Too Short A Blessing
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THE moment she stepped inside the front door, Sara Barclay saw the change in her brother. Gone was the morose, withdrawn man she had left behind two weeks ago, and in his place was the older brother she remembered from her teenage years.

‘Managed to tame the wild beast, did you?’ he teased as he rolled his wheelchair forwards to relieve her of her suitcase.

‘Just about.’

The wild beast in question was the very advanced computer-cum-word processor which her brother had just purchased, and which she, as his secretary-cum-assistant, had spent the last fortnight learning to operate. In addition to its basic functions, the machine was so advanced that it could be locked into the information banks of other computers on a worldwide scale, thus enabling Sam to keep himself completely up to date with the economic world. Before the devastating accident which had robbed Sam of the use of his legs and killed both Sam’s wife, Holly, and Sara’s own fiancé, Rick, Sam had been part of the frenetic world of currency dealing, with a brilliant future ahead of him.

Now that was gone, along with so much else; Sam was virtually confined to his wheelchair, able to walk only a dozen or so steps unaided, his health far too uncertain to permit him to work in the gruellingly demanding world of currency dealing, where young men could be burned out by the time they were thirty, unable to keep up with the ferocious pressure of the work. Sam now worked from home, writing for various economics magazines, and working on the book he was trying to write—a blend of fact and fiction based on the world he had once known.

Getting the computer had been Sara’s idea—a last-ditch attempt to rouse her brother from the miasma of depression that had engulfed him since Holly’s death, but it was obvious to Sara as he ushered her into the sitting-room of his London house that something had happened during her absence to restore her brother to something approaching his old self.

‘Where’s Carly?’ she asked him as she sat down.

All of them had been affected by the tragedy of the two shocking deaths and Sam’s physical disability, but surely the person to suffer the most damage must be her little niece? In one short evening Carly’s small world had been virtually destroyed. Her mother had been killed, and her father so badly injured that for days the doctors had despaired of being able to save him.

Perhaps it was no wonder that she and Carly should have grown so close in those early weeks after the accident. Physically Carly had clung to her, but emotionally she had been the one to cling to the little girl, Sara acknowledged. Without the responsibility of Carly, she doubted if she could have found the will to survive those dreadful early days.

Even now, over eighteen months later, they were still etched sharply on her memory: the laughter when Holly set off with the two men to drive them to the station to catch the train for Cambridge—Rick, her fiancé, had been at university with Sam, and it was Sam who had introduced them. Sam and Rick were attending a new computer course together, and she and Rick had been spending the weekend with her brother and his family. She and Rick had been going to be married, six weeks after the course ended.

They had met and fallen in love over a long period of time, but she was still at the ecstatic disbelieving stage, still giddy and delirious with the pleasure of being in love and loved in return.

And then in one short, horror-filled afternoon her whole world was overturned.

She hadn’t worried when Holly didn’t come rushing back. Her sister-in-law had said that she might take advantage of having a resident babysitter to do some shopping, so when the knock came on the door and she opened it to a white-faced police constable the very last thing in her mind was that there had been an accident.

At first she had been too shocked to take very much in. The first numbing discovery that Holly, lovely, laughing Holly whom her brother adored, and Rick, dear, wonderful Rick, who had made her whole world come alive, were both dead, was so immensely unbelievable that it blotted anything else out.

Scooping up Carly, she had gone numbly into the police car, and from there to the hospital, leaving Carly in the care of a calmly smiling nurse while she was ushered into a room where a grave-faced doctor tried to explain to her why it was impossible for her to see her brother.

After that there had been a week of disbelief, broken sharply by unbearable bursts of pain; Holly’s and Rick’s funerals; the shock and despair on the faces of their families. She and Sam had only one another; their father had died from a heart attack when Sara was in her mid-teens, and their mother had slowly faded away after that, dying when Sara was nineteen.

Sara had had a good job as a secretary, which she had planned to give up when she and Rick married. In the circumstances, leaving a little earlier had presented no problems. During those first early weeks there had been a lot for her to cope with Visits from Sam’s employers, Sara’s keen perception showing her that beneath their concerned enquiries was an implacable determination to let her know that there could be no place in the company for a man with Sam’s disabilities—a man who would virtually be confined to a wheelchair—if he was lucky.

There had been no immediate financial problem—she had her savings to draw on to keep herself and Carly; it was out of the question for her to approach Sam concerning money. He was far too ill to be worried by anything like that.

Even when it was clear that he would survive, the doctors were very reluctant to let him come home. He had had to spend time in a rehabilitation centre, learning how to deal with his lack of mobility, and from there his doctors had wanted him to go into a home until they deemed him well enough to leave, but Sara had insisted that she was perfectly capable of looking after him; indeed, she had fought untiringly to get him home.

After the funeral, Holly’s parents had offered to take Carly, but they were an older couple who, much as they loved their granddaughter, lived a life far too quiet and retired for a lively five-year-old, and so, without making any deliberate decision, Sara had found herself slipping into the role of surrogate mother to Carly, and nurse-cum-companion to Sam. If nothing else, it gave her some reason to keep on living.

Over the last six months Sam had commented on several occasions that she should get out more, make new friends. New men friends, he meant, but that part of her life had gone for ever. Where she had once been warmed by her love for Rick, she now felt cold—dead, really. She had no desire to replace him. A psychologist would no doubt put her lack of interest in men down to the fact that she was afraid … afraid of loving and losing again, but logic, no matter how well founded, was no opponent for feelings. She had loved Rick and she had lost him, and she could never again be the girl she had once been. Everything about her now was muted and slightly withdrawn. She had become a woman who preferred the cool protection of the shadows to the heat of the sun.

As she sat down in an armchair opposite her brother, her eye was caught by a letter lying on the coffeee table. As she read the letter heading and recognised the name of her brother’s solicitors, her body tensed.

Ever since the accident, a long legal battle had been going on between Sam’s solicitors and those acting for the man who had caused the accident.

Even now, Sara could not think about Wayne Houseley without her stomach cramping with agony and bitterness flooding her heart.

The first time he approached her she hadn’t known who he was. The police had simply told her that the driver of the large, powerful car which had smashed into Holly’s small Citroën had been drinking before the accident.

Wayne Houseley was fairly well known as an entrepreneur, and certainly Sara had seen his name in the papers. Sam had been convinced that he was driving the car, and it was later confirmed that he and his wife had been on their way home from a luncheon party, but when the police reached the scene of the accident, Wayne Houseley had informed them that his wife had been driving the car.

There had been no witnesses to the accident, barring Sam, who of course could not be considered impartial … and although Sara was sure that the police believed her brother, legally speaking it looked as though Wayne Houseley was going to get off any charges, other than that of careless driving levelled at his wife.

Sam’s insurance company and solicitors had assured them that financially this would not make any difference—the Houseleys would still have to pay considerable damages, and Wayne Houseley had been properly insured—but it was the man’s arrogant ability to avoid any responsibility for what he had done that made Sara bitter. She was convinced that her brother had been right when he said he saw Wayne Houseley in the driver’s seat of the large BMW and not his wife, and it seemed to Sara that Wayne Houseley was typical of that breed of men who considered that their wealth and the power it brought them set them above the law.

It was wrong that Wayne Houseley should not be punished, wrong that his wife should be forced into accepting the blame, but then of course his wife had not been drinking …

‘Houseley wants to settle the damages out of court,’ Sam now told her, seeing her frown. ‘Jenkins thinks I should accept.’

He watched as Sara’s mouth tightened, saddened to see what the last eighteen months had done to his sister. Sara had always been a pretty girl, and now she was a beautiful woman, but one who carried with her a haunting aura of pain. The blue eyes, that once danced with laughter and happiness were clouded and withdrawn; her dark auburn hair seemed to have lost some of its gloss and glow. She was thinner, he recognised guiltily. He had been so wrapped up in his own pain that he hadn’t always realised that his tragedy had been Sara’s, too.

‘I’ve asked Mrs Morris to look after Carly for the afternoon,’ he told her, answering her earlier question. ‘I wanted to have a talk with you.’

He paused, and Sara had the impression that he was intensely excited about something. His thin face had a colour she had not seen in it for months, his eyes—the same shade of blue as her own—snapping with the fierce enthusiasm that had once been such an integral part of him, but which had been lost since the accident.

‘Look at this.’ He picked up a glossy magazine from behind his chair. It was open at the property advertisement section, and a brilliant red circle was drawn round one of the ads. Sara read it slowly.

‘For sale—part-Tudor cottage badly in need of sympathetic renovation in accordance with Grade One Listed Buildings requirements, plus one acre of land and private gardens.’

‘It sounds idyllic,’ commented Sara idly, ‘but it’s very much off the beaten track, isn’t it?’ The address given was in a part of Dorset that Sara knew to be rather remote. As children she and Sam had lived some twenty miles away from the village mentioned, and both of them knew the area reasonably well.

She looked up and and saw the expression in her brother’s eyes, her own opening wide as she breathed unbelievingly, ‘Sam, you aren’t thinking of buying it, are you?’

‘Not thinking of it,’ he agreed with a grin. ‘I’ve already decided.’ He saw her face and added hastily, ‘Look, before you start objecting, let me tell you what I’ve got in mind. I rang the agents up last week and arranged to go down and see the place. I took Phil Roberts with me—you remember, he’s an old friend of mine from Cambridge who’s now with one of the big London estate agents. I wanted him to check the place over for me, and he was quite impressed. Basically it’s pretty sound, although very, very run down. But best of all, it’s got enough outbuildings for us to convert them into a ground floor self-contained unit for me,’ he grimaced faintly, ‘I’m sick of sleeping in the sitting-room, and a traditional bungalow doesn’t really appeal, so …’

‘But Sam, it’s miles from anywhere … totally cut off … and all that land—–’

‘It’s what I want, Sara,’ he interrupted, looking directly at her. ‘Holly was the one who liked London, and it was always on the cards that we’d leave one day. There’s nothing to keep me here now. I can work just as easily from Croft End as I can from here—more easily once the new computer’s installed. And think of the benefits for Carly—and for you. You always did have a yen for a cottage with roses round the door.’

He was teasing her, Sara knew, but there was a grain of truth in what he said. Their father’s job had been one which necessitated almost constant moves, and as a child she had longed for security, for what she had seen as the comfort and protection of a small village atmosphere.

‘But all that land …’ she protested again.

‘Not just the land,’ Sam told her with a grin. ‘A donkey, two cats and a dog go with it.’ He laughed when he saw her expression. ‘It’s quite a story. Apparently the property was owned by a rather eccentric old lady, and she specified to her solicitors that the house was only to be sold to someone who could take on the responsibility of her animals. Apparently she also specified that it was not to be sold to her next-door neighbour—the chap whose land runs adjacent to hers is Croft End’s equivalent of the local squire—owns the largest house in the neighbourhood, that sort of thing. He also owns and runs a highly profitable nursery garden, apparently, selling mainly wholesale, and he very much wanted the paddock attached to the cottage to extend his operation.

‘I don’t know the full story, but according to the estate agents there was some sort of quarrel between him and Miss Betts which led to her specifying that on no account was he to be allowed to buy either the cottage or the land. Apparently the proceeds from the sale are to go to an animal charity. Anyway, no one else seems to be interested—the property isn’t cheap, and the alterations won’t be either, because of the building being listed, but with the money I’ll get from this place I should be able to afford it. There’s a huge garden, complete with vegetable plot and fruit bushes; you always did fancy yourself as something of a back-to-nature freak, as I remember! It will be good for Carly, all that fresh country air …’

He wanted to go, almost desperately, Sara recognised on a deep twist of pain. This was the first time since Holly’s death that she had seen Sam enthusiastic about anything. He wanted her to share his enthusiasm, she knew, but as yet she was too surprised … too shocked by his news to know what she felt.

Only one thing was certain. Wherever Sam chose to live, she would be going with him. He and Carly were her only reason for living now. The three of them were a small, very close-knit family unit, and if Sam wanted to bury himself in a remote Dorset village in what sounded like a wreck of a house, then, like it or not, she would be going with him.

Taking a deep breath, she summoned a shaky smile. ‘Well, I hope it has electricity,’ she warned him. ‘Otherwise that very expensive piece of equipment you’ve just ordered will be no use at all.’

He gave a deep laugh and reached forward to rumple her hair. ‘Yes it has, my little pessimist, and not only that, but there’s also an ancient generator in the garage. I don’t know if it works, but if not I can amuse myself by taking it to bits and then putting it back together again.’

‘Yes, minus several parts,’ agreed Sara with a grin, remembering the variety of dismembered radios and televisions that had filled their garage at home when they were children. Invariably Sam would be left with several ‘parts’ over, and yet, incredibly, he had nearly always managed to make the things work.

‘I know this has come as a shock to you,’ he said quietly, covering one of her hands with his own, ‘but I feel in my bones that I’m making the right decision, Sara. I want you to come with us, you know that … but if you feel you can’t, then Carly and I will still go.’

‘I’m coming with you.’ She forced herself to sound light-hearted and cheerful as she added, ‘When do we actually get to move in?’

‘Not for a couple of months yet. I’ve put Phil in charge of organising the essential work that needs to be done. The property actually becomes ours at the end of the month, and Phil reckons it’ll be another couple of months after that before we can move in. Décor and furnishing I’m leaving up to you. Phil is going to come round later in the week with the plans of how it’s going to look, and that should give you an idea of what we’re going to need.’

‘Can’t I go down and see it before then?’

Sam shook his head.

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ he told her with a faint grin. ‘It looks so ramshackle that if you saw it in its present state you’d probably refuse point blank to move.’

‘But what about these animals?’

‘All being taken care of until we actually move in. The two cats are apparently half wild; the dog’s boarded out and the donkey is being fed twice daily by a neighbour.’

All in all, she had had an extremly eventful homecoming, Sara thought later as she curled up under her quilt.

Carly was asleep in the bedroom next door, while she, Sara, slept in what had once been the spare bedroom. No one slept across the landing in the bedroom that had been Sam’s and Holly’s; Sam slept downstairs in what had been the dining-room, in a specially adapted bed. Although he could do most things for himself, his legs were too weak to allow him to climb the stairs. The accident had not caused any paralysis, but the many operations involved in the rebuilding of his legs had meant that Sam would always have a degree of disability, although in time he should be able to walk, even if he had to resort to his wheelchair occasionally.

As she sank slowly into sleep, picture-book images retained from her childhood mingled with her dreams. A Tudor cottage in the depths of the country. What could be more in keeping with the secret adolescent dreams she had once woven for herself? Dreams that had been upstaged by Rick’s emergence into her life, but which were now resurfacing, offering her comfort and something to cling to.

But what about their neighbour-to-be? The local would-be ‘squire’ whom the old lady had specifically refused to allow to buy her home and land?

Every paradise had to have its serpent, Sara reminded herself drowsily, mentally picturing a heavy, brash male with a ruddy complexion and a manner very like Wayne Houseley’s. Did he bully his wife the way Wayne Houseley had bullied his? Probably, she thought bitterly. Men of that stamp liked bullying women.

Before Sara finally let sleep claim her, she summoned up Rick’s beloved image, a ritual she had performed every night since he had been killed. As always, she felt the enormity of what she had lost consume her, her dry eyes burning more painfully than if she had shed tears.

If only she and Rick had been given more time … if only she had his child to comfort her as Sam had Carly. If only … The saddest words in any language, surely?

CHAPTER TWO

‘WOW! It’s terrific, isn’t it, Aunt Sara? Just like that jigsaw Gran sent me for Christmas?’ Carly demanded enthusiastically as Sara emerged from the driver’s seat of the car to stand alongside her. The rutted track which had led from the main road to the front of the house had jolted Sara’s small car roughly from side to side, and she grimaced slightly, wondering how long her ancient Mini’s suspension would last if it was constantly exposed to the rigours of the cart track. Little wonder that Sam had not seen fit to mention it during his eulogy on the delights of their new home!

Carly was quite right, though: the white plaster-work and black beams of the cottage, and the lavish display of cottage garden flowers in the beds bordering the road, made an ideal picture-postcard scene. A narrow brick path led towards the open front door, the bright May sunshine bouncing off the diamond-paned windows.

Sam had travelled down to their new home the previous day with Phil, leaving Sara and Carly behind to finish cleaning up the house and to check that the furniture removers did their job properly.

The furniture van had not yet arrived, and Sara suspected that its driver would be none too pleased with their cart track of a road. Still, she certainly could not carp at the setting: lush fields, broken up by green clumps of woodland spread all around out on three sides of the cottage. On the fourth was what Sara guessed must be the paddock, complete with the donkey, which had just caught Carly’s eye. On the far side of the paddock was a high brick wall, presumably the boundary of their land and the beginning of that belonging to their one neighbour.

Sara had driven through the village before turning off for the cottage. It was only a mile or so away, but it seemed a pity that the nearest neighbour had to be such an unpleasant sort of person. Mentally shrugging the thought aside, she pushed open the small gate and ushered Carly up the brick path ahead of her.

Sam was waiting to welcome them inside, and he was actually standing free of his wheelchair, Sara noticed with delight, and beaming at both of them as he stood back to let them get past him and into the small square hall.

The soft cream walls and exposed beams made Sara cry out with pleasure. The stone floor underfoot was worn and polished by time. As yet the hall was unfurnished, but in her mind’s eye Sara saw the floor covered by the Persian rug Holly had bought the first Christmas she and Sam were married.

A narrow staircase twisted upwards, light pouring into the hall from a casement window with a seat just big enough for Carly to perch on.

‘Come into the sitting-room. Luckily everything’s been finished on schedule. Phil told me the builders were working late every night last week to get it all done. I must say they’ve done a superb job. Just wait until you see the kitchen—complete with Aga, I might add.’

When consulted about what she would like in the kitchen, Sara had opted for the traditional fuel-burning cooker, knowing that it could be relied upon to provide both heat and somewhere to cook food should there ever be any problems with their electricity supply. The cottage was too remote to have been supplied with gas, and despite Sam’s claim that he could get the generator working, Sara felt that she would prefer not to have to depend on it. Dorset was notorious for its heavy snow-falls, and the last thing she wanted was to be snowed up in a remote cottage without any form of warmth or means to cook by.

‘When the builders started work, they discovered this fireplace,’ said Sam. ‘It was bricked up and hidden behind some plasterboard.’

He stood to one side so that Sara could admire the large traditional fireplace that had been uncovered. As with the hall, the walls in this room had been painted a soft cream, the starkness offset by the dark beams.

The sitting-room was suprisingly large, with windows at either end. The rear windows overlooked the gardens, and Sara wandered over to look out, catching her breath in a gasp of pleasure as she did so.

Beyond the overgrown brick-paved patio area stretched an emerald-green lawn bordered by a wilderness of traditional cottage garden plants. A lattice trellis, broken in places and smothered in roses and clematis, separated the lawn from what Sam told her was the vegetable garden and a small orchard.

‘You can explore it all later,’ he told her firmly, grinning at her. ‘Come and have a look at the rest of the house.’

Thanks to Phil’s careful planning, the downstairs of the house had been extended to incorporate what had once been a motley collection of outbuildings. These now comprised a comfortable sitting-room-cum-study for Sam, a good-sized bedroom, and his own specially organised bathroom.

The extension ran at right angles to the main building, and opening the French windows of his sitting-room, Sam told her that he wanted to extend the paved area of the garden so that he would have somewhere to sit and work during the summer months.

In addition to the sitting-room, the main part of the house also had a very small study, a dining-room and a well-proportioned kitchen. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a bathroom. One of the bedrooms had obviously been decorated with Carly in mind, but the two others had plain cream walls—so that she could choose her own décor, Sam told her when she rejoined him downstairs.

‘It’s perfect, Sam,’ she told him, laughing when he teased,

‘In spite of the cart-track outside? Apparently the guy who owns the property next door wanted to have it made up properly, but Miss Betts wouldn’t agree. She liked her privacy and maintained that the state of the lane prevented her from getting unwanted visitors. Jonas Chesney, who owns and runs the nursery, wanted the road made up because his buyers find it difficult to use—especially in winter. It runs right into the back of his property.’

‘And considering himself the local squire, he wouldn’t want the hoi polloi turning up at his front door, of course,’ put in Sara nastily.

Sam raised his eyebrows slightly. ‘I don’t think it’s a matter of that. It seems that the greenhouses and his office are close to what used to be the stable block, and that’s where this lane leads to. The house itself and the main gardens are open to the public certain days of the week. I haven’t seen it myself, but apparently it’s a lovely place—beautifully maintained, which can’t be cheap. Derek Middleton, Miss Betts’s solicitor, had nothing but praise for the man. I get the impression that he thought Miss Betts had behaved very unreasonably towards him. It seems that at one time the family owned all the land around here, but Jonas Chesney’s uncle had to sell off most of it to meet death duties. Middleton told me that Jonas has done wonders with the place. It seems he gave up a very promising career abroad to come home when his uncle died, and he’s made a real success of this nursery business. He wanted the land to extend into, it seems.’

‘Mmm … I don’t suppose he’s going to be overjoyed about getting us for neighbours,’ said Sara aggressively. ‘I expect he’d hoped to get the place at a knock-down price when Miss Betts died. No doubt it came as quite a shock to him to discover the contents of her will.’

‘What’s got into you?’ Sam looked distinctly puzzled. ‘Anyone would think you’d actually met the man and taken a violent dislike to him.’

‘I know his type,’ Sara said shortly.

Sam frowned, his mouth relaxing a little as he said softly, ‘Sara, I know what you’re thinking, but from what I’ve heard, he isn’t the same type as Wayne Houseley at all. Far from it. A less scrupulous man could easily have found some way round Miss Betts’s will, you know, and this morning when I arrived I found he’d sent over a basket of eggs and some milk and bread. I think you’re making an unnecessary ogre out of the man. Don’t forget he’s going to be our closest neighbour,’ he added warningly, his voice lightening as he commented, ‘and one whose help we’ll probably be very grateful for if that jungle out there is as bad as it looks! I found a goldfish pond on the far side of the lawn. We’ll have to get something to cover it—a net or something. I don’t want to run the risk of Carly falling in. Speaking of my daughter, where is she?’ he asked.

‘Talking to the donkey,’ Sara told him. She glanced round and asked, ‘Where are the cats and the dog?’

‘Being looked after by our neighbour, apparently. He offered to take charge of them after Miss Betts’s funeral. Mmm … that sounds like the furniture van. I’ll leave you to deal with them. By the way, I’ve invited Phil to join us for dinner tonight, if that’s okay with you?

Sara nodded her head briefly. Whatever her private doubts might be about the wisdom of their move, she could already see an improvement in Sam. He spoke and moved with a much greater sense of purpose—a resurgence of the old Sam she had missed so much during the last eighteen months. It had been frightening at times to realise how much both he and Carly depended on her, and yet she had needed their dependence simply to give her a reason to go on living.

Rick’s death had devastated her. Always a fairly quiet girl, she had become totally withdrawn, unable to cope with the cruelty of the loss. Rick had been outward-going and extrovert, and she had loved him to the extent that he had filled her whole world, leaving little room for anyone else. Even now there were times when she could scarcely comprehend that all that vitality had been wiped out. She dreamed some nights that he had come back to her, that she only had to reach out to touch him. Waking up after those dreams was agony.

There had been several occasions recently when Sam had told her that she ought to go out more, to rebuild her life. To find another man, he meant, but Sara did not want another man. She was content with her life as it was. She had Sam and Carly to love and to love her in return, and that was all she wanted from life. She didn’t want to love again, if the truth were known. She didn’t want the pain of loving someone only to risk losing them. No … she was perfectly happy as she was.

She’d already met Phil on several occasions. He was pleasant enough and she quite liked him, but if Sam had any matchmaking in mind …

The sound of the removal van stopping outside galvanised her into action. She hurried to the front door, glad of an excuse to dismiss thoughts that she thought of as too introspective. She didn’t like delving deep into her emotions any more. It was too painful. There had been so much pain in her life that now she had almost no tolerance of it at all. It was as though she was so emotionally scarred that she couldn’t bear anything touching the wounded area.

As she instructed the removal men she glanced across towards the paddock, checking on Carly. It was an automatic reaction these days, a reassurance to herself that the little girl was safe. How she had hated it when Carly first started school, but she had taught herself to let go, not to pass on to her niece her own fears. Carly enjoyed school, and Sam had already spoken to the headmistress of the small village school she would be attending from the end of the summer holidays. In view of her age it had been decided that there was no point in her starting at her new school until then, when she would do so with children of her own age, since the country school did not start its pupils at four as had the London one she had previously attended.

She had the whole summer in which to enjoy the company of her brother and her niece, to put down roots and let them flourish in the rich country earth. As she glanced at Carly, her attention was caught by the brick boundary wall, the sight of it reminding her of their neighbour.

Sam didn’t want her to be antagonistic towards him, she knew that, but even without knowing the man she didn’t like him. Illogical, she knew, but it was there.

‘Just one more story,’ begged Carly, snuggling further down into her small bed.

Where on earth did children get their energy from? Sara wondered fatalistically as she complied with her small niece’s request. There was Carly, all bright and bouncy, while she could barely keep her eyes open.

The removal men were long gone; the furniture all in place. Sam was in his study with Phil discussing his plans for the future. Both men had insisted on helping her with the washing up after dinner, and although she had found Phil pleasant enough she had been glad to excuse herself on the pretext of needing to put Carly to bed.

Now all she wanted to do was to go to bed herself. It had been a long day and she was tired out. The cottage was much larger than Sam’s London house, and soon she would have to get down to buying furniture and carpets.

She had been so busy that she hadn’t even had time to explore the garden, a treat she had been promising herself all day. Sara had a thing about gardens. She had always loved them, and as a child had longed for one of her own, but her parents had never lived anywhere long enough for her to watch the seeds she had sown grow.

The garden was to be her province; Sam had promised her that. In her mind’s eye she could already see a productive kitchen garden, and kitchen shelves filled with bottled fruits and jams. Rick had teased her about her dream of becoming a busy country wife; his future lay in the city, and Sara had willingly abandoned her own girlhood dreams to share it with him. But the garden surrounding the cottage was something that would give her life a new purpose, something of her own that she could cherish and nurture. She wanted that—needed it, she acknowledged, as she gently pulled the covers up round her sleeping niece.

In her own room she stood for a long time looking out into the dark silence. No cars … no traffic sounds … nothing. It was bliss. Tomorrow she would get up early and explore the garden. Suddenly she felt almost childishly excited, full of anticipation she had not felt in a long, long time.

A flash of orange beneath the green of the lily pad caught her eye and Sara bent to look a little closer, childishly delighted to see the fish. It was only half past six, and she had been awake since five.

Unable to deny herself the treat of exploring the garden any longer, she had sneaked downstairs in her cotton nightdress and bare feet, forgetting that the lawn would be damp with dew.

The sky was a bowl of pale blue edged with lemon where the sun was starting to climb; the garden was so still and peaceful.

The fish rose to the surface, searching for food, its round eyes observing her with calm indifference. Sam was right about one thing: they would need to cover the pool with something to make it safe for Carly.

She had resented Sam’s decision to uproot them, but now that she had seen the house and the garden, she knew that nothing could drag her away from it. Smiling wryly at herself, she stood up and moved backwards, the breath leaving her lungs as she cannoned into something solid and warm.

‘Careful!’

Calloused brown fingers circled her wrist, the shock of the unfamiliar male voice behind her sending ripples of sensation quivering down her spine. She wrenched her wrist free and swung round, anger sparkling in her eyes.

He was standing so close to her that she had to tilt her head quite a long way to look up into his face.

And what a face! she acknowledged on another wave of shock. Lean and tanned, and so totally masculine that she could feel the tendrils of antipathy curling through her stomach. Whoever he was, she didn’t like this man; he was far too male and sure of himself. Beneath the lazy mockery, the grey eyes were regarding her in a way that made her skin prickle. He was looking at her the way a man looks at a woman he finds sexually desirable. She was shocked by the discovery. It affronted her that he should dare to look at her like that. Her throat felt tight with anger. Didn’t he know that he had no right to look at her that way? She belonged to Rick—Rick, who was dead, and who could never again look at a woman with desire in his eyes.

A searing, penetrating pain engulfed her, making her stumble back from the concern she saw unexpectedly darkening his eyes. His hand came out and she dashed it away, trembling with fury and dislike.

‘What is it?’

His voice was low and urgent, his fingers curling imprisoningly round her wrist as she tried to jerk away.

Tension seized her as she suddenly realised her vulnerability. Her cotton nightdress did nothing to conceal her body from him; she had forgotten how inappropriately dressed she was. Hot colour seared her pale skin as she looked up into his face, demanding to be set free, and saw the way he was studying her body. No one, not even Rick, had ever looked at her with such open sexuality. She could almost smell the maleness of him, she recognised on a wave of revulsion.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ she demanded huskily, dragging her eyes away from his jeans-clad figure. The jeans were old and worn, the check shirt open over his chest and rolled up to reveal powerful forearms roughened by dark hairs.

‘I’m your neighbour,’ he told her easily, confounding her. ‘I saw you standing by the pool as I walked down the lane, and I thought I’d come and introduce myself.’

He was laughing at her now, and Sara felt her skin burn. She hadn’t realized she was so highly visable. Anyone could have walked down the lane and seen her standing there.

Almost as though he knew what she was thinking, he added softly, ‘Don’t worry about it. The lane only goes as far as my property and no one other than me uses it at this time of the morning.’

‘I wasn’t worried.’

His intimation galled her, all the more so because he had guessed so accurately at her thoughts. That was another intrusion that she resented. He had no right to read her mind so easily; Rick had been the only man she permitted to do that. It was all wrong that this arrogant, over-confident man should be alive and healthy while Rick … A sob of resentment rose in her throat. She had felt like this before, but only in the first weeks after Rick’s death, illogically resenting that other young men should be alive while he was dead—but that feeling had faded in time. It disturbed her that this man should be the means of resurrecting it, and she glared up at him, willing him to release her and go away.

‘Not exactly friendly, are you?’ he murmered wryly, watching the emotions chase one another across her face. ‘I wonder why?’

‘Perhaps because I don’t like you,’ retorted Sara waspishly.

The dark eyebrows rose. His hair was almost black and very thick. It was also too long, she thought disparagingly.

‘Really? But you don’t know me, do you?’

His good-humoured amusement increased her sense of ill-usage.

‘I don’t want to know you,’ she told him through gritted teeth, ‘and if you would kindly release my arm …’

‘In a moment.’

He wasn’t amused now. In fact, there was a distinctly disturbing glint in his eyes, a warning that his temper was not perhaps as equable as she had first supposed.

He moved towards her, crowding her against the pool so that she could not escape, the fingers of his free hand drifting lightly along her arm. She shivered beneath the light caress, watching his eyes darken with sexual awareness as his head bent towards her.

He was going to kiss her, she recognised disbelievingly, hardly able to understand what was happening. But it was happening. His parted lips were touching hers, coaxing and very, very experienced.

She wanted to reject him and pull away, but frighteningly, her body wouldn’t respond to her will. And worse, it did respond to the sexual expertise it was being subjected to.

Her lips seemed to melt and flower against the seductive male warmth of his, rivers of heat flooding through her veins as his arms went round her to draw against his body.

She could feel the hard jut of his hips through the thinness of her nightdress, and the powerful movements of his chest against her breasts as he breathed deeply.

His hands moulded the contours of her back, resting momentarily on her waist and then moving lower as he made a small sound of satisfaction against her mouth.

Rick was the only man with whom she had experienced passion, with whom she had wanted to taste all the heady delights of fulfilment, but he had been snatched away from her before their love had been consummated, and incredibly, shockingly, her body now seemed intent on relieving all the frustrations of that denial with the man who now held her in his arms.

She heard him mutter something against her mouth as his teasing caress turned into a passionate assault, and then he raised his head to look down into her bemused and vulnerable eyes, his own dark with a desire that her body recognised and welcomed even as her mind and heart repudiated it.

‘Well, well. It seems both of us got more than we bargained for,’ he told her frankly, his voice rough and slightly unsteady.

Too shocked to make any response, Sara could only stare at him, watching in dumb disbelief as he raised one hand from her body to stroke a calloused fingertip along her moist mouth. His other hand still held her against him, and as he traced the outline of her lips he moved against her, making her intimately aware of his arousal.

It stunned her, both that he could be so easily aroused and that he should make no effort to conceal it. She had been right to tell Sam that she would not like him, she thought feverishly. It was obvious. The casual attitude to sex which his behaviour betrayed was, to her, thoroughly contemptible.

As she opened her mouth to tell him what she thought of him, his hand slid down her body, caressing first her throat and then the smooth curve of her shoulder, pushing aside the wide neck of her nightdress to expose the rounded gleam of her arm.

His mouth touched the pale flesh his hand had just revealed and the words of denial were choked in her throat as her body quivered in response.

His hand moved to her breast, sliding aside the cotton barrier to reveal its pink-tipped fullness to his gaze.

A dark flush of colour flooded his face, his body tense as his fingers cupped the flesh that had previously only known Rick’s caress. Mentally she was filled with a sickening sense of defilement, but physically … Sara caught her breath on a gasp of mingled shock and excitement as the dark head bent towards her breast and she felt the warm mouth take the place of his caressing fingers. The shudder that went through her made her whole body sag weakly against him, every nerve ending concentrating on the intense physical pleasure aroused by the heated movement of his tongue and mouth against her sensitive flesh.

‘No … No … please don’t …’

The sobbed words were torn from her throat, tears she wasn’t aware of shedding lying damply on her skin.

The look in his eyes as he reluctantly released her breast, only to cover the still moist nipple with the caressing heat of his palm, made her shiver violently.

‘I want you.’ He said it harshly, as though in some way he found the words as shocking as she did, the look in his eyes suggesting that he was as shocked by the violent passion that had errupted between them as she was herself, but she knew that that could not be so. After all he was the one who had initiated what had happened.

‘I want you.’ He repeated the words in a slurred, unsteady voice, a blank, almost dazed look in his eyes as he pressed his body into hers, his hips moving restlessly against her.

‘I want you!’

He said it more softly this time, bending his mouth towards her own, but the brief respite from the sorcery of his touch had been enough to bring Sara back to sanity. She was appalled by what had happened—that she had actually allowed this hateful man intimacies which before had been permitted to Rick alone—and even harder to accept was the fact that part of her at least had actually enjoyed and wanted the heat of his mouth against her skin. And if she was truthful, wasn’t there still a nagging ache deep inside her in rebellious response to the frantic movement of his aroused body against her own?

Shocked by this self-admission, she stepped back from him, an expression of disgust curling her mouth.

His eyes focused on her face, the pupils almost black and very brilliant. He looked like someone coming out of a drug-induced stupor, she thought bitterly as she watched shock and recognition of what he had done vie for prominence in his expression.

‘I …’ He shook his head as though trying to clear it, and Sara knew that whatever he was going to say, she didn’t want to hear it.

Logically she knew quite well that when he had first kissed her he hadn’t meant it to be anything other than a light-hearted caress, a display of male superiority over the female, but whatever his explanation was going to be for the passionate desire that had exploded between them, she didn’t want to hear it. No doubt he would find some way of blaming her for what had happened, she thought bitterly as she pushed past him, ignoring his husky demand that she stay as she fled in the direction of the house.

He didn’t follow her, and although she told herself that she was glad, a tiny part of her felt something else. Not disappointment, Sara assured herself vehemently as she hurried back to her bedroom.

From her window she had an excellent view of the garden and the fishpond, but she didn’t take advantage of it. Instead she sank down on her bed, covering her face with her hands, engulfed by a feeling of self-disgust so strong that she actually felt physically sick with it.

What on earth could have possessed her? The man represented everything she detested; he was in the same mould as Wayne Housely—an arrogant bully, who thought himself lord of all he surveyed and above the law.

And yet, in his arms …

She shuddered deeply. That had been physical frustration, that was all. She had grieved so deeply emotionally for Rick that she had forgotten that her body must be grieving for him as well.

Until she met Rick she hadn’t considered herself a highly sexed person. She had found it depressingly easy to reject the clumsy sexual overtures of her teenage peers. But with Rick it had been different. He had been six years older than her, for one thing; for another, he had been very sexually experienced. He had not tried to rush her into a physical relationship she wasn’t ready for, but by the time they became engaged she would have gone willingly to bed with him had he wished it.

It had been lack of opportunity rather than the lack of desire that had preserved her virginity, and she suspected that her body, resentful of the pleasure Rick had promised it, which it had then been denied, had decide to make its displeasure felt.

Uncovering her face, she stood up and, ruthlessly tugging off her nightdress, studied herself in the mirror.

She was slender for her height, apart form her breasts which were lushly full—more full than usual at this moment, surely, her nipples stiff and aching a little, a sensation which was familiar to her from her days with Rick.

That was all it was, she assured herself guiltily; her body missed Rick’s passionate caresses and that was why it had responded so eagerly to … to someone else.

A deep wave of colour surged up over her skin as she remembered just how eager that response had been, but she hadn’t been alone in that almost frenetic flood of desire. He had been gripped by it too. Instinctively she sensed that he wasn’t a man who normally gave way so easily to physical desire. He was the sort of man who would always want to be in control, she thought intuitively, both of himself and of the situation he was in. She hadn’t been mistaken, surely, in the shock and surprise she had seen in his eyes? Or had it simply been her over-passionate response that had caused his reaction? she wondered uneasily, her skin suddenly feeling extremely hot.

Snatching up clean underwear, jeans and a top, she hurried into the bathroom.

It was half past seven. Carly would be waking up soon: Sam would want his breakfast. All she could do was put the incident behind her and forget about it.

But that was easier said than done, when her flesh continued to tingle disturbingly despite her attempts to ignore it.

It was galling in the extreme to have to admit that she had been aroused to such an extent by a man who was a complete stranger, even if that desire had been caused originally by her body’s physical loss of Rick.

Up until now she hadn’t given any thoughts to the physical aspect of her loss, or to the fact that she intended to spend the rest of her life without a lover, and now, suddenly, all her bitterness and resentment was focused on Jonas Chesney.

What right did he have to be alive when Rick was dead … to touch her and arouse her in a way that Rick no longer could? A sob tore from her throat as she pulled on her clothes. She hated him, loathed him … and if she ever saw him again … But she would take care that she didn’t, she decided grimly. He was not going to get another opportunity to catch her off guard as he had done this morning. No doubt he was already gloating over his conquest of her, she decided bitterly, conveniently forgetting that not ten minutes before, she had been acknowledging that he was as stunned by what had happened as she was herself.

No doubt it was a favourite hobby of his, to go round collecting female scalps. With those undeniably good looks, and that healthily muscled masculine body … Swiftly she checked her thoughts, resenting the admissions her body had forced upon her. So he was good looking—so what? That didn’t alter the fact that she detested and loathed him.

Perhaps she had been wrong about him, a traitorous inner voice whispered. Perhaps he wasn’t another Wayne Houseley after all?

What did it matter? her mind demanded bitterly. He was alive and Rick was dead, and she resented and hated him for that alone.

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