by Penny Jordan
‘To you, perhaps,’ Rue answered him in a suffocated voice, almost totally unable to believe that she had heard him correctly. His rudeness was really insufferable. She opened her mouth to tell him as much and then, to her own shock, heard herself saying instead, ‘If you really must know, my husband gambled it away and I let him.’
She faced him proudly, waiting to see the pity and contempt form in his eyes. But, whatever feelings her words had evoked inside him, he betrayed nothing of them as he said coolly, ‘You must hate him for that.’
‘No, not really. Odd though you might find it to believe, I’m far happier now than I ever was when I was my father’s heiress. I was a spoiled, arrogant child. You could even say that I deserved everything that happened to me. There’s no way today, for instance, that I would ever be remotely attracted to a man like Julian, and certainly I’d never be stupid enough now to believe him capable of loving me.’
‘Him, or any man?’ Neil Saxton asked her quietly.
The shock of it was reflected in her expression as her eyes darkened and widened. How had he known that? How had he known of the iron that had entered her heart when she’d found out the truth about Julian? How had he known that she had sworn that never again would she allow any man to deceive her into believing he cared about her?
She fought to regain her self-control, shrugging her shoulders and saying as coolly as she could, ‘It’s true. I’m afraid I don’t have a very high opinion of your sex.’
‘Or of yourself,’ Neil Saxton told her, softly and unforgivably.
She turned her back on him then, gripping hold of her trug tightly in order to stop her hand from trembling.
‘You’re on my land, Mr Saxton,’ she told him emotionlessly, ‘and I would be very grateful if you would remove yourself from it immediately.’
‘You know, you interest me,’ he told her conversationally, totally ignoring her command. ‘It must have taken guts to establish all this—’ he waved his hand over the flowing river of colour surrounding them ‘—out of nothing. To turn yourself from a dependent child into an independent business-woman.’
Rue smiled mirthlessly at him. ‘And men don’t like women with guts, especially successful women with guts—is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
To her astonishment he laughed, throwing back his head to reveal the hard, masculine line of his throat. ‘Is that what you think?’ he marvelled, looking at her. ‘Is that the reason for this?’ He reached out and touched her tightly drawn back hair and then her make-up-less face. It was only the briefest of touches, no more than a mere brushing of hard muscles against the softness of her smooth skin, but it was still enough to make her jump back from him as though she had been burned, rage and panic warring for supremacy in her eyes.
‘You’re out of date,’ he told her mockingly. ‘At least where I’m concerned. I admire a woman with guts. She’s so much more of a challenge, both in bed and out of it.’
‘Your personal views of my sex are of no interest to me whatsoever,’ Rue ground out at him from between clenched teeth when she had recovered from the shock of his unashamedly taunting comments.
‘No, I can see that,’ he agreed, and for some reason the cool, insolent way his glance roved over her body, from the crown of her head right down to her bare toes with their unvarnished nails, made her want to turn and run and hide herself away from him. Stupidly, she had a vivid mental image of herself as she had been at eighteen, pretty and silly, her blonde hair a flowing mane, her nails long and painted, her clothes the very best that Knightsbridge could provide and her head empty of a single thought that did not concern having fun and enjoying herself.
It was too easy to blame her father for her hedonistic naïveté. He had loved her and indulged her shamelessly, but he had been too old to understand the pitfalls lurking to snare such a very young and unworldly girl as she had been.
She had had very few friends of her own age, and no female relatives at all. No relatives of any kind in fact, apart from her father. She had been taught privately at home and, although her father had taken her all over the world with him and had showered her with jewellery and pretty clothes, she had had no real experience of life at all. His death when she was nineteen had come as a tremendous shock, even though it seemed that the doctors had been warning him for years that he was overdoing things.
She was his only child and sole heiress and, more scientist than businessman, he had never thought to tie up her inheritance in a way that would ultimately protect her so that when Julian…
‘I came over to ask whether you’d like to have dinner with me.’
The invitation shocked her out of her thoughts. She stared at him in disbelief.
‘Dinner? With you?’ Her mouth compressed. She was no longer an idealistic nineteen-year-old. She knew very well now that, when men paid pretty compliments and spoke falsely of love, their words were simply being used to mask other desires and other needs. Men were predators on her sex, using women to further their own aims and their own ambitions. ‘Dinner? Are you crazy?’ she questioned him sharply. ‘I’ve already told you you’re wasting your time. I have no intention of selling my home.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t as a possible purchaser of your land that I wanted to give you dinner,’ he told her, enjoying the confusion which suddenly darkened her eyes before suspicion drove it away. ‘No, it’s your expertise in the art of floral décor I’m interested in at the moment. Don’t think I’ve given up on getting your land, though,’ he warned her. ‘I can be very determined when I want something.’
‘I’m sure,’ Rue told him drily.
He laughed, apparently completely unabashed by the cool tone of her voice.
‘My mother is coming to stay with me in a few weeks’ time. I bought the house as it stands, but some of the rooms look a little bit dreary. I thought some dried flowers might add a slightly more welcoming touch, and I wanted to seek your professional advice and expertise.’
Rue looked at him, not sure of whether to believe him or not.
‘Of course,’ he added carelessly, ‘I quite understand if you prefer not to come up to the house. I can see that visiting it might prove too painful.’
His suggestion that she might be jealous, that she might for one moment resent the fact he was living in her old home, goaded Rue into immediate retaliation.
‘Not at all,’ she told him swiftly. ‘I don’t think I have anything on tonight. If you’d tell me what time you’d like me to call—but there would be really no need for you to provide me with dinner.’
‘It will be my pleasure,’ he interrupted smoothly. ‘I much prefer to cook for someone else other than myself. It’s so much more rewarding, don’t you agree?’
And, before Rue could hide her astonishment that such a very masculine man should actually admit to being able to cook, he turned and looked at her, his grey eyes alight with amusement. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t mind some cuttings from your herbs, once I’ve got the kitchen garden re-established. It’s in a very run-down state at the moment.’
‘Yes,’ Rue remarked absently. ‘The previous owners only visited the house on very rare occasions, and it’s been badly neglected.’
She was curious to know why an apparently single man should choose to buy himself such a large house, and on an impulse she couldn’t quite analyse she asked quickly, ‘Do you live alone, or…?’
‘Am I married or otherwise attached?’ he supplied drily, making her flush with embarrassment and irritation. ‘Neither. Just as for many another successful businessman, there never seems to have been time to establish any deep-rooted relationships, which is why I now find myself in my mid-thirties and somewhat isolated from the rest of my peer group. Everywhere I look these days I seem to see happily married men with wives and families.’
‘A wife and family shouldn’t be too difficult for a man of your wealth to find,’ Rue told him cynically.
‘That depends,’ he responded and, without waiting for her to qu
estion him, he added, ‘on how high one’s standards are. Mine are very high,’ he told her evenly, which meant, Rue reflected bitterly, that if and when he married it would be to some pretty and possibly well-born young woman whose looks would be a perfect foil for his success.
‘I’ll pick you up at eight o’clock,’ he announced. ‘We can eat about half-past eight and over dinner we can talk about the kind of floral arrangements you might be able to provide that would add a slightly softening effect to the house’s austerity.’
‘There’s no need for you to pick me up,’ Rue told him sharply. ‘Heavens, it’s only half a mile or so to walk, and besides, I do have transport.’
‘I’ll pick you up,’ Neil reiterated in a voice that warned her that he was not prepared to listen to any further argument.
After he had gone, Rue stood where she was in the middle of the field, in a daze, wondering why on earth she had been mad enough to allow him to talk her into having dinner with him. The last thing that she wanted was to spend time in his company.
She didn’t like him. Since Julian’s death and the end of her marriage, she had kept her distance from all men, but most especially from those men like Neil Saxton, from whom emanated an almost tangible aura of male sexuality. She no longer deceived herself. The pretty, girlish bloom she had once had was long gone. She was not beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, nor did she want to be.
She had no desire at all to excite male admiration, and she was certainly not so stupid as to imagine that Neil Saxton wanted her company because he found her attractive as a woman. Once, long ago, she had been foolish enough to believe that a man loved her. She had paid a very heavy price for that folly, and it was a mistake she was never going to repeat.
As she bent over her work she told herself that it was stupid to waste time thinking about Neil Saxton. If there was any way she could have got out of their dinner date she would have done so, but she had to acknowledge that he was perfectly capable of coming into the cottage and dragging her out by force if he felt it necessary.
No, she would have dinner with him tonight, and afterwards she would make it plain to him that she wanted no further contact whatsoever with him.
At five o’clock, her back feeling as though it was about to break in two, she made her last journey towards the drying shed to empty her trug. The long worktop under the window was inches deep in the flowers she had picked that afternoon.
She had several hours’ work ahead of her now, preparing the flowers for drying. Over the years, mostly by trial and error, she had evolved several different methods of drying flowers according to their various needs. Some of them could quite easily be dried in bunches suspended from the ceiling beams, others needed more delicate handling, and these she spread in very fine nets which she suspended between the beams. Others still needs drying in the warmth and darkness of the heated room, and for that purpose she used the lower part of the old stable, closing the heavy shutters on the window to keep out the daylight. Some of the flowers she left in their natural state, others she dyed in the more vivid shades that were becoming popular, especially among her more sophisticated clients.
Really, this evening she should have been devoting every minute of her time to her work. Angry with herself for wasting precious hours with a man whom she already knew she ought to be doing everything in her power to avoid, Rue made her way back to the house.
It was almost the end of the financial quarter. Soon it would be time to go through her books and prepare the returns for the accountant and the VAT officials. Her bookwork was the bane of her existence. She dreaded the two or three days a quarter she had to spend cooped up at her desk, checking and rechecking the tiny columns of figures she kept meticulously.
As she poured herself some lemonade, her mind shied away from the reality of her almost paranoic dread of this quarterly ordeal. It had nothing really to do with her ability to cope with the long columns of figures, and in fact sprang from the past. Julian had worked for her father’s accountants. He had come to see her two months after her father’s death. He had been so sympathetic and charming, so ready to spend time with her and listen to her, and she, lonely and bereft in those early months after her father’s death, had been only too eager to have someone to lean on.
He had been ten years older than her, sophisticated and mature, and he had known exactly how to flatter and coax her, so that by the time he actually proposed to her she was half wild with love for him, or rather she had believed that she was.
It had taken just one disastrous night of marriage to show her the real Julian, the man behind the mask he had worn to woo her, the man who cared nothing for her at all and had only wanted her father’s fortune. As always when her memories of the past threatened to spill over into the present, she fought to subdue them, to push them away, and she was glad when the telephone rang, giving her an excuse for doing so now.
It was one of the large city shops she supplied, asking if she could let them have some extra stock. It didn’t take her long to run through her stockbook. Luckily she had plenty of what they wanted already dried.
Because she was so busy, she informed them that they would have to send someone out to collect their order, and by the time she had replaced the receiver she had got the past firmly back where it belonged—out of her mind.
CHAPTER THREE
RUE worked until seven o’clock, grimly refusing to allow herself her normal break as a punishment for her folly in being trapped into having dinner with Neil Saxton. It was just gone seven when she returned to the house. Her bedroom wasn’t the largest of the upstairs rooms, but as far as she was concerned it had the best view. Its tiny dormer window looked out on to fields and, beyond them, the hills of the Cheviot countryside. It was a view of which she never grew tired or bored and, as she stood by the window breathing in the fresh coolness of the early evening air, she reflected on how very fortunate she had been that fate had stepped in just in time, allowing her to salvage this cottage and its land from the destruction of her father’s estate.
What she had not known about Julian at the time she married him was that, not only did he not love her, but he was also an inveterate gambler. He had married her quite cold-bloodedly, seeing her fortune as his only means of paying off his even then huge gambling debts, and once having paid them off he had gone on to gamble away not only all her father’s careful investments, but every single asset that Rue had been left—and she had known nothing at all about it.
It had been shocking enough to learn about his death, even though by then they had been living apart for five of the six months of their marriage. That another woman had been driving the car in which they had died had not really come as any surprise to her. He had made it more than plain to her, after that one appalling night of their honeymoon, just how inadequate he found her as a woman, and she had been left in no doubt as to his intentions to replace her in his bed.
Battered and bruised physically as well as emotionally, her dreams and illusions totally destroyed, she had only been able to feel relief that she would not be called upon to suffer his physical assault on her again. The discovery that the papers he had asked her to sign in the days leading up to their marriage had in fact been the power of attorney which gave him total control of her fortune had meant nothing at all to her until her solicitor had worriedly and uncomfortably explained that not only was she now a widow, but she was also completely penniless and her home, Parnham Court, would have to be sold in order to meet all of her husband’s gambling debts. And then, right at the last moment, when she was just about to sign the documents handing Parnham Court over, her solicitor had discovered the possibility of transferring to herself in her own name the freehold of Vine Cottage and its land, under an obscure legal loophole caused by the fact that at one time the cottage and its land had been made over to the gardener.
At first the cottage had simply been a place to live, somewhere to hide away, but as the months had gone by she had found herself gr
owing attached to it, loving it, so that now it was part of her in a way that Parnham Court had never been.
Her father had bought the Court on his marriage to her mother, a gift to his new young wife, and he had kept the house on after her death as a home for himself and his motherless child. He had run his business from the Court and had even set up a laboratory there so that he could enjoy the research on which his fortune had originally been founded.
The patent for the drug he had discovered had run out shortly after his death, so that even funds from that source were no longer available to Rue. For a girl who had never known anything but the comforts of expensive wealth, poverty had come as a shock. But there were degrees of poverty, as Rue was the first to admit, just as she was the first to admit that it was far easier to be poor in the countryside than it was in one of the stark, lonely tower blocks of the country’s inner cities.
She had discovered within herself a strength that she had never suspected could exist, and with it had come a certain peace of mind. Not that she would ever be able to forgive herself for her folly in being taken in by Julian. The young girl she had once been was so alien to her now that she could scarcely comprehend that she and that girl were one and the same person.
She showered in the bathroom off her bedroom, turning quickly away as she caught a glimpse of her nude body in the mirror. Her own nudity was something she had felt slightly uncomfortable with ever since the first night of her honeymoon, when Julian had looked down at her as she lay, shocked and exhausted, on the hotel bed, and told her cruelly just how deficient he found her as a woman.
It was not that there was anything specifically wrong with her shape. She was small, it was true, very narrow on the hips and the waist, with full, soft breasts that she was at great pains to disguise with heavy sweaters and loose T-shirts. No, her abhorrence of her body was caused more by its inward flaws than any outward failings.