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.

Free Spirit
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘OH, YOU’RE off then, are you, darling?’ Hannah’s mother mourned, as Hannah came rushing into the kitchen, her weekend bag swinging from her shoulder.

It was a secret sorrow of Mrs Maitland’s that, having produced four sons in succession before the arrival of a much longed for daughter, that daughter should turn out to be a determined career girl. She was proud of Hannah, of course she was, but she couldn’t help feeling a little envious when her husband’s parishioners mentioned family marriages and grandchildren.

With four sons scattered to the four corners of the earth, pursuing their chosen careers, surely it was only natural for her to wish that Hannah, her only daughter, had chosen to stay at home and settle down? Tom, her husband, laughed at her whenever she voiced this complaint, reminding her gently that Hannah had every right to choose her own way of living her life.

As she watched her crossing the kitchen, Rosemary Maitland studied her covertly. Even now, after twenty-six years, it still amazed her that she and Tom had produced this ravishingly beautiful creature, with her tall, slender body, and delicately oval-shaped face. Her tawny eyes had been inherited from Rosemary’s own grandfather but, widely spaced and set between thick, dark lashes, Hannah’s possessed an allure Rosemary could not remember her grandfather’s having. Hair as tawny as her eyes, every conceivable shade of brown streaked with red and blonde, which nowadays was confined to a neat, elegant bob, had once curled half-way down her back until Hannah had announced that it was too untidy and not the image she wanted to project as a financial accountant.

Her daughter’s choice of career was something that constantly amazed Rosemary. Where on earth had she got it from, this flair with figures? Certainly not from her, nor from Tom. Rosemary suppressed a small chuckle, remembering the many hours she and her husband had toiled over their household accounts.

A vicar’s wife learned young how to manage on slender means, but they had been lucky; a generous bequest from a great-aunt had enabled them to educate all five children privately and to finance them through university.

‘I’m sorry I’ve got to rush, Ma,’ Hannah apologised, ‘but I promised Linda that I’d call round. She’s having problems with the Inland Revenue. She’s got an appointment to see them this afternoon and I’ve promised I’ll go with her. You know what she’s like about figures. The mere sight of a column of them turns her into a dithering idiot, which is a shame because she’s a marvellous businesswoman in every other sense.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard that the shop’s doing very well,’ her mother agreed. ‘I called in a few weeks ago and was dangerously tempted to buy the most beautiful tapestry cushion, Kaffe Fassett, I believe it was.’

Making a mental note to check with her friend on what exactly it was her mother had seen, Hannah went over to her and gave her a fond hug and a quick kiss. Her mother’s birthday was coming up soon and the tapestry cushion would make a surprise present for her. Hannah had already bought her main present, a beautiful tweed suit from Jaeger, which she knew her mother would love.

‘Give Linda my love, won’t you?’ her mother told her as she followed her out of the kitchen.

The vicarage was old and rambling and without the benefit of central heating, other than a very primitive handful of radiators that ran off the temperamental back boiler in the kitchen. Since this boiler required a fearsome amount of stoking to keep the radiators even moderately warm, it was the expressed opinion of the Maitland family that it was easier to do without the heating than to try to make it work. Her parents’ life hadn’t been an easy one, Hannah acknowledged, as she walked swiftly over to her car, and yet they were happy, far happier than the majority of her contemporaries’ parents.

Her car had been a twenty-sixth birthday present to herself, a steel-grey Volvo, practical and sturdy.

‘I’m sorry your father isn’t here to see you off,’ her mother apologised, as Hannah got into the driver’s seat.

Hannah grinned, and for a moment it was possible for Rosemary Maitland to believe she was looking at Hannah as she had been as a teenager, all coltish legs and long, untidy hair. Now all that seemed to be left of that girl was that teasing grin, and even that was seldom in evidence these days. Hannah looked exactly what she was, a very successful businesswoman, dressed and groomed in a way that mirrored her life-style and her ambition, and looking at her, observing the elegant charcoal-grey pinstripe suit and the cream silk blouse designed like a shirt, without any feminine frills or flounces to it, Rosemary couldn’t help feeling a little sad. She was proud of Hannah, of course she was, but she just wished that she would relax a little more; for instance, what had happened to that infamous temper Hannah had had as a child, a temper which her brothers had so often unkindly sparked off by tormenting her?

These days Hannah was everything that was reasoned and controlled. Too controlled, perhaps. Hannah started the engine and, with a final wave to her mother, set off down the overgrown drive.

The Dorset village which was home to her parents, and which had been home to her until she’d left for university, was small and picturesque, but that didn’t mean that life for its inhabitants was without its problems. Parents mourned as their sons and daughters, unable to get jobs, moved away from home. Work on the land, which had once been labour-intensive, was now mechanised to such an extent that farm workers’ cottages fell into disrepair as they became vacant, and farmers neither had the inclination nor the need to replace their workforce.

Now many of those cottages were being snapped up by people from London, up and coming career men and women, much like herself, with a keen eye for a bargain, and the knowledge that money invested in property was a wise investment. The village had changed even in her short lifetime.

Her father was close to retirement, and even though neither her father nor her mother had said anything Hannah knew they were both worrying about how they would manage and where they would live once her father had to give up the vicarage.

She and her brothers had discussed this problem the last time they were all together the previous Christmas. None of her brothers was married, preferring like her to be footloose and fancy free, and between the five of them they had agreed that they would all start saving towards being able to buy their parents a comfortable home.

After all, it was only right that they should do so, Mark had commented earnestly. Had their father invested his inheritance in bricks and mortar, instead of in their education, he would not be worrying about his retirement now.

Who else but a vicar would call his sons Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Hannah wondered as she turned into the traffic. The boys took it well, even though there had been a period in their teens when all of them had opted to use their second and less conspicuous names. Once, their mother had confessed that it had been she who had called them after the Apostles, and Luke had teased her that the only reason she had chosen such names for them was because, in her disappointment at not producing the daughter she longed for so much, she had simply thought of the most convenient names.

Hannah had grown up surrounded by love and laughter. Her father was a gentle, intelligent man, who cared deeply about the human race and who suffered with it. Her mother was everything a vicar’s wife should be: supportive, understanding, generous both with her time and her patience, cheerfully tolerant of the demands others made on her husband’s time and of the financial hardship their life together had involved.

Even now, her mother still made her own jams and chutneys, still used every scrap of produce the huge, rambling vicarage garden gave, not so much these days because they needed it—after all, there were now only two mouths to feed, three if one counted Simon, a cat who had adopted them—but simply because for so many years she had not been able to afford to waste anything that now the habit had become ingrained with her. Hannah thought wryly of the half-opened cartons of this and that, discarded from her own fridge without a second thought. She rarely cooked for herself, preferring to eat out.

Most lunchtimes she ate with clients of the company for whom she worked. Most evenings she ate either snacks while working at home or went out with friends. How different her life-style was now from her mother’s!

This visit home, as always, her mother had probed gently into her personal life. What she wanted to know was if Hannah had fallen in love. Hannah had gently evaded her questions, not because she resented them but simply because she didn’t know how to explain to her mother that falling in love for her was something that just wasn’t going to happen. She had seen what the pressures of modern living did to too many of her friends’ relationships to risk such intimacy herself, and vicars’ daughters weren’t like the rest of the female population, they either revolted and went completely wild or, like Hannah herself, they lived by a set of rules and regulations, so totally out of step with modern mores as to be archaic.

Not that either parent had ever put any pressure on Hannah to conform to special standards different from those of her peers, but she and the boys, most especially Hannah herself, had grown up desperately aware of how very vulnerable their father was to public opinion. While it might be all very well for the daughter of the local entrepreneur to be out discoing at fourteen years old, while the local landlord’s daughter might have her name splashed all over the gossip press with impunity, and while other stalwarts of the Women’s Guild might discreetly let slip that their daughters were involved in intimate relationships which did not include a wedding ring, Hannah was in no doubt at all that the local community as a whole would not only strongly disapprove of any such behaviour on her part, but would also carry that disapproval to the ears of her father, and, quite simply, Hannah had never felt able to put that burden on him.

Now, of course, she was living away from home and in London, where she had her own airy apartment in the refurbished docklands area, and she had grown into the habit of evading intimacy, preferring solitude to ‘coupledom’, so that she automatically fended off those men who did approach her sexually. Fair-mindedly, she had to admit that her single state wasn’t entirely because of her parents.

There had also been her career. She had worked single-mindedly to achieve the high position she now held: consultant to one of the managers of a very small but well-established firm of financial experts. The genteel poverty of her childhood wasn’t something she had enjoyed, she felt ashamed to admit now.

There had been times when she had envied other children their possessions, their toys, their spending money, even though with wisdom and security she could appreciate that the gifts she had received from her parents had been of far more value than mere material possessions. Even so, she had been left with a desire, almost a craving, for financial security, not the kind of security that came from marriage to a wealthy man, but the kind of security she could earn for herself.

The village wasn’t busy. It was half-day closing. Hannah’s mother had been surprised when she had telephoned early in the week to say that she was taking a couple of days off, and to ask if it was convenient for her to come home. She hadn’t said anything then about Linda’s desperate telephone call to her the previous day, begging her to advise her.

Linda Askew was the daughter of a local businessman. She and Hannah had been at school together, and their friendship had been established then. The only child of wealthy parents, Linda had chosen not to go on to university as Hannah had, but her parents’ death in a car crash two years ago had revealed the shocking fact that the business was virtually bankrupt. In order to pay off her father’s outstanding debts, Linda had sold virtually everything.

Forced to confront the necessity of earning her own living, she had bought a small property in the village and decided to use her interest and expertise in various forms of needlework to establish a small shop. The business had done well. Linda was a sympathetic and caring person. She had a flair for designing, and her tapestries had become much sought after.

An approach from a glossy magazine had resulted in them marketing one of her tapestries as a special offer to their readers. The offer had been wildly successful, and it was because of the funds she had received via this offer that Linda found that she had now run into problems with the Inland Revenue. They had confronted her with a demand for tax which, she had told Hannah tearfully, she simply could not pay.

Having previously dealt with her own accounting system, she had not known whom to turn to, and so Hannah had offered to come down to the village and go with her on her appointment to see the tax inspector. Because it was half-day closing, it was relatively easy for her to park in the main street of the village.

Checking that the burglar alarm was in place and firmly locking her door, Hannah walked briskly towards Linda’s shop, not going to the front door but going the full length of the row of stone-built houses and then round the back, past the long, narrow gardens, where the richness of the autumn-hued flowers was just beginning to take over from the brilliant blaze of summer.

Linda was waiting for her by her back door. She ushered Hannah inside quickly and said breathlessly, ‘I’ve got the coffee on. I didn’t know whether you’d want a cup or…’

‘I’d love one,’ Hannah told her. ‘I can drink it while I go through your papers. What time exactly is the appointment?’

Linda told her and Hannah checked her watch. That left her a good hour to run through the figures, which should be ample time. She found the error quickly enough, a simple mistake in adding up, which had resulted in Linda paying less than the amount of tax that she ought to have paid the previous year.

‘Oh, no,’ Linda said, sitting down, her face going pale. ‘Oh, Hannah, what on earth am I going to do?’

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Hannah assured her. ‘I’ve just checked back into your previous year’s figures, and you seem to have made a trading loss, but from what I can see, you actually paid tax.’

‘Well, yes,’ Linda agreed, frowning slightly as she scanned the figures Hannah was indicating. ‘You see, I got the demand and I…well, I just paid it.’

Hannah had a tiny grimace. ‘Well, at the end of the day, I suspect you will probably find that you only owe the Inland Revenue a very small sum of money indeed,’ she said soothingly. ‘What we need to do now is to put all these figures in front of the inspector.’

‘Oh, Hannah, you must think me an absolute idiot,’ Linda said ruefully, as they finished their coffee and Hannah collected all the papers, folding them neatly and inserting them into a spare file she was carrying in her black leather briefcase. ‘I don’t know why it is, but the sight of a column of figures always throws me into an absolute panic. I always used to envy you. You were always top of the class in maths.’

‘And you were always top in domestic science,’ Hannah reminded her, ‘whereas I was still sewing the same grubby scrap of fabric in the fifth form as I was in the third.’

Her comment lightened Linda’s tension, as she had intended it to do, and the other girl laughed.

‘Yes, I suppose we all have our weaknesses and our strong points,’ she agreed.

The tax office was in the local county town, and when Hannah suggested that they both went in her car Linda agreed willingly.

‘I’m still driving Dad’s old Jag,’ she told her. ‘It’s on its last legs now, really, but I can’t afford to replace it, even though it guzzles petrol at an appalling rate. Mack at the garage somehow or other manages to keep it going for me, I don’t know how.’

Without taking her eyes off the road, Hannah said sotto voce, ‘A labour of love, perhaps.’

Linda flushed, and Hannah reflected on her mother’s comments that the village grapevine was reporting that Linda and Ian Macdonald were ‘getting involved’.

‘He’s been marvellous since Dad died,’ Linda said quietly. ‘I don’t really know what I’d have done without him. It was he who suggested that I bought the shop, and he gave me trade references when I first set up in business. He even offered to guarantee my loan with the bank, but I couldn’t let him do that. He’s away at the moment,’ she gave a slight sigh, ‘a family funeral in Edinburgh.’

Hence the frantic call to her, Hannah recognised. The county town wasn’t busy. Hannah knew where the local Inland Revenue offices were and parked her car deftly in the nearest car park. Several people eyed her businesslike suit and crisp, authoritative manner as she and Linda waited to cross the road.

She looked out of place here in the quiet mellowness of the old stone town. Young mothers in jeans and sweatshirts pushed prams or held the hands of toddlers. Older women in tweeds and sensible shoes, carrying shopping baskets, eyed her curiously. A group of youths stopped and stared, one of them whistling at her. Hannah ignored them. She was used to attracting attention.

Long ago she had learned the necessity of playing down her looks. In the career she had chosen, to look feminine in the way she herself looked feminine was not an asset. The full softness of her mouth made men think thoughts that were not at all businesslike. The high curves of her breasts concealed by her silk shirt and the businesslike cut of her suit jacket caused male concentration to wander, and in the early days of her career she had encountered more than her fair share of sexual harassment, before a kindly and far more worldly colleague had taken her on one side and pointed out that in their line of business, a lushly feminine figure such as hers was definitely not an asset—not if she wished to be taken seriously, that was. And so Hannah had learned to disguise the narrowness of her waist and the fullness of her breasts.

She had learned to adopt a severe, almost cold expression. She had learned to modulate her voice so that it never betrayed any emotion. She had had her hair cut and kept it straight and sleek in a businesslike bob, and most of all she had learned to control her terrible betraying temper, to distance herself from the slights and snubs she had endured in the early days of working her way up the career ladder.

She had come a long way from the girl she had been when she had first left university, but there was still a long, long way to go. She thought about the new job she had applied for. She had heard about it on the grapevine, a prestige appointment as vice-president of a small but extremely highly geared financial services group. The post would involve working very closely with the chairman of the group, someone whom Hannah had never met, but whom she had heard much about. His name featured frequently in the pages of the Financial Times. It was spoken with awe over the lunch tables of their small, e´lite world.

Silas Jeffreys was a man who guarded his privacy with the utmost stringency. She had never even seen a photograph of him, never read a word of gossip about his private life, never even met the man, but what she had heard of his reputation, what she knew of the way he ran his business, told her how much she wanted to work with him. It would be like sitting at the feet of a master.

She had applied for the job a week ago. She had an interview on Monday, a good sign. She could feel cautiously hopeful. Her qualifications and work experience were good, but there were still intelligent and otherwise sane men who did not believe that women could work in finance, and she had no way of knowing if he was one of that number.

No amount of discreet probing could elicit enough information for her to draw a composite picture of the man, which was aggravating to someone like Hannah who had trained herself to have a neat, orderly mind and to keep her mind empty of clutter but full of information.

As they walked into the building, she and Linda were moving at the same pace, but by the time they had entered the reception area Hannah noticed that Linda was lagging slightly behind her. She hid a small smile. After all, her friend wasn’t the only person to be intimidated by the vast anonymity of the Revenue offices.

The girl on reception was young and smiled warmly at them. Obviously she hadn’t been in her job very long yet, Hannah reflected cynically, as she turned enquiringly to Linda, asking her for the name of the tax officer they were due to see.

Linda had it written down, and she handed the piece of paper over to the girl nervously.

‘Oh, yes, he’s on the fifth floor,’ the girl told her, giving them another warm smile.

The lift was old and creaked as it moved slowly upwards. A symbol of the tax system itself, or simply symbolic of a careful husbanding of national resources? Hannah wondered, as she and Linda stood silently side by side. Her friend was very nervous. Hannah wanted to tell her not to be, but she knew that it wouldn’t do the slightest good. She wanted to tell her that tax officials were only human, after all, capable of standards that were good, bad and indifferent, just like anyone else, and merely trained to appear distant and sharply suspicious of the motives of the public. However, Linda was very vulnerable and emotional where her weakness over figures was concerned, and Hannah suspected that, like somebody with a phobia about visiting the dentist, no amount of reassurance from someone else would tend to lessen her apprehension.

They found the office down a long corridor, a small boxlike room furnished with a basic desk, a chair behind it and then two other chairs in front of it. Behind the desk was a set of filing cabinets and some open shelves full of bulging files, books and other papers. Hannah could see all this through the glass partition of the door as she knocked briefly on it and waited for the young man working behind the desk to lift his head and invite them in.

He did so very politely, and Hannah read in the grimness behind the polite words and the tiredness she could see in his eyes the kind of strain that comes from long, long hours of work, when the worker knows that no matter how many hours that he or she puts in the work itself will never diminish. Hannah introduced herself, firmly shaking his hand and advising him that she would be representing Linda.

She sat down and explained calmly and concisely that an error had occurred, but that it was merely an error and not an attempt to defraud the Revenue. The inspector looked unconvinced, which was no more than Hannah had expected. Linda, however, shot her a nervous, agitated glance, quickly bursting into a muddled explanation of how the error had first occurred.

The interview lasted far longer than the young inspector could have anticipated. Hannah was tireless and relentless in putting forward Linda’s case, checking every move that the young man made, calmly and coolly putting forward a very strong defence of Linda’s errors. Hannah saw him glance surreptitiously at his watch. A date? she wondered, seeing the tiny frown touch his forehead.

His telephone rang and he excused himself to answer it. He listened for a few seconds, and then said tersely, ‘Yes, thank you. Can you ask him to wait down there for me, please?’

Whoever was at the other end of the line said something else, and then the tax inspector said, ‘Oh, well, if he’s already on his way up…’

As soon as he had replaced the receiver, Hannah said smoothly, ‘I’m sorry we’re taking so much of your time, but you can understand Linda’s concern over the whole matter.’

‘We, too, have been concerned,’ the tax inspector responded tersely, but he wasn’t looking at her, Hannah realised. His attention wasn’t focused on them the way it had been before. Instead he was looking at the door.

They heard the footsteps on the uncarpeted corridor, long before the door opened. Male footsteps, firm and very, very sure of themselves. The door opened, but Hannah didn’t turn round to look to see who had come in. Whoever the visitor was, she suspected from the look of strain on the tax inspector’s face that he wasn’t entirely welcome. She wondered if it was a more senior inspector come to check on the young man’s progress, and decided that she was right in her assumption when she heard him saying awkwardly, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not quite finished here.’

Seeing an opportunity to put Linda’s case before a more senior authority, Hannah turned toward the newcomer, only just managing to suppress her shock as she saw him for the first time.

Her first impression was that he made the small room seem even smaller. He was leaning on the back wall of the office, his arms crossed negligently in front of him, his tall, broad-shouldered frame encased in a suit that Hannah’s practised business eye recognised immediately as coming from Savile Row. The fabric alone must have cost a fortune—that kind of wool and silk mixture was unbelievably expensive, as she knew to her cost.

His suit was charcoal grey—the same colour as his eyes, she noticed absently—his shirt impossibly white, the cuffs fastened with plain, expensive gold links, the old-fashioned kind of double links in wafer-thin old gold. Instead of the uniform striped tie, though, his was a bright, sharp red. She focused on it, studying it, a tiny frown touching her forehead, and as though he sensed her confusion amusement curled the corners of his mouth.

Hannah didn’t see the amusement, though; she was too busy wondering in outraged disappointment how a tax official, no matter how lofty, came to be wearing a suit which her astute brain told her had probably cost upward of one and half thousand pounds.

Behind her, she heard the young inspector make a murmured comment which she didn’t quite catch. She suspected the young man was fully aware that Linda had had no intention of deliberately defrauding the Revenue, and she also suspected that he was being over severe with her friend to warn her in future to keep a better grip on the financial side of her business. But Linda was beginning to look pale and sick, and Hannah had tired of the unchallenging game of outmanoeuvreing the young inspector.

Now, as she raised her glance from the older man’s tie to his face, she went crisply through the small saga once again, this time to the older man, pointing out that there were considerable losses for Linda’s first year of trading which she in her ignorance had not claimed back, and that these more than offset the amount she owed in unpaid tax.

There was an odd silence in the room after she had delivered her argument. She saw the look the older man gave the younger: grave and considering. The younger man coloured slightly, opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again at a tiny shake of the older man’s head, which Hannah only just caught. She took advantage of it, adding smoothly, turning back to address the younger inspector, ‘In fact, if you had checked through the first year’s accounts, you would have seen that there were trading losses.’

His colour deepened, and he looked uncomfortably over Hannah’s head towards the older man.

How much older? Ten years—a little more? He was somewhere in his early to mid-thirties, Hannah estimated, with features that almost had too much visual impact. His skin was dark as though tanned, but she suspected the olive tinge was natural, hinting at perhaps Spanish or Italian blood somewhere in his background, his nose aquiline and emphasising the arrogance of his profile. High cheekbones jutted beneath the grey glitter of his eyes, his hair thick and very dark, immaculately shaped to his long skull.

Now for the first time he spoke directly to her, his voice deep and paced, without holding any inflection other than a certain malicious silkiness as he pointed out, ‘But surely that’s your job as this young lady’s accountant to point those losses out to the Revenue, not theirs to point them out to you. The Revenue is hard pressed enough as it is, undermanned to an extent that in private industry would be considered criminal; its staff are expected to produce miracles and are constantly under siege from those sections of the population that deem it—er…unjust that they should abide by the taxation laws of this country, while of course expecting to have the full benefit from being a British citizen. Besides, I think you’ve tormented this young man enough, don’t you?’ he asked her wryly, wringing an unwary start of surprise from her.

‘An error appears to have been made—on both sides,’ he continued. ‘I suggest that you leave your papers here so that we can have time to go through in a less…combustible atmosphere. The Revenue takes no sides. It simply seeks to fulfil its duty in ensuring that the country’s citizens pay their full dues.’

For the first time in a long, long time Hannah felt her colour rise. She was being told off…reminded very promptly and calmly of the stresses the young inspector was under…made to feel almost childishly unkind in her clear-cut definitions of his errors. She felt small and mean, and just a tiny little bit ashamed of herself.

Which was surely completely ludicrous. If she hadn’t come with Linda to help and support her, her poor friend would have been in a state of complete panic and would have probably been browbeaten into paying out tax which she simply did not owe.

She opened her mouth to say as much, and then closed it again. Taking her critic’s comments personally would not do Linda’s case any good. Summoning the self-control she had taught herself so hardily over the years, she curved her mouth into a cool, professional smile and said in an equally cool and professional voice, ‘Of course. We’ll leave it with you, then.’

And she got up and shook hands briskly across the desk with the younger man, waiting for Linda to do the same.

For some reason, as she walked the small distance to the door, she didn’t offer her hand to the older man; and she even found that she was deliberately keeping a greater distance between them than was at all necessary.

Why? Because she found his sexuality intimidating? Nonsense. Why on earth should she? What was there to be frightened of? That he might try and pounce on her? She stifled a mirthless laugh. Hardly…On looks alone he could have women beating a path to his door, and was hardly likely to find it necessary to do something so unprofessional as to make a pass at her. So she stopped at the door and turned round, gravely proffering him her hand. She saw the smile that twitched at his mouth and frowned, wondering what had caused it. Not her, surely? She bristled a little at the thought and gave him a clear, frosty look from her tawny eyes.

‘Thank goodness that’s over,’ Linda breathed as soon as they were out of earshot of the office. ‘What do you think will happen?’

‘I’m sure you have nothing to worry about,’ Hannah soothed her, ‘but if you’re at all worried, just give me a ring at the flat. You’ve got the number.’

The late summer sunshine was casting long shadows as they walked out of the building.

Just as they were about to cross the road, Linda remembered that she had some letters to post, so they retraced their footsteps back to the post office.

When they returned to the car park, Hannah discovered an elegant Daimler saloon was parked next to her own car. She looked at it enviously, wondering who it belonged to.

‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ Linda said wryly. ‘I only hope for its owner’s sake that it has better fuel consumption than my old one.’

When Hannah stopped her car outside Linda’s shop, Linda invited her in for supper but Hannah shook her head. She would be late enough as it was, and she had some reading up to do on the Jeffreys Group before her interview on Monday.

‘What a pity you couldn’t have taken a longer break,’ Linda commiserated as they said goodbye. ‘You must miss Dorset…’

‘Yes, I do,’ Hannah agreed honestly—an admission she would never have made to any of her colleagues who were such dedicated city dwellers. There were times when she felt almost claustrophobic in London, but living virtually on the river helped to banish that feeling, although nothing could ever really replace the spaciousness and rural beauty of her parents’ home village.

‘Unfortunately, London is where the jobs are. London and other capital cities.’

She wondered what Linda would say if she told her she was taking a special language course in Japanese; not that she intended to go and work in Japan, but the world was shrinking every day and the Japanese money markets were fast-growing business areas. One had to think of the future…

‘Don’t you ever envy the girls we grew up with, Hannah?’ Linda asked her a little wistfully, her hand on the open passenger door of the car. ‘I mean, they’re all married now with children…families…’

‘Not at all,’ Hannah told her crisply. ‘I’m not decrying marriage, Linda, but how many of those girls ever fulfilled their true potential? Oh, I’m not saying that being a wife and mother isn’t fulfilling…of course it is, but I can’t help wondering how many of those girls will turn round in ten years’ time and find themselves alone, their marriages broken up and themselves the sole breadwinner, and how many of them then will regret not having trained for a career…in not having some sense of themselves, apart from their husbands and children.

‘I prefer to rely on myself, rather than to rely on others,’ she added firmly. ‘It’s much safer.’

Linda’s mouth twisted a little bitterly. ‘And that’s a major consideration for our generation, isn’t it? Safety. Have you ever noticed how much the word “safe” occurs in our conversations? We’re almost obsessed by it.’

‘With every good reason,’ Hannah pointed out calmly. ‘The world—today is a very dangerous place, made dangerous by we who inhabit it.’

She gave her friend a final smile, and when Linda had closed the door and disappeared inside her home she set the car in motion again, heading for London.

CHAPTER TWO

‘HANNAH, where the devil are those figures on Hanson I asked you for last week?’

Refusing to react to the biting, bullying tone of her boss’s voice, Hannah went calmly to his desk and removed a file, which she handed to him without showing any signs of either chagrin or triumph.

This was one of the main reasons she had applied for the Jeffreys’ job. Ever since Brian Howard had been head-hunted by the directors, and appointed into a senior managerial post with the company, he had made her a target for his prejudice against her sex. A prejudice, that was, of her sex working in the same professional field as himself.

When he’d first joined the company, he had mistaken Hannah for one of the secretaries; his manner towards her had been insulting in the extreme and, as Hannah had told him coldly at the time, she sincerely felt for the secretarial staff if his behaviour towards her was indicative of the kind of sexual harassment they had to endure.

He had resented the tone she had taken with him, resented her sheer skill in her work and the professionalism that would not allow her to betray how much she disliked working for him.

He was forever needling her, criticising her and generally trying to put her down. And Hannah had resolved to herself several months ago that it would be sensible for her to look for another job. She was not a girl who believed in taking her problems to others, nor expecting them to solve them for her. The man was at fault, but since she knew quite well that what he wanted was a confrontation, whereby he could bully and browbeat her into feminine defensiveness and retreat, if possible accompanied by her loss of temper and, even better, her tears, she knew that to try and reason with him as she might have done with another man would be a sheer waste of time.

He resented her and he feared—not her—but her intelligence, her calm air of authority, her sheer ability.

Confrontation was not Hannah’s way; she had tried it too often with her brothers as a child and lost. Nor did she intend to go behind his back and solicit the support of others. She preferred to handle the situation in her own way.

It had come as an unpleasant shock to realise what other members of her sex had to endure in the workplace. When she had said as much to one of the senior secretaries in an unguarded moment, the other girl had grimaced, and said, ‘You don’t know the half of it! Talk about pandering to the male ego…Some of them are sweeties and the worst you can say about them is that they haven’t bothered to keep up with the new technology and that they expect their secretaries to do their work for them, and to keep quiet about their contributions when the plaudits are being handed out. But that’s the best of them. The worst—’ She had rolled her eyes and added grimly, ‘I advise every junior secretary I train to make it plain right from the start where they stand when it comes to sexual harassment.’

‘But how?’ Hannah had asked, remembering how hard she had found it to get it through her boss’s arrogant conceit that she found his advances repulsive.

‘Oh, it’s not easy, but there are ways. No provocative clothing, no flirtatious or misinterpretable remarks, unless you know the guy on the receiving end is going to take them the right way. And if you do get someone who steps out of line…well, depending on how far out of line he is, there are one or two tricks of the trade to make him see the error of his ways. Spilling his coffee over him, dropping a couple of files where it’s going to hurt, mentioning his wife and saying you think your mother knows her.’

Even though she had laughed, Hannah had been appalled that such measures were necessary.

Now she waited as he studied the figures she had given him, his small mouth pursing meanly. He put down the papers and leaned across her desk, bracing his hands on the edge of it, a threatening sexual stance, which Hannah ignored.

‘Two days off this week. Another off on Monday. Got a boyfriend, have we?’

Hannah bristled mentally at the overt prurience in his voice, but didn’t lift her head from her work.

Her boss was balding and forty-odd, his body running to fat. He had a penchant for strong aftershaves which were unpleasant at close quarters. He was well-groomed, as one would expect of a man in his position, but Hannah reflected that it was more due to his wife than to him. The wife whom he openly boasted about keeping short of money at home…jocularly adding that it was the best place for women to be, while leering at the office junior as she whisked past in her fashionable short skirt.

Hannah detested him and all men like him, but she was wise enough to know that no amount of protesting would change his attitude.

She was glad when her telephone rang, making it unnecessary for her to answer his questions. At least it was Friday, and she had the whole weekend in which to prepare herself for Monday’s interview.

WHEN SHE WAS at home in her docklands apartment, Hannah dressed completely differently from the way she did for work. Jeans and sweatshirts were the order of the day, while she worked happily on decorating the apartment more in line with her own tastes than those of the builder.

She had opted for one of the more expensive apartments, with a generous balcony area and marvellous views of the Thames.

On Saturday morning, drawn outside by the sun, she ate her breakfast sitting by the balcony, lazily watching the world and his wife go by—most of them apparently driving bright scarlet Porsches, and wearing clothes from a very small and select group of designers.

‘Yuppies,’ the media designated them with fiendish joy, but to Hannah, who was part of them professionally and yet apart from them personally, they sometimes seemed to be a sad, uncertain group, huddled together clone-like for comfort, desperate to conform to their own rigidly set standards. But then she allowed fair-mindedly that any group must seem like that to those on the outside.

She rested her chin in her hands as she stared out across the Thames, busy with craft as people made the most of the sunshine.

She ate the rest of her croissant, bought from the small specialist baker who had opened in the elegant shopping arcade not far from her apartment, acknowledging that she was lucky in her tall slenderness in that she never had to worry about putting on extra pounds.

Her eldest brother Matt had called at the apartment just after she’d moved in. He had been making an overnight stop in London, en route for Alaska and the pipeline whose constructions he had been heavily involved in.

‘Very swish,’ he had approved, grinning at her, as he inspected the stark black and white de´cor and furniture. ‘Not much like home, though, is it?’

‘It isn’t meant to be,’ Hannah had told him sharply, not liking the hint of amusement she sensed beneath his admiration.

Was that why she had almost deliberately set out to soften the harsh lines of the apartment’s design, by bringing in rich textiles, silk damasks in scarlet and gold, India rugs that warmed the bare floorboards?

And in her bedroom she had given way fully to the imaginative side of her nature, the side she normally kept strictly under control, falling for and buying some French bedroom furniture in smooth, strong cherrywood.

The bed had high scrolled head and foot-boards that made her think rather fancifully, when she lay in it looking at the river, that she was lying in her own private barge, perhaps waiting for the tide to take her upriver to the heart of the city, or down-river and out to sea like an Elizabethan buccaneer.

The bed had a rich blue, silk damask quilted eiderdown and matching spread; the silk had cost a fortune and she had wondered if she was a little mad after she had committed herself to its purchase, but there was something about the sensation of the silk, about the richness of its colour, about the sheer luxury of the fabric, that was worth every penny she had spent.

Curled up in the Lloyd loom chair she had filched from her bedroom at home, she studied the fact sheets she had assembled.

The Jeffreys Group had been started as a single cell company almost fifteen years before by Silas Jeffreys, who had seen an opening selling financial services to his fellow ex-graduates as they found their way in the business world. He had advised them on their tax affairs, their pensions, their investments; his financial acumen was so keen that he had been retained by several small, successful companies to reorganise their financial departments, and so his own business had grown.

He was one of the few new-wave financiers who did not feel it necessary to operate from New York as well as London, although he had been approached by various American concerns as a consultant.

The share crisis which had stunned worldwide stockmarkets in 1987 had left him unscathed, which had added to his aura of mystique.

Hannah put the papers to one side and thought of the people she knew by repute who worked for his organisation, all of them with formidable reputations. Jeffreys Group never head-hunted staff—it never needed to. The prestige of working for it was such that Silas Jeffreys could choose his own workforce from among the best financial brains in the country.

Would she be eligible to join that number? She pressed her hand to her stomach to quell the unfamiliar sensation of butterflies fluttering there.

Until now she hadn’t admitted even to herself how important getting this job was. She had developed caution during her teens when she had discovered how much her enthusiasm for maths set her apart from her peers…Seeing how much they, especially her male peers, resented her success and her enthusiasm, she hadn’t allowed herself to want anything too much. She could vividly remember as a teenager the excitement of being invited out on a date and then finding that the boy concerned didn’t share her thirst for knowledge, her determination to use her talents to the full.

Was it then that she had started to teach herself to make a choice? To accept that, no matter what the media hyped, it wasn’t possible to ‘have it all?’

Among her acquaintances there were several couples with high-profile careers and marriages which seemed to thrive on busy schedules and frantic efforts to spend time together; they were happy and fulfilled, these energetic, busy couples who filled every moment of their lives, but Hannah wasn’t sure if she possessed the ability to match such diversification, whether she had it in herself to make a success of marriage and a career. The men she had known had demanded too much from her, making her back off from them, making her fear that they would try to woo her away from her career.

She would like to be one of the enviable few who had it all: a satisfying career, plus a partner with whom she could genuinely share the joys and disappointments of her life, who would genuinely accept her as his equal, who would understand her desire to be part of the busy, thriving world of finance. And yet someone who at the same time understood her nostalgic yearning for a home such as the home her parents had built: comfortable, welcoming…a home where muddy boots and muddy paws were equally welcome, a home where children thrived, a garden full of sunshine in summer and snow in winter, comfortable rooms full of old furniture. And it was this ambiguity within her that insisted she make choices, that insisted that for her a career and marriage could not go hand in hand.

It might be different if she had ever met a man who mattered…a man so essential to her life that he would be the very core of it, and yet instinctively she feared that dependence, that emotional needing.

She closed her eyes, impatient of the deeply romantic vein within her that she preferred to ignore, and was stunned by the immediacy with which her imagination recreated for her the features of a certain tax official.

So, he had an openly visual masculine face, a male aura that had been hard to ignore, a subtle awareness of himself that had been vaguely challenging, giving her the sensation that he was daring her to react to him.

He was probably married with half a dozen children, and a lover tucked away discreetly somewhere, she told herself cynically, banishing his image. It was her mother’s fault that she was suffering this mood of introspection…her loving, old-fashioned mother with her talk of weddings and babies, and her thinly veiled anxiety that she, her daughter, was never going to produce grandchildren for her to coo over and boast about.

She had four brothers, for heaven’s sake, Hannah thought pettishly. Let them produce grandchildren…

She had received several casual invitations from friends for events over the weekend, but she had turned them all down, wanting to concentrate on planning her interview strategy. Besides, there was a Beethoven concert on the radio on Sunday evening which she wanted to hear.

She went to bed early, wishing she could subdue the restless sensation of dissatisfaction which had invaded her. It was counter-productive and dangerous. There was no room for it in her life. Especially not now when she faced what was probably the most challenging interview of her career.

ON MONDAY morning she was up at her normal time. Her interview was at eleven o’clock, which left her plenty of time to get ready. She showered and washed her hair, blowdrying it into its smooth bob, and dressing carefully in a cool cream satin shirt and a new suit in navy with a chalk stripe, severely cut and formidably businesslike.

Navy tights, Jourdan pumps, her expensive navy leather briefcase. On her wrist, her discreet gold watch. The gold ear-rings the boys had bought her for Christmas in her ears. A light spray of the cool fresh perfume she favoured, just to let the interviewer know that, while she had no intentions of trading on her femininity, neither was she in the slightest ashamed of it.

She was lucky in the excellence of her skin, which required little make-up. She uncapped her new lipstick, a soft red, which the salesgirl had enthused over, but which, once she had it on, seemed to draw attention to her mouth in a way she was not sure she liked, even though there was nothing vibrant or striking about the colour. She hesitated to wipe it off, frowning a little and then deciding she was being over-critical, not seeing in her reflection what a man would notice straight away—and that was that the subtle gleam of the lipstick drew attention to the unexpectedly vulnerable fullness of her mouth, throwing it into challenging contrast with her businesslike appearance.

Just a mere brush of matt dark green eyeshadow to shape her eyes, and blusher to highlight her cheekbones, and then she was ready.

She hadn’t varnished her nails, which she kept short and well-buffed, and a small, fine gold ring which had belonged to a maternal great-aunt was her only piece of jewellery apart from her watch and ear-rings.

Before leaving, she stood on her balcony and took several calming deep breaths, concentrating all her mental energies within herself, gathering herself up for the ordeal ahead. And then she was ready.

She wasn’t driving her car, not having wanted to risk being unable to find a parking spot. The taxi she had ordered arrived on time, and she saw the driver give her an appreciative male look as she stepped into it. She ignored the look and crisply gave him his directions.

The Jeffreys Group had its offices, not in one of the high modern office blocks, but in a Georgian house in an elegant terrace of such houses set round one of London’s smaller squares.

The garden in the middle was lushly green, the trees throwing welcome shadows on to the footpath. The railings that guarded the square were painted black and tipped with gold; and as the taxi stopped alongside them to allow her to alight Hannah noticed a small gothic gazebo, almost hidden by the foilage, its walls painted green, only the pewter shimmer of its bell-shaped roof betraying its presence.

The garden had a padlocked gate, and inside someone was working, tirelessly weeding.

Although there was really no similarity between them whatsoever, for some reason the small garden made Hannah think of her home, and her mother, who loved the vicarage’s rambling, overgrown garden almost as much as though it was an extra child.

The square was full of parked cars: expensive, gleaming cars with German pedigrees, almost uniformly dark in colour, apart from the occasional thrusting scarlet of a new Porsche or Ferrari.

The car parked outside the Group’s front door was a Daimler, the same colour as the one she had noticed in the car park at home, Hannah recognised in passing.

The Georgian door was painted black and decorated with traditional brass knocker and handle. Above it, the delicacy of the Adam fanlight caught Hannah’s eye, and she hesitated, uncertain as to whether to knock or simply walk in. As she waited, the door opened and she realised that someone must be watching her. The thought made her feel slightly uncomfortable. She stepped into the cool darkness of the tiled hallway and found a smiling receptionist waiting to greet her.

‘Hannah Maitland?’ she questioned, and when Hannah nodded, she said pleasantly, ‘If you would just like to wait in the library. It’s down the corridor, first door on your right. You’re a few minutes early for your appointment. Would you like a cup of tea or coffee while you’re waiting?’

Hannah shook her head. She was too nervous to need any added stimulation.

Thanking the receptionist, she followed her directions and found that the library was exactly that: a welcoming, faintly musty room with leather chairs and mahogany bookshelves, stacked with leather-bound volumes. The carpet on the floor was Persian and beautifully faded. The original Adam fireplace had been retained, and even though Hannah suspected that the discreetly mellowed panelling along one wall probably concealed all manner of up-to-date computer and visual study equipment, it did not detract from the ambience of the room at all.

It was a room that spoke of comfort and mellowness…of a need to respect the proper order of things…of tradition and timelessness. It was a room that relaxed and reassured, she recognised sensitively.

She wasn’t being interviewed by Silas Jeffreys himself, but by his deputy, which led her to suspect that this was just a weeding-out series of interviews.

She glanced surreptitiously at her watch. Three minutes to go. Her heart leapt as the door opened and then it leapt again, as she recognised the man who walked in, although for a far different reason.

To say that she was staggered to come face to face with the senior of the two tax officials from her county town, here of all places, was to grossly underestimate her feelings.

Her mouth dropped open as she stared at him in disbelief, her shock heightened by an odd feeling of fear and resentment. What was he doing here?

And then she knew. He was another contender for the job and a formidable opponent to her own chances, so her instincts told her.

He smiled at her as though coming face to face with her was an everyday occurrence, and once again she felt off balance and unnerved by his own very evident lack of reaction.

‘What do you think?’ he asked her pleasantly, and it took her several seconds to realise he was asking her opinion of their surroundings.

‘It’s…it’s very cleverly designed,’ she managed snappishly when she had recovered her composure. ‘Relaxing and reassuring. Clients coming in here would immediately feel reassured about the probity of the Group.’

He shot her a thoughtful look. Hannah would almost have described it as an assessing look, were it not for the fact that the mere thought of him daring to assess her made her stiffen with rejection and irritation.

‘You’ll be going in for your interview in a moment.’ He made the comment a statement rather than a question, and that added fuel to the fire of her resentment. ‘What is it that appeals most to you about this position?’ he questioned.

Hannah only just managed to stifle her gasp of fury.

‘I think that’s for the interviewer to ask and not you,’ she told him pointedly, and then couldn’t resist adding with a small grimace, ‘I suppose there’s no need to ask what you’re doing here? Although surely,’ she added with what she knew to be a touch of malice, ‘it’s rather dangerous for a man of your age to make such a major career move.’

She saw him start slightly, as if she had surprised him, and felt a fierce stab of pleasure, as though somehow the thought of having got the better of him, in however small a way, boosted her own self-confidence.

‘What makes you think I’m contemplating a career move?’ he asked her smoothly, eyebrows lifting in an interrogative manner.

‘The mere fact that you’re here,’ she responded crisply. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? What other purpose could there be in you, a tax official, appearing here in the offices of a private company? Unless, of course,’ she added nastily, ‘you’ve come to interview Mr Jeffreys about his personal tax affairs.’

He gave her a calm smile, which added to her growing irritation with him. His eyes crinkled a little at the corners, as though he was suppressing a desire to laugh. His whole manner towards her was so reminiscent of the lordly attitude adopted by her older brothers that she longed to react to his male arrogance in the same way as she had reacted to theirs as a little girl. Hadn’t she learnt then, though, the uselessness of pitting her own much frailer strength against that of her much bigger and stronger brothers?

This man would have as little difficulty in fending off flaying fists and angry words as they had done. As she realised what she was thinking, Hannah was furious with herself, just as furious as she had originally been with him.

What on earth was she doing, allowing this man to trick her into losing her temper and her self-control? Undermining the confidence of the other applicants for a position was surely one of the oldest tricks in the book, and she should have had more sense than to fall for it.

The door to the library opened and the receptionist from the front entrance came in, starting a little as she realised that Hannah wasn’t the only occupant in the room. She looked uncertainly from Hannah to her companion, as though not quite certain which one of them she should address.

The problem was solved for her when he turned his back and walked over to the bookshelves, studying their contents.

‘If you’d like to come this way, please,’ she said a little breathlessly to Hannah, more than half her attention still focused on the relaxed back of the other occupant of the room. Irritated by the way the girl couldn’t take her attention off him and focus it on her, Hannah gave her a cool smile and swept towards the door, only just restraining herself from making some acid remark to her opponent.

The receptionist escorted her to a lift, discreetly hidden in the rear of the hallway.

‘It will take you directly to the executive suite,’ she told Hannah, ‘and when you get there Mr Giles’ secretary will be waiting for you.’

Gordon Giles was Silas Jeffreys’ secondin-command, a man whose reputation was almost as formidable as that of Silas Jeffreys himself. Hannah felt a tremor of nervousness start in the tip of her stomach as she got into the lift. It was silly to let herself be unnerved by that wholly unexpected and wholly unwanted second encounter with the tax official.

How had he heard about this job? she wondered acidly, as the lift slowed smoothly to a halt and the door opened automatically.

Gordon Giles’ secretary was about her own age, a pleasant, intelligent-looking brunette, who smiled warmly at her as she escorted her to Gordon Giles’ office.

Gordon Giles himself was not as intimidating as Hannah had expected. A tall, thin, slightly stooping man in his early fifties, he greeted her with a warm smile and a firm handshake, offering her a seat with a faintly old-world air of courtesy that had nothing sexist in it and was merely an expression of what her mother would term ‘good manners’.

He started the interview without any preamble, remarking, as Hannah herself already knew, that her qualifications were excellent.

‘Your work experience is a little more limited than that of most of the other applicants,’ he told her quite freely, ‘but that needn’t necessarily count against you.’

He went on to discuss various aspects of the job, should Hannah actually get it, making the odd note as she answered his questions.

‘Now,’ he said firmly, pushing aside his papers and studying her thoughtfully, ‘please don’t take this amiss, but your personal life…just how free are you to travel? Silas wants an assistant whose personal life and responsibilities are fluid enough to enable him or her to travel with him. He has recently bought a house in the country and he spends two, sometimes three days a week working from there. As his personal assistant you would be required to stay overnight there and so be available to work with him. Would that cause you any problems?’ he asked her directly.

Hannah shook her head, knowing from the tone of his voice that she had nothing to fear or resent in telling him the truth, and that it was not prurient curiosity or any sexist attitude that motivated his questions.

‘I live alone,’ she told him calmly, ‘and I’m completely free to adapt to whatever arrangements Mr Jeffreys wishes to make.’

‘And the thought of spending two, possibly three, out of every five working days out of London doesn’t worry you?’ he persisted.

‘Not at all,’ Hannah told him honestly. ‘I was brought up in the country and miss it. To work in London and in the country would be like having the best of both worlds.’

‘Good. There is one other point I feel I should mention, and that is something you may or may not know.’

Hannah waited, not quite sure of what was to come, a little perturbed by the faint frown that touched his forehead, his almost fatherly note of concern in his voice, when he told her, ‘Silas isn’t married, and while of course I can totally and completely vouch for him both as an employer and as a man, you might feel that I had been less than honest with you, if at a future date we were to offer you the job. I’m simply saying this now to avoid wasting both your time and ours.’

He glanced down at the files that lay on his desk and said simply, ‘I see from your CV that your father is a vicar.’ Hannah immediately caught on. She suppressed the tiny flash of irritation that burned through her. How many times in the past had people on discovering her father’s career made incorrect judgements about her—and yet, to be fair, she had to admit that Gordon Giles had said nothing that was either offensive or unrealistic.

‘I’m not someone who is given to overimaginative flights of fancy,’ she told him swiftly. ‘The knowledge that Mr Jeffreys isn’t married and that I should be spending a couple of nights a week under his roof causes me no concern whatsoever. In fact,’ she added in a slightly more wry tone, ‘I should imagine the apprehension, if there is any, would be all on his side.’

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