Читать книгу Stranger From The Past - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

OF COURSE, it would have to be raining, Sybilla reflected with disgust as she emerged from the supermarket with her overladen trolley.

It didn’t help to improve her mood either, she knew, acknowledging that the rain had been forecast and that because she had already been running late she had decided to take a chance and hope that it held off until she had completed her shopping.

The way her life was going at the moment she really ought to have known better, she admitted ruefully as she stood under the shelter of the supermarket building and eyed the vast packed car park.

Her car was parked right at the back; the car park had been full when she’d arrived and that had been the only spot she could find.

She eyed the pencil-slim cream length of her skirt with a sinking heart as she acknowledged how inappropriate a garment it was in which to push a heavily laden trolley across a car park which seemed specifically designed not to ease the transportation of one’s shopping to one’s car, but to actively hinder it. The rain was becoming heavier; there were puddles on the tarmac, she was wearing a long-sleeved silk shirt, her skirt, brand-new expensive tights and equally brand-new and expensive high-heeled shoes.

She looked, she admitted as she glanced around, rather ludicrously inappropriately dressed for her task.

The majority of the other women shoppers were wearing comfortable, brightly coloured, weatherproof casual clothes, and flat or low-heeled shoes.

But then it was hardly her fault that her business partner’s husband should have been involved in a car accident, necessitating Belinda’s rushing off to his bedside, while it fell to her to step into Belinda’s shoes, give up her precious day off, and take over Belinda’s appointments for the day.

Fortunately Tom, Belinda’s husband, had not been badly hurt; even so, Sybilla could well understand her friend’s desire to be with him.

Perhaps if she hadn’t offered to do her neighbours’ shopping for them as well as her own she could have put off this trip to the supermarket, but Mr and Mrs Simmonds were elderly and had been so grateful for her offer of help with their shopping that she had felt she couldn’t possibly cancel the trip.

Another wry glance at the dense cloud-packed sky confirmed that the rain wasn’t likely to let up, and, since she could hardly stay where she was for the rest of the day, nor somehow magic her car to miraculously appear at the supermarket door, she really had no alternative but to accept that she was going to have to get wet and minimise the damage to her clothes as best she could.

Gritting her teeth, she stepped out from under the canopy, resolutely pushing the trolley in front of her, groaning when she discovered that she had somehow or other managed to find herself one of those rogue trolleys with four wheels that appeared to want to go in the completely opposite direction to that she was pushing in.

It was too wet and she was too impractically dressed to get down and try to free the jammed wheels, which meant that somehow or other she was going to have to control the trolley by leaning against the left-hand side of it at the same time as she pushed it.

Normally blessed with a good sense of humour, Sybilla reflected that today was most definitely not going to be her day.

She tried not to imagine what the muddy spray of water from the tarmac was doing to the backs of her legs, and was within a few yards of her car, and just about to give a soft sigh of relief, when a large expensive-looking Daimler saloon car swept towards her.

Automatically she stopped, trying to pull the trolley out of the way, but, instead of it responding to her wishes, the inadvertently sharp tug she had given it made it yaw dangerously to one side.

Of course, she made an immediate grab for it, but it was too late; dangerously overladen with the burden of her neighbours’ shopping as well as her own, to her absolute horror the trolley started to tip to one side.

As she leaned across it to try and steady the trolley it bumped painfully into her shin, and she felt the metal tear into the fragile fabric of her tights before finally toppling over.

The car, meanwhile, which had been the unwitting cause of her downfall, had stopped a couple of yards away, the driver no doubt intending to reverse into the empty parking space nearby.

Naturally enough, though, Sybilla didn’t have much time to spare to pay attention to what was going on around her. She was far too concerned about how she was going to get her trolley back on its wheels, so at first she did not pay any attention to the opening and closing of the car door, save to mentally acknowledge that it had occurred with a very soft and expensive clunk, rather than with the sharp tinny sound her car door made.

To be confronted therefore with a pair of immaculately polished male shoes, topped by equally immaculate and very expensive-looking dark-coloured trousers, startled her so much that she automatically abandoned the trolley and tried to stand up, horribly conscious of the appearance she must present: her fair hair hanging in rain-sodden strands around her face, her cream shirt and skirt no doubt liberally spattered with dirty rainwater-spots, her tights ripped beyond redemption, and her general appearance was one of a woman so totally unable to control her life that she was not in the least surprised that the man seemed to assume that she needed some help.

She would have accepted it, and thanked him for having the consideration to offer it, if, just as she was getting to her feet, she hadn’t heard his voice.

Immediately she froze, recognising it instantly, even though she knew it must be all of a decade since she had last heard it. True, in that decade it had altered, deepened, hardened perhaps…certainly matured, but there was no evidence that his years of working in America had altered his speech pattern. As the man put out his hand to help her to her feet Sybilla withdrew icily from him and, without bothering to lift her head and look at him, was just starting to say coldly and admittedly untruthfully that she could manage when the passenger-door of the Daimler opened, and a woman wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes even more expensive and less weatherproof than her own came clicking across the tarmac towards them, exclaiming in a bored voice, ‘Gareth, what on earth is going on? We’re going to be dreadfully late, although why on earth you couldn’t have got your grandfather’s solicitor to come up to the house instead of our having to trail down here into this dreary little town…’

The sharp, petulant words suddenly ceased. Deliberately refusing to look at or acknowledge either of them from her semi-squatting position, Sybilla turned her back on them and then started to get to her feet.

Behind her she could hear the woman saying contemptuously, ‘For goodness’sake, Gareth, let’s go. What an idiotic thing to do. Stupid woman.’

Sybilla could feel the hot angry colour rising up under her skin. She had always cursed its fairness, just as she had always hated her soft fair hair, longing for the more dramatic colouring she so envied in others: thick, curly, almost black hair, warm olive-tinted skin that tanned quickly and, well, eyes that were a sharp definite colour rather than softly luminous and somewhere between lavender and grey.

In the old days Gareth had always favoured girls with exotic semi-Mediterranean looks. She remembered one whom he had brought home from London with him, a dark gypsy-like wildness about her, a full, pouting red mouth, sparkling brown eyes…She and Gareth had been inseparable. She remembered how she had envied her…resented her. She had been fifteen at the time, Gareth almost twenty-two.

She suppressed the small stab of remembered pain. She had been such a child, nursing a huge crush on someone so unobtainable that her silly childish love for him had been totally ludicrous.

She had heard him say so himself. Not to her, of course. No, the conversation she had overheard had been between Gareth and his grandfather.

She had gone up to the house on the pretext of visiting Gareth’s grandfather, but in reality hoping for a glimpse of Gareth, and perhaps, just perhaps he might deign to spend a few heavenly minutes with her, talking with her.

She had used the side-gate to the garden, scrambling through the undergrowth, pausing as she’d reached the summer house and heard Gareth’s voice.

What had prompted their conversation she never knew. All she did know was that, as she’d frozen outside the summer house, hearing with awful clarity every single word of what was being said, in that handful of seconds her childish adoration for Gareth had changed into a corrosive and bitter self-contempt, a loathing of her own immaturity, her foolishness, so that in that moment it was as though she had been split in two, one half of her still being the foolish child who had so stupidly worshipped Gareth, the other a new Sybilla, an adult, aware Sybilla, who could see her folly for all that it was.

Yes, of course—he had eyes in his head, Gareth had said. Of course he could see how Sybilla felt about him. Of course he was aware of the dangers of the situation, and of course he intended to do all that he could to remedy it. It would make his task easier, he had pointed out grimly to his grandfather, if he had not encouraged Sybilla to treat the Cedars as though it were her second home.

‘I like the lass,’ Thomas Seymour had replied gruffly, warming Sybilla’s chilled heart. ‘She’s got a kind heart, bless her. This place is like a morgue when you aren’t here, Gareth.’

‘Well, you know the remedy for that, don’t you? Sell it and buy something smaller. Move closer to town.’

Sybilla had crept away while they were still arguing.

She knew all about Gareth’s desire for his grandfather to sell the large house where he lived virtually alone and to move to something smaller and more convenient; but Thomas Seymour was as stubborn as his grandson. The Cedars had been in the Seymour family since the first Seymour had set up business in the town during Queen Victoria’s reign.

That business still existed, and Thomas Seymour had continued to run it right up until his death three weeks ago.

Sybilla knew that Gareth was back, of course. She could not have failed to do so. Everyone knew. What no one knew as yet was what Gareth intended to do with the business he had inherited from his grandfather.

The two men, so close in so many ways, had never been able to work in harness. They had tried it when Gareth left university, but had quarrelled too often and too passionately for it to work. Gareth had gone to America, carving a new and very successful career for himself in the development of the kind of laser technology he had wanted to introduce into the family firm and which his grandfather had steadfastly refused to allow.

As a result of Thomas Seymour’s refusal to move with the times the Seymour business had over the last decade slowly fallen into a decline. The rumours in the town were that, now that Thomas was dead and Gareth had inherited, he would find a buyer for the business or close it down altogether.

Sybilla had refused to be drawn into any kind of verbal speculation about what Gareth might or might not do. She told those who commented on it that she really had no interest in either the business or Gareth himself, her voice losing a little of its normal husky thread of amusement and becoming instead cool and just a little withdrawn. Her too-fair skin might still betray her on occasions, but she had learned over the years how to skilfully deflect attention from areas that caused her anxiety and discomfort, and unfortunately Gareth Seymour had continued to remain one of those areas.

Of course, she was long over that idiotic crush, but the soreness, the humiliation, the sheer mental angst of discovering that not only did he know how she felt about him, that he was aware of what she had truly believed to be her own secret and very personal feelings, but that he could so callously and cruelly make light of them, still lingered.

That was when she had realised the huge gap that yawned between a girl of fifteen and a man of twenty-two, when she had actually realised the difference between being a child and an adult, when she had realised that in order for her to bridge that gap, in order for her to become an adult herself, she was going to have to become like him: cruel, unfeeling, unkind. And she had known that she was not ready to take such a drastic step, that she preferred to remain as she was, and so she had stopped surreptitiously dabbing on immature touches of make-up, had stopped trying to behave and dress in a way she considered grown-up, and had instead reverted to the safe comfort of adolescence; back to her ancient jeans and old sweatshirts, back to tying up her hair to keep it off her face…back to spending her time roaming the countryside about her home instead of poring over fashion magazines and wishing that there was some way she could transform herself into the kind of dark beauty she had known Gareth preferred.

The hair colourant, bought on impulse but not as yet used, had been thrown into the dustbin, the allure of its promise of shining raven locks ignored, the make-up she had bought with her precious earnings from her paper-round pushed to the back of her dressing-table drawer.

If her parents had wondered why, after haunting the Cedars, she never went near the place until she was sure that Gareth had returned to London, they had been too tactful to mention it.

In the intervening decade she had meticulously seen to it, then, on his brief visits home, that they never ran into one another, and she had intended to keep things that way.

However, if fate had decreed that their paths must cross she would have chosen for them to do so under far different circumstances from those occurring right now, with her virtually kneeling at his feet, looking for all the world very much like the ungainly, scruffy fifteen-year-old she had been and not the elegant, assured twenty-five-year-old businesswoman she now was.

No, she decided bitterly, today was most definitely not her day.

She stayed where she was, praying that he wouldn’t recognise her, waiting for him to answer his companion’s imperious summons and walk away, but to her consternation he stayed right where he was, ignoring the rejection of her tense back, ignoring her determination to pretend that he wasn’t there, ignoring, it seemed, everything else and everyone else.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him right her recalcitrant trolley and then start to pick up her shopping.

Both of them reached for the can of shaving-foam she had bought for her neighbour’s husband at the same time, his hand impossibly brown, his fingers hard and warm as just for a second they touched hers.

Once that casual, inadvertent touch would have sent her into transports of teenage delight, would have stirred her as intimately and erotically as a far more personal and passionate touch, and perhaps it was because of that…because of her memories…her awareness of how vulnerable to him she had once been that she snatched back her hand, curling her fingers closed, not quite able to stifle her small betraying gasp of shocked protest.

Of course, all that did was to have exactly the effect she had feared, making him focus on her and study her, and even with her head averted, and her hair swinging forward to conceal her profile he still managed to recognise her.

‘Sybilla. It is you, isn’t it?’

What could she say? Undignified and idiotic to continue to try to ignore him.

Instead she had to struggle to her feet and from somewhere find some semblance of a polite contained smile, one that acknowledged his recognition of her and at the same time made it clear that the past was exactly where she wanted to keep her memories of him.

‘Gareth, I’d heard you were back.’

‘You didn’t attend the funeral.’

Was that a hint of criticism in his voice? She swallowed hard, refusing to allow it to jar her conscience. It was true that she had stayed away from Thomas’s funeral, and equally true that she had done so simply because she had not wanted to run into Gareth. On the face of it it could seem as though she had simply not cared enough for the old man to pay her last respects, but that had not been true. She had loved him almost as if he had been the grandfather she had never had, had loved him and had respected him, even though in recent years she had become increasingly aware that his once firm grip on his business affairs was slackening…that the company was in fact going downhill.

She had made sure she was out of town on the day of the funeral.

Her father was now retired and he and her mother were living fifty miles away, close to her brother and his family. They had been away on holiday when Thomas died, and she had used their absence as an excuse to pay a duty visit to their home to make sure that everything there was in order and safe from burglars or any other damage—a weak excuse, but it had been the only one she could find, unable to face the thought of confronting Gareth and dealing with her grief.

If her friends were surprised by her decision, knowing how close she had been to Thomas towards the end of his life, they were too tactful to make any comment.

His death had come as a surprise to the whole town. It was true that he was well into his eighties, but he had always seemed so strong…so alive.

Privately Sybilla believed that, given the choice, he would have much preferred the immediacy of his fatal heart attack to a long-drawn-out period of illness, but that did not stop it being a shock to all those who had been close to him, herself included.

His only close family had been Gareth, but he had had many friends, and, even though a manager had been appointed to run the business, Thomas had still put in an appearance at the factory every working day.

His presence would be missed in the town.

‘My parents were away and I had promised them I’d keep a check on their house,’ she responded coolly now to Gareth’s comment.

She had no alternative but to stand up and confront him. He was, she noticed, still holding the can of shaving-foam…and he was looking at it in a very odd and angry way.

She swallowed hard, averting her face, determined not to allow herself to be affected by his maleness…his presence…his sheer irritating but overwhelmingly undeniable masculinity.

‘Please don’t let me delay you,’ she told him in a controlled frosty little voice.

‘You’re not,’he responded quietly and, she suspected, untruthfully. Certainly his elegant female companion seemed to think so, to judge from the increasingly petulant expression marring the model-like perfection of her features.

Surprisingly she wasn’t a brunette but a blonde, a rather cold and icy-looking blonde in Sybilla’s opinion, for surely those sharp blue eyes were a touch too sharp, a touch too hard. Certainly they were assessing her in a very critical and condemning fashion, subjecting her to surely a far more intense scrutiny than she actually merited.

‘Gareth, we’re going to be late,’ she protested a second time as Sybilla firmly turned her back on him and started to gather up the remainder of her purchases.

He was still holding the shaving-foam, and as she stood up, dropping her armful of things into the trolley he, instead of adding it to the pile, handed the can directly to her so that she was obliged to reach out towards him for it.

‘Yours, I believe.’

Something about the way he said it made her focus on him.

The grey eyes were regarding her almost remotely, his face a mask she couldn’t read. In maturity it had a hard-boned masculinity that made her suddenly sharply aware of him as a man in several ways her innocent teenage self would never have been able to be aware of. Not that she was exactly what one might describe as a woman of the world. Far from it—unlike Gareth’s woman friend, to judge from her appearance and demeanour.

There had been boyfriends, of course; dates, parties, the usual round of social entertainments, but for some reason she had never felt comfortable enough with any of the men who had dated her to allow them to get too close to her or too intimate with her, either emotionally or sexually.

She reached out to take the shaving-foam from Gareth, conscious as she did so of a certain mental withdrawal, a discernible coolness in the way he was regarding her.

Well, why should that surprise her? He had always treated her with a certain aloof disdain, even if for a while in her teens she had foolishly managed to persuade herself that there was an imagined degree of warmth, of caring in his manner towards her.

But then, teenage girls were notorious, weren’t they, for building their castles of dreams on impossibly insecure foundations?

She couldn’t really blame Gareth for deriding her foolish adoration of him, but she was determined never to allow him or anyone else to affect her emotions so dangerously again, and, even more importantly, to make it abundantly clear to him that, however foolish she might have been at fifteen, that foolishness was now safely behind her.

The teenager Sybilla had been had lost no opportunity to be with him, seeking him out on the flimsiest of excuses, haunting the house where he had grown up under the guardianship of his grandfather, hanging adoringly and blushingly on his every word…silently begging him to notice her…to want her…to love her.

But that teenager no longer existed. Firmly from the moment she had overheard and realised that he knew how she felt about him, and that it was the subject of open discussion between himself and his grandfather, she had been determined to show him that he was wrong, that he meant nothing to her, and it was for this reason that she had so strictly adhered to her resolve to ensure that she never came into any kind of contact with him, either by accident or design.

At least no one could ever claim that today’s unfortunate accident could be anything other than an unwanted coincidence. Not even Gareth himself.

She took a box of tissues from him, almost snatching at it in her desire to escape from him just as soon as she could. And why on earth the sight of a can of Mr Simmonds’ shaving-foam should cause him to glare at her so disapprovingly, she really didn’t know.

‘Oh, do come on, Gareth.’

The blonde was glowering at her now, making it plain how she regarded her, her hand reaching possessively for Gareth’s arm, scarlet nails gleaming dangerously against his suit-clad arm.

‘You know you’re mentioned in the will?’

Sybilla had almost turned away from him, but his curt, almost acid words stopped her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed tonelessly, without looking at him. Henry Grieves, Thomas’s solicitor, had already been in touch with her about the collection of Dresden figures, which Thomas had directed were to be hers.

She had been a little girl of no more than six or seven the first time she had seen the figures and fallen in love with them. Now she blinked away emotional tears, trying not to remember how at Christmas Thomas had told her that he had left them to her.

He had always said that eventually the figures were to be hers, but she had treated his comments as a joke, knowing how valuable they were, and knowing also that Thomas knew that her love for them had been formed in the days when she had had no knowledge at all of their financial worth.

In many ways she would have preferred that he had not left them to her, even though she appreciated that they had been a gift of love.

Now though, sensitively suspecting that Gareth was somehow criticising her…perhaps even suggesting that she had pressurised Thomas into leaving her such a valuable gift, she tensed defensively.

‘I only mention it because you haven’t come to collect the figures.’

His mildness confused her, coming so quickly after his earlier apparent coldness.

She couldn’t tell him that the reason she hadn’t been up to the house was because she had known he was there.

In the distance a church clock struck the hour, causing Gareth to frown. ‘I have to go now, but…we really ought…’

‘Gareth, for goodness’ sake…’

Sybilla was already turning away from him, determinedly pushing her trolley in the direction of her own car. She was, she discovered, trembling slightly, her legs oddly weak.

She told herself it was the shock of her trolley’s overturning, but in her heart of hearts she knew it was more than that. That the reason for her unfamiliar and unwanted weakness lay with the six-feet-odd of lean hardened maleness she had just walked away from.

Shaking because of one inadvertent meeting with Gareth Seymour. Ridiculous. She had stopped being vulnerable to him or any other man when she was fifteen years old. Hadn’t she?