in front of her beginning to swim and blur. She rubbed her eyes tiredly and glanced at her watch, unable to believe how long she had been working. Her whole body ached, her bones feeling almost bruised as she moved uncomfortably in her chair.

She had lost weight in these last few months, weight some might say she could ill afford to lose. She wasn’t a tall woman, barely five feet five, with small delicate features that were now beginning to have the haunted, pinched look of someone under severe stress.

Her fair hair, which in London she had always kept perfectly groomed in a slick, neat hairstyle, had grown down on to her shoulders; she had neither the money nor the energy to do anything about getting it cut. The expensive London highlights had been replaced by the natural streaked effect of sunlight, just as her skin had gained a soft peachy warmth from that same exposure. She had never thought of herself as a particularly sensual or sexually attractive woman, but then she had never wanted to be, being quite content with the neatness of her oval-shaped face and the seriousness of her grey eyes.

She had her admirers: men who—like her—were too busy climbing the corporate ladder to want any kind of permanent commitment, men who, while admiring her and wanting her company, appreciated her single-minded determination to concentrate on her career. Men who respected her.

Yes, her career had been the sole focus of her life—until she had realised how ill Aunt May was. At first her aunt had protested that there was no need for her to go to such lengths—to give up her career, her well-structured life—but Georgia hadn’t listened to her. It wasn’t out of some grim sense of duty that she had made her decision, as one of her London friends had intimated. On the contrary, it had been out of love. Nothing more, nothing less—and there had not been one second of time since that decision had been made when she had regretted its making. All she did regret was that she had been so busy with her own life that she hadn’t realised earlier what was happening to her aunt. She would never be able to forgive herself that piece of selfishness, even though Aunt May had reassured her time and time again that she herself had known about and ignored certain warning signs, certain omens, which should have alerted her to seek medical help earlier than she had.

The sound of a car coming down the bumpy track that led to the cottage alerted her to the arrival of her potential lodger. He was someone who apparently needed accommodation locally for a few months while he sorted out the financial affairs of a small local company his city-based group had recently taken over.

Georgia knew very little about the man himself, other than that the agency for whom she worked had been able to vouch for him as someone eminently respectable and trustworthy. When she had expressed doubts that someone as highly placed and wealthy as the chairman of a progressive and profitable group would want to lodge in someone else’s home rather than rent somewhere, Louise Mather, who ran the agency, had informed her that Mitch Fletcher did not fit into the normal stereotype of the successful entrepreneur-cum-businessman mould and that, when he had approached her for help with the additional staff he needed to recruit, he had told her that all he needed was somewhere to sleep at night and where he would remain relatively undisturbed by the comings and goings of the other members of the household. For that he was prepared to pay very well indeed and, as Louise herself had pointed out when she had urged Georgia to think seriously about taking him on as a lodger, he was the answer to all her financial problems.

Wearily Georgia stood up, clutching the back of her chair when she went slightly dizzy. She had not, she realised, eaten anything since suppertime last night, and even then she had pushed away the meal she had made barely touched.

Perhaps the discipline of having to provide meals for a lodger might force her to eat more sensibly. In these last few weeks since her aunt had gone into the hospice, she had found preparing and then eating her solitary meals more and more of a burden. Some evenings, once she returned from her final visit of the day to the hospice, she felt far too drained of energy and emotionally wrought-up to bear to eat, and yet logically and intelligently she knew that she needed the energy that came from a healthy well-balanced diet.

She glanced out of the window and saw the car stop outside the front gate. A steel-grey BMW saloon, it looked sleekly, almost arrogantly out of place outside her humble home.

As she went downstairs she reflected that this Mitch Fletcher was probably writing the cottage off as unsuitable even before she opened the door. She did not, she acknowledged as she went towards the front door, really want the hassle, the responsibility, of sharing her home with someone else. She was afraid that the inevitable inroads it would make into her life would somehow threaten the need she felt to devote every second of her spare time either to being with her aunt or willing her to get better, to recover and come home.

When she opened the door the cool words of greeting and introduction hovering on her lips fled in disordered confusion as she recognised the man standing there.

As he stepped forward, Georgia recognised that, infuriatingly, she had somehow or other by her silence lost control of the situation—because it was he who broke the silence, extending his hand towards her and saying, ‘Miss Barnes? Mitchell Fletcher. I understand from Louise Mather that you have a room you’d be prepared to let. I think she’s explained the position to you: I’m looking for somewhere temporary to stay while I’m working in the area.’

As he spoke, he came forward, and Georgia discovered that she was stepping back almost automatically, allowing him to walk into the hallway.

Until he suddenly stopped, she hadn’t realised that the shadows in her small hallway had cloaked her features from him, and that he had not, like her, had the benefit of that instant recognition.

Now, as he focused on her, she saw from his lightning change of expression that he had recognised her from their unfortunate encounter earlier in the day and, moreover, that he was not exactly pleased to be seeing her again.

His reaction to her brought all her earlier guilt and discomfort flooding back. Before, when she had so rudely ignored the brief moment of shared amusement he had offered her, she had comforted herself with the knowledge that they were not likely to meet again and that his awareness of her bad temper and unpleasantness was something that was unlikely to be reinforced by another encounter. But she had been wrong and, as she felt her skin flushing as the coolness in his eyes reminded her of just how unpleasant she had been, she had to subdue an extremely childish impulse to close the door between them and shut him out so that she wouldn’t have to face that extremely uncomfortable scrutiny.

It seemed that he was waiting for her to speak and, since he had now stepped into her hall, she had no option but to at least go through the motions of pretending that this morning simply had not happened, and that neither of them had already made up their minds that there was simply no way they could ever share a roof...

‘Yes, Louise has explained the situation to me,’ Georgia agreed. ‘If you’d like to come into the kitchen we can discuss everything.’

She had deliberately asked Louise not to mention her aunt or the latter’s illness to Mitch Fletcher, not wanting it to seem as though she was inviting his pity.

Late afternoon sunshine flooded the comfortable kitchen. It was her aunt’s favourite room, reminiscent, so she had told Georgia the first time they viewed the cottage, of the home she had known as a girl. On hearing that, Georgia had ruthlessly changed her mind about replacing the kitchen’s ancient Aga with something more modern and getting rid of its heavy free-standing kitchen cupboards and dresser. Instead, she had done everything she could to reinforce Aunt May’s pleasure in the room’s homeliness—even if she did sometimes find that scouring the porous stone sink had a disastrous effect on her nails, and that the Aga, while giving off a delicious warmth, was not always as efficient as the modern electric oven she had had in her London flat. Maybe it was just that she was not accustomed to using it... Whatever, there had been several expensive mistakes before she had begun to appreciate its charms.

Once inside the kitchen, she waited, expecting to see distaste and scorn darkening Mitchell Fletcher’s astonishingly masculine golden eyes as he compared the kitchen to the marvels of modern technology to which he was no doubt accustomed. To her surprise he seemed to approve of the room, stroking the surface of the dresser and commenting, ‘Mid-nineteenth century, isn’t it? A very nice piece too... Solid and well made. A good, plain, unpretentious piece of furniture without any unnecessary frills and fuss about it. Good design is one of my hobby horses,’ he enlightened her. ‘That’s why—’ He broke off. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to hear my views on modern furniture,’ he told her drily, adding in a more ironic tone, ‘And I know you won’t want me to waste too much of your time.’

She thought he was referring to her behaviour earlier in the day and could feel her face growing warm until he added, ‘Louise did warn me that you would want to keep this interview short. In fact she stressed that you were looking for a lodger who made as few demands on your time as possible.’ He was eyeing her in an odd way, with a mingling of cynicism and curiosity, as he asked her, ‘If it isn’t too personal a question, why exactly do you want a lodger?’

Georgia was too tired to lie and, besides, what did it matter what he thought? They both knew that he was not going to want to stay here. ‘I need the money,’ she told him shortly.

There was a brief pause and then he said wryly, ‘Well, that’s honest at least. You need the money, but I suspect that you most certainly do not want the company...’

For some reason his perception made her shift uncomfortably, almost as though a burr had physically attached itself to her skin and was irritating her, making her want to shrug off his allegation. ‘As Louise told you, I don’t have time to waste, Mr Fletcher. I’m sorry you’ve had an unnecessary journey out here, but in the circumstances I don’t think—’

‘Hang on a minute!’ he interrupted her. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you’ve changed your mind, that you don’t now want a lodger?’

Georgia stared at him. ‘Well, you can hardly want to lodge here...’

‘Why not?’ he demanded, watching her piercingly.

Georgia didn’t know what to say. She could feel the heat scorching her skin, turning her face poppy-red. ‘Well, the cottage is out of the way...and very small, and I expect...at least I assume—’

‘It never does to make assumptions,’ he interrupted her smoothly. Too smoothly, Georgia recognised uncomfortably. ‘And if you think that I’m the kind of man to be deterred by what happened this morning... You don’t have to like me, Miss Barnes—in fact to be honest with you the one thing that did tend to put me off was the fact that you are a young, single woman.’ He ignored her outraged gasp, continuing silkily, ‘I don’t mean to condemn your whole sex for the silliness of a very small minority, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate that, until meeting you, I was concerned that you might well be a member of that small minority—’

Georgia couldn’t listen to any more. ‘If you think that I’m looking for a lodger for any reason other than the fact that I need the money—’ she began.

Without seeming to raise his voice, he cut through her angry demand to say coolly, ‘Certainly not—now that I’ve met you. I’d like to see the room if I may, please...’

He wanted to see the room! Georgia stared at him. She had been so sure that he would not want to stay. She was still so sure that he wouldn’t want to stay!

Angrily she led the way upstairs, opening the door into the spare bedroom. ‘The cottage only has one bathroom,’ she warned him curtly.

He had been looking out of the window at the garden. Now he turned round, looking very tall against the low slope of the dormer windows. He had been looking out at the garden and now, as he studied her, Georgia felt an uncomfortable frisson of sensation prickle warningly over her skin. This man would, she recognised with a small shock of unease, make a very formidable adversary.

An adversary? Why should she think of him in those terms? All she had to say was that she had changed her mind and that the room was no longer available, and he would be gone—safely out of her life.

‘That’s all right. I’m an early riser and likely to be gone by seven-thirty most mornings. Louise tells me you work from home?’

The question, so neatly slipped in under her guard, had her focusing on his face in surprised bewilderment, as though she were not quite sure where it had come from or why.

‘Rather unusual in this day and age, to find a woman of your age and skills, living in such a remote spot and working from home...’

Something about the cynical way his mouth twisted while he spoke made her reply defensively, almost aggressively, ‘I have my reasons.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you do,’ he agreed suavely.

Another shock skittered down her spine. He knew about her aunt, but how? Why? Surely—

‘He’s married, of course.’

Above her shock she was aware of the disgust, the anger almost in his voice, the condemnation held in the short flat statement that fell so shockingly against her ears.

‘What?’ Georgia focused disbelievingly on him.

‘He’s married. Your lover,’ Mitch Fletcher repeated grimly, apparently misreading her reaction. ‘It isn’t so hard to work it out, you know: you live alone, you’re obviously tense, anxious, on edge. You’re out most evenings, so Louise tells me.’

He thought she was having an affair with a married man! Georgia was stunned. How on earth...?

‘He obviously isn’t wealthy otherwise you wouldn’t need to consider taking in a lodger. Don’t you ever stop to think of the consequences of what you’re doing—not just to his wife and family, but to yourself as well? The chances are he’ll never leave her for you. They rarely do. And what satisfaction any woman can get from having to share a man with another woman...’

Georgia couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and yet, to her astonishment, instead of denying his allegations, she heard herself responding bitingly, ‘Well, since you so obviously don’t approve, it’s obvious that you won’t be wanting to stay here.’

‘I may not want to, but I don’t seem to have much option. Finding lodgings around here is like prospecting for gold in the North Sea! I’d like to move in tomorrow if that’s OK with you. I’m prepared to pay the full three months’ rent in advance.’

Georgia had been on the verge of telling him that she had changed her mind, but now abruptly she stopped. Three months’ rent in advance! She did a quick calculation and was astounded to discover how much money that actually was. Enough to cover the cost of her aunt’s expenses and to help with the mortgage... She wanted to refuse—ached to do so in fact—but she couldn’t let her pride stand in the way of providing Aunt May with all the comfort and care she could give her.

Swallowing hard on the impulse to tell him that his money was something she neither wanted nor needed in her life, she forced herself to say flatly, ‘Very well, then, if you’re sure.’

‘I’m sure.’ His voice sounded equally flat, hard and cold, unlike the warmth she had heard in it earlier in the day. He was walking towards her, and for some reason his easy cat-like tread made her retreat nervously on to the landing...

She was being ridiculous, she told herself as she headed for the kitchen. Just because he had jumped to a totally erroneous and unfounded assumption about her...an assumption she had deliberately chosen not to correct... Why hadn’t she corrected him? Because she had been too shocked to do so? Had her behaviour been governed more by self-defence and shock than by a deliberate need to foster the antagonism between them?

Tiredly, she put a hand to her forehead, disconcerted by her own thoughts, guiltily aware that for virtually the first time since they had moved to the cottage she had allowed someone else other than her aunt to dominate her mind.

As she walked into the kitchen, he was right behind her, and yet when she tensed and turned round, he stepped back from her, as though he had sensed her feeling of uncertainty and being somehow overpowered by him—as though he was deliberately allowing her space, cooling down the heat of mutual antipathy which she had quite distinctly felt. As he stepped back he reached inside the jacket of his suit and removed a cheque-book.

Nervously Georgia licked her lips, a habit left over from her childhood which she had thought she had long ago brought under control. Once he had written that cheque—once she had accepted it from him—it would be too late to say that she had changed her mind. Yet, as she watched him, she could not bring herself to utter the words which would have banished him from her life...

When he had written the cheque he straightened up. Georgia left it where it was lying between them on the kitchen table. As she turned her head, she saw the time and immediately realised she was going to be late for seeing her aunt. Instantly everything else was forgotten, a strained, hunted expression tensing her face as she said quickly, ‘I have to go out. I...’

‘Such a devoted lover!’ he mocked her sardonically. ‘Is he equally devoted? I wonder... Do you ever think about the woman—the family—he steals the time from that he spends with you? Do you ever put yourself in her shoes? Do you?’

The cheque was still on the table. Angrily Georgia picked it up, her voice shaking as she held it out to him and said, ‘You don’t have to stay here.’

‘Unfortunately I do,’ he told her curtly. ‘As I said, lodgings aren’t easy to come by round here.’ Ignoring her outstretched hand and the cheque, he turned towards the door. ‘Until tomorrow evening, then... Would seven o’clock suit you?’

Seven was the beginning of visiting time. Shaking her head, she said quickly, ‘Six would be better, or later—say about ten?’

Raising his eyebrows, he commented acidly, ‘He spends as much time with you as that, does he? His wife must be a saint—or a fool...’

Too concerned about being late to see her aunt, Georgia didn’t waste time on any response, simply going to the back door and opening it for him. As he came towards her she felt herself pulling in her stomach muscles, instinctively avoiding any kind of physical contact not just with him but with his very clothes. He paused as he drew level with her, looking thoughtfully at her for a moment so that it was impossible for her to avoid the deep scrutiny of his narrowed gaze.

‘His wife isn’t suffering alone either, is she?’ he said quietly. ‘You know, I can never understand women like you; to waste so much emotional energy and in such a worthless cause...’

‘What would you know about it?’ Georgia challenged him, driven to give in to the impulse to defend herself even while her mind screamed at her that she must get rid of him and get on her way to the hospice.

‘A good deal. My father had a succession of mistresses before he finally divorced my mother to marry one of them. I saw the hell he put her through, and us. I grew up hating those other women for taking him away from us, until I realised that my father was the one I should really hate, and that they were just as much his victims as we were.’

His quiet admission left Georgia too astounded to make any kind of response—and then he was gone, walking round the corner of the cottage, heading for the front gate and his car.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOU’RE very quiet, Georgy. You’re not still worrying about me, are you?’

Georgia focused on her aunt’s pale face, forcing herself to try to smile. She had in fact been thinking about Mitch Fletcher and his extraordinarily intimate disclosure just as he was leaving the cottage. She really would have to tell him that he was mistaken about her, to explain—if not everything, then at least enough for him to understand that it was her aunt who took up so much of her time and not some non-existent married lover.

She frowned a little, acknowledging how hard it must have been for him to witness the disintegration of his parents’ relationship, to have his own love for and trust in his father destroyed, as it obviously had been destroyed. Poor little boy... She caught herself up, shaking her head angrily. What on earth was she doing, feeling sympathy for someone who had suggested that she...? She bit her lip in vexation, unwillingly acknowledging that if he had misjudged her it was at least partly her own fault.

She wasn’t really sure why she was so reluctant for him—for anyone—to know the truth. Was it because in facing their concern and sympathy she would be forced to make herself confront the reality of how seriously ill her aunt was? No...no! Her thoughts scattered, frantically fleeing from what she could still not bring herself to face—fleeing from the enormity of that realisation... Her aunt was getting better... Only this morning she herself had said how well she felt, and yet as Georgia looked at the tiny figure in the bed, her fear was like cold, cold fingers tightening around her heart.

Unwillingly she looked into her aunt’s face and saw the tiredness there. She was holding her hand and it felt so frail, so cold.

‘Georgy—’ her aunt smiled at her through her tiredness ‘—you mustn’t...you mustn’t—’

She stopped speaking and, before her aunt could finish what she had been about to say, Georgia began to tell her about the garden, describing for her the new flowers that were opening, her voice high with denial of her terrible fear. ‘But you’ll be seeing them for yourself soon. Just as soon as you get well enough to come home...’ She thought she heard her aunt sigh. Certainly the pressure of those frail fingers holding her own tightened a little. She could feel herself starting to tremble, as fear and love rolled through her.

As always, the precious time she was allowed to spend at her aunt’s bedside was gone all too quickly, and it was time for her to leave. The sister in charge came towards her as she was going. Georgia smiled at her, saying eagerly, ‘Aunt May seems so much better since she came here. I’ve been telling her about the garden. She’s always wanted a proper garden of her own. The roses will be out soon. We bought them last year—scented ones. Perhaps she’ll be home in time to enjoy them and—’

‘Georgia, your aunt is doing very well,’ the sister interrupted her. ‘But you must realise—’ She had to break off as one of the nurses came quickly towards her, excusing herself to Georgia as she turned aside to listen to what she had to say. ‘Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go, but...’

As she watched her hurry away, Georgia fought to ignore the tension and fear she was feeling. Sometimes when she talked to her aunt about the garden, about the future, Aunt May looked at her with such a compassionate, concerned expression that Georgia felt as though... As though what? As though Aunt May knew and accepted something which she herself did not know—or did not want to know?

She was trembling when she got into her car, cold with fear.

* * *

As always when she suffered like this, Georgia found the only way to hold the terror and the pressure of her own despairing thoughts at bay was to work as hard as she could, so that all her mental energy was exhausted, making it impossible for her to dwell on the truth that her intelligence told her existed but which her heart refused to acknowledge.

It was almost one o’clock in the morning before she admitted that she was so tired that if she didn’t stop working she would probably fall asleep where she was.

She had, she confessed to Louise Mather, been lucky to find an agency with enough work to enable her to temp from home, but Louise had corrected her, telling her frankly, ‘No, I’m the one who’s lucky to have such a highly qualified and hard-working person on my books, and if you ever do want something more permanent, don’t hesitate to let me know.’

Louise knew what had prompted her move from London, but she was one of the very small circle of people who did. The doctor was another, plus the staff at the hospice, and the farmer’s wife—who was their closest neighbour and who, in the days before Aunt May had gone into the hospice, had been a regular visitor, bringing them fresh eggs and vegetables, and shared with Aunt May her own countrywoman’s lore. Aunt May was a very private person, and she had brought Georgia herself up the same way, and besides... Georgia leaned back in her chair, rubbing her eyes to relieve the strain of staring at the screen, and acknowledged that one of the reasons she was so reluctant to discuss her aunt’s illness with others was because somehow in doing so it was as though she was physically holding it at bay, refusing to allow it to tighten its grip on their lives. It was as though, by refusing to admit its existence, she could somehow pretend that it did not exist. Was that what she was doing? she asked herself. Was that why she preferred to allow someone like Mitch Fletcher to believe that she was having an affair with a married man rather than admit the truth?

Mind you, if she had a psychological problem, then so too did he. How on earth had he managed to leap to the conclusions he had about her on such flimsy evidence? It hadn’t been so much a leap as an impossible connecting together of facts which surely even a fool could see could not possibly amount to what he had seen in them. It was obvious that the trauma of his childhood had left a very deep impression on him—just as hers had left her with a fear of being alone, without someone she could call her own. Was that why she was so desperately afraid of losing her aunt? Not so much for her aunt’s sake, but more selfishly for her own?

Georgia shivered, hugging her arms around her body as though trying physically to ward off the darkness of the thoughts passing through her mind. It was because it was so late...because she was so tired...because she was alone... Because she was still even now suffering the after-effects of the emotions churned up by Mitch Fletcher...

Mitch Fletcher. She stood up unsteadily, smothering a yawn. She should never have allowed him to give her that cheque. She should have stood her ground and told him that she had changed her mind, that she no longer wanted a lodger. But then that would not have been true: she did not want a lodger, but she needed a lodger because she desperately needed the income having one would bring in. What she did not want was a lodger in the form of Mitch Fletcher, and what was more she suspected he was perfectly well aware of her feelings. Despite the easy charm, the warmth she had seen so clearly exhibited earlier in the day when he had responded with humour to their small confrontation, there was quite obviously another man beneath that easygoing surface, a tough, determined man whose relaxed outward pose cloaked a will of steel. She shivered, acknowledging that it wasn’t the cool night air coming in through her bedroom which was responsible for the lifting of the tiny hairs on her skin.

It was only when she was finally sliding gratefully into an exhausted sleep that she remembered that she hadn’t told her aunt about Mitch Fletcher. Tomorrow, she would tell her tomorrow. No, it would be today now, she recognised in a confused manner, impatiently blaming Mitch Fletcher for the fact that, infuriatingly, although she was both mentally and physically exhausted, as soon as he had slipped into her thoughts all desire to sleep had somehow evaded her.

* * *

As she was discovering more and more often these days, her sleep was brief and not very relaxing, and her first thoughts when she opened her eyes were, as always, for her aunt. Perhaps her inability to sleep properly lately was a legacy of those weeks when her aunt had herself been unable to sleep and when she, Georgia, had—ignoring the protests—sat up with her, talking to her and trying to help her to overcome the intensity of her pain. Now her aunt was receiving the benefit of the hospice’s care and experience in helping people to control and live with such pain, but Georgia herself could not get back into the habit of sleeping deeply and well.

Long before seven o’clock she was up and had eaten her breakfast—or rather had attempted to eat her breakfast, pushing away her cereal barely touched. Now, as she wandered through the garden, ignoring the discomfort of the early-morning dew soaking into her trainers, she paused to study the buds on one of the rose bushes she and her aunt had ordered the previous autumn. These were special roses, old varieties which they were growing for their scent rather than for the perfection of their blooms. As she looked at them, carefully examining them for any signs of greenfly, her throat ached with the pressure of the tears she dared not allow herself to cry.

When she returned to the kitchen for a pair of scissors and a basket and carefully cut a half-dozen or so buds, it was an impulse decision, and one which made her hands shake with emotion when she carefully placed the buds into the basket. Why was she picking them when surely her aunt would soon be able to come home and see them for herself? What was her subconscious mind trying to tell her? For a moment she was almost tempted to destroy the buds, to trample them into the ground, so that she could forget that strong current of awareness that had compelled her to cut them; as though some deep part of her was already acknowledging that her aunt would never see them blooming in their natural setting. A sharp, agonising dart of pain shivered through her. No...that wasn’t true! As she tensed her whole body, bracing it to reject the strong current of her own thoughts, she saw someone walking across the grass towards her.

It took her several seconds to recognise Mitch Fletcher, and then several more to pull herself together sufficiently to wonder what he was doing. She hadn’t been expecting to see him until this evening.

He, like her, was wearing a pair of trainers, hence his unheralded approach. He was also wearing a dark-coloured tracksuit, and he explained briefly, ‘I run this way most mornings, and when I saw you were in the garden I thought I’d stop to ask you if you minded if I brought my stuff round this afternoon instead of this evening? The hotel need my bedroom and they’d like me to check out before lunch...’

As she mentally calculated the distance from the town’s one decent hotel to the cottage, Georgia reflected that it was no wonder he looked so tautly muscled and fit if he ran that kind of distance most mornings.

A lot of people used the footpath that went past the cottage to the farm, both for walking and running, and she had become so used to them going past that she scarcely noticed them now, hence the reason she had not spotted him before. His abrupt intrusion into her sombre and painfully reflective mood left her feeling jarred and on edge, exposed somehow, and anxious for him to go, and yet somehow still too saddened by what she had been thinking to make a snappy quick response to his question.

There was no reason why he shouldn’t move in during the afternoon: she would be at home after all, working, and yet she wanted to say no to him. Did she want him lodging with her? She had no option now, and it would be stupid to allow her own emotions to cut her off from such a valuable source of much-needed income. She had kept from her aunt her worries about their financial resources, wanting the older woman to concentrate all her mental energy on fighting her cancer, not worrying about her niece.

‘Old-fashioned shrub roses. My grandmother used to grow them.’ The bleak, almost hard comment broke through her guard. She focused on Mitchell Fletcher as he leaned forward to examine the nearest bush.

Something in his voice made her question, ‘You didn’t get on with her?’

The look he gave her was sharp and prolonged. ‘On the contrary,’ he told her, ‘she was the one source of stability during my childhood. Her home, her garden were always somewhere I could escape to when things at home got out of hand. She was my father’s mother, and yet she never took his side. I think in many ways she blamed herself for his promiscuity, his lack of loyalty. She had brought him up alone, you see: her husband, my grandfather, had been killed in action during the war. She found great solace in her garden, both for the loss of her husband, and for the faults of her son. She died when I was fourteen...’

Unwillingly, Georgia felt her emotions responding to all that he had not said, to the pain she could tell was cloaked by the flat hardness of his voice. ‘You must have missed her dreadfully.’

There was a long pause, so long that she thought he must not have heard her, and then he said even more flatly, ‘Yes, indeed. So much so that I destroyed her entire rose garden... A stupid, pointless act of vandalism which incurred my father’s wrath because by doing so I had seriously brought down the value of the house, which was by then up for sale, and caused another row between my parents.

‘My father was in mid-affair at the time—never a good point at which to annoy him. We could chart the progress of his affairs by his moods, my mother and I. When a new one started, there was a general air of bonhomie and cheerfulness about him. As the chase hotted up and the affair began to develop, he would become euphoric—almost ecstatically so when the affair eventually became a physical reality. After that would follow a period when he was like someone high on drugs, and woe betide anyone who in any way, however inadvertently, came between him and his need to concentrate exclusively on the object of his desire. Later, in the cooling-off period, he would be more approachable, less obsessed. That was always a good time to get his attention.’

Georgia listened in silent horror, wanting to reject the unpleasantness of the words being delivered in that flat, emotionless voice, knowing how much pain, how much anguish they must cover, unwillingly finding herself in sympathy with him.

Abruptly he shrugged, a brief flexing of his shoulders as though he was actually throwing off some burden, his voice lighter and far more cynical as he added, ‘Of course, as an adult, one realises that no one partner alone is responsible for all the ills in a marriage. I dare say my mother played her part in the destruction of their relationship, even though as a child I was not aware of it. Certainly what I do know is that my father should never really have married. He was the kind of man who could never wholly commit himself to one single woman...’

He leaned forward and looked into her basket. ‘Roses... A gift for your lover?’ His smile was very cynical. ‘Haven’t you got it the wrong way round? Shouldn’t he be the one giving you roses, strewing them dew-fresh across your pillow in the best of romantic traditions? But then of course I was forgetting he can never be here for you in the morning, can he? He has to return to the matrimonial pillow. I’m not surprised you want to keep this place. It’s ideal as a lovers’ retreat: tucked away here, cut off from the rest of the world, a secret, secluded, private paradise. Do you ever ask yourself about her—about his other life, his wife? Yes, of course you do, don’t you? You couldn’t not do. Do you pray for him to be free, or do you pretend that you’re content with things as they are, gratefully taking the small part of his time that is all he can give you, believing that one day it will be different—that one day he will be free?’

‘It isn’t like that,’ Georgia protested angrily. ‘You don’t—

‘I don’t what?’ he interrupted her. ‘I don’t understand? Like his wife? How your sex does love to delude itself!’ He turned away from her. ‘Will it be all right if I come round this afternoon with my stuff, or will it interfere with...with your private life?’

‘No, it won’t,’ Georgia told him furiously. ‘In fact—’

‘Fine. I’ll be here about three,’ he told her, already starting to lope away towards the gate, with the easy movement of a natural athlete.

Impotently, Georgia stared after him, wondering why on earth she hadn’t acted when she had had the opportunity and told him not only just how wrong he was in his assumptions but also that she had changed her mind and that she was no longer willing to have him as a lodger. Too late to wish her reactions had been faster now. He had gone.

The perfume of the roses wafted poignantly around her. She touched one of the buds tenderly. Poor boy, he must have been devastated when he lost his grandmother. She could well understand the emotions which must have led him to destroying her roses...the grief and frustration. He must have felt so alone, so deserted. It was so easy for her to understand how he must have felt. Too easy, she warned herself as she walked towards the house, reminding herself that it wasn’t the boy she was going to deal with but the man, and that that man had leapt to the most erroneous and unfair assumptions about her, based on the most tenuous of links and such scant knowledge of her.

Later, as she showered and prepared for her visit to her aunt, her conscience pricked her, reminding her that she needed only to have stopped Mitch Fletcher when he first mentioned her supposed lover and that she ought to have corrected him then. Why hadn’t she done so? Not because she was the kind of person who enjoyed allowing others to misjudge her so that she could wallow in self-pity and then enjoy their embarrassment once the truth was ultimately revealed. No, it wasn’t that. It was because...because she was afraid of discussing her aunt’s condition with anyone, afraid...afraid of what? Of what she might be forced to confront in doing so?

Her heart had started to hammer, the familiar feeling of panic, despair and anger flooding through her, the sense of outrage and helplessness... Abruptly she switched off, refusing to allow her thoughts to charge heedlessly down the road they were heading—down a road she could not allow them to go. Why? Because she knew that road led nowhere other than to an empty wasteland of anguish and pain. She had, after all, already travelled down it once when her parents died. Then there had been Aunt May to help her, to hold her, to comfort her. Now there was no one. No, she would be completely on her own...

She could feel the panic building up inside her, the rejection of what her mind was trying to tell her, the impotent rage and misery.

As she went downstairs she saw the roses she had cut, and for a moment she was tempted to pick them up and throw them into the dustbin. Then she remembered Mitch Fletcher’s flat and yet extraordinarily graphic description of his destruction of his grandmother’s rose bushes and she quelled the impulse.

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