by Penny Jordan
Ten minutes later Sylvie was on her way downstairs when she heard voices in the hallway, and as she rounded the curve of the staircase she could see Mrs Elliott talking with a tall, elegant woman in her late thirties.
‘So you’ll tell Ran that I called,’ she was saying to Mrs Elliott.
‘Yes, I will, Mrs Edwards,’ the other woman was responding respectfully.
Thoughtfully and discreetly Sylvie studied her. Tall, slender, expensively dressed, immaculately made up, she was the type of woman whom Sylvie could remember Ran favouring and she immediately guessed that she must be Ran’s current woman-friend. There was certainly that very confident, almost proprietorial air about her that suggested she was far more than simply a mere visitor to the house. She turned away from Mrs Elliott and then saw Sylvie, her expression changing slightly and becoming, if not challenging then certainly assessing, Sylvie recognised as she continued on her way downstairs.
‘I’m just on my way to Haverton Hall, Mrs Elliott,’ she told Ran’s daily calmly, adding with an impetuosity she later refused to examine or analyse, ‘Please thank Ran for his offer of dinner.’
Out of the corner of her eye she could see the way Ran’s woman-friend’s eyes darkened as she watched her, and she had just reached the front door when Mrs Elliott stopped her, announcing, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I almost forgot; Ran asked me to tell you that if you wanted to finish going over the big house he’d be back around three.’
‘Did he? That’s very thoughtful of him. How very obliging of him,’ Sylvie responded acidly. ‘When he does return, Mrs Elliott, please tell him that there’s no need for him to put himself to so much trouble. I have my own set of keys to Haverton Hall.’
Without waiting for the older woman to make any further response, Sylvie pulled open the front door. How dared he? she fumed as she hurried towards her hire car. She had no need of either his company or his permission to view the Hall. Furiously she started the Discovery, sending up an angry spray of gravel as she reversed and then headed for the drive.
She was over halfway to Haverton Hall before she felt calm enough to slow down a little, her face burning as hotly as her temper. It was not up to Ran to tell her what she could and could not do—not any longer.
As she brought the Discovery to a halt outside the house she hastily averted her eyes from the spot where last night... What had happened last night was something she had no intention of dwelling on nor trying to analyse; it had been a mistake, an error of judgement, a total and complete aberration and something which had, no doubt, been brought on by some kind of jet lag, some kind of inexplicable imbalance, and it really wasn’t worthy of having her waste any time agonising over it.
Unlocking the huge door, she turned the handle and took a deep breath as she pushed it open and stepped inside. Resolutely ignoring the echoing sound of her own footsteps, she hurried to where she and Ran had left off their inspection the previous day. In her bag she had an inventory and a plan of the house, but an hour later she was forced to admit that it was proving far less interesting inspecting the rooms on her own than it had been yesterday, with Ran’s informative descriptions of the rooms and their original uses.
From previous experience she knew that in a very short space of time she herself would be completely familiar with the house’s layout and its history, but right now... She gave a small scream as a mouse scuttled across the floor right in front of her. She had always had an irrational fear of them—they moved so fast and so far, and she had never totally got over an unpleasant childhood experience of having one jump towards her as it ran from one of the stable cats.
She was working her way along the upper floor when she suddenly heard Ran calling her name. Stiffening, she stood where she was. Mrs Elliott must have told him that he would find her here. In her bag she had the report and the costings he had commissioned for treatment of the wet and dry rot. Firmly she walked towards the door, opened it and called out, ‘I’m up here, Ran...’
‘You shouldn’t have come here on your own,’ he cautioned her as he came down the corridor towards her.
‘Why not? The house isn’t haunted, is it?’ she mocked him sarcastically.
‘Not as far as I know,’ he agreed, ‘but the floors, especially on these upper two floors, aren’t totally to be trusted, and if you should have had an accident—’
‘How very thoughtful of you to be concerned, Ran,’ Sylvie interrupted him. ‘Almost as thoughtful as it was of you to commission these reports.’
As she spoke she removed the reports from her bag and waved them under his nose. ‘Or am I being naive and would “self-interested” be a much truer description?’
Ran started to frown.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, Sylvie,’ he began, but she wouldn’t let him go any further, challenging him immediately,
‘Don’t you, Ran? I read the reports from the surveyors this morning. Tucked in at the back of the estimates you’d obtained was this...’
Coolly she handed him the costing for the work on the Rectory.
‘So?’ Ran shrugged after he had scanned the piece of paper she proffered.
‘This particular costing relates to work that needs to be carried out on the Rectory, your own private house,’ Sylvie pointed out patiently.
‘And...?’ Ran demanded, frowning at her before telling her, ‘I’m sorry, Sylvie, but I’m afraid I’m at a loss to understand exactly what it is you’re driving at. The Rectory needed some work doing on it to put right the dry rot the surveyors found, and—’
‘You decided to slip the bill for that work in amongst the bills for the work that was needed on Haverton Hall, to lose it amongst the admittedly far greater cost of the work needed here!’
‘What?’ Ran demanded ominously quietly, his expression as well as his voice betraying his outrage.
‘I don’t like what you’re trying to suggest, Sylvie,’ he told her sharply.
She shook her head and told him thinly, ‘Neither do I, Ran. But the facts speak for themselves.’
‘Do they?’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘I rather think it’s your overheated imagination that’s doing the “speaking” through your totally erroneous interpretation of them,’ he told her through gritted teeth.
‘You can’t deny the evidence of this report,’ Sylvie reminded him sternly.
‘What evidence?’ Ran demanded. ‘This is a report and an estimate for work on the Rectory—work which I have had carried out at my own expense; the only reason the report and costing is there at all is because I omitted to remove it when I had the documents copied for you...’
‘You’ve paid for the work on the Rectory yourself?’ Sylvie queried in disbelief.
Ran’s mouth thinned.
‘Perhaps you’d like to see the receipts,’ he challenged her.
‘Yes, I would,’ Sylvie responded doggedly, refusing to let him cow her even though she could feel her face starting to burn self-consciously and her stomach beginning to churn as she contemplated just how foolish she was going to look if Ran did produce such receipts.
‘Mrs Elliott tells me that you’re going out for dinner this evening.’
Sylvie stared at him, thrown by his abrupt change of subject.
‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ she agreed.
‘There isn’t a decent restaurant for miles,’ he told her, ‘and certainly not one that offers fresh wild salmon; it’s always been one of your favourites...’
‘Perhaps my tastes have changed,’ Sylvie said a little loftily, adding robustly, ‘Unlike yours...’
As he started to frown she explained sweetly, ‘I saw your...friend. She called at the Rectory just as I was leaving. I’m sure she’d be more than delighted to share your salmon with you, Ran,’ she told him coolly. ‘Now, about those receipts...’
Inwardly Sylvie shivered a bit as she saw the anger flare in his eyes but outwardly she stood her ground. It was, after all, her job to make sure that the Trust wasn’t cheated—by any
one.
‘Of course,’ Ran told her formally, inclining his head as though in defeat, but then, just as Sylvie started to draw a relieved breath, he gave her a dangerously vulpine smile and told her softly, ‘But I’m afraid it will have to be this evening as I have a business meeting tomorrow morning and then I shall probably be away for several days...’
‘With your...friend...?’
Later Sylvie could only despair over whatever it was that had led her to make such a dangerously betraying and provocative remark, but inexplicably the words were out before she could stop them, causing Ran, who had been on the point of turning away from her, to turn back and slowly scrutinise her from head to foot before asking her softly, ‘If you mean Vicky, is that really any of your business...or the Trust’s...?’
He had caught her out and Sylvie knew it. It most certainly was not part of her duty as the Trust’s representative to ask any questions about his personal life, and she was mortified that she had done so.
‘If you want to see the receipts for the work on the Rectory then it will have to be this evening, Sylvie,’ Ran was repeating briskly. ‘Shall we say about eight-thirty?’
Before she could say anything else he had gone, striding across the dusty floor and leaving her to watch his departing back.
It was a good ten minutes after she had heard the noise of his Land Rover engine die away before Sylvie felt able to continue with her work. Her intelligence told her that their antagonism was coming between her and the normally wisely efficient way in which she dealt with even the most awkward of the Trust’s clients, but her emotions refused to allow her to back down, to climb down. If she was wary of him, suspicious of him, then she had every right to be.
And every right to as good as accuse him of trying to defraud the Trust?
She started to nibble anxiously at her bottom lip. If she was wrong about him trying to get the Trust to cover the cost of work he had had done on his own home, and if he chose to complain to Lloyd—Irritably Sylvie reminded herself why she was here.
* * *
Although the house wasn’t any larger than others she had dealt with, it certainly seemed to possess far more small interconnecting rooms here on its upper storeys. She rubbed the dust from the window of one of them and peered out at the countryside spread all around her. From here she could see the river where Ran must have caught his fish. It wound lazily in a long half-loop through the parkland which surrounded the house. Although the terrain here in Derbyshire was very different from that which surrounded Alex’s home, it was disturbingly easy, looking down towards the river, to remember the many happy hours she had spent with Alex and Ran as a young girl, watching them as they worked together, helping them fish and later learning from them their countryside skills.
One of the ways in which, hopefully, ultimately, Haverton Hall could generate its own income would be, as Ran had suggested in the initial approach he had made to the Trust, for the house to be let out to large corporations and groups along with its fishing and shooting rights. The Trust adopted a policy that no game existing on its lands could be killed simply for sport—a very strict culling programme was put in place where necessary and the art of tracking animals was taught as a skill for its own sake rather than with a view to killing. That had been a condition which she herself had insisted on persuading the trustees to adopt, and it made her stop and frown slightly to herself now as she was forced to remember how it had been Ran who had first shown her that it was not necessary to kill to enjoy such traditional country sports.
* * *
Ran...
Sylvie was still thinking about him some time later when an exhausting drive through the virtually uninhabited countryside which surrounded the house had only produced three small villages, not one of which boasted a restaurant.
In the small pub in the third village the landlord shook his head when she asked about food and apologised.
‘We don’t have the trade for it round here, although I could perhaps see if there’s any sandwiches left over from lunchtime.’
Smiling wanly, Sylvie shook her head. She was hungry, very hungry in fact, and had been looking forward to sitting down to a proper hot meal.
‘There’s a good place over Lintwell way,’ the pub manager was continuing helpfully, ‘but that’s a good twenty-five miles from here.’
Twenty-five miles. Sylvie’s stomach was already starting to rumble. Against her will she had a mental vision of Ran’s salmon, pink and poached, served with delicious home-grown baby new potatoes and fresh vegetables and, of course, a proper hollandaise sauce. Her mouth watered.
It was gone seven o’clock now, though, and if she were to drive to Lintwell and back and eat as well that would mean she would be late for her meeting with Ran and there was no way she was going to allow him the opportunity to accuse her of being unprofessional.
Refusing the landlord’s offer of the afternoon’s leftover sandwiches, she made her way back to her car. She would just have to go without a meal tonight, she told herself firmly; after all, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. She was hardly going to starve... But oh, that salmon and... Ran was quite right. It was her favourite.
It was almost eight when Sylvie pulled up outside the Rectory’s front door.
Her earlier hunger had turned into a gnawing irritation that was making her head ache and her temper on edge. Low blood sugar, she told herself sternly. All you need is a sweet drink.
All she needed maybe, but not all she wanted. What she wanted...
What on earth was the matter with her? she derided herself as she opened the front door. Other women her age daydreamed and fantasised about having men, not meals.
Eight o’clock. She just had time to get showered and changed before her meeting with Ran. She wanted to run through her figures again, but if, as he said, he had paid for the work himself and he had the receipts to prove it... Perhaps she had been too quick to accuse him...
‘Sylvie...’
She froze at the bottom of the stairs as she heard Ran’s voice. When she turned her head he was standing in an open doorway several feet away from her.
‘Mrs Elliott is going to serve dinner at eight-thirty so you’ve got half an hour to get ready...’
A dozen questions and just as many denials and arguments sprang immediately to Sylvie’s lips, but somehow she managed not to utter them and she was at the top of the stairs before she managed to ask herself why she had not simply told Ran that she had eaten already.
Why? The audible rumble of her stomach as she opened her bedroom door gave its own answer. Even so, it galled her to know that Ran had guessed she would have to return to the house without having found somewhere to eat. But just let him try to make something of it, Sylvie decided fiercely as, having had her shower, she changed into a long silky black jersey dress, brushing her hair and quickly re-doing her make-up before checking the time.
Almost eight-thirty. Taking a deep breath, Sylvie checked her appearance in the mirror and then, holding her head high, headed for the bedroom door.
Her jersey dress, plain black and unadorned, might not, to anyone but the cognoscente, reveal the fact that it had cost her the best part of a month’s wages and carried the label of one of New York’s top designers—the uninitiated might be deceived by the simple design and the way the heavy fabric discreetly hinted at rather than clung more obviously to Sylvie’s slender figure. But even the most self-confessed sartorial ignoramus would have reacted to the way Ran looked when Sylvie saw him waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.
Used as she was to seeing him wearing casual work clothes, and perhaps because that was the image she held engraved in her mind’s eye—jeans fitting snugly against the hard muscle of his thighs, checked work shirt rolled up at the sleeves and just open enough at the neck to reveal the silky dark expanse of body hair which so temptingly and tormentingly made one’s fingers long to unfasten a few more buttons and explore just how thick, just how silky that soft dark hai
r actually was—Sylvie had forgotten how very male Ran could look in formal clothes.
And although he hadn’t gone so far as to change into a dinner suit he was wearing a pair of well-cut dark trousers and a crisp white shirt.
The fact that he was just shrugging on his jacket as she came down the stairs afforded Sylvie an unwanted glimpse of the lethal maleness of the muscles in his torso and made her hesitate betrayingly just for a second before continuing her journey downwards.
He had changed his clothes simply to have dinner with her.
Why? Because he knew very well the effect his appearance would have on any susceptible woman and because he intended to use that fact to distract her, confuse her when she needed all her attention, all her concentration to ascertain the truth about that invoice? Or was she letting her imagination run away with her? Was the woman he had dressed so elegantly for not her but—?
Was he perhaps seeing the other woman after their meeting had finished?
‘We’ve just got time for a drink before dinner if you’d like one,’ Ran told her calmly, but his glance, Sylvie was sure, had rested for just a betraying fraction of a second on the soft thrust of her breasts before it had lifted to her face. Her heart started to thump giddily.
‘No... No drink, thanks,’ she refused, giving him a thin smile as she added deliberately, ‘I generally find that alcohol and business don’t mix.’
Giving a small shrug, Ran opened the dining-room door for her and waited for her to precede him inside. As she did so, Sylvie caught the clean, sharp scent of his freshly showered body and the giddying thump of her vulnerable heart became a frighteningly heavy ache.
‘I...I’ve brought the estimates down with me,’ she told him quickly, lifting the papers she was holding in front of him, but Ran shook his head.
‘After dinner,’ he told her dismissively, adding, ‘I generally find that good food and poor communication don’t mix.’
Poor communication. Sylvie gave him a fulminating look before taking the chair he had pulled out for her.
* * *
The salmon was every bit as delicious as Sylvie had imagined and so, too, was the home-made summer pudding served with fresh cream that followed it. The cheese they ate to finish the meal was made locally, Ran informed her, adding that he had been wondering if he might not produce something similar himself, but that he had decided the costs involved were prohibitive.