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So Close And No Closer
PENNY JORDAN


Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now.Rue didn't need a man in her life. She didn't want one, either. The past had taught her only too well the chaos that love could bring. She was happy enough, building her small dried-flower business and learning to enjoy life on her own. Neil Saxton, however, seemed determined to break down all her defences. Neil made it clear that he wouldn't take no for an answer when he offered to buy her land.But somehow, Rue got the distinct feeling that it was more than her property he was after…










Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.




About the Author


PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.




So Close and No Closer

Penny Jordan







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




CHAPTER ONE


RUE knew she had a visitor long before the old-fashioned bell-pull clanged in the small front porch. Horatio had started rumbling deep in his throat the moment the car pulled up outside. It would probably be Jane Roselle coming to collect the delphiniums she had promised to have ready for her. If so, she was going to have to wait for half an hour, because she was early, and Rue hadn’t quite finished tying up the bunches.

Five years ago, when she had first started growing and drying her own flowers and herbs, she had had no idea how quickly her small business would escalate, or the pleasure it would give her, but then, five years ago she had not thought it possible that life could hold pleasure for her ever again. She had been wrong, though. Perhaps her enjoyment was not the kind a young woman in her mid-twenties would normally expect, because it did not encompass any of the things that the rest of the world might consider necessary for happiness. There was no man in her life, for instance—no lover or husband to share her small pleasures and pains. She had no children, no family of any sort, barring Horatio.

But she was content in her aloneness, preferring it, even welcoming it for its security.

The bell clanged again, more impatiently, and Horatio’s growl deepened.

Rue deftly tied another bundle of the tall dried flowers and then hurried across the stone-flagged floor of the drying shed to wash her hands in the old-fashioned stone sink in the corner.

Her home, Vine Cottage, had once been part of a much larger estate. Vine Cottage itself had housed the estate gardener and, because of this, attached to it was a large assortment of outbuildings, including the comfortably sized drying shed with its old-fashioned heavy beams so ideal for hanging her flowers from. Next door to it was a small two-storey stable with a boarded loft and thick stone walls that kept dry in the wettest of weathers.

From the doorway in the upper storey, which had once been used, with the help of its small hoist, to store animal feed for the winter, it was possible to see as far as the big house itself and the hills beyond, as well as to look over her own ten-acre field, which was now, as they approached the end of summer, a glorious mass of rank upon rank of rich colour as her flowers bloomed.

She was just approaching the most critical period of her busy year. A dry late summer and early autumn meant that she could pick her flowers at their peak. Wet, windy weather destroyed the fragile blooms and could mean a whole season’s work going to waste.

Horatio whined at the door as she walked towards it. He was a dog of large size and indeterminate breed. She had found him abandoned half a mile outside the village three winters ago and, having been unable to trace his owners, had adopted him, or rather he had adopted her, she admitted ruefully as he followed her into the house.

Vine Cottage, with its small stone-mullioned windows, seemed dark and cool after the hot sunshine outside. The original cottage had grown over the centuries and the house was now in fact a good size, although the many interconnecting rooms made it awkward to traverse in a hurry, Rue acknowledged.

The small front hallway was little more than a tiny passage with no natural daylight. So when Rue opened the front door she was momentarily blinded by the sunlight, and had to blink rapidly as her eyes adjusted to its brightness, before she realised that her visitor wasn’t the customer she had been expecting, but a total stranger…a total male stranger.

Instinctively her fingers curled into Horatio’s collar, finding comfort in the soft fur and reassuring solid muscle beneath it, and as though he felt her tension Horatio uttered a deep-throated growl of warning.

‘Miss Livesey?’

He had a very deep voice, as one might expect for a man of his height and breadth, Rue acknowledged, at the same time as she acknowledged that he was obviously not a man who was used to being kept waiting, if that faint tinge of impatience, hardening his words to incisive irritation, was anything to go by.

As she nodded in acknowledgement, he stepped forward. ‘If I could have a word with you?’

And, although he phrased the words as a question, Rue was left in no doubt that he fully intended them as a statement of intent. She was forced to step back into the narrow darkness of the hall.

The man had to duck his head to step under the lintel. All the cottage doorways were low; that did not bother her, as she was barely five foot four herself, but it would be bound to cause her visitor a good deal of irritation were he forced to inhabit Vine Cottage, as by her estimate he was a good two inches above six feet tall.

Rue thought momentarily of the doorways at the big house, spacious, elegant doorways many of them, designed by Robert Adam to go with the spacious, elegant rooms they opened into. It would surely be difficult to find two more different environments than Vine Cottage and Parnham Court, but Rue knew which she preferred.

It seemed that she had no option but to invite her unexpected visitor into the pretty sitting-room to the right of the front door. The front of Vine Cottage faced south, warm sunlight spilling from the mullioned windows into the comfortably furnished room. Rue had decorated this room herself, lovingly waxing the beams and then painting their ancient plaster infills with a special lime wash stained palest ochre, which gave the plaster a soft, warm glow.

She had learned a good deal in the five years she had lived in Vine Cottage, she acknowledged, glancing slightly ruefully at her clean but very short fingernails. Five years ago she would not even have known the importance of painting traditional plaster infills with lime wash instead of modern paint—and five years ago she would certainly never have dreamed of doing such work herself.

As her visitor followed her into the sunny room, Rue saw him glancing appraisingly at her few good antiques: the chest of drawers which she lovingly polished with wax polish; the two chairs she had reupholstered herself; the small bureau.

While he was studying her home, Rue studied him, and now that she could see him properly she was tensely conscious of the air of vital masculinity that emanated from him.

Here was a man who was used to making his own rules in life…who was used to giving commands and having those commands obeyed. Here was a man who was used to the feminine sex paying full dues to his maleness, Rue suspected, even though there was nothing remotely sexual in the way his gaze flicked assessingly over her own slender body, registering the delicacy of her fine bone-structure and the fragility of her frame. Her blonde hair was pulled back off her face in a ponytail to make it easier for her to work, her skin free of make-up.

Six years ago she would never have dreamed of letting a man—any man—see her looking anything other than immaculately made-up and dressed. Odd to remember how much store she had once set by such things. These days…these days she saw very few men, and when she did was always glad when she was free of their presence. They made her feel on edge, resurrected memories she would rather have suppressed…made her remember.

She realised that the man was looking expectantly at her and, for no reason that she could think of, she flushed vividly.

She saw the amusement darken the steel-grey of his eyes, and instantly her own flashed dark green with anger. So he found her amusing, did he? She didn’t offer him a seat, but asked crisply, ‘How can I help you, Mr…?’

‘Saxton, Neil Saxton,’ he supplied for her. ‘I understood that my solicitor had been in touch with you.’

The moment he said his name, Rue remembered it. Of course, this man hadn’t come here wanting to buy her dried flowers or herbs…one look at the expensively tailored pale grey suit he was wearing should have told her that much. The letter had arrived over two weeks ago, and she had stuffed it to the back of her desk, meaning to reply to it but somehow or other never taking time in the busy days that had followed.

‘You’re the new owner of Parnham Court,’ she said huskily, and, as though he found her statement of what he already knew to be both irritating and time-wasting, he said curtly, ‘Yes. You’ve obviously received my letter.’

‘You want to buy my land and this cottage?’

‘Yes. I need somewhere for a housekeeper to live. There’s room at the court, but I like my privacy. This place would be ideal for her. Your land, as you know, runs down one side of my drive. I’m prepared to offer you a good price.’

As she listened to him, Rue felt her anger growing. Did he really think he could simply walk into her home and bully her, with his masculinity and his wealth, into selling it to him? Five years ago she had virtually crawled into Vine Cottage like a wounded animal seeking sanctuary, and like an animal she had hibernated here all through one winter, barely aware of the damp and the draughts…the tiles missing from the roof, the lack of proper amenities…the state of disrepair the cottage had fallen into, having been unlived in for almost eight years. And then, with the spring, she had gradually started to reawaken to life itself. She had looked around her new surroundings and seen, in the sharp, strong sunlight of those early spring days, the dust and the dilapidation.

Having no money, she had had to do most of the work on the cottage herself. It had taken her two years to make it the comfortable home it was today. Two years of going to night school to learn a variety of crafts. Two years of working so hard that she practically fell asleep standing up at night. And now Vine Cottage wasn’t just a house…it was a part of her.

She looked at Neil Saxton with angry eyes. How dared he simply walk in here and assume that, because he was a wealthy man, he had the right to expect that she would be willing to sell her home to him, just because he wanted it? She opened her mouth to tell him that no money on earth could purchase Vine Cottage, and then she acknowledged that part of the blame was hers. She ought to have written to her solicitor and informed him that under no circumstances did she wish to sell either the cottage or the land.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said formally, turning her back on him so that he wouldn’t see her apology for the polite sham it was. ‘Vine Cottage isn’t for sale, and never will be.’

‘I see.’ Without looking at him, she could tell from the clipped tone of his voice that she had angered him. ‘Well, Miss Livesey…I think I ought to warn you that I’m a man who never takes no for an answer. Everything has its price,’ he told her cynically, and as she turned round to deny it Rue flinched beneath the look in his eyes.

It seemed to say ‘even you’, and her breath caught in her throat, locked there on a huge wave of pain and fear. Once his comment might have been all too pertinent…but over the last five years she had truly learned the value of her own self-respect, her own pride, her own independence and, most of all, her own peace of mind, and these were things that were so important to her that they were worth more than the most fabulous of king’s ransoms. And all of them were directly linked with Vine Cottage. It was her security blanket…her base…her own special private place; and too late she realised that in allowing this man to invade it she had allowed him to bring in with him values and emotions that made her tremble a little with fear.

Horatio felt it and growled again, his ears flattening to his head.

He had a good deal of Alsatian in him, and when he bared his teeth, as he was doing now, he could look extremely ferocious. Neil Saxton, though, seemed totally unafraid. He clicked his fingers to the dog and made a soft sound under his breath that changed Horatio’s growl to a whine, and from that to a fawning adoration that made Rue stand and stare in disbelief.

Over Horatio’s head, her eyes met Neil Saxton’s cool grey ones in shocked anger.

Instantly the masculine hand that had been fondling the dog’s soft head was removed, a frown drawing the dark eyebrows sharply together. He had thick, dark hair, well-groomed, and so clean that the sunlight bounced light back off it.

As he moved towards her, the air in the room seemed to stir lazily, warmed by the sun, and Rue just caught a hint of some tangy and very male cologne that made her think of the coolness of lavender mixed with the sharpness of her favourite herbs.

‘There’s no need to get worked up,’ the cool, masculine voice told her almost mockingly. ‘I came here to make you a genuine offer for your property, not steal it from you.’

He said it cynically, anger just beginning to darken his eyes as though he found the thought of her defensiveness both unnecessary and ridiculous.

His cool words penetrated Rue’s anger. She focused on him and the blood came rushing into her face as she realised what a fool she was making of herself. But, as she looked at him and read the mockery in his eyes, her common sense was defeated by her anger. Gripping hold of Horatio’s collar, she told him fiercely, ‘I’ll never sell this house…never! Now, please leave.’

She didn’t accompany him to the front door, but stayed where she was until after she had seen him walk down the front path and out of the gate into the village street where his car was parked. An expensive, gleaming Daimler saloon with new numberplates on it, she recognised absently as he drove away.

Only when she was sure he had gone did she move, almost stumbling into the hallway and, once there, locking the heavy front door with both its old-fashioned key and the bolts she had had put on when she’d moved in. It was disconcerting to discover that she was actually shaking.

The telephone rang, and she took a deep breath that hurt her chest as she went to answer it.

It was Jane Roselle, apologising and asking if it would be all right if she collected the flowers she had ordered in the morning.

Assuring her that it would, Rue walked back, not into the sitting-room, but into the room on the left of the narrow hallway—the original rectangular cottage kitchen, which now served as her study-cum-sitting-room and which was comfortably furnished with two large old-fashioned armchairs, one either side of the fireplace, and the big, old desk which had once belonged to her grandfather and which really was out of place in the humble cottage sitting-room, but which she had not been able to bring herself to part with. What had once been the outbuildings to the original cottage had now been converted into a pretty kitchen-dining-room. Upstairs the cottage had three good-sized bedrooms and a pretty bathroom. She felt comfortable here…far more comfortable than she had ever felt at…

She dismissed the thought, shivering a little as she went into the kitchen and started to make some fresh coffee. How long would it be before Neil Saxton discovered that…? Her hand shook and cold water splashed down on to it as the jug jolted.

She had heard that Parnham Court had changed hands. The last people to own it had rarely used it; there had been talk locally of them converting it into a country hotel, but that had evidently come to nothing and now it had been sold again.

An unlucky house, so some of the locals believed. The story went that the house had originally been built on the site of an abbey, and that stone from the abbey had been used in the construction of the original Tudor house, now concealed somewhere behind the impressive Georgian additions made in the eighteenth century. It was said that the man who had originally built Parnham Court had also been responsible for the destruction of the abbey, and that, because of that, he and the house itself had been cursed. Rue shivered again, and at her feet Horatio whined. He followed her everywhere and even slept on the end of her bed if she let him, although he had a comfortable bed of his own on the floor just outside her bedroom door. His presence made her feel comfortable and safe. It protected her from her own aloneness, and from the memories that haunted her during her sleepless nights.

Neil Saxton had gone away, but how long would it be before he came back? Even without his saying so to her in as many words, she would have known he was not the kind of man to give up on something he wanted. And he wanted her home and her land.

She knew why, of course. Once, this cottage and its land had been part of the Parnham estate, and then it had been left to its then incumbent, the head gardener, for the duration of his lifetime, after which its ownership would return to the estate.

Parnham Court was two miles or so outside the small village of Parnham Magna. The drive to the house was long and straight, bordered on one side by an impressive row of lime trees; but on the other side, spoiling the symmetry of the driveway, was her land…her field, the border of which went right up to the edge of Parnham Court’s drive.

Her hawthorn hedge now grew where the lime trees must have once been, and her cottage disrupted the long, elegant line of the high brick wall which surrounded Parnham Court. Oh, yes, she knew quite well why Neil Saxton wanted her home. He wanted it so that he could destroy it.

He wasn’t the first person to approach her with a view to buying her home. Only last summer there had been a builder, a tough, self-made man from a nearby city who had driven through the village and seen at once the possibilities of her home and its land with its valuable main-road frontage, in a small, rural area that would be so conveniently close to the city once the new motorway system was completed.

He had been very angry when Rue had turned his offer down.

It was a pity it was Saturday, otherwise she could have got in touch with her solicitor and asked him to write to Neil Saxton, making it plain that she had no intention of selling. If she hadn’t been so busy she would have done so before now. But it had been a good summer for her. Her field was now crammed full of the flowers she grew to pick and dry. Only this spring she had planted up the last quarter of it, paying half a dozen teenagers from the village to help her with the work. Upstairs in the loft above the stable, she had rack upon rack of those spring and early summer flowers which had already been harvested.

She had never envisaged herself as a businesswoman, but that was what she had become, albeit in a small way. Her talent for drying and arranging flowers had been something she had done merely for her own pleasure, until a friend had asked her if she would supply her with some of her arrangements, and her skill had spread by word of mouth until another friend had suggested she turn her talent into a full-time business.

It had helped having the new country hotel and club open less than ten miles away. The two young chefs who ran it had come to the house to buy dried flower arrangements for the hotel and, seeing the walled herb garden to the rear of the property, had begged her to sell them some fresh herbs. That side of her business too had escalated, and she now supplied not just them but several other local restaurants as well.

All in all, she had carved out a very pleasant life for herself, even if her friends did bemoan the fact that there was no man in it.

They all knew about the past, of course; it was impossible to keep a secret in such a small village, even if she wanted to, and they all respected her refusal to talk about what had happened. She suspected that the more romantically inclined of them thought her reticence was due to grief.

Grief…If only they knew.

RUE HAD TO MAKE THE MOST of the long summer evenings, and it was gone ten o’clock before she tiredly acknowledged that she had had enough.

Calling Horatio, she set out in the direction of her field, opening the door in the wall that led to it.

Horatio knew better than to do anything other than stick to the narrow paths between the flowers. When his mistress paused to examine some blooms more closely or to test the richness of their scent, he too waited, knowing that, once her inspection was done, he would be allowed to run free along the footpath that ran behind her field and back to the village.

This was one of her favourite parts of the day, Rue acknowledged, savouring the colour of the tall spikes of delphiniums glowing richly against the evening sky.

Her other favourite time of day was early in the morning, just after dawn, when the dew was still on the grass and she felt as though she had the whole world to herself. She liked it that way: clean…new…uninhabited by anyone bar herself and Horatio.

As she finished her inspection and climbed the stile that led to the footpath, she saw in the distance the outline of Parnham Court. Lights shone at the windows; evidence, if she needed it, that the new owner was in occupation.

What was he doing? Reading in the quiet solitude of the panelled library…eating in the awesomely elegant crimson dining-room, or perhaps relaxing in the comfort of the south drawing-room?

Her own curiosity made her feel uneasy. She had never speculated about the inhabitants of Parnham Court before…perhaps because they had not come knocking on her door, spoiling her peace, making demands on her which she could not and would not meet.

Healthily tired, she made her way back to her cottage. Horatio, used to his mistress’s evening routine, padded into the kitchen, waiting for her to make the hot milky drink she always took to bed with her.




CHAPTER TWO


AT TEN past nine on Monday morning Rue had just returned from checking her field—something she did meticulously twice a day during the height of the summer and early in the autumn, those all-important times of the year for her when even a couple of days’ neglect could mean the difference between picking her flowers at their very best or finding she had left things too late and the petals were already beginning to shed—when the telephone rang. She picked up the receiver in one hand while she poured herself a cup of coffee with the other.

The unexpected sound of her solicitor’s voice, faintly hesitant and apologetic, surprised her.

‘I wonder if you could come in and see me,’ he asked her. ‘There are one or two things I need to talk over with you.’

Instantly suspicious, Rue told him, ‘If it’s about Neil Saxton’s offer to buy the cottage and my land, then I might as well tell you that I’m not interested.’

‘It isn’t something we can discuss over the telephone,’ her solicitor told her and, sensing his determination and knowing how much he had her interests at heart, Rue gave in and agreed reluctantly that she would drive in to the local market town and see him. He suggested taking her out for lunch, but Rue turned his invitation down, explaining to him that she was far too busy to be able to spare him more than half an hour of her time. She didn’t add that she wouldn’t have been able to spare him as much as that if she hadn’t needed to go into her local market town to stock up on supplies. The village, lovely though it was, only had one very small general store, and Rue normally made the trip once a month to the local market town to stock up on groceries.

At eleven o’clock she bundled Horatio into the ancient estate car she had bought three years ago when her business had first started to grow. The car was old but reliable, its roomy rear-section ideal for carrying her stock.

It took her just over half an hour to drive into town. She parked her car in the pretty market square, empty on a Monday of the bustle of traffic which filled it to capacity on Wednesdays and Saturdays—market days.

Her solicitor’s office was up a rickety flight of stairs in a tiny Elizabethan building, part of what had once originally been the old Shambles. Now the whole street was a conservation area, the shop beneath the offices a prestigious book store.

It was still possible, from the attic room at the top of the house, to reach out from the window and shake hands with somebody doing the same thing in the house on the opposite side of the street, but it wasn’t the building’s history which was on Rue’s mind as she rapped on the outer door of her solicitor’s office and walked into the small reception area.

David Winten had originally been her father’s solicitor, and the two men would have been about the same age if her father had been alive. As always when she was invited into the tiny, cramped office, Rue was reminded unbearably of her father. He had married fairly late in life, and she had been born eighteen months after her parents married.

Tragically, her mother had died within hours of her own birth, and because of that, she and her father had shared a closeness which even now, six years after his death, she still missed.

‘Rue.’ Her solicitor’s face creased in a delighted smile as he swept some papers off the chair and dusted it down apologetically before offering it to her. ‘My dear, how lovely it is to see you.’

Rue hid a tiny smile as she accepted the chair. How on earth he managed to make a living out of his practice she had no idea. Every surface in the small room was piled high with pink-tied bundles of legal papers, files gaped open in half-open drawers, and a tortoiseshell cat drowsed in the sun coming through the small window.

‘Neil Saxton came here to see me first thing this morning,’ he told her rather breathlessly as Rue sat down. ‘In fact, he was here waiting for me at half-past eight when I arrived.’

Immediately he mentioned Neil Saxton’s name, Rue’s face hardened. ‘It’s no good,’ she told him firmly. ‘Nothing you can say to me will make me change my mind. I’m not going to sell Vine Cottage or the land.’

‘My dear child, think,’ her solicitor pleaded with her. ‘I assure you he’s prepared to be very generous—very generous indeed. With that money…’

‘I have more than enough money for my needs,’ Rue cut in ruthlessly. ‘I own the cottage and the land and its freehold. I have no debts.’

‘And no assets, either,’ her solicitor pointed out firmly, surprising her a little. ‘Rue, think: at the moment your business is doing very well, but you have precious little behind you. A bad season, any other kind of accident…’

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ Rue interrupted him. ‘But it isn’t going to happen.’

‘My dear, I can understand your attachment to the cottage and to the village, but surely there must be other properties.’

‘I’m sure there are,’ Rue agreed obediently, ‘but I suggest you try telling that to Neil Saxton, and not to me.’

‘But you must realise why he wants your property.’

‘Of course,’ Rue agreed.

‘It was, after all, originally part of the estate,’ her solicitor pointed out. ‘He has told me that he is concerned that, if for any reason anything were to happen to you, the land could be sold away completely, and that is the reason he is prepared to make such a very generous offer.’

Rue’s eyebrows climbed a little as she listened to this rather hesitant statement, hardly surprising, she reflected inwardly, in view of her comparative youth.

‘You may reassure Mr Saxton that I have no intentions of selling the land either to him or to anyone else,’ she said firmly, standing up. ‘I’m sorry. I know you’re only thinking of my future and my security, but Vine Cottage is my future and my security. I refused to sell it to that builder last year and now I’m refusing to sell it to Neil Saxton. I’m sorry if he finds that knowledge unpalatable, but he’ll just have to accept it.’

She saw that her solicitor was looking very unhappy, and hesitated, frowning a little.

‘He’s a very determined man,’ her solicitor offered nervously. ‘He asked me a lot of questions about you…about the land…’

Rue’s frown deepened. ‘What did you tell him?’ she questioned sharply.

Her solicitor looked even more unhappy, and a tiny sigh of irritation escaped Rue’s soft mouth. She should have known that a man like her solicitor would be no match for the Neil Saxtons of this world. By now, no doubt, he knew the whole sordid story of her past and the folly she had committed. She shrugged inwardly. What did it matter? He would think her a fool, of course, but what did his opinion matter to her?

‘Well, if he gets in touch with you again, please tell him that there is absolutely no question of any selling the land either to him or to anyone else,’ Rue said firmly.

‘I don’t think he’s going to give up easily,’ her solicitor told her warningly, ‘not a man like that, who’s built up a multi-million international company almost out of nothing.’

Rue hesitated, her interest caught in spite of herself. ‘What exactly does he do?’ she questioned her solicitor thoughtfully.

‘His company deals in computer software of a highly specialised sort.’ Her solicitor made a vague movement with his hands. ‘I believe it’s very highpowered, and that he himself has made a personal fortune from his own innovative ideas.’

‘A self-made millionaire,’ Rue mocked a little bitterly, ‘and now that he’s made it he’s decided to buy himself a part of England’s heritage in the shape of Parnham Court.’

As though he knew the pain that underlay her cynical words, her solicitor looked sympathetically at her.

‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said softly. ‘I know how it must hurt you.’

Rue brushed aside his words impatiently.

‘No, no, it doesn’t at all,’ she told him fiercely. ‘I’m not so much of a dog in the manger.’

Her solicitor looked at her and waited, and Rue knew he was waiting for her to explain her antipathy towards Neil Saxton. Unfortunately, it was something she just couldn’t do. She couldn’t analyse even to herself the true reasons underlying her instinctive dislike of the man. One thing she did know, though, was that, no matter what her financial circumstances might be, she would never sell Vine Cottage or its land to him.

And yet, when she stepped outside into the shadowed coolness of the narrowed street, it wasn’t with a feeling of confident assertiveness because she had made it plain to her solicitor that she had no wish to enter any kind of negotiation for the sale of her property, but rather with a feeling of deep and unwanted unease. The kind of unease that prickled under her skin and made her muscles tense, almost as though she half expected Neil Saxton to appear out of nowhere and demand that she sell her land to him.

Horatio was waiting patiently in the car for her when she got back with her shopping. She stowed it away economically and then got into the driver’s seat. She had wasted far too much time over Neil Saxton already, she told herself grimly as she drove towards home.

Once there, she removed her shopping from the car and packed it away, and then went upstairs to change into her working uniform of cotton T-shirt and jeans. The neat skirt and top she had donned for her visit to her solicitor were clothes that belonged more properly to the period before her father’s death. She rarely wore such formal things these days, and indeed, had only put them on in the first place because she knew that her solicitor, old-fashioned perhaps about such things, would not have felt comfortable at the sight of one of his female clients clad in a pair of disreputable old jeans and a shabby T-shirt. Nevertheless, these were the clothes she now felt most at home in, she told herself, pulling the T-shirt on over her head and disturbing the smooth sleekness of her blonde hair as she did so.

She just had time to snatch a quick salad lunch before going outside into the field with her secateurs and her trug, ready to start harvesting those flowers that were at their peak. It was hard, backbreaking work, especially with the heat of the sun beating down on the back of her neck and her upper arms.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, as she straightened up tiredly, she acknowledged that she ought to have worn a hat. Her head was already beginning to ache, the pain pounding in her temples as she raised a grubby hand to massage the too-tight skin. Horatio had long ago deserted her to go and lie down in the shelter of the hedge. She thought longingly of her cool kitchen and the lemonade in the fridge there.

She was just on the point of giving in and going back to the house to get some when an all too familiar male voice hailed her. Furiously she watched as Neil Saxton climbed over the stile that separated his land from hers and came towards her, carefully weaving his way among the tall spires of her flowers.

Unlike her, he looked immaculate and cool. He was wearing a pair of white cotton trousers and a thin white cotton shirt open at the throat. His skin, like hers, was tanned, but his tan was much darker, richer. As he came towards her she felt a tiny pulse of fear beat frantically deep inside her body, and she had a compulsive urge to throw down her trug and take to her heels.

Telling herself that she was being idiotic, she remained where she was, unaware of how revealing the tight, defensive look on her face was to the man approaching her. He had learned a good deal from her solicitor this morning, and as he drew level with her Rue saw that knowledge in his eyes.

Mentally cursing her solicitor for his naı¨vete´, she said coldly, ‘If you’ve come to try to persuade me to sell my land, you’re wasting my time.’

Instead of responding to her challenge, he turned away from her and gestured over to where the neat beds of herbs nestled in the shelter of her walled garden.

‘Who buys those from you?’ he asked her thoughtfully.

Surprised into giving him a response, Rue told him, ‘Restaurants, sometimes gardeners wanting plants of their own, health food shops, and even people wanting to buy them for medicinal purposes.’

‘You’re joking.’ His amused cynicism irritated her.

‘No, I’m not joking at all,’ she told him sharply. ‘After all, herbal medicine existed long before our so-called modern drugs.’

‘Well, yes, but they were hardly as powerful.’

His self-assurance annoyed her, and she had a sudden longing to destroy it.

‘Some of them are,’ she argued firmly. ‘Take ergot, for instance…’

‘Ergot…What’s that?’ She had his attention now, he was looking at her in a direct, uncompromising way that she knew that she ought to find intimidating, but which instead for some odd reason she found challenging.

‘Ergot is the fungus on the rye,’ she told him knowledgeably. ‘It used to be used, among other things, for aborting unwanted foetuses. Unfortunately, its side-effects can be devastating. Used unwisely, it can give rise to a whole range of things from gangrene to madness.’ She saw the look on his face and laughed harshly. ‘It’s still used today as a base for migraine drugs. Doctors prefer only to prescribe it for men,’ she added drily.

‘You obviously know a lot about it.’

Without thinking, she shrugged and said, ‘It was my father’s hobby. I grew up with it, so to speak.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed grandly. ‘I think I can see why a man who’s fortune was founded on modern drugs could be interested in herbal medicine.’

Instantly Rue tensed. He had ticked her—and she had let him, fool that she was, carried away by her enthusiasm for one of her favourite subjects—into betraying herself and giving him exactly the kind of lever he wanted to pry into her most private affairs. He wouldn’t hesitate to use it, she could see that in his eyes as he looked at her.

‘Your solicitor was telling me this morning about your father,’ he added, still watching her. ‘What happened?’ he demanded abruptly when she refused to either look away or make any comment.

The abruptness of his question caught her off guard. ‘To what?’ she asked him uncertainly, not sure of the meaning behind his question.

‘To the fortune your father left you?’ he answered harshly. ‘He died six years ago, apparently a millionaire, and yet you, his only child, are now living here in this cottage, instead of Parnham Court which he left to you, and apparently earning your own living—a rather curious state of affairs, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

‘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 naı¨vete´. 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 de´cor 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 question 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 growing 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.

Even now sometimes, at night, she dreamt she could hear Julian’s mocking laughter as she wept and begged him not to touch her. Before their marriage he had been so gentle, so caring, so tender, so very much the considerate lover. She ought to have realised it was all simply a ploy, a fac¸ade, but she had been too thrilled and excited by his declarations of love, too eager to believe that he desired her to ever imagine that he was lying.

She had deserved to be hurt, she told herself ruthlessly, towelling her body dry with rough ferocity until her skin glowed a bright peach. Her sexuality was not something she ever allowed herself to think about these days. When she was in the company of other women she listened to their frank exchanges regarding their lover’s prowess or lack of it and sometimes their even franker descriptions of their own needs and desires, and, although she smiled and laughed and made the appropriate comments, inside her body felt dead. They may as well have been speaking in a foreign language when they described their pleasure, so different was her own experience.

She had never experienced sexual pleasure other than fleetingly and tenuously in those early days of their courtship, when Julian had teased her with kisses that promised so much and yet in the end meant so very little. Perhaps if she had not been so sheltered, so naı¨ve, she might have realised the truth, might have queried the sincerity of a man who professed to desire her and yet at the same time seemed content with no more than a good-night kiss.

It had not been with desire that he had come to her on their wedding night but with rage and resentment, and with a determination to let her know exactly what role she was to play in his life. He had entered her brutally and ruthlessly, without making any attempt to prepare her for his possession, taking an almost sadistic satisfaction in her pain and shock, and then, when she had cried out, he had punished her for it, inflicting bruises and contusions on her pale skin which had taken days to heal.

After that first night he had never come back to her bed, and she had been too relieved to care. In that one short night he had ripped away the veils of innocence and naı¨vete´ which had protected her, and she had seen all that her marriage was going to be. She had lived in a state of shock after that, relieved that he continued to stay away from Parnham Court and yet at the same time too proud to seek advice from those who might have been able to help and advise her.

His death had brought about her release in more ways than one, and she had not been able to mourn for him. Now she was a different woman from that naı¨ve, foolish nineteen-year-old girl. Now she reflected hardily that she was better off for what had happened to her, and her life as it was now was richer in all the things that mattered than it had ever been when she was her father’s pampered heiress.

She had no regrets about the loss of her father’s wealth, other than those that sprang from guilt caused by her knowledge that there were many, many needy causes that could have benefited from her inheritance. For herself, she was content as she was, and proud of her own small achievements and the progress she had made towards independence.

It was true, as her solicitor had warned her only this morning, that a bad summer, a freak thunderstorm, anything, in fact, that damaged her flowercrop, could jeopardise her financial position almost disastrously. She had very little money behind her. All the profits she had made so far had been ploughed straight back into the business and, although it was true that she had neither mortgage nor debts to worry about, she still had to live.

She pulled on her housecoat. It had been one of her father’s last Christmas gifts to her, worn and faded now but still comfortable and warm, even if it was a trifle girlish for a woman of twenty-five. There were very few clothes in her wardrobe. The expensive designer things she had bought as a teenager had either been sold or given away, most of them too outrageous to last for more than one fashion season. In the place of the silks and satins she had once worn, she now wore denim jeans and cotton sweatshirts—hardly the sort of thing one could put on for dinner with a man like Neil Saxton, she reflected wryly as she opened her wardrobe doors and checked abruptly.

Why should it matter what she wore? She had no desire to impress the man. Women adorned their bodies in silks and satins so that they would be pleasing to the male of the species, she reminded herself grimly. She had no desire to please the eye or the sexual appetite of any man.

She reached out for a pair of clean jeans and then hesitated, her pride, that same pride that had driven her to accept his invitation in the first place, making her check and turn instead to frown over the few formal clothes she possessed. There were a couple of suits, the one she had worn this morning and a heavier, more winter-weight one, which she wore for important business meetings with her bank manager or her accountant.

There was her raincoat, a classically cut trench-coat in a waterproof stone-coloured fabric, and a heavy navy winter coat she had splurged out on and bought for herself the previous winter. There were a couple of tailored linen dresses she had bought in a second-hand clothes shop which would have been eminently suitable for city shopping on a hot day, but were hardly the right sort of things to go out for dinner in, and then there were her two evening dresses. One was full-length and formal, and she kept that for the rare winter balls she was obliged to attend; the other—she reached out towards it, and then tensed—the other had been a gift from a client for whom she had done rather a lot of work.

Hannah Ford and her husband had moved into the area less than eighteen months ago. Originally from London, Tom Ford had been forced by ill-health to take a fresh look at his life-style. He had been a successful investment manager in the high-pressure field of corporate finance, but one heart attack and a threatened bypass operation had been enough to suggest to his employers that they should give him a sideways move to a country branch of his bank. Hannah, whose career as an interior designer was just beginning to take off, had given up her own work to come with him, and the move had paid off for them in more ways than one.

Determined not to allow him to feel guilty over the fact that she had given up a very promising post, Hannah had insisted on starting up in business on her own. Even she admitted that she was astounded by her own success. In fact, she had been so successful that Tom was now thinking of giving up his bank job completely so that he could handle the financial side of her business. As if that had not been enough, within six months of moving to the Cheviots Hannah had discovered that she was pregnant.

As she’d confided to Rue, at thirty-nine the last thing she wanted was to start a family, but, once Lucy Saffron Ford had arrived, no parents could have been more doting or adoring than Hannah and Tom, and Hannah was even talking about providing Lucy with a brother or a sister. Having seen one of Rue’s beautifully arranged baskets in the home of one of her clients, Hannah had lost no time in getting in touch with Rue and asking her to design some arrangements to complement her own colourschemes.

Astounded by the very modest fee Rue had asked, ridiculously low by London standards, or so Hannah had told her, she had presented Rue at Christmas with a beautifully wrapped, large box. Inside it, beneath layer upon layer of white tissue paper, had been a dress like no other Rue had ever seen. It had been designed by a friend of hers, especially for Rue, Hannah had told her.

It was black velvet, the softest black velvet Rue had ever seen, and cut so plainly yet so cleverly that it was only when it was actually on that the skill of its designer could truly be seen. The long-sleeved bodice moulded Rue’s soft curves and tiny waist; the slightly gathered tulip-shaped skirt skimmed her knees and hinted at the fragile curve of her hips; the ruffled bustle at the back added emphasis to the skirt and a formal touch to the dress, which drew everyone’s eyes to her whenever Rue wore it. She had told Hannah initially that the dress simply wasn’t her and at any rate was far too expensive a gift, but Hannah had looked so crestfallen, so hurt, that Rue had not been able to refuse to accept it.




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