by Penny Jordan
‘Love me back,’ Sylvie supplied chokily for him. If, in the past, she had thought that his anger and contempt were hard to bear, they were nothing now that she was faced with his pity and compassion. ‘Yes. It is,’ she agreed. ‘But I’m a woman now, Ran, not a child, and if I choose to love the wrong person, then that is my choice and my right. The last thing I want or need is your pity,’ she told him sharply, pride making her hold up her head.
‘Last night shouldn’t have happened,’ Ran told her quietly, ‘but I...’
‘Couldn’t help yourself,’ Sylvie finished lightly. ‘Yes, so you said at the time. It’s obviously something we should both...forget...’
Sylvie looked away as she spoke, knowing quite well that she was lying, that she would have the most important reason there could be for not forgetting it, for not being able to forget it, but that wasn’t a piece of information she had any intention of sharing with Ran.
‘I...I should like to go back to my own room to get dressed before Mrs Elliott arrives,’ she told him with formal dignity, adding, when he continued to look at her, ‘I want you to turn your back, Ran, so that I can get out of this bed...’
The look he gave her made her face burn.
‘Yes, I know that you’ve already seen...that... But that was last night,’ she snapped self-consciously. ‘That was then...this...this is now; this is different...’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ Ran agreed heavily, and then, to her relief, he turned away so that she could slip out of the bed and snatch up her nightdress which she pulled on before heading for the door, opening it without pausing to look back because she knew that if she did look back— Last night had been the most perfect, the most wonderful night of her life, but now it was over and soon, too, with Lloyd’s agreement, her time here would be over, and only she would know that when she left Haverton Hall, when she left Ran, she would be carrying a small and very precious piece of him with her.
CHAPTER TEN
‘I’M SORRY to disturb you but Ran said that he thought you might like coffee.’
Forcing a welcoming smile to her lips, Sylvie took the tray from Ran’s housekeeper.
She had been working in the library all morning, painstakingly going through the accounts and costings for the work she had already commissioned for Haverton Hall.
But now, even though she hadn’t eaten any breakfast and she knew that she ought to be hungry, the only hunger she had was the never-ending hunger for Ran’s love. And, as he had made more than plain to her, that was something she could never have.
Half an hour later she was just on her way downstairs, intending to drive over to Haverton, when her mobile rang. Answering it, she was surprised to hear Lloyd’s voice on the other end of the line.
‘Lloyd. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you today. I thought you’d be...otherwise engaged,’ Sylvie told him tactfully.
‘Well, I guess I thought I would be too,’ she heard Lloyd responding with a rueful note in his voice. ‘Like they say, though, there’s no fool like an old fool. Still, it was fun while it lasted, and I guess I had my money’s worth.’
From the tone of his voice Sylvie immediately recognised that Lloyd had quickly become disillusioned with Vicky.
‘I’m going to miss you, hon, when I’m back in New York,’ Lloyd told her with the warm affection that was so much a part of his personality.
‘I’ll miss you as well,’ Sylvie told him gravely, and meant it. ‘Lloyd, I need to talk to you,’ she added quietly. ‘There’s...there’s... I can’t stay here... I...I want to come back to New York...’
Biting down hard on her bottom lip, Sylvie willed herself not to lose control. Lloyd would wonder what on earth was the matter with her. She hadn’t intended to blurt it all out like that. She had told herself that she would wait, assemble all her arguments and then talk to him calmly and quietly, and yet here she was, letting her emotions run away with her, giving in to the urgent need she felt to protect herself from the pain that being so physically close to Ran was causing her.
‘Say, honey, you sound upset. What’s wrong?’ she heard Lloyd asking her anxiously.
‘I can’t discuss it over the phone,’ Sylvie told him. ‘I need to see you... Oh, Lloyd, I’m so sorry...’ She gulped as she heard her voice thickening with tears.
‘Don’t be,’ she heard Lloyd telling her gently, and then, to her relief, he said, ‘I’ll be there with you just as soon as I can fix up everything down here and then we can talk.’
‘Oh, Lloyd,’ Sylvie wept.
How typical it was of Lloyd that he should put everything else on hold to come and see her, Sylvie acknowledged after their call had ended. He would understand, she knew he would, but she still felt guilty about letting him down.
The door to Ran’s study was open and Ran himself entered the hallway just as she was about to cross it. As he glanced at the mobile she was still holding in her hand, Sylvie realised that he must have overheard her talking to Lloyd.
‘Lloyd’s coming back,’ she told him huskily.
‘Yes, so I gathered,’ she heard him responding flatly, with something that almost sounded like anger hardening his voice. Sylvie couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Already the tenderness they had shared last night felt as though it was all something she herself had imagined, created out of her own need; it had gone.
‘I...I have to go to Haverton,’ she told him shakily as she made to walk past him.
Ran watched her go. It tore him apart to see the pain she was in. Last night she had turned to him in need, in simple human need, driven by her longing, her love for another man, a man who had left her to be with another woman.
Did Lloyd have any conception of what he had done, of what he was doing, or did he simply think that his wealth gave him the right to ignore other people’s feelings? Did he think that the damage he had done to Sylvie, the hurt he had caused her, simply didn’t matter?
Yesterday he had left her to be with someone else and now, today, he was coming back.
‘I need to see you,’ he had heard Sylvie whisper emotionally to him, and as he had heard the betraying tremble in her voice he had closed his eyes. He knew all about that need, had known about it from long before the night he had taken Sylvie in his arms in a mixture of fury and longing, breaking every promise he had ever made himself as he made love to her, with her, and discovered, with a mixture of joy, pain and shame, that he was her first lover.
‘Wayne’s been telling me for ages to find someone to lose my virginity with,’ she had thrown tauntingly at him, and she had gone from him to Wayne, abandoning everything and everyone to be with him—her family, her education, even, it had seemed to Ran at times, her principles.
But then she had changed her mind, begged Alex for his help and support, to help her get her life back on track.
He had seen her off at the airport with Alex and his new wife, an impulse decision, giving in to a need for which he had berated and despised himself.
He had ended up going home afterwards and slowly getting drunk—not something he was in any way proud to remember, but it had been the only way he could find to anaesthetise himself against his pain.
Not even to Alex, his closest friend, had he been able to talk about how he felt, about how much he loved her. Alex was, after all, her stepbrother.
He had thought that he was prepared for the reality of knowing that she would spend her life with someone else, but that had been when that reality was at a safe distance. Knowing she loved Lloyd was one thing; having to witness that love, having to hold her whilst she cried for him, having to listen to her pleading with him for his return—no amount of preparation could protect him from that kind of pain.
And now Lloyd was on his way back to see her. Would she tell him about last night, about the intimacy they had shared? Morally there was no reason why she should do so but...
Last night, when he had held her, touched her, loved her, when he had felt her body’s response to him, answe
red not just its sensuality but its deeper and far more intensely urgent demand for something that went far beyond even the physical, sexual satisfaction he had felt...known... He opened his eyes and walked across to the window of his study to look out into the garden. Long-ago ancestors of his had designed and planned this garden, lived in this building; his title, his land, the great house which was now too big and too expensive for any one family to run—all that tradition now rested on him and with him.
Once, long ago, it would have been considered his duty as the last male of his line to produce a child, a son, a legitimate heir. But that was something he could never do. He could not marry another woman when it was Sylvie he loved, not for his own sake and not for any wife’s either, so there would be no legitimate heir. The only child he would ever have was the one he knew already that he and Sylvie had created between them last night. Their child. But he could not compel Sylvie to allow him to be a part of that child’s life. Not when he knew that she didn’t love him. Twice now she had turned to him for comfort when, in reality, she had loved another man. There could not, must not ever be a third occasion.
Lloyd was more than likely to arrive before evening and Ran knew that he simply could not endure being there to see him reunited with Sylvie.
He walked back to his desk and reached for the telephone.
* * *
In the pretty sitting room which his wife had made so much her own, Alex grinned in appreciation as their son headed eagerly towards him, swinging him up into his arms as Mollie looked on placidly. Alex looked lovingly at her. She was in the early stages of pregnancy with their second child and suffering from morning sickness.
‘I’ve just had a phone call from Ran,’ he told her.
‘Mmm... How is he—and Sylvie...?’
‘He wants to come down for a few days. Apparently he wants to pick my brains for ideas on making the estate more self-sufficient.’
‘Do you think he and Sylvie will ever work things out?’ Mollie asked him anxiously.
Alex raised his eyebrows.
‘Why ask me? You’re the one who thinks that they are madly in love with one another.’
‘I don’t think, I know,’ Mollie corrected him sternly. ‘But the pair of them are just so...so stubbornly determined not to admit to one another how they feel.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might just be wrong?’ Alex asked her tenderly.
‘No, because I’m not. You’re Sylvie’s brother, Alex, and Ran’s best friend; you have a duty to do something to help them.’
‘Oh, no! No! No way...’ Alex denied, shaking his head and looking alarmed. ‘They are both adults.’
‘Maybe. But they’re both behaving like children. We have to do something, Alex; you saw the way Sylvie was breaking her heart over Ran when we went to see her in New York just after she went there... It was pitiful to see the look in her eyes when she finally managed to ask after him... And Ran’s just as bad.’
‘Look, they’re at Haverton Hall together...alone,’ Alex stressed. ‘If that doesn’t give them both the opportunity to sort themselves out...’
‘Maybe being alone isn’t what they need, maybe they need someone to talk to, to show them...’ Mollie suggested meaningfully, giving him a coaxing smile.
‘No way,’ Alex told her firmly, but Mollie had made up her mind. One way or another, something would have to be done, and if Alex couldn’t be persuaded to do that something, well, then—Determinedly she started to think.
* * *
It was later in the afternoon when Sylvie returned from Haverton Hall to learn from Mrs Elliott that Ran had announced that he had to go away for several days.
‘Did he say where he was going or when he would be back?’ Sylvie asked her stiffly.
The older woman shook her head.
‘He just said that he would telephone,’ she informed her.
Had Ran genuinely gone away on business or had he gone because of her? Sylvie wondered painfully. He had been kind towards her when he had talked about the pain of unrequited love, kinder than she had ever known him be before, but that didn’t alter the fact that he didn’t love her and that her presence here in his home must be creating problems for him. Well, she wouldn’t be creating those problems for very much longer, she decided, her determination to convince Lloyd to hand over their Haverton Hall project to someone else even stronger than it had already been.
Lloyd himself rang whilst she was upstairs updating her files, explaining that he had been delayed a little longer than he had expected and that it would be late evening before he arrived in Derbyshire.
Ran had instructed his housekeeper to prepare a room for Lloyd before he had left—the room next to her own, Sylvie discovered, when Mrs Elliott, the housekeeper, informed her of Ran’s instructions.
Her mobile rang and she answered it, expecting to hear Lloyd’s voice but hearing instead that of her stepsister-in-law.
‘Mollie, how are you?’ she asked, genuinely pleased to recognise her caller.
‘Queasy,’ Mollie responded, but Sylvie could tell from the happiness in the other woman’s voice just how pleased she was about her recently announced pregnancy.
‘Just you wait until it’s your turn,’ Mollie warned her. ‘It’s no joke. We had salmon for supper and it’s my favourite and I couldn’t touch a bite...’
Her turn! Sylvie gripped her mobile tightly. How would Mollie and Alex react when she told them that she was pregnant? They would want to know who the father of her child was, of course, although both of them were modern enough, loving enough, to accept her decision to keep the father’s identity to herself and to bring up her child alone.
‘How are things going up there?’ Mollie asked her. ‘How are you and Ran getting on...?’
To Mollie’s intuitive ears the silence that hummed down the wire between them before Sylvie answered her spoke volumes.
‘We aren’t,’ Sylvie told her shortly. ‘And in fact...’ She paused and then decided there was little point in keeping her decision from Mollie who was, in many ways, despite the distance which separated them, probably her closet friend; not just a stepsister-in-law.
‘I...I’ve decided to ask Lloyd to take me off this project, Mollie. I can’t...it isn’t... My being here just isn’t going to work... Ran and I...’ She stopped.
‘You still love him, don’t you?’ Mollie asked her gently.
For a moment Sylvie didn’t think she was going to be able to reply but almost against her will she felt compelled to respond honestly to Mollie’s gentle question.
‘Yes. Yes, I do,’ she admitted. ‘More than ever. He’s...he’s everything I’ve ever wanted, Mollie. The only man I’ve ever loved, the only man I ever will love...in every sense of the word,’ she admitted in a very low voice. ‘There hasn’t... I haven’t... Isn’t it incredible in this day and age,’ she continued, her voice full of angry despair, ‘that at my age the only man I’ve ever been intimate with, the only man who’s ever touched me...made love to me...is Ran? And both times... He doesn’t love me, Mollie. I know that. He never has, and that first time he was angry, and his reactions were... Both of us were angry and what we did...what we had... But this time it was so...so loving...so tender...so meaningful. But in reality he was just comforting me... He—’
‘Did he tell you that?’ Mollie interrupted her softly.
‘Not in so many words. He talked about how painful it is to love someone who can’t love you back, and...and about how there’s no need to...to feel ashamed of having that love; of needing that person.
‘I can’t stay here, Mollie,’ she burst out passionately. ‘I’m afraid of what might happen, of what I might say...do... Ran was so kind, so...gentle and tender... I want to keep that memory... I don’t want...’
‘He must feel something for you if...’
‘If he took me to bed?’ Sylvie supplied dryly for her. ‘He wanted me, yes, but... Lloyd was up here and he took Ran’s latest lady-friend back
to London with him. Oh, I don’t think their relationship was particularly serious, but obviously Ran’s a man, and as such...’
‘He took you to bed because he wanted sex; is that what you’re saying?’ Mollie asked her shrewdly.
‘Well, I think that was a large part of it,’ Sylvie agreed.
‘But he must have felt something for you, Sylvie, to talk to you the way you say he did. If he really didn’t care, didn’t want to get involved, then surely the last thing he would do would be to allow that kind of intimacy to take place between you.’
‘Yes... No... Oh, I don’t know. I just know... I just know that I’m afraid if I stay here I’ll... I can’t cope with it, Mollie; it’s safer for me to put as much distance as I can between us...’
‘Have you told him you’re leaving?’ Mollie asked her.
‘Not in so many words,’ Sylvie admitted. ‘He knows that I’ve asked... Lloyd’s coming up to Derbyshire to see me, but Ran isn’t here at the moment. His housekeeper says he told her that he’s had to go away for a few days, but he hasn’t told her where or when he’ll be back... I suspect that he’s trying to avoid me...’
‘Just like he was when he took you to bed,’ Mollie suggested wryly. ‘Have you ever asked him how he feels about you, Sylvie?’
For a moment Sylvie was too shocked to answer.
‘No! No, of course not—I couldn’t. How could I? Would you have asked Alex that?’
‘Perhaps not,’ Mollie acknowledged. ‘But Alex’s and my relationship is very different to yours and Ran’s. We hadn’t known one another very long. Whilst you and Ran...’
‘The difference is that you and Alex love one another, whilst Ran and I... I have to go, Mollie. I just can’t talk about it any longer,’ Sylvie told her emotionally.
As she ended the call she prayed that Lloyd would get here soon. God and Lloyd willing, she could leave Derbyshire before Ran came back.