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Past Loving
PENNY JORDAN


Why Had He Returned?It was over ten years ago since Holly, a naive girl still in her teens, had fallen for Robert Graham and had assumed that his intentions were more long-term than just an affair. She had been bitterly disillusioned. Robert had no intention of marrying before he had made his way in life, and had callously abandoned Holly in search of pastures new.Now he was back in town and apparently willing to pick up their relationship where he had left off. But Holly had other ideas…










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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.

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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.




Past Loving

Penny Jordan







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




CHAPTER ONE


‘AND then he said that he had to work late again; that’s the third time in a fortnight. I know how much of his time your business is taking up now that it’s expanding so much, Holly, and with all this media attention you’ve been getting, but honestly do I look like a fool? Working late…not on your accounts, I’ll bet, and that new secretary of his had the gall to tell me that he was in a meeting when I rang him yesterday.’

Smoothing the neat straight skirt of her primrose yellow suit, Holly let Patsy’s diatribe wash over her; not because she wasn’t interested or didn’t care about her old friend’s problems—after all, instead of being here listening to Patsy complaining about Gerald, she had intended to spend her precious few hours helping Rory put in the tulips and forget-me-nots that were going to make such a lavish display of blue and yellow in the spring.

When Patsy had telephoned her, announcing that she had to see her because there was something she had to talk to her about, she had immediately assumed from the tragic tone of her friend’s voice that something catastrophic had occurred.

Poor Gerald, the last thing he was likely to do was to be unfaithful to his volatile red-haired wife; Patsy was the one who had always had a rather elastic view of her marriage vows.

She tried to concentrate on what Patsy was saying and discovered that her friend had ceased complaining about Gerald’s new secretary and was now complaining about the amount of work her own business was causing Gerald.

‘I know Gerald himself would never mention it, but it isn’t as though he’s actually on your board or anything, is it? I mean, I know he’s your accountant, but he does have other clients.’

Holly suppressed a grim smile. She ought to be used by now to the fact that some of her friends were inclined to be either envious or resentful of her unexpected commercial success. Many of them, like Patsy, also seemed to have a very inflated idea of her imagined new-found wealth. It was true that her company had become startlingly profitable, but the majority of those profits were being ploughed back into the business, the one luxury she had allowed herself being the purchase of the long low-built Tudor farmhouse several miles outside town.

Even as a girl she had loved Haddon’s Farm, not quite as much as she had loved the Hall perhaps, but then what did one single woman want with a home that boasted over twenty bedrooms, a ballroom, and a drawing-room large enough to accommodate the entire downstairs of her own home, plus a library, two sitting-rooms, and a whole village of small dark and dank pantries and kitchens, even if she had been able to afford it?

No, the farm was much more her style…much more in keeping with the way she wanted to live. It had roots that went back almost as far as the village itself, pre-dating the Hall by almost a century, and best of all it had a wonderful range of outbuildings, even if they were half falling down and even if the gardens that surrounded the house had resembled a wilderness when she moved in.

All the more scope for her to implement her own ideas and desires, she had told Gerald and Paul mischievously when they had complained that she must be mad to take on such a time-consuming task, when by rights every bit of her time ought to be devoted to the business.

The business…The slim hand smoothing the yellow silk of her skirt went still.

Even now she found it hard sometimes to come to terms with the way the small business she had started at home in her father’s garden shed had mushroomed into the high-profile success it was today.

Fresh from university, newly qualified as a chemist, she had found herself uneasy and unhappy with the modern emphasis on chemically produced beauty products. It had been the gift of a dog-eared Housekeeper’s Receipt Book-cum-Herbal dating from the seventeenth century which had set her off along the alternative avenue of exploring the simpler, kinder methods of producing beauty products from natural sources which had eventually led to the successful business she had today. Things she had made initially just for herself or to test out the recipes in her herbal, their reputation initially spreading by word of mouth, loyally encouraged by Paul, her brother, who had entrepreneurially taken charge of the marketing side of her small business. She vividly remembered their début into the world of country fairs and market stalls. She had enjoyed those days, enjoyed that life, when she had been free to dress in a pair of tatty old jeans and a sweatshirt and to leave her hair free from the time-consuming restrictions of style and image.

Now things were different, especially over the last couple of years when she had been named ‘New Businesswoman of the Year’, and had somehow or other been swept up in a public-relations exercise which had now left her feeling uncomfortably at odds with herself, unfamiliar and sometimes very out of charity with the woman she saw in the mirror, a woman who had swapped her jeans for designer suits, a woman who no longer went bare-legged but who wore silk stockings, a woman whose silky fine hair had been skilfully cut and even more skilfully highlighted so that it fell in a soft blonde sheeny bob that emphasised the delicate purity of her skin and bone-structure…but most of all a woman who she was suddenly recognising had become a woman, and was no longer a girl.

She was thirty now…where on earth had the years gone? When she looked back to her late teens her life had worked out so differently from what she had imagined. Then she had expected and believed that she would marry, would have children, would be content and absorbed by the fulfilment of being the axis on which her husband’s and her children’s lives turned, just as her own mother had been, and yet here she was at thirty, not married, not a mother, but with the kind of high profile and successful career which she had so strenuously denied at eighteen was what she wanted. But then at eighteen she had believed herself to be in love; and what was more she had believed that that love was returned and that it was forever. How naïve she had been. These days, when she looked around at her friends’marriages and relationships, she was forced to realise just how idealistic her teenage dreams had been. Paul, her brother, was always complaining that she was too much of a daydreamer.

Paul. He was away in South America at the moment, gathering as much research material as he could from the tribes of the rain forests before their environment and the potentially irreplaceable properties of the things that grew there were lost forever, plants that could produce lifesaving drugs, without the side-effects of synthetic products.

She moved restlessly on Patsy’s chintz-covered settee, suddenly overwhelmed by the heavy scent of Patsy’s perfume, the cloying over-stuffed prettiness of her carefully designed sitting-room. She ached to be outside in the fresh air, to be dressed in her oldest jeans, turning over spades full of soft loamy earth, feeling the excitement and pleasure of siting the bulbs, of allowing her imagination to paint for her the colourful picture they would make in the spring, in their uniform beds set among lawn pathways and bordered by a long deep border of old-fashioned perennial plants. The kitchen window overlooked those beds, and beyond them on the other side of the wall lay her herb and vegetable garden.

Robert had always teased her about her fascination with growing things, claiming that it must be a throwback…a resurgence of those genes which had led to her father’s family producing generation after generation of farmers.

In her grandparents’ day, though, farming had not been profitable enough to support a family and so the farm had been sold and her own father had qualified as an accountant, even though he had never been drawn to city life and had remained living in the village where he had been brought up.

Her brother had none of the need for roots and continuity that so motivated her; he was a traveller, a restless adventurer whose quicksilver brain never allowed him to rest. No wonder he and Robert had been such good friends. Had been…Holly wondered if they were still in touch. Paul certainly never mentioned him much these days—or at least he hadn’t mentioned him until recently…until his name and his photograph had begun to feature so prominently on the pages of the financial Press.

She could feel her muscles starting to tense, her mind and body preparing to reject the mental image she could feel trying to threaten her peace of mind. In vain she tried frantically to concentrate on the soothing mental spectacle of the frothy mass of deep blue forget-me-nots and the tall elegant blooms of golden yellow tulips, but instead, traitorously, the only image her brain cells would produce was one of a lithe dark-haired man, the image in her own memory-banks subtly altered to allow for the passage of time, so that the hardness of his bone-structure was more apparent, and the cool clarity of his blue-grey eyes reinforced by time and experience.

Robert had always known what he wanted from life, had always known where he was going; the pity of it was that she had misguidedly believed that she was a part of that life plan; that when he told her he loved her, he meant he would always love her.

Memories she didn’t want to acknowledge started to surface: emotions, needs, feelings she had told herself over ten years ago that she had to suppress and destroy.

How many girls of eighteen or thereabouts suffered what she had suffered and walked away from that suffering without a backward glance? Why was it that she had never been able to say truthfully to herself that she was over Robert, that the memory of him no longer caused her the slightest surge of pain?

She had been careful with her relationships since then, careful to admit into her life men whom she knew could never threaten her emotional barriers, men whom she liked, whose company she enjoyed, men whom she knew would have liked to take their relationship a step further from that of good friends to that of lovers, men who in many cases and with only the slightest encouragement could easily have fallen in love with her and wanted to spend their life with her, but she had been too afraid to allow that…afraid of making the wrong judgement…afraid of allowing herself to love again, only to be rejected again. And what, after all, was she missing out on? Not the idealistic union of two people who were all in all to one another, lovers, friends, companions, mutually loving and supportive, intensely loyal, sufficient only to themselves, as she had imagined that marriage would be when she was in love with Robert.

No, when she looked at her friends’ marriages, none of them was like that, although in the main most of them worked…after a fashion.

She knew so many women who said openly that their relationships with their husbands came a poor second to their love for their children and that it was that love that cemented their marriages together; and she also knew many men who claimed over business lunches and to her irritation and annoyance that their wives no longer cared for them, no longer put them first, no longer treated them with the adoration and worship they believed they deserved. And yet somehow or other their marriages kept going.

Perhaps the fault was hers in that she as an outsider looking in saw the flaws…or perhaps it was simply her mind’s defence mechanism, a way of comforting her and of telling her that she was better off the way she was…better off staying single rather than risking the precarious waters of marriage, rather than allowing herself to risk the pain that went with love.

No, nothing in her life had worked out as she had planned. She glanced across at Patsy, who was still complaining about Gerald, her face twisted into prematurely aging lines of bitterness and irritation. Patsy, who during their teens had been the one who had said challengingly and determinedly that she was going to make something of her life, that she wasn’t going to stay mouldering away in the country when there was all the excitement of the city waiting for anyone with the enterprise and will-power to take up that challenge.

And so what had Patsy done? She had taken herself off to London, and got herself a job working at a gallery off Bond Street, where she had promptly and foolishly had an affair with the owner, which had resulted in her summary dismissal when her boss’s wife had found out, plus an unscheduled and very unpleasant visit to a private abortion clinic.

Patsy had told her all this in a tearful and wine-induced confession on the eve of her marriage to Gerald. Gerald, the childhood sweetheart she had come home to marry, when the glitter of city life had begun to pall. Gerald, who in Patsy’s estimation was her consolation prize in life for failing to win something more enticing in its lottery.

And yet here was Pasty complaining that she thought that Gerald might be being unfaithful to her.

Automatically Holly started to reassure her, only to be interrupted when Patsy struck out venomously, ‘Well, of course you would say that. Honestly, Holly, you’ve always got your head in the clouds. You never see reality. It’s no wonder that you’re still unmarried—which reminds me…Guess who’s bought the Hall?’

Holly waited, her face calm and she hoped expressionless. She knew what was coming and had known it all weekend, in fact, since Rory, arriving with a load of manure for the roses, had casually announced that the Hall had been sold and guess who had bought it? He, of course, was a decade younger than her, far too young to have known, even less remembered that once she and Robert Graham had been ‘going steady’ or that she had assumed that their relationship was going to lead to an engagement and then to marriage. That she had already chosen the names of their first two children…that she had cosily envisaged the life they would lead together…that she had believed, when Robert said he loved her, that he meant the words…had believed that when they were lovers their physical union meant far, far more than the mere joining of their two bodies. Her mouth twisted a little self-mockingly, her eyes darkening with the memory of that gut-wrenching, shockingly acid pain she had felt the night Robert had told her that he was going to America to do a post-graduate degree in business studies…the night he had made it clear to her that she had simply been a brief diversion, a means of passing the long summer months before he went on with the real business of following his life plan. Where she had dreamed of forever, marriage, babies and everything that to her went with the commitment she had made to him, he had seen other and very different horizons.

He had stared at her in open disbelief when Holly had haltingly tried to express her feelings, shocked into protesting that he couldn’t mean what he was saying by the intensity and immediacy of her raw disbelief that he could actually be doing this, that he could actually be telling her that he was leaving for Harvard at the end of the month and that their relationship was over.

‘Marriage? But you’re only eighteen. You’re going to university in September. You’re too young…’

You’re too young. How neatly and logically he had used her youth against her, exonerating himself from all blame…from any guilt.

Where now she might have bitterly pointed out that she had also been too young for the sophisticated game of casual sex he had obviously been playing with her, then she had been too shocked, too hurt…too overwhelmed to remind him of those words of love he had whispered to her when he had held her in his arms, to remind him of the passionate intensity of their lovemaking…to remind him that at eighteen she had been too young and too unknowing to be able to differentiate between a man’s desire for sex and a girl’s infatuated desire for what she perceived to be love.

Now, with over a decade of experience separating her from the girl she had been then and the woman she was now, she waited patiently with a calmly serene face for Patsy to unload her burden of news, allowing only the merest flicker of response to cross her face when Patsy told her importantly, ‘Robert Graham is back. I thought I’d better warn you…’

‘Warn me?’ Holly enquired politely, allowing her voice to express a faint puzzlement with her friend’s intensity. ‘Warn me about what?’

‘Well…well, about the fact that he’s back,’ Patsy told her, floundering a little. ‘I mean, I can remember how devastated you were when he dropped you—well, we all can. I was saying to Lucy only the other day that we all thought that you and Robert would be married by the time you were twenty-one…’

Grimly suppressing her real feelings, Holly allowed herself to appear relaxed and to smile. The media-familiarisation course her PR adviser had virtually forced her to go on was having some benefits after all, she decided with irony.

‘Good heavens, Patsy, that was over ten years ago. You don’t surely still think that silly teenage crush on Robert Graham has any bearing on my life today, do you? Heavens, I can barely even remember what the man looks like. He must be well into his thirties by now.’

She managed to make it sound as though Robert were merely one step away from drawing his pension, her smile and shrug implying that the woman she was today could only derive amusement and disdain at the thought of her childish folly in loving such a man.

Patsy’s mouth dropped open a little.

‘You mean you aren’t bothered?’

‘About what?’ Holly enquired, smoothing a non-existent crease from her suit. The combination of primrose yellow silk and her highlighted blonde hair was one which she privately considered to be gilding the lily, but her PR consultant had been insistent that for the sake of the business she must present an image with which other women could not only identify, but which they could also aspire to.

‘But it’s not the real me,’ she had protested, wrinkling her nose with distaste.

‘It will be,’ Elaine Harrison had told her robustly with a determined look. ‘It will be.’And rather weakly she had given in, more because she felt that she owed it to everyone else, those who had supported her and the business in the early days when she was struggling to make ends meet, than because it was what she personally wanted.

‘We aren’t changing you,’ Elaine had pointed out more kindly. ‘Just emphasising certain aspects of you.’

No, they hadn’t changed her. But sometimes she wished…

‘About Robert moving back here,’ Patsy was saying. ‘I mean I thought he’d left for good. From what I’ve read in the papers he’s so high-powered and everything now that I never thought he’d want to come back here to live. Every time you read about him, he seems to be jetting off to a different part of the world to see one of his clients. A management consultant…you’d think he’d live in New York or London.’

Her voice expressed her dissatisfaction that someone who could choose to live somewhere so glamorous would bury themselves in a quiet English village. Personally Holly couldn’t think of anything worse than living in a large impersonal city…but then she was not Patsy. She wasn’t Robert Graham either, and although she wasn’t going to say as much she too was surprised that he should base himself here in the country.

Patsy was wrong about one thing, though…Far from jetting all over the world to see his clients, his eminence and reputation these days was such that they were the ones jetting in to see him—and he was no longer someone employed by millionaires. He was one himself.

Not that she envied him that. Large wealth brought with it its own set of very complex responsibilities, as she was beginning to discover.

‘So you’re not bothered about it, then?’

Patsy sounded quite disappointed. For the first time a glimmer of amusement broke through the icy apprehension which had frozen the normally warm core of her life since she had learned that Robert was coming back. No wonder she had turned to her garden for solace, desperately planning colour schemes for the spring, desperately giving herself something to hold on to, something to reach out for, something to look forward to once the long cold months of winter were over.

‘I’m bothered about all manner of things,’ she corrected Patsy with a faint smile. ‘I’m bothered about the ecology, about the destruction of the rain forests, about the destruction we, the human race, are wreaking not just against one another but against our whole environment—’

‘Oh, yes…I know about that,’ Patsy interrupted pettishly. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant and you know it. I meant were you bothered about Robert coming back?’

Holly stood up. As she reached for her bag, the soft swing of her hair skilfully hid her face.

‘No, I’m not. Why should I be?’ she questioned, adding wryly, ‘As I’ve just said, all manner of things do “bother me”, as you put it, Patsy…things which are far, far more important to me than Robert Graham could ever be.’

She smiled at her friend as she straightened up and added dulcetly, ‘And as for Gerald, I really don’t think you need to worry. Have you actually met his new secretary yet?’

‘No. No, I haven’t, why?’

‘She’s fifty-five, married with two grown-up children and four grandchildren,’ Holly told her drily.

OUTSIDE SHE STOOD in the sun for a while, enjoying its beneficent September warmth. Last night there had been a full moon, and the night air had been cool, a foretaste of the autumn to come. She thought about her wardrobe, bulging with the new autumn clothes the PR girl had almost forcibly made her buy. They were launching their new range of natural perfumes and body products before Christmas; there would be a rash of media interviews to attend. She had to look the part…and there were now so many things to consider. She herself had insisted that she would only wear clothes made in natural fibres, and then had been irritated when Elaine had solemnly pronounced, ‘Very good—yes, that will really underline your commitment to the environment and to the new green mood sweeping the country.’

She had wanted to protest there and then that her decision had nothing to do with fitting into a given mould, but Elaine had already passed on to other issues, complimenting her on her decision not to have her hair permed but to keep it natural and straight.

She had ached to point out that the shockingly expensive hairdresser who cut it once monthly and the even more horrendously expensive lightening procedure which involved a trip to London every month could hardly be described as natural, but what was the point? In actual fact she rather liked the simple elegance of her new hairstyle now that she had had time to grow accustomed to it. It was much more suitable for a woman of thirty than her previous unstyled long hair had been, but she hated the way she sometimes felt that she was being forced into a specific image, just as she disliked the current ‘fashion’ for promoting environment-conscious awareness and products in a way that really only paid lip-service to the ethics that lay behind them.

But then, as Paul had wisely pointed out to her, the more people who bought her products, the more people would become aware of how precious and how vulnerable nature’s resources were, and the profits her business made were even now helping to preserve those resources, to fight off the effect of their destruction.

She smiled wryly to herself as she unlocked her car. Environmentally speaking, she supposed she ought to have owned a bicycle and not a car…She did use lead-free petrol, however, even if Paul, who was in charge of the fleet-purchasing of cars for the company, had stunned her by presenting her with the keys for this bright red convertible model of the same car he had leased for the other company executives.

When she had protested that it was far too vibrant, and far too high-powered for her, he had grinned at her and said, ‘OK, I’ll send it back, shall I?’ and they had both burst out laughing.

‘You’re a rat,’ she had told him affectionately. ‘You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist it.’

‘Well, someone has to bring you down from the lofty heights and remind you occasionally that you are human and subject to the same vices as the rest of us,’ he had told her, and behind his teasing she had realised what he was trying to say to her. She had never deliberately tried to appear holier than thou, and that was the last way she wanted people to perceive her, and so, feeling rather chastened by his comment, she had allowed Elaine to sweep her off to London and equip her with the new wardrobe she would be wearing for the rash of interviews she would be forced to face in October.

As she drove away from Patsy’s, she thought how lucky she was to be able to work in a country environment.

The business had expanded to such an extent now that they had their own purpose-built factory and office complex, on a small industrial site outside their local market town and close to the nearest motorway complex, and it was there that she headed for now.

She had a meeting this afternoon to discuss the packaging for a new make-up range they hoped to bring out in time for Christmas. She glanced at the dashboard clock and realised she had spent rather longer with Patsy than she had intended. There was a short cut she could take, a narrow dusty country lane which would cut a good few miles off her journey, even though, strictly speaking, it was a privately owned road.

She turned off on to it a mile away from Patsy’s house. It had been a hot summer; the grass that grew either side of the lane was just beginning to die back, blackberries glistened on the hedgerows. The thought of her mother’s blackberry and apple crumble made her mouth water, but she wasn’t likely to taste one this autumn. Her parents had only just embarked on a world cruise, something her father had been promising her mother they would do once he had retired. Even though she now had her own home, she missed them. Like her, her mother was a keen gardener, and together they would have spent the autumn months poring over plant catalogues.

Her mind on her garden and the pleasure of the work that still lay ahead of her there, she drove down the lane, the land to either side of her obscured by the overgrown hedges, so overgrown that as she approached a particularly bad bend the branches actually scraped against the sides of her car. It was a blind bend, impossible to see round and the lane was only wide enough for one car, so to be confronted by the imposing black bonnet of a brand new and very large Mercedes saloon coming in the opposite direction made her reach automatically for the brake-pedal, her heart in her mouth, guilt and tension tightening her stomach muscles as she immediately recognised Robert Graham as the driver of the other car.

Guilt because she knew quite well that this lane was the private rear entrance to the Hall, continuing on past it to rejoin the main road on the other side of the village, and tension because…well, because Robert had stopped his car and was getting out.

Why on earth had she ever implied that a man of thirty-odd was a man well past his sexual prime? A tiny shiver of a sensation she did not want to recognise ricocheted down her spine as she sat virtually frozen in her own seat, staring at him as he walked towards her.




CHAPTER TWO


DISTURBINGLY Robert was dressed not as the image projected both by the financial Press and the sleek bulk of his expensive car suggested—in the immaculate formality of a business suit and shirt—but in jeans and a checked shirt worn under a soft leather blouson jacket, the clothes soft and well-worn, lacking the image-conscious stiffness of clothes conspicuously brand new and bought ‘for the country’.

No, these were clothes he was used to wearing, familiar and chosen for comfort. And yet for all the casualness of his clothes there was about him a very strong aura of power and control, emphasised by the impatient, semi-hostile way he was approaching her car, his forehead creased in a frown as he called out curtly to her once he was within earshot.

‘I’m sorry, but you must have missed your way. This is a private lane—’

He stopped speaking abruptly, his frown deepening as he stared into the car and then demanded incredulously, ‘Holly?’

She forced herself to remember that she was thirty and not eighteen. Her face felt as stiff as wood but somehow she managed to get her lips to creak into a facsimile of a polite and distant smile.

‘Hello, Robert—’ she began, but before she could continue he interrupted her, demanding,

‘Were you looking for me?’

Looking for him? Now she was thirty, the spell of his unexpected appearance broken as she stared at him with cool irritation, not unmixed with anger at his arrogance. Did he think she was still a silly little girl of eighteen, needlessly running after a man who no longer wanted her?

‘No, I wasn’t,’ she told him. ‘Actually I didn’t realise you were here. I had heard that you’d bought the Hall, of course, but I’m afraid I was just using your lane to take a short cut back to the main road. Something I’ll have to get used to not doing…’

It gave her a sharp sense of pleasure to be able to deny his assumption that she had been looking for him and even more to know that it was the truth.

‘The Hall’s been empty for so long—’ she started to add, but he cut across her comment, telling her,

‘Well, I intend to have gates placed at either end of the lane, which should deter future trespassers, although in your case you could always have planned your journey so that you didn’t need to take a short cut. As it is, one of us is going to have to reverse.’

Meaning that she was going to have to reverse, Holly suspected as she deliberately refused to make any response to his comment about the gates. The Hall had been empty for so long that she wasn’t the only person using the lane as a short cut, and, while she could understand that any new owner would want to maintain his privacy, she felt that Robert’s comment to her had been double-edged, a means of warning her that the lane wasn’t the only thing that was out of bounds as far as she was concerned.

Was he really so arrogant as to imagine that she still cherished the idealistic and stupid daydreams she had held at eighteen? Or was she simply being over-sensitive, over-reacting because of what Patsy had said earlier and because of the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly, of realising that, no matter how many times she had seen his photograph in the papers, it had not prepared her for the reality of him, for the sheer maleness of him, and for all the ways in which her stupefied senses were being bombarded by their awareness of him?

All right, so he was still one hell of a sensually attractive man, she fumed inwardly, and, all right, so a part of her was dismayingly vulnerable to that sensuality, but it was surely a vulnerability which was being heightened by shock—a vulnerability she would soon have under control?

After all, nothing was as great a deterrent to the headiness of physical excitement and awareness as the dulling mundaneness of proximity.

‘I’d better be the one to reverse,’ she heard Robert saying to her. ‘After all, we’re closer to the house than we are to the main road.’

She focused on him, automatically starting to thank him, but he was already turning away from her.

He reversed the large Mercedes with a smooth dexterity which she envied.

For a birthday present last year, Paul had booked her on to an advanced driving course, and, while she felt she had learned a good deal from it, she had finished it feeling inwardly that she lacked many of the assets needed to make a truly good advanced driver. Her worst fault, she knew, was that she was inclined to daydream while at the wheel…as she had been doing just now.

The lane ran outside the main wall of the Hall and gates from the stable yard opened on to it. For the last few years they had remained closed, rotting slowly away, as the Hall remained empty, but today they stood open, and as Robert reversed through them into the stable yard she found herself slowing down so that she could peer curiously towards the house.

It was a long time since she had last been inside it—an unauthorised visit during a village fête held in its grounds when she had been much younger. Then she had been awed and amazed by the size of the rooms, wondering what on earth one very old lady would want with so many. She must have been eight or nine at the time. Paul, of course, had been the instigator of that piece of naughtiness. Robert had gone with them as well and it had been Robert who had rescued her, when she discovered that her legs were too short to make it over the open windowsill through which they had made their illegal entry into the house.

It had been from the secure haven of his arms that she had faced the irritation of Mrs Powers’ housekeeper, who had demanded to know just what they were up to, and it had been Robert who had apologised and smoothed over her anger. She ought to have realised then that a male with such a powerful ability to refocus female emotions would never be content to marry early and settle for a placid domestic life.

After that incident she had worshipped Robert, but since Paul had bluntly told her that neither he nor Robert wanted her interfering in their games she had docilely restrained herself to worshipping him in silence and solitude.

Suddenly realising the construction which Robert might put on the fact that she was virtually sitting still with her car engine idling, she was just about to drive away when he got out of his own car and came towards her.

An absurd flood of self-consciousness made her duck her head, conscious of the burning heat searing her pale skin. She was blushing—something she had believed she had stopped doing a decade ago. She prayed that the soft swing of her hair would conceal her heightened colour from Robert, quickly starting to change gear as she prepared to drive off, but he had now reached her car and had placed a restraining hand on her own window.

‘I had hoped to see Paul, but I understand he’s away on business…’

‘Yes,’ she agreed tersely.

‘Never mind, I’ll have plenty of time to catch up with him once he gets back. When will he be back, by the way?’

‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘Mm…well, I’m renting a small cottage locally while I oversee the renovation of this place, so I’m going to be around for the foreseeable future.’

He was leaning on the window as he spoke to her. She could smell the leather of his jacket, the soap tang of his skin. His hands were tanned, the nails clean and trimmed, but not manicured. There was a graze across the back of his hand and a small cut on one finger. She wondered how they had got there…perhaps in defending one of the lovely women he always seemed to be photographed with from the attentions of the papa-razzi? She switched her glance from his hand to her own. Hers too bore the odd scratch. She had been attacked by an over-vigorous climbing rose at the weekend, angrily defending its right to spread itself just as far and fast as it chose. The rose had definitely been the victor of that battle, but she had warned it of stiff pruning to come in the autumn if it insisted on its greedy absorption of territory that was not its to appropriate…

In a garden, order had to be imposed if havoc was not to result.

‘I’ll let Paul know that you’re back,’ she told Robert, still unable to look at him properly.

‘He’ll be married by now, I expect?’

‘No, Paul is the proverbial rolling stone who refuses to gather moss.’ In fact her brother had a more off than on and very volatile relationship with a woman friend who was divorced with two small children and who had told him plainly and bluntly that, while she enjoyed going to bed with him, she had no intentions of prejudicing her children’s security by introducing into their lives a man who was only going to play at being there for them.

‘And you…I hear that you’re still single as well.’

His comment jarred, reminding her of so many things she did not wish to remember.

‘These days women don’t need to marry to lead fulfilled lives, and at thirty—’

‘You’re still young enough not to have to worry too much about the ticking away of your biological clock. I know,’ he agreed, suavely interrupting her. He had shifted his position somehow so that she was increasingly aware of him and his effect upon her senses, and now she turned towards him too quickly, her eyes widening as she realised just how close to her he was, as he leaned down towards her, his eyes only inches from hers as she inadvertently looked straight at him.

‘Strange how things worked out…I’d always imagined you’d marry young, have children—’

‘I don’t see why you should be so surprised,’ she interrupted him shakily. ‘After all, you were the one who told me that I’d be a fool to waste my opportunities, to throw away my chances of success by tying myself down with a husband and children.’

He had said that to her, but they both knew that what he had meant was that he would be a fool if he threw away his chances and tied himself down by marrying her. But he had deliberately chosen to make it sound as though he were thinking of her when in reality his motives had been entirely rooted in his own needs and wants. If he had thought about her at all, he would have made sure that she never got the chance to fall in love with him in the first place and he would certainly never have allowed her to believe that that love was returned, but then, as she had discovered over the years, men were adept at making women believe they were acting in their best interest and for the most altruistic of reasons when in fact they were doing almost exactly the opposite.

‘You’ve changed, Holly.’

She smiled mirthlessly at him, and said lightly, ‘I should think I have, although I prefer to think of it as growth rather than change. I must go, Robert. I’ve got a board meeting this afternoon and I’m already late.’

She realised as she said it that it sounded more like the defiant boasting of a frightened child than the cool, reasoned comment of a woman too protected and safe from the kind of vulnerability she had once known to be remotely affected by a chance meeting with the man who had once been the cause of her greatest unhappiness.

The look Robert gave her seemed to reinforce her own thoughts.

‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll wait,’ he said softly, and it wasn’t a kind comment. ‘Odd how different our perceptions are from reality. You’re every inch the sleek, sophisticated, successful businesswoman now. I wonder, has she completely obliterated the girl I once knew?’

His comment stunned her. She had no idea what had motivated it or why he should be so deliberately cruel as to mention that girl. He must know how much anguish he had caused her…how much pain…how much self-revulsion when eventually she had come through the madness of begging and entreating him not to leave her, of pleading tearfully with him to stay…to love her instead of leaving her.

He had changed too…because the Robert she had known would never have made a comment like that. The Robert she had known—the Robert she had thought she had known, she reminded herself as she looked away from him, fiercely stabbing the car into gear, and gritting her teeth. But that Robert had never really existed.

As she started to move away, Robert stepped back from the car, telling her drily, ‘Next time, remember, set out a bit earlier.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she told him through her gritted teeth. ‘Now that I know you’ve bought this place, wild horses wouldn’t drag me within a mile of it.’

Ten minutes later, when she finally pulled out on to the main road, she was still shaking, still cursing herself for her folly in giving in to her need to make that childish verbal defiance. Why on earth hadn’t she simply remained cool and uncaring, shrugging aside his comment and just driving off without giving in to the need to react to it?

Well, at least she had made her position plain. As far as she was concerned, his presence in the village wasn’t welcome, and she wished he had not chosen to come back. She was glad that it was extremely unlikely that she would have to have any kind of contact with him, although, womanlike, she couldn’t help wondering what on earth a single man could possibly want with such a huge barn of a house.

She was of course late for her board meeting, apologising to the other members when she hurried in.

As they discussed the new packaging, she remembered Patsy’s hint about Gerald not even being on the board. For some time she had been contemplating inviting him to join them as a non-executive director. He was a well-balanced, cautious man who would help to offset Paul’s ebullience, and he was their accountant.

‘I hear Robert Graham has just moved into the area,’ Lawrence Starling commented to her after the board meeting.

Lawrence was their newly appointed sales manager. Paul had head-hunted him from one of the multinationals. Single and two years older than her, he was beginning to develop a semi-proprietorial attitude towards her that Holly was trying to discourage.

‘Yes, I believe so,’ she agreed dismissively.

‘Strange sort of thing for him to do—I mean to move out here…’

‘He grew up here,’ Holly informed him.

‘Oh, I see. Look, Holly, I was wondering: there are one or two aspects of the new packaging I wanted to bring up at the board meeting, but with your being late there really wasn’t time. I know Bob Holmes wanted to get off to play golf, and I didn’t want to delay him. Could we discuss them over dinner tonight?’

‘No, I’m sorry, I already have an engagement,’ Holly told him truthfully. She hadn’t missed the none-too-subtle way Lawrence had let her know that Bob was playing golf, and, while she was forced to agree with Paul that Lawrence’s aggressive marketing tactics were beginning to pay off, she found his incessant need to put others down and his uncurbed ambitious desire both distasteful and wearying. And besides, in a sense what she had said was true, even if her engagement was merely with her garden and her desire to make sure that the new forget-me-not plants were tucked up in their beds just as soon as possible.

‘Tomorrow, then?’ Lawrence pressed her.

Firmly Holly shook her head, telling him, ‘I think you’d better wait and discuss it with Paul when he gets back. You know that he has overall charge of marketing.’

The sullen look Lawrence gave her irritated her, but she didn’t let it show. Why was it that men had this annoying propensity to change from ‘I know best’ father figures to sulky little boys whenever the former bullying manner did not work? Why could so few men accept a woman as their equal and rejoice in her success and her skills? Why must they always feel so threatened and be so antagonistic? Perhaps it was time that someone discovered a way of reprogramming the entire male species.

If they did, one thing was for sure; it would be a woman who would make the discovery and implement it…no man would ever admit that his psyche needed any kind of change.

Reminding herself that she was perhaps being a little unfair and that there were many, many men who were comfortable with and supportive of their female partners’ success in life, she headed for her office.

IT WAS SIX o’clock before she was able to lift her head from her paperwork and think about preparing to go home.

An hour later, as she drove past the entrance to the lane past the Hall, she noticed that two men were working there, putting in the supports for a rough-hewn farm-style gate.

Well, Robert certainly hadn’t wasted much time there, she reflected as she put her foot down on the accelerator and sped past.

She was half a mile further down the road when she heard the all too unwanted sound of a police car siren. When she looked in the mirror and saw the driver flashing his lights at her, she cursed under her breath and pulled in to the side of the road.

She had been speeding, if only marginally, and she of all people ought to have known better. The number of times she had complained to Paul that he drove too fast—And now she was the one to get booked.

The police officer was polite but unrelenting; she wondered what he would have said if she had pleaded in mitigation that it had been the soreness in her heart caused by the memory of an old love-affair that had caused her to put her foot down and break the speed limit. Since he was a man, it was all too probable that he just would not have understood, she told herself as she listened gravely to his caution. Her first driving offence in over ten years of blemishless driving. And it was all Robert’s fault.

She was still glowering and mentally blaming him when she eventually drove off, this time keeping a much stricter eye on her speed.

Rory had gone but the newly turned earth of the flower-beds showed how hard he had been working. The forget-me-nots were small dots of soft grey-green against the darkness of the earth. She lingered in the garden, studying them, telling them not to be overawed by their well-established perennial bedmates, and then paused to console and reassure those same larger plants, coaxingly promising them that the new arrivals were no threat to them, and that the summer extravagance of their pinks, silvers, whites and blues would be all the more spectacular after the sharp colour contrast of the bright spring yellows and blue of the bulbs and forget-me-nots.

It was almost an hour before she had finished her tour of the garden, and although it was still light she could smell the crisp early autumn scent infusing the air.

Yesterday morning she had spotted a heron investigating the fish pond, which meant that this weekend she would have to string wires from the vine eyes in the brick surrounding the pond to stop him from helping himself to her fish.

The irritation and anxiety produced by her run-in with Robert was slowly fading as her senses responded to the peace of her garden.

If, ten years ago, someone had told her that she would become so devoted to such a homely pursuit, that she would find so much solace and pleasure in it, she would have bitterly denied what they were saying. A small smile touched her mouth. It was time she went in. She was going out this evening.

Their local market town’s seventeenth-century assembly rooms had recently been renovated and reopened, providing an elegant setting for a number of events. Tonight’s event was a small charity affair; a well-known cellist who supported the charity would be playing for them, and there was to be a light supper afterwards, provided by the local WI.

As a prominent business figure locally, Holly had been approached to support the charity and in addition to buying tickets she had also given a generous donation. The bowls of potpourri scenting the rooms had been provided by her company, their perfume a distillation of natural products and one which she personally thought was evocative of the period in which the assembly rooms had been built.

The evening was to be a formal affair—black tie for the men and gowns for the women, preferably with some sort of Regency look about them to complement the setting. When she had originally bought the tickets, Holly had assumed that Paul would be escorting her, but then this trip to South America had intervened.

Instead she was now being partnered by a relative newcomer to the area.

The building of a new private hospital just outside the market town had resulted in an influx of medical personnel. John Lloyd was the new hospital’s chief administrator. A Scot in his late thirties, divorced with two children, he had made no secret of the fact that he found her very attractive.

However, he was old enough and intelligent enough to accept that while she enjoyed his company Holly did not wish their relationship to progress any further.

For this evening’s occasion she had had made an Empire-style dress in eau-de-Nil silk with silver embroidery around the hem. Over it, she was wearing a dark green velvet cloak lined with the same silk as the dress. The outfit had been an extravagance, but, as Paul had pointed out, the event was being photographed both for the local paper and the county magazine and she would be photographed in her role as head of the company so that it was important that she presented the right appearance.

With the aid of her electric curling-tongs she managed to produce enough feathery ringlets in her fine hair to be caught back in a soft ethereal tangle, vaguely reminiscent of the correct period hairstyle.

When she was dressed and ready, she pulled a face at herself in her mirror. This kind of event was not really her style, although the charity in aid of children in need was one she was more than happy to support.

Personally she would far rather have made an anonymous cash donation than participate in this kind of event, but she quelled these thoughts, telling herself that she was being very unworldly in thinking that the money she and others had spent on outfits for the affair could far more sensibly have been donated direct to the charity. As Paul had pointed out to her when she had said as much to him, there were those who, while they were quite happy to buy expensive tickets for such events, would never have considered donating any such sum without the event to back it up.

John arrived on the dot at half-past seven. Holly didn’t invite him in. Years ago she had learned to be wary of naïvely allowing men to mistake her natural warmth and friendliness for sexual encouragement.

After Robert, the heady and dangerous sexual desire he had aroused within her had died completely, leaving her somehow bereft of any ability to respond to men on a sexual basis. As a form of self-preservation it couldn’t be beaten, and, in the new restrained mood of sexual constancy and celibacy which seemed to have doused the sexually ferocious fires of earlier decades, she had been able to reflect that perhaps after all Robert had done her a favour in destroying her ability to be sexually responsive to other men.

As she smiled at John and locked the door behind her, he murmured appreciatively, ‘Mm…nice perfume.’

Immediately she tensed. She had her back to him, but she could tell from the way she could feel the warmth of his breath against the back of her neck that he was leaning towards her.

‘Do you think so? It’s our new one,’ she told him brightly, firmly stepping to one side and turning round.

‘Officially we shan’t be launching it for a while yet. It has a floral base, but we’ve added some subtle extras to bring it into line with current tastes.’

‘It’s very sexy. And so are you…especially in that dress.’

Hurriedly Holly pulled her cloak more firmly around herself, suddenly uncomfortably conscious of the way the light from the security lights was highlighting the soft pale fullness of her breasts. The dress had a slightly lower neckline than she had expected. She remembered at the time that the dressmaker had pointed out to her that it had been de rigueur at the time the Empire line was made so popular for the neckline to reveal the upper curve of the wearer’s bosom.

The way John’s glance lingered appreciatively on her body made her feel both uncomfortable and irritated. She told herself that she probably ought to feel flattered by his admiration and interest; he was after all a very attractive man but on the one and only occasion when he had taken her in his arms and kissed her she had felt nothing at all, other than a mild sense of curiosity, quickly followed by panic and revulsion when the tenor of his kiss had become too passionate.

And yet with Robert…in Robert’s arms…She trembled suddenly, remembering how he had made her feel, how her whole body had trembled with eagerness and expectancy. How she had so wantonly and willingly moved closer to him, little moans of anguished expectation filling her throat as her body anticipated the pleasure he would give it. She had given herself to him so eagerly, so naïvely, believing he loved her as she did him. Sexually she might have been inexperienced, but there had been no hesitation in her response to him, no holding back, no restraint, no thought in her head of even attempting to control the emotions he aroused inside her. His merest touch had been enough to send her into a seventh heaven of delirious joy; the lightest brush of his fingertips against her skin, the gentlest touch of his mouth on her lips. And how she had ached for the intimacy of being held close to him without the barrier of their clothes; how she had quivered with longing and need to feel the sensual stroke of his hands on her breasts, her belly…He had cautioned her a little sometimes, groaning against her throat that she made it impossible for him to take his time and to lavish on her all the sensual joy he wanted to give her, because her immediate response to him destroyed his self-control.

She could remember so vividly the first time they had made love; before then there had been kisses and then caresses, so intimate and arousing that she had ached and begged for his complete possession, but he had told her that there was too much risk, that while she was unprotected from an unwanted pregnancy they must be content without that ultimate intimacy.

She could remember even now her first nerve-racking visit to the family-planning clinic, her fear that the doctor would turn down her request, but she had been over eighteen—just, and, although he had eyed her thoughtfully and had spoken to her at great length about her relationship with Robert, eventually she had been given the precious prescription.

She had said nothing to Robert of her decision. He had received her tremulous news in a frowning silence which she had only later recognised should have alerted her to the truth, but then eventually there had come the evening when she had cried and begged him not to hold back, and when he had given in to her whispered pleas and the eager yearning of her body.

They had been lovers for just over six months when he had dropped his bombshell and told her that he would shortly be leaving for America.

She supposed he must have mentioned his decision to accept the post-graduate course at Harvard, but if he had she had deliberately pushed it to the back of her mind, telling herself that their love for one another was bound to be far more important to him than any plans he might previously have made for his career. Their love…She smiled cynically to herself as she felt the aching shadow of that old pain clutch familiarly at her heart. The love had been all on her side, only she had been too much of a fool to see it. She couldn’t blame him for taking physical advantage of that love; after all, she had been the one to instigate that intimacy, to urge and encourage him to make love to her. No, it wasn’t his fault that she now found it impossible to experience sexual desire; it was her own, her feelings a direct revulsion against what she felt had been her own lack of self-control, her own inability to face reality, her own stupid self-deception. She was never going to allow herself to fall into that kind of trap again. Never!

‘You’re very quiet,’John commented as he drove towards their destination. ‘Problems at work?’

‘No, not really. I was just thinking about the launch of the new perfume,’ Holly fibbed.

‘But surely that’s Paul’s responsibility?’

‘Yes, it is—at least the launch of the new range is down to him but it was my idea to produce it; we’ve invested an awful lot of time and money in it…’

‘Well, if it makes other women smell as good as you, then I should say from a man’s point of view that you’ve definitely got a winner on your hands.’

Even as she was smiling and accepting his compliment Holly was conscious of an inner dismay, an inner sense of anxiety in case the situation somehow got out of her control. She liked John and she didn’t want to lose his friendship, but sexually…She gave a tiny shudder, uncomfortably aware that for some reason seeing Robert this afternoon had heightened and underlined her lack of desire for John to such an extent that she couldn’t contemplate him even touching her without experiencing a sharp sense of rejection.

Damn Robert, damn him, she cursed inwardly. Why did he have to come back here? Why?

John parked his car in the market square, empty of stalls and already half full of cars, most of whose occupants were no doubt headed for the same destination.

The assembly rooms were illuminated by discreet floodlights which showed off the newly cleaned stone and the elegance of the Georgian windows and the fanlight above the door.

Holly and John were warmly welcomed by their local MP and her husband. She was on the charity committee and Holly knew her quite well—a woman closer to her mother’s age than her own, who was very well thought of locally and who worked hard for the community.

‘Holly, I love your dress!’ she exclaimed admiringly, adding, ‘I’d like to have a word with you later, if I may. We’re hoping to organise a Christmas fair to raise some more money, and we shall be looking to local businesses for whatever help they can give.’

Smilingly Holly assured her that they would be pleased to help before walking through into the anteroom to leave her cloak.

The recital was to last two hours with a short break halfway through. Holly and John’s seats were close to the front.As they were being directed towards them, a familiar male figure standing talking with another group caught her eye.

She froze immediately, causing John to bump into her and to reach instinctively for her arm as he did so.

Inside Holly could feel herself beginning to tremble. She felt sick and angry at the same time, idiotically close to tears of anger and resentment as she focused on the tall dinner-suit-clad figure of Robert.

He was standing with his back to her, a small dark-haired woman in an expensive designer dress clinging to his side. Holly recognised her immediately as the widow of a local entrepreneur. Although she was in her early forties, she was still a very sensually attractive woman. Too much so, Holly had heard. Apparently she wasn’t very well liked by her own sex.

‘It’s that “helpless little me” act of hers that gets me,’ one of Holly’s friends had admitted through gritted teeth at a party where Angela Standard had appropriated her husband. ‘Especially when I know she’s about as helpless as a praying mantis. Everyone knows that she only married Harry Standard for his money. I mean he was close to fifty when they married and she was barely twenty-five…’

Then Holly had taken her friend’s comments with a pinch of salt, but now she was suddenly so searingly and shockingly jealous that she could easily have crossed the room and torn that pale, clinging hand from Robert’s dark-suited arm.

The intensity of her own emotions made her shake inside with sick awareness of how inappropriate and dangerous her feelings were.

She turned away blindly, cannoning straight into John.

‘Hey…are you OK?’

There was concern and warmth in his voice as he held her. Her eyes blurred with anguished tears, her throat filling with them so that she couldn’t speak, shaking her head as she tried to insist that there was nothing wrong. Blindly she pulled away from him, ignoring the curious and speculative look the girl showing them to their seats was giving her.

She felt hot and cold at the same time, sick with an anger that was directed against herself for her idiotic response to the sight of Robert with someone else.

As she sat down in her seat, she tried to tell herself that it was the unexpected shock of seeing him that was responsible for what she was feeling; that if she had anticipated that he might be here and prepared herself for it accordingly she would never have reacted in the way she had; but the arguments failed to convince her, and throughout the first half of the recital she was barely aware of the glorious sounds filling the room, so deeply engrossed was she in her own painful thoughts.




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