by Penny Jordan
If her friends were surprised by her decision, knowing how close she had been to Thomas towards the end of his life, they were too tactful to make any comment.
His death had come as a surprise to the whole town. It was true that he was well into his eighties, but he had always seemed so strong… so alive.
Privately Sybilla believed that, given the choice, he would have much preferred the immediacy of his fatal heart attack to a long-drawn-out period of illness, but that did not stop it being a shock to all those who had been close to him, herself included.
His only close family had been Gareth, but he had had many friends, and, even though a manager had been appointed to run the business, Thomas had still put in an appearance at the factory every working day.
His presence would be missed in the town.
‘My parents were away and I had promised them I’d keep a check on their house,’ she responded coolly now to Gareth’s comment.
She had no alternative but to stand up and confront him. He was, she noticed, still holding the can of shaving-foam…and he was looking at it in a very odd and angry way.
She swallowed hard, averting her face, determined not to allow herself to be affected by his maleness…his presence…his sheer irritating but overwhelmingly undeniable masculinity.
‘Please don’t let me delay you,’ she told him in a controlled frosty little voice.
‘You’re not,’ he responded quietly and, she suspected, untruthfully. Certainly his elegant female companion seemed to think so, to judge from the increasingly petulant expression marring the model-like perfection of her features.
Surprisingly she wasn’t a brunette but a blonde, a rather cold and icy-looking blonde in Sybilla’s opinion, for surely those sharp blue eyes were a touch too sharp, a touch too hard. Certainly they were assessing her in a very critical and condemning fashion, subjecting her to surely a far more intense scrutiny than she actually merited.
‘Gareth, we’re going to be late,’ she protested a second time as Sybilla firmly turned her back on him and started to gather up the remainder of her purchases.
He was still holding the shaving-foam, and as she stood up, dropping her armful of things into the trolley he, instead of adding it to the pile, handed the can directly to her so that she was obliged to reach out towards him for it.
‘Yours, I believe.’
Something about the way he said it made her focus on him.
The grey eyes were regarding her almost remotely, his face a mask she couldn’t read. In maturity it had a hard-boned masculinity that made her suddenly sharply aware of him as a man in several ways her innocent teenage self would never have been able to be aware of. Not that she was exactly what one might describe as a woman of the world. Far from it—unlike Gareth’s woman friend, to judge from her appearance and demeanour.
There had been boyfriends, of course; dates, parties, the usual round of social entertainments, but for some reason she had never felt comfortable enough with any of the men who had dated her to allow them to get too close to her or too intimate with her, either emotionally or sexually.
She reached out to take the shaving-foam from Gareth, conscious as she did so of a certain mental withdrawal, a discernible coolness in the way he was regarding her.
Well, why should that surprise her? He had always treated her with a certain aloof disdain, even if for a while in her teens she had foolishly managed to persuade herself that there was an imagined degree of warmth, of caring in his manner towards her.
But then, teenage girls were notorious, weren’t they, for building their castles of dreams on impossibly insecure foundations?
She couldn’t really blame Gareth for deriding her foolish adoration of him, but she was determined never to allow him or anyone else to affect her emotions so dangerously again, and, even more importantly, to make it abundantly clear to him that, however foolish she might have been at fifteen, that foolishness was now safely behind her.
The teenager Sybilla had been had lost no opportunity to be with him, seeking him out on the flimsiest of excuses, haunting the house where he had grown up under the guardianship of his grandfather, hanging adoringly and blushingly on his every word…silently begging him to notice her…to want her…to love her.
But that teenager no longer existed. Firmly from the moment she had overheard and realised that he knew how she felt about him, and that it was the subject of open discussion between himself and his grandfather, she had been determined to show him that he was wrong, that he meant nothing to her, and it was for this reason that she had so strictly adhered to her resolve to ensure that she never came into any kind of contact with him, either by accident or design.
At least no one could ever claim that today’s unfortunate accident could be anything other than an unwanted coincidence. Not even Gareth himself.
She took a box of tissues from him, almost snatching at it in her desire to escape from him just as soon as she could. And why on earth the sight of a can of Mr Simmonds’ shaving-foam should cause him to glare at her so disapprovingly, she really didn’t know.
‘Oh, do come on, Gareth.’
The blonde was glowering at her now, making it plain how she regarded her, her hand reaching possessively for Gareth’s arm, scarlet nails gleaming dangerously against his suit-clad arm.
‘You know you’re mentioned in the will?’
Sybilla had almost turned away from him, but his curt, almost acid words stopped her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed tonelessly, without looking at him. Henry Grieves, Thomas’s solicitor, had already been in touch with her about the collection of Dresden figures, which Thomas had directed were to be hers.
She had been a little girl of no more than six or seven the first time she had seen the figures and fallen in love with them. Now she blinked away emotional tears, trying not to remember how at Christmas Thomas had told her that he had left them to her.
He had always said that eventually the figures were to be hers, but she had treated his comments as a joke, knowing how valuable they were, and knowing also that Thomas knew that her love for them had been formed in the days when she had had no knowledge at all of their financial worth.
In many ways she would have preferred that he had not left them to her, even though she appreciated that they had been a gift of love.
Now though, sensitively suspecting that Gareth was somehow criticising her…perhaps even suggesting that she had pressurised Thomas into leaving her such a valuable gift, she tensed defensively.
‘I only mention it because you haven’t come to collect the figures.’
His mildness confused her, coming so quickly after his earlier apparent coldness.
She couldn’t tell him that the reason she hadn’t been up to the house was because she had known he was there.
In the distance a church clock struck the hour, causing Gareth to frown. ‘I have to go now, but…we really ought…’
‘Gareth, for goodness’ sake…’
Sybilla was already turning away from him, determinedly pushing her trolley in the direction of her own car. She was, she discovered, trembling slightly, her legs oddly weak.
She told herself it was the shock of her trolley’s overturning, but in her heart of hearts she knew it was more than that. That the reason for her unfamiliar and unwanted weakness lay with the six-feet-odd of lean hardened maleness she had just walked away from.
Shaking because of one inadvertent meeting with Gareth Seymour. Ridiculous. She had stopped being vulnerable to him or any other man when she was fifteen years old. Hadn’t she?
CHAPTER TWO
OF COURSE, Sybilla could not now go straight into the office as she had originally planned. She would have to go home and change her clothes, do something about her damp hair, and generally make herself look a bit more like the efficient and well-groomed businesswoman she purported to be, before she went through Belinda’s diary and dealt with her workload for the day.
Fortunately, Belinda’s first ap
pointment wasn’t until lunchtime, according to their shared secretary.
Five years ago, when the two girls had decided to start up an agency providing temporary secretarial services, neither of them had envisaged how successful they were going to be. The town had been very small and parochial in those days, and it had only been with the opening up of a new motorway system and the consequent increase in small businesses establishing themselves in the newly developed business park just outside the town that the whole area had become more prosperous. Now, in addition to having on their books twenty very proficient secretaries, they could also provide clients with a wide range of other staff, including computer-operators and programmers.
Sensibly so far they had concentrated on ploughing back the profits they’d made into the business and on expanding it slowly and carefully, and only the previous week they had been approached by their local newspaper, who were keen to include them in an article they planned to run on successful local enterprises.
One of the drawbacks of running one’s own business, as Sybilla had discovered, was that it left little time for social and leisure activities.
She had a good circle of friends, some from her schooldays, others she had made since through the business; at least twice a week she attempted to visit the town’s new leisure centre and spend an hour or more in the swimming pool there, but of late she had found that the demands of their growing business meant that she had less and less free time.
Belinda had said ruefully just the other day that her husband and two teenage children were beginning to complain that they never saw her, and had told her friend, ‘It’s not so bad for me, but you don’t seem to have any social life at all these days, and you know what they say about all work and no play…’
Sybilla had laughed, but too many of her friends were beginning to make the same comments to her, and only last week the next-door neighbours, for whom she had done this morning’s shopping, had warned her that she was never going to find herself a nice young man and settle down if she wasn’t careful.
Because she liked and respected the Simmondses, Sybilla had refrained from telling them that she was quite happy as she was. Perhaps she had an over-jaundiced view of the male sex, but it seemed to her that, even in this day and age, once a woman was married and had children it became incumbent on her to juggle so many demanding roles that Sybilla felt it was small wonder that so many potentially very successful career women found themselves abandoning the unequal struggle of competing successfully with their male colleagues for promotion at the same time as they tried to meet the demands of their husbands and children.
When she fell in love she would feel differently, Belinda had told her when she’d voiced this view to her, agreeing that, without that leavening magic, to an outsider it could seem that it was always the woman who seemed to have the responsibility for making relationships work, for keeping life harmonious and happy.
Sybilla had contented herself with lifting a cynical eyebrow. She knew quite well that to those who thought they knew her she represented something of an enigma. With her close friends she was warm and affectionate; to those who needed her help—like her neighbours, like Thomas Seymour—she gave it generously and happily, but when it came to men, especially those who indicated that they found her attractive and wanted to get to know her better, she was cool and off-putting.
She knew that her friends presumed that this was because she had dedicated herself to her career and that there was no room in her life for a man who might demand too much from her.
But the truth was that she was afraid of allowing herself to become emotionally involved with anyone.
She had seen too many marriages and relationships break up under the kind of strain that her own responsibility to the business would put on her to want to risk the same thing happening to her. The truth was that, for all her outward demeanour, at heart she was still the same idiotically romantic girl she had been at fifteen.
When she loved she wanted it to be completely and without reserve; and she wanted it to be forever.
Logic told her that she was being both naïve and foolish, and that in setting such impossibly high goals for herself she was almost deliberately making it impossible for her to form any kind of man-to-woman relationship. Instead of lowering her ideals a little and accepting reality she was deliberately withholding from herself the pleasure and happiness she might have found by doing so, and all because she was still punishing herself for being such a fool over Gareth.
She had been fifteen, for heaven’s sake. Little more than a child. All right, so she had behaved embarrassingly and idiotically, but she wasn’t the only girl who had ever had a crush on someone. All right, so it was unfortunate that Gareth had realised how she’d felt, but that was no reason for her to feel that to allow any man to believe she cared for him was to open herself to humiliation and hurt.
Mentally she might be twenty-five, she acknowledged wearily as she parked her car in her drive, but emotionally she was still trapped in the time-warp of the girl she had been at fifteen. Not an admission she liked making, even to herself.
Ten years on and she was still afraid of making a fool of herself over another man in the way she had done over Gareth Seymour.
Perhaps Belinda was right. Perhaps if she actually was to fall in love… But in order to allow herself to fall in love she would need first to feel secure in her relationship with the man concerned, and before that could happen…
She sighed to herself as she got out of her car. If Belinda were privy to her thoughts no doubt she would tell her that she was trying to put the cart before the horse, and chide her that one did not allow oneself to fall in love…that love was an inescapable force, too powerful to resist.
Her house was one of a small row of traditionally built stone cottages a mile or so outside the town.
She had bought it three years ago when her parents had moved away; it was large enough for her needs but small enough not to overwhelm her, and, best of all, it had a long back garden, with views from the upstairs windows of the surrounding countryside.
Most of her neighbours were retired couples, although in recent months two young married couples had moved into the terrace, both of them working for the new companies springing up in the town.
The neighbours for whom she had been shopping were both in their eighties and very independent. They had two sons and a daughter, and several grown-up grandchildren, but their daughter and her family now lived in Australia, and their sons lived too far away from them to be able to do much more than visit a handful of times a year, so Sybilla had found that she had taken on the role of an ‘adopted’ granddaughter to her neighbours.
Now, as she headed for her own back door, Emily Simmonds had obviously seen her and came out of her own house, exclaiming, ‘Heavens! What on earth has happened to you?’
Sybilla quickly explained her trauma with the shopping trolley, but had to refuse Emily’s compensatory offer of a cup of tea, saying that she had to get changed and rush back to her office.
Once she had carried Emily’s shopping into her kitchen for her, she hurried back to her own house, hastily unpacking and storing away her own purchases before running upstairs and into her bedroom.
The image thrown back to her by the full-length mirror there confirmed her worst fears about her appearance.
Her hair had dried now, but the rain had destroyed the sleek silkiness of its normal style and it would have to be rewashed, her skirt was spattered with mud-stains and would have to be cleaned, and as for her shirt…the front of it was still slightly damp, and to her chagrin she realised that where the fine fabric was clinging to her body it had become virtually transparent. The bra she was wearing beneath it was silk too, and her face flamed with angry colour as she realised that in all probability the rain had soaked through that as well, and that Gareth must have…
She swallowed hard, telling herself fiercely that she was a fool and worse if she thought for one single momen
t that Gareth Seymour would have had the slightest interest in looking at her body either clothed or unclothed.
It didn’t take her long to change and redo her hair, and within the hour she was parking her car outside the office she and Belinda rented in the centre of the town.
‘Sorry about the delay,’ she apologised to Meg as she hurried in.
‘No problem,’ the other girl assured her. ‘Oh, and Belinda rang in to say that Tom’s fine, and that she’ll be back in tomorrow if you want to take your day off then. I’ve been through her diary for you. She’s got a lunch booked for today with Talbot Engineering. Ray Lewis from Talbot Engineering.’
Sybilla’s heart sank. Ray Lewis was a very good client, but as a man… From the moment they had met he had made it plain to her that he wanted more than a business relationship with her, but he was a married man, and even if he hadn’t been he was not the type to appeal to her. She realised that his personal good looks and smooth charm might have deceived another woman, but to her they were simply a mask he used to conceal his insincerity and sexual greed.
She had met his wife and had instantly felt sorry for her. It was plain that she adored her husband, and equally plain that she was terrified of losing him, as she most probably would do, Sybilla thought cynically.
Ray Lewis was a rich and successful man, and he was the kind of man to whom loyalty…love… the promises he had made in marriage meant nothing. Sooner or later he would start looking around for a woman he could show off…the kind of woman a man of his financial success ought to have as a wife. Until then, no doubt, he would content himself with a series of unimportant little affairs…but one day…