It felt like heaven to have his arms close around her.

And then, totally unexpectedly, Ran was kissing her, not with the gentle tenderness he had shown her before, but with a fierce sensual passion that took her breath away and with it all her resistance.

He was and always had been a very male man, Sylvie reminded herself. He might not love her, she might not be the woman he wanted, but she was here in his arms, loving him, wanting him, and she could sense how little it would take to overturn his self-control.

Swiftly, dangerously, stabbing right at the heart of her, came the thought that she might not ever have his love, but she could have tonight....

Born in Lancashire, England, PENNY JORDAN now lives with her husband in a beautiful fourteenth-century house in rural Cheshire. Penny has been writing for over fifteen years and now has more than one hundred novels to her name, including the highly successful To Love, Honor and Betray, Power Games and A Perfect Family. With over sixty million books sold, and translations into seventeen languages, her record is truly phenomenal.

One Night in His Arms develops Ran’s and Sylvie’s relationship. They first met in an earlier Mills & Boon Modern novel, Fantasy for Two, when Sylvie developed a teenage crush on her stepbrother’s good-looking estate manager.

One Night in His Arms
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Copyright

PROLOGUE

‘WHAT the hell are you doing, Sylvie? Just what kind of game are you playing now?’ Ran demanded angrily as he removed her hands, releasing her fingers from his shirt where she had unconsciously curled them in her attempt to get him to listen to what she wanted to say, to understand that she was no longer a child, that she was now completely and totally a woman...a woman who loved and wanted him.

‘Ran, this isn’t a game,’ she protested, her eyes starting to fill with anguished tears as he thrust her away. ‘I want—’

‘Oh, I know exactly what you want, Sylvie,’ he interrupted her savagely. ‘You want me to take you to bed. But right now what I feel more like doing—’ He broke off, said something she couldn’t quite catch under his breath and then turned to look at her so that the light fell sharply across his face, outlining the aristocratic arrogance of his profile.

‘Your stepbrother is one of my closest friends and my employer and—’

‘This doesn’t have anything to do with Alex,’ Sylvie protested frantically. ‘This is just between you and me, Ran.’

‘You and me? There is no you and me,’ he told her cruelly. ‘You are just a schoolgirl, Sylvie, whilst I am a fully adult man.’

‘But Ran, I love you,’ Sylvie pleaded desperately, throwing everything she had left into one last attempt to make him see how she felt.

‘Really?’ Ran drawled mockingly. ‘How much? As much as the pop star you were ready to die for six months ago, or the pony you wanted three months before that?’

‘That was before I was properly grown up,’ Sylvie told him.

So very little space separated them—a few feet...that was all. If she let him walk away from her now without at least trying...

Boldly she closed the distance between them, taking him off guard as she placed her body close to his and wrapped her arms possessively around him, possessively and far too tightly for him to remove them as he had done so easily a few moments ago.

‘Ran...’ She pleaded with him, lifting her face to him, her mouth trembling. ‘Ran, please...’

She felt something that could have been a shudder galvanise his body before clumsily and inexpertly she pressed her mouth against his in a closed-lipped, untutored kiss.

His mouth felt hard and hot, his skin where he had shaved thrillingly rough against her own. Fireworks ignited and exploded deep within her body; her heart was beating so fast she thought she might die of the excitement.

‘Ran,’ she moaned passionately against his mouth as she twisted with innocent provocation against his body.

Suddenly his own arms were around her, not pushing her away as he had done earlier, but holding onto her, his fingers biting hard into her slender arms as he slid one hand into the back of her hair, holding her head still whilst his mouth started to move on hers.

Sylvie felt her head start to spin and her knees go weak.

If she had thought that her heart was beating fast before, that was nothing to the way it was pounding now. Her whole body ached and pulsed with the intoxication of what was happening.

Ran! Ran! Ran!

She loved him so much, wanted him so much. Eagerly she pressed her still coltishly youthful body even closer to his. She could feel every nerve-ending in her skin aching with the intensity of her yearning for him.

The tip of his tongue was caressing the softly swollen outline of her mouth.

She wanted him to make love to her so desperately. These last few weeks, whilst they had been working together clearing the overgrown stagnant lake in the woods on her stepbrother’s estate, working on a conservation project which Ran, as her stepbrother’s estate manager, had been overseeing, she had come to see him in a new light and in doing so had fallen head over heels in love with him, with all the passion and intensity of her seventeen-year-old nature.

And now, after the corrosive hurt of all his recent rebuffs, all his painful rejections of her attempts to make him realise how she felt, here he was holding her, kissing her...wanting her...

A fiercely sharp thrill of feminine excitement spun through her. Her breasts ached for the touch of his hands, to be held and caressed by him as she had read about, seen in films. The thought of their two naked bodies entwined in the sensual privacy of Ran’s bed was almost too much for her. Eagerly she opened her mouth, inviting him to probe deeper with his tongue, but then abruptly, to her shock, Ran was suddenly pushing her away as quickly as he had taken hold of her, his face dark with anger.

‘Ran, wh-what is it...what’s wrong?’ she stammered.

‘What’s wrong? Oh, for God’s sake...’ she heard him mutter. ‘The fact that you even need to ask that kind of question shows just how... You’re a child still, Sylvie... Six months from now...’

She bit down hard on her bottom lip when she saw the irritation in his eyes as he ran his hand through his thick dark copper hair.

‘I’m sorry... I should never have done that...’ he told her tersely.

Sylvie felt her eyes fill with vulnerable tears.

‘You kissed me,’ she protested shakily. ‘You wanted me...’

‘No, Sylvie,’ she heard Ran telling her grittily. ‘What I wanted,’ he told her bluntly, ‘was not you, but what you offered. I’m a man, and when a woman comes on to me, offering me sex...’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘You’re a child still, Sylvie.’

‘I bet if we were in bed together you wouldn’t be saying that,’ Sylvie challenged him boldly, adding recklessly, ‘I’m not a child at all, Ran, and I could prove it to you...’

She heard the savage hiss as he expelled the air from his lungs.

‘Dear God,’ she heard him rasp, ‘have you the first idea of what you’re saying...suggesting...?’

‘I want you, Ran... I love you...’

‘Well, I sure as hell don’t want or love you,’ he told her ferociously, his face suddenly shockingly pale underneath its weather-beaten tan. ‘And let me give you a small warning, Sylvie: if you continue to go around offering yourself to men, sooner or later one of them’s going to take you up on your offer and I promise you that the experience won’t be a pleasant one. You’re far too young to be experimenting with sex, and when you are old enough it should be with someone of your own age and not... I’m a man, not a boy, Sylvie,’ he told her brutally, ‘and...well, let’s just say that the idea of taking some over-excited and inexperienced little virgin to bed and playing touchy-feely games with her is not my idea of a particularly satisfying relationship—not sexually, not mentally and certainly not emotionally...

‘Go and find someone your own age to play with, Sylvie,’ he told her grimly.

For a moment Sylvie was tempted to protest, to argue and plead, or even more daringly to throw herself back into his arms and prove to him that she could make him want her despite her age and her lack of experience. She was not normally so easily defeated or diminished, but something deep down inside, some very new sense of womanliness, shrank from enduring another rejection from him. And so, instead, swallowing back the tears she was aching to cry, she lifted her head and, tilting her chin to him defiantly, said, ‘Yes, I think I will...’

There had been one boy in particular in the party of co-workers involved in the conservation campaign who had shown a very marked interest in her. At the time, newly, wildly in love with Ran, she hadn’t paid him very much attention, but now...

A militant sparkle illuminated her eyes. She could see Ran beginning to frown.

‘Sylvie,’ he warned. Angrily she refused to stop and listen to him, he had no jurisdiction over her.

The bright delicacy of her newly emergent tender love was already tarnishing and fading as resentment, pride and enmity took its place.

Ran!

She loved him but now she felt as though she could very easily come to hate him—she certainly wanted to hate him.

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU’RE not serious...’

Sylvie frowned as she studied the synopsis pinned to the front of the file her employer had just handed her.

Lloyd Kelmer the fourth was the kind of eccentric billionaire who, by rights, only ought to have existed in fairy stories—as a particularly genial and indulgent godfather, Sylvie thought. She had been introduced to him at a party to which she had been invited by some acquaintances of her stepbrother’s. She had only gone to the party because she had been feeling particularly lost and insignificant, having only recently left her American college and moved to New York. They had got chatting and Lloyd had begun to tell her about the trials and traumas he had experienced in running the huge wealthy Trust set up by his grandfather.

‘The old man had this thing about stately homes, I guess I kinda feel the same. He owned a fair handful of the things himself, so he kinda had a taste for them, if you know what I mean. There was the plantation down in Carolina and then a couple of châteaux in France and a palazzo in Venice, so it just kinda happened naturally that he should have this idea of using his millions to preserve and protect big houses, and now the Trust has a whole skew of them all over the world, and more wanting to have the Trust bankroll them every day.’

Sylvie, with her own admittedly second-hand experience of her stepbrother’s problems in running and financing his own large family estate in England, had quite naturally been very interested in what Lloyd had had to say, but it had still surprised her a few days later to receive not just a telephone call from him but the offer of a job as his personal assistant.

Sylvie wasn’t seventeen any longer, nor was she the naive and perhaps over-protected girl she had once been. Lloyd might be in his early sixties and might, so far, not have done or said anything to suggest that he had any ulterior motive whatsoever in making contact with her, but nevertheless, having asked him for time to consider his unexpected offer, the first thing Sylvia had done was telephone her stepbrother in England and ask for his advice.

An unscheduled and unfortunately brief visit from Alex and his wife Mollie to vet Lloyd and talk over the situation with Sylvie had resulted in her deciding to take the job, a decision which, twelve months down the line, she regularly paused to congratulate herself on making, or at least she had done until now.

Her work was varied and fascinating, and barely left her with any time to draw breath, never mind for any personal relationships with members of the opposite sex, but that didn’t worry Sylvie. So far, what she had learned from her experiences with men was that she was a particularly poor judge of the breed. First there had been her revoltingly humiliating teenage crush on Ran and his rejection of her, then there had been the appalling danger she had put herself and her family in with her foolish involvement with Wayne.

She and Wayne might never have been lovers but she had known, from the first, of his involvement in the drug scene and, as foolishly as she had tried to convince herself that Ran would fall in love with her, she had also tried to convince herself that Wayne was simply a lost soul in need of protecting and saving.

She had been wrong on both counts. Love was the last emotion Ran had ever felt for her. And as for Wayne... Well, thankfully he was now safely out of her life.

Her new job took every minute of her time and every ounce of her energy. Each new property the Trust decided to ‘adopt’ had to be inspected, vetted and then painstakingly brought up to the same standard as all the other properties the Trust financed and opened to the general public.

Sylvie knew that her employer’s highly individualistic and personalised way of deciding which of the multitude of properties he was offered as potential new additions to the Trust’s portfolio were worth acquiring caused other organisations to eye him slightly askance. For Lloyd to accept a house it had to have what he described as the ‘right feel’, but his eccentricities tended to make Sylvie feel almost maternally protective of him.

Or at least they had until now.

To return from a six-week trip to Prague, where she had been supervising the takeover of a particularly beautiful if horrendously run-down eighteenth-century palace they had recently added to their acquisitions, to discover that in her absence Lloyd had made yet another acquisition in the form of Haverton Hall, a huge neoclassical building set in its own parkland in Derbyshire, had caused her heart to sink into her shoes.

‘But Sylvie, this place is a gem, a perfect example of English neoclassicism,’ she could hear Lloyd protesting as he studied her stubborn expression. ‘I promise you, you’ll love it. I’ve had Gena book you onto the day after tomorrow’s Concorde flight for London. I thought you’d be pleased. You were only complaining way back in the spring how much you wanted to spend more time with your stepbrother and his wife and their son...

‘This house... Did I tell you, by the way, that the guy who inherited it just happens to know your stepbrother and that’s how he’d got to hear about us? It seems that he was telling your stepbrother about the problems he was experiencing, having unexpectedly inherited this place, and Alex suggested that he should get in touch with me... I wasn’t too sure at first. After all, we’ve already got that pretty little Georgian place down near Brighton, but, well, I kinda felt I owed it to Alex, so I flew over to Britain and went to have a look.’

Sylvie closed her eyes as she listened to Lloyd extolling the virtues of Haverton Hall.

How could she admit to him that it wasn’t so much the house itself she objected to as its owner?

Its owner...

There it was on the front page of the report... Haverton Hall... Owner... Sir Ranulf Carrington. Sir Ranulf now, not just Ran any longer... Not that Sylvie was impressed by a title. How could she be when her own stepbrother was an earl?

She had known all about Ran’s unexpected inheritance of course. It had been the subject of a good deal of discussion at Christmas, when she had gone home, not least because Ran, with an estate of his own to run, quite naturally could no longer run her stepbrother’s.

No one, least of all Ran himself, had expected that he would inherit. After all, his cousin had only been in his early forties and had seemed perfectly fit. The last thing anyone imagined was that he would suffer a fatal heart attack.

Sylvie had smiled politely, but without interest. The last thing, the last person she wanted to waste time talking about was Ran.

Her memories of the way he had rejected her might have been carefully and very deeply buried but...but every time she returned to her brother’s home she was painfully reminded of her seventeen-year-old self and her vulnerability.

No question about it, she must have annoyed and aggravated Ran with her unwanted adoration, but surely he could have handled the situation and her a little more gently, let her down a bit more caringly instead of...

Sylvie was aware that Lloyd was watching her expectantly. How could she, as her instincts urged her to do, totally and flatly refuse to have anything to do with Ran? She couldn’t. She was a woman now, a woman who prided herself on her professionalism, a woman who along with her outward New York shine and gloss had also developed an inner self-worth and determination. She loved her work and she truly believed that what Lloyd and the Trust were doing was extremely worthwhile.

Secretly, there was nothing she enjoyed more than watching the houses that Lloyd rescued from their often pitiful state of decay being restored to their former glory... Perhaps it was idealistic and, yes, even foolishly romantic of her, but there was something about watching the process, of seeing these once grand homes rising phoenix-like from the ashes of their own neglect, that touched a chord within her. She could well understand what motivated Lloyd, and she suspected that, ironically, it had been that long-ago conservation scheme she had worked on under Ran’s supervision which had awakened within her the awareness of how very important it was to preserve and care for—to protect—a landscape and its architecture, which had ultimately led to her sharing Lloyd’s passion for their task.

However, Sylvie’s responsibility as an employee of the Trust included a duty not just to share Lloyd’s enthusiasm but to make sure as well that the Trust’s acquisitions were funded and run in a businesslike manner, and that the Trust’s money was used shrewdly and wisely and not wasted or squandered—a responsibility which Sylvie took very seriously. No project, and certainly no bill, was too small for Sylvie to break down and scrutinise very carefully indeed, a fact which caused the Trust’s accountants to comment approvingly on her attention to detail and her excellent bookkeeping.

It had been pointless for Lloyd to protest when they had been renovating the Venetian palazzo that he preferred the red silk to the gold which Sylvie had favoured.

‘Red is almost twice as expensive,’ she had pointed out sternly, adding as a clincher, ‘And besides, the records we’ve managed to trace all indicate that this room was originally decorated in gold and hung with gold drapes...’

‘Then gold it is, then.’ Lloyd had given in with a sigh, but Sylvie had been the one who had been forced to give in to him a few weeks later when, on their departure from Venice, Lloyd had presented her with a set of the most exquisite and expensive leather luggage crafted as only the Italians could craft leather.

‘Lloyd, I can’t possibly accept this,’ Sylvie had protested with a small gasp.

‘Why not? It is your birthday, isn’t it?’ Lloyd had countered, and of course he had been right, and ultimately Sylvie had given in.

Although, as she had told her stepbrother defensively at Christmas when Mollie had marvelled enviously at the luggage, ‘I didn’t want to accept it but Lloyd would have been hurt if I hadn’t.’ She’d added worriedly, ‘Alex, do you think I should have refused...? If you...’

‘Sylvie, the luggage is beautiful and you did the right thing to accept it,’ Alex had reassured her gently. ‘Stop worrying, little one,’ he had commanded her.

‘Little one’! Only Alex ever called her that, and it made her feel so...so protected and safe.

Protected and safe? She was an adult, a woman, for heaven’s sake, and more than capable of protecting herself, of keeping herself safe. Irritably she dragged her attention back to the file she was holding.

‘You don’t approve, do you?’ Lloyd demanded, shaking his head ruefully. ‘Just wait until you see it, though, Sylvie. You’ll love it. It’s a perfect example of...’

‘We’re already very close to the limit of this year’s budget,’ Sylvie warned him sternly, ‘and—’

‘So what? We’ll just have to increase this year’s funding,’ Lloyd told her with typical laid-back geniality.

‘Lloyd,’ Sylvie protested, ‘you’re talking about an increase of heaven alone knows how many million dollars... The Trust...’

‘I am the Trust,’ Lloyd reminded her gently, and Sylvie had to acknowledge that he spoke the truth. Even so, she gave him an ironic look to which he responded by informing her loftily, ‘I’m just doing what I know the old man would have wanted me to do...’

‘By buying a decaying neoclassical pile in the middle of Derbyshire?’ Sylvie asked him dryly.

And she was still shaking her head as Lloyd told her winningly, ‘You’ll love it, Sylvie...I promise you!’

Cravenly Sylvie was tempted to tell him that she was far too busy and that he would have to find someone else to take charge of this particular project, but her pride—the same pride which had kept her going, kept her head held high and her spirit strong through Ran’s rejection of her and everything that had followed—refused to allow her to do so.

This time she and Ran would be meeting on equal ground—as adults—and this time...this time...

This time what? This time she wasn’t going to let him hurt her. This time her attitude towards him would be cool, distant and totally businesslike.

This time...

Sylvie closed her eyes as she felt the tiny shivers of apprehension icing down her spine. The last time she had seen Ran had been when he had unexpectedly turned up at the airport three years ago when she had been leaving England to finish her degree course in America. She could still remember the shock it had given her to see him there, the shock and the sharply sweet surge of helpless pleasure and longing.

She had still been so vulnerable and naive then, a part of her still hoping that maybe, just maybe, he had changed his mind...his heart... But of course he had not. He had been there simply to assure himself that she was actually leaving the country and his life.

Alex knew, of course, that she had once had a foolish adolescent crush on his friend and employee but, thankfully, that was all he did know; thankfully, he had no knowledge of that shaming and searingly painful, never to be thought about, never mind talked about incident that had taken place when she had still been at university in England.

No one knew about that Only she and Ran. But that was all in the past now, and she was determined that this time when she and Ran met, as meet they would surely have to, she would be the one who would have the upper hand and he would be the one who would be the supplicant; she would have the power to deny and refuse him what he wanted and he would have to beg and plead with her.

Immediately Sylvie opened her eyes. What on earth had got into her? That kind of warped, vengeful thinking was, to her mind, as foolish and adolescent as her youthful infatuation with Ran had been. She was above all that kind of thing. She had to be; her job demanded it. No, she would make no distinction between Ran and all the other clients she had had to deal with. The fact that Ran had once cruelly and uncaringly turned down her pleas for his love, for his lovemaking, the fact that he had once rejected and demeaned her, would make no difference to the way she treated him. She was above all that kind of small-mindedness. Proudly she lifted her head as she continued to listen to Lloyd enthusiastically telling her the virtues of his latest ‘find’.

Ran stared grimly around the unfurnished, dusty and cobweb-festooned hallway of Haverton Hall. The smell of neglect and the much more ominous dry rot hung malodorously on the still, late afternoon air. The large room, in common with the rest of the Hall, had a desolate, down-at-heel air of weariness which reminded him uncomfortably of the elderly great-uncle who had owned the property when Ran was growing up. Visits to see him had been something which Ran had always dreaded and, ironically, he could remember how relieved he had been to discover that it was not he but an older cousin who would ultimately inherit the responsibility for the vast, empty, neglected house.

But now that cousin was dead and he, Ran, was Haverton’s owner, or at least he had been until a week or so ago, when he had finally and thankfully signed the papers which would convey legal ownership of Haverton and all the problems that went with it into the hands of Lloyd Kelmer.

His initial reaction when he had unexpectedly and unwontedly inherited the place had been to make enquiries to see if any of the British trusts could be persuaded to take it over, but, as their representatives had quickly and wryly explained, the trusts were awash with unwanted properties and deluged with despairing owners wanting them to take on even more.

Faced with the prospect of having to stand aside and watch as the house and its lands fell into an even greater state of decay, Ran hadn’t known what on earth he was going to do—his inheritance had been the house and the land; there hadn’t been any money to leave for its upkeep—and then Alex had happened to mention the existence of an eccentric American billionaire whose main vocation and purpose in life was the buying up and restoring of old properties which he then opened to the public, and Ran had lost no time in getting in touch with him.

To his relief Lloyd had flown over to England to view the house and promptly declared that he loved it.

That relief had turned to something very different, though, when he had received a fax from Lloyd advising him that his assistant, Ms Sylvie Bennett, would be flying over to Britain to act as his representative over the repair and renovation of the property. He could, of course, have simply chosen to turn his back, walk away, and leave someone else to liaise with Sylvie, but Ran wasn’t like that. If he had a job to do he preferred to see it through for himself, no matter how unwanted or potentially problematic that task might be.

Potentially problematic! A bitter half-smile curled his mouth. There was nothing potential about the problems that Sylvie was likely to cause him... Nothing potential at all.

He had heard scraps of news about her over the years, of course, mainly from Alex and Mollie. Sylvie had completed her degree course and majored summa cum laude... Sylvie was living in New York and looking for a job... Sylvie had got a job... Sylvie was working in Venice... In Rome... In Prague... Sylvie... Sylvie... Sylvie...

Alex and Mollie weren’t his only sources of information, though. Only the previous winter in London, Ran had unexpectedly bumped into Sylvie’s mother, Alex’s stepmother, predictably just outside Harvey Nichols.

Belinda had gushed enthusiastically over his recent elevation to the peerage. She had always been the most appalling snob and Ran could still remember how bitterly she had opposed Alex’s request to her after his father had died that Sylvie be allowed to stay on at Otel Place with him instead of being sent to boarding school.

‘Sylvie cannot possibly live with you, Alex,’ she had told him sharply. ‘For one thing it simply wouldn’t be proper. There is, after all, no blood relationship between you. And for another... Sylvie has been spending far too much time with the wrong sort of people.’

Ran, who had been standing outside Alex’s library whilst this conversation had been taking place, had turned round and been about to walk away when, to his disgust, he had suddenly heard his own name mentioned. Alex had demanded of his stepmother, ‘What wrong sort of people...?’

‘Well, Ran for a start... Oh, I know you count him as one of your friends, but he’s still merely an employee and—’

Alex had immediately exploded, informing his stepmother, much to Ran’s chagrin, ‘Ran is a friend and, as for anything else, he happens to be far better born than either you or I.’

‘Really?’ had come back the acid retort. ‘He might be better born, Alex, but he still doesn’t have any money. Sylvie is very much in danger of developing the sort of crush on him that could totally ruin her reputation if she’s to make the right sort of marriage.’

“‘The right sort of marriage”?’ Alex had retorted angrily. ‘For heaven’s sake, what century are you living in...?’

‘Sylvie is my daughter and there’s no way I want her mixing with the estate workers...and that includes Ran... And whilst we’re on the subject, Alex, I really do think that as Sylvie’s stepbrother you do have a responsibility to her to protect her from unsuitable...friendships...’

Ran could still remember how bitterly, furiously angry he had been, how humiliated he had felt... He had made sure that he kept his distance from Sylvie after that, even if Sylvie herself had not made that particularly easy. He had been twenty-seven then, ten years older than Sylvie. A man, whilst she was still only a child.

A child... A child who had told him passionately that she loved and wanted him; a child who had demanded even more passionately that he love her back, that he make love to her...with her...that he show her...teach her... take her...

He could have wrung her pretty little neck for that... wrung it or—He could still remember how she had defied him, flinging herself into his arms, wrapping them round him, pressing her soft lips against him...

Then, he had managed to resist her...just...that time...

She had always been so passionately intense. It was perhaps no wonder that the love she had professed to feel for him had ultimately turned to loathing and hatred.

And now she was coming back. Not just to England but here, to Haverton, into his home...his life...

What would she be like? Beautiful, of course; that went without saying... Her mother had told him as much when he had bumped into her—not that he needed telling; it had been blindingly obvious even when she was a child that ultimately she would be an extraordinarily beautiful woman.

‘You’ll know, of course, that Sylvie is working in New York...for a billionaire...’ Belinda had cooed happily at him, smiling with satisfaction.

‘He’s totally besotted with her of course,’ she had added, and though it hadn’t been put into as many words Ran had gained the distinct impression from Sylvie’s mother that the relationship between Sylvie and Lloyd was rather more than that of merely employer and employee...

It had come as something of a shock to him later, when he met Lloyd, to recognise how much older than Sylvie he actually was, but he had told himself that if Sylvie chose to have as her lover a man who was plainly so much older than her then that was her business and no one else’s.

Sylvie... In another few hours she would be here, their roles in many ways reversed.

‘I despise you, Ran, I hate you,’ she had hissed at him between gritted teeth when she had first left for New York, averting her face when he had leaned forward to kiss her cheek.

‘I hate you...’ She had said it with almost as much passion as she had once cried out to him that she loved him. Almost as much...

CHAPTER TWO

FIVE miles or so before her ultimate destination Sylvie pulled the car she had hired at the airport over to the side of the road and switched off the engine—not because she was unsure of where she was going, not even because she wanted to absorb the beauty of the Derbyshire countryside around her, magnificent though it was as it basked warmly in the mid-afternoon sunshine, devoid of any sign of human occupation apart from her own.

No, the reason she had stopped was that she had been tellingly aware for the last few miles not just of the slight dampness of her hands on the steering wheel but, even more betrayingly, of the increasing turmoil of her thoughts and the nervous butterflies churning her stomach.

When she finally met...confronted...Ran, she wanted to be calm and in control of both herself and the situation. She was not, she reminded herself sternly, meeting him as an idealistic teenager who had fallen so disastrously and desperately in love with him, but as a woman, a woman who had a job to do. She would not, must not allow her own personal feelings to affect her judgement or her professionalism.

In the eyes of other people, her job might appear to be an enviable sinecure, travelling the world, living and breathing the air of some of its most beautiful buildings, able to afford to commission its very best workmen, but there was far more to it than that.

As Lloyd had remarked admiringly to her the previous year, when he had viewed the finished work on the Venetian palazzo, Sylvie didn’t just possess the most marvellous and accurate eye for correct period detail, for harmony and colour, for the subtlety that meant she could hold in her mind’s eye the entire finished concept of how an original period room must have looked, she also had an extremely shrewd and practical side to her nature which ensured that with every project she had worked on so far she had managed to bring the work to completion on time and under budget.

This was something that didn’t just ‘happen’. It involved hours and hours spent poring over costings and budgets, more hours and hours tramping around warehouses, inspecting fabrics and furniture, and in many cases, because of the age of the houses, it also meant actually finding and commissioning workmen to make new ‘aged’ copies of the pieces she required. Italy, as she had quickly discovered, was a treasure house for such craftsmen and so, oddly, was London, but always at a price, and Sylvie had surprised herself a little at her ability to haggle and bargain for days if necessary, until she had got what she wanted and at a price she considered to be fair.

This had, of course, led to her often having to take an extremely firm line, not just with the craftspeople she dealt with but very often with the original owners of their properties as well, who very often retained life tenancy in the houses and quite naturally wanted to have their say in how they were restored and furnished.

Oh, yes, Sylvie was used to dealing with sometimes difficult ex-owners, and situations where she had to use both patience and tact to ensure that no one’s pride was hurt.

It was a very definite skill to be able to walk the tightrope between avoiding hurting a prior owner’s often sensitive pride and ensuring that the house was restored as she knew Lloyd would want it to be.

But this time it wasn’t just the sensitive feelings of a property’s ex-owner she was going to need to consider. No, this time the person whose feelings, whose emotions were going to need careful handling was herself.

Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply and calmly several times and then opened them again, wiping her hands on a tissue and then re-starting the Discovery’s engine.

She had hired a four-wheel drive, not just because she suspected from the plans and other papers Lloyd had given her to study that it would be useful for travelling over the rugged terrain and the no doubt overgrown driveways that surrounded Haverton Hall, but also because, as she had discovered in the past, a large sturdy off-road vehicle often provided a boon for transporting the odd ‘find’ she came across when scouting around looking for materials for the restoration work to a property.

The statue she had found for the secluded enclosed garden of the Italian palazzo had been one such find, bought and paid for on the spot before the vendor could change his mind, and loaded immediately into her car.

Ten minutes later she was driving through the open gates to Haverton Hall. The twin lodges at either side of the gate, joined by a pretty spanning ‘archway’, had both looked run-down and in need of repair.

Sylvie knew from her homework that they had been constructed at the same time as the main house—and the house, like them, had been designed by one of the country’s foremost architects in the Palladian manner favoured by the likes of Inigo Jones.

Theatrically, the drive to the house curved through flanking trees, several of which were missing, spoiling its original symmetry, although those which remained were so heavily in leaf that they still obscured all her attempts to glimpse the house until she had driven past the final curve in the drive.

Sylvie caught her breath. Used as she was to beautiful properties—after all, Alex’s ancestral home was renowned for its elegant grace—this one, despite the shabbiness of its fading elegance, was something very special and she could see instantly why Lloyd had fallen so immediately and completely in love with it.

Set on a small incline, so that it could overlook its surrounding gardens and parklands, it was everything that the neoclassicist architects had decreed their houses should be and then some more, Sylvie acknowledged as she drove slowly towards the gravelled parking area in front of the massive columned portico to the house. Stopping the Discovery, she opened the door and started to get out.

Ran had seen her drive up from an upstairs window. She was just a few seconds short of five minutes early. Remembering a younger Sylvie, and her apparent total inability to arrive anywhere on time, he grimaced ruefully to himself before making his way downstairs.

They met on the paved portico. Ran opened the massive front door just as Sylvie mounted the last step. She stopped the minute she saw him, freezing instinctively like a gazelle scenting the presence of a leopard.

He hadn’t changed, but then why should he have? He still looked exactly the same. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the smooth warm skin of a countryman, his jeans clinging softly to the taut muscles of his long legs, his forearms bare and bronzed, the soft checked shirt he was wearing exactly the same kind of shirt she could remember seeing him wearing all the years she had been growing up. His hair was still as thick and darkly rich as ever, his jaw just as chiselled—no signs of soft, rich living there, despite the odd snippets of gossip she had picked up from her mother and from Mollie about the discreet parade of elegant, wealthy women who had passed through his life—Ran had always had a penchant for that type, women in the main who were slightly older than himself, soignée, knowing...all the things that an adoring, unknowing seventeen-year-old was not.

Only his eyes had changed, Sylvie noticed, with a sudden sharp flicker of sensation which she immediately suppressed. Oh, they were still the same incredible colour, somewhere between onyx and gold, still flecked with those heart-dizzying little specks of lighter colour and still surrounded by those unfairly long, thick dark lashes.

Yes, all that was still familiar to her, but the lazily sensual way they were studying her, the subtle but very male message she could read in them as Ran’s gaze flicked over her T-shirt-covered breasts and her slim waist in the plain blue jeans...that was most certainly not familiar to her, at least not from Ran.

And it was only then, when she countered that look with an instinctive and automatically female one of cool reproval, that Sylvie realised that one of them had closed the distance between them from its original safe several metres to a much, much less secure three or four feet.

One of them... To her chagrin Sylvie recognised that it was not only Ran who had moved so much closer and that she herself was halfway towards the front door now instead of on the perimeter of the portico... When had she moved...and how, without knowing what she was doing...? Ran had always had that kind of effect on her... Had had... All that was in the past now, she reminded herself fiercely. And just to ensure that Ran knew it too she held out her hand to him and, raising her voice slightly, smiled with cool authority as she greeted him.

‘Ran, good, I’m glad you’re here. We can get straight down to work. I’ve studied the plans of the house, but I always find that it makes an enormous difference to actually walk over a property, so...’

God, but she was so incredibly sexy, Ran acknowledged. He could feel the heat, the reaction, the response surging through his veins. He had been prepared to find her beautiful. She had always been that. But in the past it had been almost a sexless, childish kind of beauty... Now her sensuality, and his own reaction to it, hit him in the solar plexus like a blow.

As for that cool little voice of authoritative superiority, that distancing little outstretched hand... Later Ran was to ask himself what on earth he had thought he was doing and if he had gone completely mad, but at the time...

Ignoring her outstretched hand, he covered the distance between them and before Sylvie could even begin to guess what he intended doing his hands were resting either side of her waist, his scent, his heat filling her nostrils, his body and his mouth less than inches away from her own.

‘Ran!’

Was that really her own voice, that soft, husky, and, yes, somehow invitingly sensual little thread of sound, gasping his name in a slow-drawn-out moan that was more invitation than protest?

But it was too late to correct the erroneous message she knew instinctively she had given; Ran was already acting on what he had obviously interpreted her ‘protest’ to mean, his hands lifting from her waist to her arms, her shoulders, as he drew her closer, his mouth fastening on hers as he kissed her, not as an old acquaintance or a friend of her brother’s, Sylvie recognised, her senses reeling, but in all the ways she had dreamed of him kissing her all those years ago, as a man kissed a woman.

Despairingly she struggled valiantly to resist but it was useless. Her own foolish senses were doing far more to aid Ran than to support her, turning traitor and welcoming his sensual assault of her mouth with the eagerness of parched land greedily soaking up a heavy rainfall.

‘Ran...’

She tried weakly to summon her flagging defences, but the objection she tried to make was lost beneath Ran’s kiss and all the ineffectual parting of her lips did was to allow Ran’s tongue to slip masterfully into the sweet moistness of her mouth.

Briefly she tried to challenge its entry, but what should have been the rejecting thrust of her own tongue against his swiftly became, under Ran’s sensually skilful manipulation and expertise, more the intimate sparring of lovers rather than the defensive rejection of adversaries.

‘Mmm...’ Instinctively Sylvie moved closer, close enough to lean her body fully against Ran’s and let his strength support her weakness as delicious tremors of sensation skidded dangerously over her.

‘Mmm...’

Beneath her hands Ran’s back felt so broad, so firm, so...

Eagerly she tugged his shirt free of his waistband, glorying in the sensation of sliding her hands beneath it and onto the hard heat of his skin.

She felt him shudder responsively as she traced his spine and her own body jolted fiercely in excited reaction.

Beneath her white T-shirt she could feel her suddenly swollen breasts pressing eagerly against her bra. Her nipples ached and even without being able to see them she knew the crests would be hard and erect, the soft flesh around them flooded with aroused dark colour.

Ran could not see what he was doing to her, though...what effect he was having on her as his tongue slid erotically against her own, no longer coaxing but openly, fiercely demanding from her the response his sexuality wanted.

Only one man had seen her body naked and aroused, to only one man had she willingly and, yes, almost wantonly exposed the full femaleness of herself, glorying in her sexuality, in her response to him, her need for him, not fearing...not imagining that he would reject her.

Reject her!

Immediately Sylvie stiffened, her nails momentarily digging into Ran’s back as she recognised with shocking abruptness just what she was doing and, even worse, whom she was doing it with.

‘Let go of me...’ she demanded furiously, fiercely pushing him away, her face bright with mortification and confusion as Ran immediately stepped back from her and then, without taking his eyes off her face, casually unfastened his belt and started to push his shirt back inside his jeans.

If her face had been pink with self-consciousness before, that was nothing to the heat she could feel burning off it now, Sylvie recognised as she refused to give in to the silent visual challenge Ran was giving her and forced herself to keep her gaze locked on his as he slowly and tauntingly completed his task.

Why, oh, why should it be that when a woman disturbed a man’s clothing in the heat of passion he could make her feel so self-conscious and femininely vulnerable whilst he repaired the dishevelment she had caused, but when it had been a man who had disturbed a woman’s clothing she was still the one to feel shy and self-conscious when she re-dressed herself?

No wonder the Victorians had considered modesty to be a feminine virtue.

His shirt rearranged to his satisfaction, Ran refastened his belt and then, without taking his eyes off her face, greeted her ironically.

‘Welcome to Haverton Hall...’

Sylvie would have given the earth to be able to make a suitably withering response but she could think of none. The shaming fact was that, no matter how she tried to convince herself otherwise, she had done exactly what she had promised herself she would not do and allowed him to take the upper hand. And worse than that...far worse...she had... Quickly she swallowed the frighteningly familiar and painful lump of aching emptiness she could feel blocking the back of her throat. No way... She was not going down that road again...not for a king’s ransom. The arrogant, selfish, almost cruel way Ran had just behaved towards her proved everything she had ever learned about him. She was under no illusions about why he had kissed her like that... It was his way of reminding her not just of the past, but also of his superiority...of telling her that, whilst she might be the one who was in charge of the project they were going to be working on together, he still had the power to control her...to control her and to hurt her.

Sylvie turned swiftly on her heel, not waiting for him to see the emotions she knew were clouding her eyes.

‘The lake needs dredging,’ she commented crisply as she shuttered her eyes and stared out towards the large ornamental lake several hundred yards away from the house.

It was the wrong thing to say. She could hear the mocking amusement in Ran’s voice as he drawled, ‘Well, yes, it does, but let’s hope this time you don’t end up head-first in the mud. We’ll have to hose you down out here if you do. There’s no way Mrs Elliott is going to let you into the Rectory smelling of stagnant lake water and covered in mud and weed...’

Sylvie stiffened, for the moment ignoring his reference to the ignominious fate which had overtaken her as an over-eager teenager when she had missed her footing and fallen head-first into the pond they had been cleaning out on Alex’s estate.

‘The Rectory?’ she questioned him with ominous calm.

She knew from the reports she had read before leaving New York that Ran was presently living in the eighteenth-century Rectory which was part of the estate and which, like the living which had originally gone with it, was in the gift of the owner of the Hall. To judge from the plans and photographs which Sylvie had seen, it was a very, very substantial and handsome property, surrounded by particularly attractive grounds, and she had not been in the least bit surprised to read that it had originally been built for a younger son of the family who had chosen to go into holy orders.

‘Mmm...you won’t have seen it as you drove in. It’s on the other side of the estate. I’m living there at the moment and I’ve arranged with Mrs Elliott, who used to be my cousin’s housekeeper when he lived there, for a room to be prepared for you. Lloyd mentioned that you’d probably be working here for a number of months and he and I agreed that in view of Haverton’s distance from the nearest town, and the fact that Lloyd has warned me that you like to keep a very keen eye on the budgets, it makes sense for you to stay at the Rectory rather than waste time and money hunting around for alternative accommodation. Especially since it seems that there could be occasions when you might have to travel abroad to check on work you’ve set in progress at other Trust properties.’

What he said made sense, but still—she wasn’t a child any longer; what she did not need to have was Ran telling her what to do!

‘But you live at the Rectory,’ Sylvie commented quickly.

Immediately Ran’s eyebrows rose and he told her laconically, ‘It’s got ten bedrooms, Sylvie, excluding the upper attics—more than enough space for both of us, I should have thought.’

‘Does this Mrs Elliott live in?’ Sylvie asked him stiffly.

Ran stared at her for a moment and then burst out laughing.

‘No, she doesn’t,’ he told her coolly, ‘although I’m not sure why it should make any difference. You and I have lived under the same roof before, after all, Sylvie, and if it’s the thought of any unplanned nocturnal wanderings that’s worrying you...’ He gave her a wolfish grin and to her fury actually reached out and patted her tauntingly on the arm as he told her, still laughing, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make sure I get a lock put on my door so that you don’t come wandering in...’

Sylvie was too speechless with anger to be able to respond.

‘What’s wrong now?’ Ran challenged her mock-innocently. ‘There’s no need to be embarrassed at the fact that you occasionally sleepwalk... Of course, it might be an idea to make sure you go to bed wearing something, but I’ll warn Mrs Elliott and...’

He stopped as Sylvie made a female growl of frustration deep in her throat.

‘That was years ago, when I was a child,’ she told him defensively, ‘and it only happened once... I don’t sleepwalk now...’

What was she doing? What was she saying? Why was she letting him do this to her? Sylvie ground her teeth. Yes, once, when she had been initially disoriented and upset at her mother marrying again, she had actually sleepwalked, and might, in fact, have suffered a nasty accident if Ran hadn’t happened to see her on his way up to bed. But it had happened once, that was all, and, even after she had eventually developed a massive crush on him, surreptitiously creeping into his bedroom had been the last thing on her mind then. She had been far too unworldly, far too naive even to think of such a thing.

‘No! Then what are you worrying about?’ Ran challenged her, his expression suddenly hardening as he demanded, ‘If it’s the fact that you’ll be living under my roof whilst Lloyd is in New York—’

‘Your roof?’ Sylvie interrupted him quickly, suddenly recognising a way of turning the tables on him and regaining control of the situation, of showing him who was boss. She gave him an acid-sweet smile. ‘The Rectory may have been yours, Ran, but as part of the estate it is now owned by the Trust and—’

‘Not so.’ Ran stopped her even faster than she had him. ‘I have retained ownership of the Rectory and the land. I intend to farm it and to develop the fishing and shooting rights.’

Sylvie was momentarily caught off guard. It was most unusual for Lloyd to allow something like that. He normally insisted on buying whatever land went with a property, if only to ensure that as much of its natural background and surroundings as possible were retained.

‘If you’d like to follow me we can drive over to the Rectory now,’ Ran offered coolly.

Immediately Sylvie shook her head. ‘No... I want to see over the house first,’ she told him crisply.

Ran stared at her and then looked at his watch before telling her softly, ‘That will take at least two hours, possibly longer; it’s now five o’clock in the afternoon.’

Sylvie raised her eyebrows. ‘So...?’ she challenged.

Ran shrugged.

‘I should have thought after a transatlantic flight and the drive here from the airport that you’d have wanted a rest before touring the house, if only so that you can view it with a fresh eye and a clear head.’

‘You’re out of touch, Ran,’ Sylvie told him with a small, superior smile. ‘These are the nineties. Crossing the Atlantic for a power breakfast and then re-crossing it for another meeting is nothing,’ she boasted.

Ran shrugged again and then waved one hand in the direction of the main doorway as he drawled laconically, ‘Very well...after you...’

As he walked towards the door behind her, Ran paused. The sight of her had given him much more of a shock than he liked. He had prepared himself for the fact that he would be meeting her as a woman, and not as the girl he had watched boarding the flight for America, but womanhood came in many different guises and took many different forms. However, none of them could possibly come anywhere near causing the kind of devastating effect on his senses that Sylvie’s was creating.

Her hair, long and thick, hung down to her shoulders in an immaculately groomed swathe of molten honey-gold. Just looking at it, at her, made him ache to run his fingers through it, to watch its silken weight sliding through his hands...

His stomach muscles tensed. The brilliantly white T-shirt she was wearing hugged the soft shape of her breasts before disappearing into her jeans. The T-shirts he remembered her wearing had been big and baggy and invariably slightly grubby as she happily trotted after him whilst he worked.

Even to his male uneducated eyes, this T-shirt was plainly not the kind one wore to work outdoors in.

And as for her jeans...!

Ran closed his eyes. What was it about the sight of a pair of plain blue jeans lovingly hugging the soft, shapely contours of a woman’s behind that had such an evocative, such a provocative effect on a man’s male instincts?

Unabashedly he acknowledged that had Sylvie been a complete stranger to him, and had he been walking down the street behind her, he would have instinctively increased his pace to walk past her so that he could see if she looked as good from the front as she did from the rear.

But she wasn’t a stranger, she was Sylvie.

‘I’ve told Alex that if you don’t keep away from Sylvie he must make you,’ Sylvie’s mother had once warned him haughtily, shortly after her husband’s death.

She had caught Ran at a bad moment and he had reacted instinctively and immediately regretted it as he’d thrown back at her bluntly, ‘It’s Sylvie you should be warning to keep away from me. She’s the one doing the chasing. Teenage girls are like that,’ he had added unkindly, watching as Sylvie’s mother pursed her lips in shock.

It had been then that he had seen Sylvie slipping past the open doorway of Alex’s estate office. Had she overheard them? He’d hoped not. Difficult though her unwanted crush on him sometimes had been, the last thing he’d wanted to do was to hurt her. But now, as he watched her, Ran acknowledged that these days if anyone was going to be hurt it was far more likely to be him! Why had she taken as her lover and her intended partner for life a man more than old enough to be her father? Ran couldn’t begin to understand. Unless it was because she had lost her father at such a young and vulnerable age.

Sylvie had pulled open the house’s unlocked door and disappeared inside. Sombrely Ran followed her.

CHAPTER THREE

THEY had covered the ground floor of the house, walked the length of the elegant gallery, with its windows overlooking the parkland and the distant vista of the Derbyshire hills, and were just inspecting the enormous ballroom which opened off it when Sylvie acknowledged inwardly that Ran might have been right to advise her to wait until after she had rested to inspect the house.

Haverton Hall’s rooms might not possess quite the vastness of the palazzo’s marble-floored rooms, nor the fading grandeur of the Prague palace, but Sylvie had already lost count of the number of salons and antechambers they had walked through on the lower floor. The gallery felt as though it stretched for miles, and as she studied the dusty wooden floor of the ballroom her heart sank at the thought of inspecting its lofty plaster-work ceiling and its elegantly inlaid panelling. And they still had the upper floors to go over! But she couldn’t afford to show any weakness in front of Ran and have him crowing over her. No way. And so, ignoring the warning beginnings of a throbbing headache, she took a deep breath and began to inspect the panelling.

‘The first thing we’re going to need to do is to get a report on the extent of the dry rot,’ she told Ran in a firmly businesslike voice.

He stopped her. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

Sylvie paused and turned to look angrily at him.

‘Ran, there’s something you have to understand,’ she told him pointedly. ‘I am in charge here now. I wasn’t asking for your approval,’ she told him gently. ‘The house has dry rot. We need a specialist’s report on the extent of the damage.’

‘I already have one.’

Sylvie started to frown.

‘When...?’ she began.

But before she could continue Ran told her coolly, ‘It was obvious that the Trust would need to commission a full structural survey of the place to assess it, so in order to save time I commissioned one. You should have had a copy. I had one faxed to the Trust’s New York office last week when I received it.’

Sylvie could feel her heart starting to beat just a little bit too fast as the angry colour burned her face.

‘You commissioned a survey?’ she questioned with dangerous calmness. ‘May I ask who gave you that authority? ’

‘Lloyd,’ came back the prompt and stingingly dismissive reply.

Sylvie opened her mouth and then closed it again. It was quite typical of Lloyd that he should have done such a thing and she knew it. He would only have been thinking of saving time in getting his latest pet project under way; he would not have seen, as she so clearly did, that what Ran was actually doing was not trying to be helpful but deliberately trying to upstage her and challenge her authority.

‘I take it you haven’t read the report,’ Ran was continuing, talking to her as though she were some kind of errant pupil who had failed to turn in a piece of homework, Sylvie decided as she silently ground her firm white teeth.

‘I haven’t received any report to read,’ she corrected him acidly.

Ran shrugged.

‘Well, I’ve got a copy here. Do you want to continue with your inspection or would you prefer to wait until you’ve had a chance to read through it?’

Had the question been put by anyone else, Sylvie knew that she would have gratefully seized on the excuse to defer her self-imposed task until after she had had a rest and the opportunity to do something about the increasingly painful pressure of her headache, but because it was Ran who asked her, Ran whom she was fiercely determined not to allow to have any advantage over her, she shook her head and told him aggressively, ‘When I want to change any of my plans, Ran, I’ll let you know. But until I do I think you can safely take it that I don’t...’

She saw his eyebrows lift a little but he made no comment.

It had been a hot week and the air in the ballroom was stifling, the dust thick and choking as it lay heavily all around them.

Sylvie sneezed and winced as the pounding in her head increased. The bright early evening sunlight streaming in through the windows was making her feel oddly dizzy and faintly nauseous... She tried to look away from it and gave a small gasp of pain as the act of moving her head made the blood pound agonisingly against her temples.

Only rarely did she suffer these enervating headaches. They were brought on by stress and tension. Turning away so that Ran wouldn’t see her, she tried to massage the pain away discreetly.

‘Careful...’ Ran warned her tersely.

‘What?’ Sylvie spun round, colour flaring up under her skin as Ran motioned towards a piece of fallen plasterwork she had almost walked over.

She was feeling increasingly sick and dizzy in the sharp bright light. Despairingly she closed her eyes and then wished she hadn’t as the room started to spin dangerously around her.

‘Sylvie...’

Quickly she opened her eyes.

‘You’re not well; what is it?’ she heard Ran demanding tersely.

‘Nothing,’ she denied angrily. ‘A headache, that’s all.’

‘A headache...?’ His eyebrows shot up as Ran studied her now far too pale face and saw the tell-tale beading of sweat on her forehead.

‘That’s it,’ he told her forcefully. ‘We can finish this tomorrow. You need to rest.’

‘I need to do my job,’ Sylvie protested shakily, but Ran quite obviously wasn’t going to listen to her.

‘Can you make it back to the car?’ he was asking her. ‘Or shall I carry you?’

Carry her... Sylvie gave him a furiously outraged look.

‘Ran, there’s nothing wrong with me,’ she lied, and then gave a small gasp as the quick movement of her head as she shook it in denial of his suggestion caused nauseating arrows of pain to savage her aching head.

The next thing she knew, Ran was taking her very firmly by the arm and propelling her towards the door, ignoring her protests to leave her alone.

At the top of the stairs, to her infuriated chagrin, he turned round and swung her up into his arms, telling her through gritted teeth, ‘If you’re going to faint on me, Sylvie, then here’s the best place to do it.’

She wanted to tell him that fainting was the last thing she intended to do, but her face was pressed against the warm flesh of his throat and if she tried to speak her lips would be touching his skin and then...

Swallowing hard, Sylvie tried to concentrate on banishing the agonising pain in her head but it was something that she couldn’t just will away. As she knew from past experience, the only way of getting rid of it was for her to go to bed and sleep it off.

They were downstairs now and Ran was crossing the hallway, thrusting open the door and carrying her out into the fresh air.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded as he walked past her Discovery towards his own car.

‘I’m taking you home...to the Rectory,’ he told her promptly.

‘I can drive,’ Sylvie protested, but to her annoyance Ran simply gave a brief derogatory laugh.

He told her dismissively, ‘No way...’ And then she was being bundled into the passenger seat of a Land Rover nearly as ancient as the one she remembered him driving around her stepbrother’s estate, and as she struggled to sit up Ran was jumping into the driver’s seat next to her and turning the key in the ignition.

‘Ran...my luggage...’ She was protesting, but he obviously had no intention of listening to her. With the Land Rover’s engine noise making it virtually impossible for her to speak over it, Sylvie gave up her attempt to stop him and subsided weakly into her seat, hunching her shoulders as she deliberately turned her head away and refused to look at him.

As he glanced at her hunched shoulders and averted profile, Ran’s frown deepened. In that pose she looked so defenceless and vulnerable, so different from the professional, high-powered businesswoman she had just shown herself to be and much more like the girl he remembered.

The Land Rover kicked up a trail of dust as he turned off the drive and onto the track that led to the Rectory.

Girl or woman, what did it matter so far as he was concerned? He cursed under his breath, his attention suddenly caught by the sight of several deer grazing placidly beside the track. They were supposed to be confined to the park area surrounding the house and not cropping the grazing he needed for his sheep. There must be a break in the fence somewhere—the new fence which he had just severely depleted his carefully hoarded bank balance to buy—which meant... There had been rumours about rustlers being in the area; other farmers had reported break-ins and losses.

Once he had seen Sylvie settled at the house he would have to come back out and check the fencing.

Sylvie winced as the Land Rover hit a rut in the road, sitting up and just about managing to suppress a sharp cry of pain—or at least she thought she had suppressed it until she heard Ran asking her curtly, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing... I’ve got a headache, that’s all,’ she stressed offhandedly, but her face flushed as she saw the look he was giving her and she realised that he wasn’t deceived.

‘A headache?’ he queried dryly. ‘It looks more like a migraine to me. Have you got some medication for it or...?’

‘It isn’t a migraine,’ Sylvie denied, adding reluctantly, ‘It’s... I... It’s a stress headache,’ she admitted in an angry rush of words. ‘I...I get them occasionally. The travel... flying...’

Ran’s mouth hardened as he listened to her.

‘What’s happened to you, Sylvie?’ he asked her quietly. ‘Why should it be so difficult for you to admit to being vulnerable...human...? What is it that pushes you, drives you, forces you to make such almost superhuman demands on yourself? Anyone else, having flown across the Atlantic and driven close on fifty miles without a break, would have chosen to rest and relax a little bit before starting to work, but not you...’

‘That may be the British way, but it’s different in America,’ Sylvie told him sharply. ‘There, people are rewarded, praised, for fulfilling their potential and for—’

‘Driving themselves into such a state of exhaustion that they make themselves ill?’ Ran challenged her. ‘I thought that Lloyd was supposed to...’ He stopped, not wanting to put into words, to make a reality, the true relationship he knew existed between Sylvie and her boss. ‘I thought he cared about you...valued you...’ he finished carefully instead.

Sylvie was sitting upright now, ignoring the pounding pain in her head as she glared belligerently at Ran.

‘Lloyd doesn’t...he isn’t...’

She stopped, shaking her head. How could she explain to Ran of all people about the thing that drove her, the memories and the fears? As a teenager she had done so many foolish things, and even let down the people who had loved and supported her; her involvement with Wayne was something she knew she would always regret.

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