Читать книгу Passionate Possession - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

‘OF COURSE I haven’t met him yet, but, from what Don has been telling me about him, he’s going to prove a marvellous asset to us locally. I mean, all that money, for one thing. It’s a pity he’s involved with someone, though. Not that they’re married, but they are living together, at least they will be once she comes back from New York. Apparently she’s over there on some kind of secondment. I’m arranging a small dinner party…just eight or ten of us, to introduce him into the local community, and of course we’ll want you to be there. Lucy, are you listening to me?’

Lucy forced herself to smile.

‘Yes, of course I am, Verity. You were telling me about Don’s new client.’

‘Yes, I was, but I don’t think you were listening properly,’ Verity complained. ‘I suppose you’re still worrying about that stupid old man. Honestly, Lucy, why don’t you simply sell the place and—?’

‘I can’t sell it because he’s a sitting tenant,’ Lucy interrupted her patiently, ‘and I haven’t got the money to do the repairs that are needed.’

‘He must know that. I’ll bet that’s why he’s complaining.’

‘He’s complaining,’ Lucy corrected her gently, ‘because he has every right to do so. The house is in a bad state of repair, but I can’t use it as security to borrow money against to have it seen to and I don’t have any other way of raising any money. Unless I sell my flat.’

‘But you can’t do that,’ Verity protested. ‘Where on earth would you live?’

Lucy shook her head. Verity was kind-hearted enough, but she was also a rather self-centred and slightly spoiled woman who had never had to confront any major kind of financial problem in her whole life.

Lucy knew she did not really understand her own position, and if it had not been for the fact that Don, her husband, was Lucy’s boss, coupled with the other fact that in her grandparents’ time Lucy’s family had been rather well-to-do and very well known in the neighbourhood, Lucy doubted that she would have been accepted socially by Verity.

Now both Lucy’s grandparents and her parents were dead, and all that was left of the assets her family had once owned locally was the small, very run-down cottage property which Lucy had recently inherited from a several-times-removed cousin.

Lucy had been appalled when she had first heard the news from her cousin’s solicitor. She knew the cottage, of course, but she had assumed that her cousin had sold it long ago to its long-time tenant. The news that she had not done so, and that she, Lucy, was now its owner and responsible for its appalling state of repair, had stunned her.

She had tentatively suggested that old Mr Barnes might wish to consider buying the cottage, but the letter she had received direct from him had made it plain that he had no intentions of doing any such thing…of wasting his money on repairing the cottage when it was her responsibility to do so.

Lucy had taken what advice she could, and as far as she could see there was no way out of the situation. She was undisputedly the owner of the cottage.

If she had been the type to give way to tears she would have given way to them then. She had struggled so hard to repair her life since the dreadful accident in which her parents had lost their lives. She had been seventeen then, with her whole future ahead of her. Her parents weren’t wealthy, but with careful management they had decided that it would be possible for them to send Lucy to university.

With their death that had become impossible. Her father had been a lovable and loving man, but a rather impractical one. He had not been properly insured; the house had had a large mortgage, and Lucy had quickly come to realise that her tiny inheritance was nowhere near enough to support her through university.

At first she had been too shocked, too filled with grief to think of the future…of her future, but, kind though everyone was, there had eventually come a time when Lucy had realised that she could not go on living with the family friends who had taken her in; that the pitifully small amount in what was now her sole bank account was not going to last forever and that it was time for her to make plans for her future.

She had taken a secretarial course, one that concentrated on the basic secretarial skills and computer familiarisation. It had been an expensive intensive course, but very worthwhile, giving her a thorough grounding in those basics. To them she added the languages she had learned at school and then polished at night school, so that she was proficient in both German and French.

Initially she had planned to look for work in London, but, excellent though the salaries had seemed, she had soon realised that with the very high cost of living she would barely be able to manage, and so instead she had taken a junior typist’s job locally, and, taking her solicitor’s advice, she had used her small inheritance to buy a tiny one-bedroom flat in a conversion development being built on the outskirts of the town in what had once been a large Victorian house.

That, she now acknowledged, had been one of the best pieces of advice anyone could have given her.

There was certainly no way now she could ever have afforded to buy even such a modest property of her own at present-day costs. Don paid her well, she lived comfortably, ran a small compact car, took her annual holidays abroad, entertained her friends, and even occasionally splurged on good clothes, but there was no way she could find the many thousands of pounds required to repair Cousin Emily’s run-down cottage.

Her only savings were the small insurance pension she had started on her twenty-first birthday, and the few hundred pounds she had in her building-society account.

Lucy did not consider herself poor nor hard done by; after all, she had a good and very pleasant job, working for a man she liked and who made it plain that he valued her professional skills. She had good friends, enough money to get by on, and she had her health. She also had her pride, something she had discovered in those awful months after her parents’ death, when she had abruptly come to hear herself being described as ‘that poor child’, and had realised sensitively that people felt sorry for her; that in some way they blamed her parents for not making better provision for her. There had even been whispered conversations about how dreadful it was that a family which had been so prominent locally and been so wealthy should have fallen so far, almost as though her poor parents had been responsible for the disappearance of that wealth, which Lucy knew was not the case at all.

She had longed to defend her parents, to tell their friends that neither her father nor her mother had considered money to be of prime importance, but at seventeen they were still treating her like a child.

She had resolved then to find a way of standing on her own two feet, and now her independence, as well as being something she privately cherished, was so much a part of her that occasionally the braver of her friends would tease her a little about it.

Perhaps she was a little over-independent, overdetermined to prove she could manage, but her friends had never been in her situation, had never discovered almost overnight that they were no longer a loved and protected only child with caring parents, but completely alone in the world with only themselves to rely on.

If anyone had asked her Lucy would have answered quickly, and she believed honestly, that at twenty-six she was completely over the trauma of losing her parents, and of the consequent discovery of her vulnerability emotionally and financially, but the shock of discovering all the problems attached to her unexpected and unwanted inheritance had shaken that belief. She felt vulnerable and afraid again, so much so that she had broken one of her unwritten rules and had confided her dilemma to Don.

As an accountant, he had warned her of the problems she was likely to face in view of the property’s run-down state and its sitting tenant; as a friend, he had consoled her as best he could, and unfortunately, as a husband, he had discussed the situation with Verity.

Not that Lucy had expected him not to. Verity, after all, was a good friend, but she was a terrible gossip, and Lucy suspected that there could be very few people who did not know about her problems with the cottage now, thanks to Verity.

The trouble with Verity was that she did not have enough to occupy her time or her mind. Their two sons were away at public school, and Verity spent most of her time either shopping or gossiping. She also had a tendency to embroider the facts, and Lucy tensed now as she heard Verity exclaiming sympathetically and indignantly, ‘It’s all Eric Barnes’s fault…trying to make all this trouble for you…he’s been living in that cottage for years. He should have complained to your cousin.’

‘He did,’ Lucy told her patiently. ‘But Emily was virtually senile. I doubt she even read his letters, never mind understood them. I used to go and visit her, you know. The people in the home were very kind, but she barely recognised them, let alone me.’

‘But there must be something you can do,’ Verity consoled.

‘Yes. There is. Sell my flat,’ Lucy repeated grimly. She got up, putting her fragile china teacup down.

Don was away on business, and she had called round with some papers she had been translating for him. Don had several clients who were investing in properties in France, and it fell to Lucy to translate the correspondence received from France concerning these properties.

‘Oh, you don’t have to go yet, do you?’ Verity complained. ‘I haven’t finished telling you about Niall Cameron. You’d never guess he was Scotch.’

‘A Scot,’ Lucy corrected her automatically. ‘Scotch is a drink.’

‘Scotch…Scottish…what does it matter?’ Verity demanded slightly petulantly, adding quickly, ‘Anyway, as I was telling you, he’s incredibly wealthy. Apparently he’s built up this huge business to do with computers, and he’s opening a factory not far away on that new industrial park just outside Tetfield. He’s bought Hawkins Farm as well—’

‘Yes, Verity, I do know,’ Lucy interrupted her, adding wryly, ‘I work for Don, remember.’

‘Yes, but you were away when it happened. You haven’t even met him yet.’

‘No,’ Lucy agreed.

She didn’t particularly want to meet Niall Cameron either, she decided with distaste. He sounded the type of man she most disliked. Arrogant…full of his own importance, forever boasting about his achievements.

She was glad she had been away when he had moved to the area, although it seemed that she wasn’t going to be allowed to put off meeting him much longer, not if Verity had her way and organised this dinner party.

‘I wish Don would buy us a property in France,’ Verity was saying poutingly now. ‘All our friends are doing it. I mean, you pick up the most marvellous things over there for next to nothing. The Martindales have bought the most fabulous château…with fifteen bedrooms.’

‘And no bathrooms nor any running water,’ Lucy told her wryly.

She knew. She had been over in France for the last month, working for Don, acting as both his representative and a translator for those of his clients who were involved in buying French properties.

It had been a hectic six weeks, demanding and challenging; she had enjoyed the work, although sometimes she had found the attitude of Don’s clients hard to understand. Many of them seemed to have no conception at all of what the purchase of their French properties was going to involve.

In many cases the properties themselves were virtually derelict, and yet the new owners were talking happily of summers spent lavishly entertaining the friends they expected to come hurrying over from England to admire and envy their newest acquisitions.

It was true that there were some who genuinely seemed to know what they were getting themselves into and who seemed to be prepared to make all the adjustments they would need to make to be able to live in such rural communities. For the most part, though…She sighed a little to herself, remembering the look on the face of one woman when she had discovered that her fourteenth-century farmhouse had neither any sanitation nor any electricity, and that when it rained the lane to it became a marshy bog through which their immaculate Daimler saloon could not possibly travel.

‘I must go,’ she told Verity.

‘Oh-ho…got a date tonight?’ Verity asked archly.

Lucy forced herself to smile.

‘Tom’s taking me to the theatre,’ she told her.

‘Tom Peters. He’s divorced now, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Lucy agreed quietly.

She and Tom were old friends, and she knew how much he had suffered during the break-up of his marriage. She liked him and felt sorry for him, but friends were all they were.

Lucy was as cautious with her emotions as she was with everything else.

She was afraid to fall in love, one of her boyfriends had once accused her. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps the loss of her parents, coming when it had, had somehow instilled in her an inability to take the kind of emotional risks that went with loving someone. Or perhaps it was her own nature she feared; the knowledge that beneath her calm surface ran very deep and intense emotions and passions.

As she walked towards the door she gave a small shrug. She was twenty-six years old and she enjoyed being single; what was wrong with that? She wasn’t the kind of woman who needed to have a sexual relationship in her life; she preferred men’s friendship to their sexual advances, and was always very firm about making that quite plain.

She had had one or two problems at first in France in that regard, but a cool smile and the information that she never, ever mixed business with pleasure had soon solved them.

Her car was parked next to Verity’s Mercedes coupe´.

‘What on earth made you choose a car that colour?’ Verity demanded as she came out to see her off and frowned over the plain grey body of Lucy’s small Ford.

‘I liked it,’ Lucy told her. ‘It’s discreet and practical.’

She smiled as she spoke, knowing that Verity would not understand. Verity was a creature of colour, an extrovert who demanded to be noticed. Lucy was not like that.

She liked to blend into her background, not stand out from it. She smiled a little over the difference in their appearances. Verity was wearing a scarlet suit, and her make-up was equally vivid. She, Lucy, was wearing a cream silk shirt worn outside a camel-coloured straight skirt. Her toffee-brown hair was cut neatly to her shoulders, its straightness enhancing its healthy shine. Her make-up was minimal and discreet; her pale matt skin needed no foundation, just a hint of blusher along her cheekbones to bring them warmth, a touch of grey shadow around her eyes to emphasise the elegance of their almond shape. That they were a particularly vivid shade of turquoise blue was something that had always made Lucy feel slightly uncomfortable; hazel or, better still, grey eyes would have been far more in keeping with the image she chose to project. Turquoise was somehow far too theatrical, far too noticeable.

Her lipstick was a discreet peachy pink. She wore the minimum she could get away with because her mouth was, in her eyes, a little too large, her lips rather too full.

‘Why is it that you always manage to look sexy without even trying?’ one of her friends had once complained.

Lucy had been horrified by her question and still sometimes rather anxiously searched her reflection in the mirror, looking uncomfortably for this supposed sexiness, which thankfully was not apparent to her.

She got into her car and started the engine, a serene-looking woman who rarely allowed others close enough to her to guess what that outward serenity sometimes cost her.

Her flat was on the opposite side of their small local town to where Don and Verity lived, but, instead of taking the more direct route through the town itself, Lucy turned the car towards the open countryside.

The cottage she had inherited from her cousin was well outside the town, all that was left of the several good-sized farms and their lands that had once been owned by her family. The big house, the house built by her great-great-grandfather, had been demolished shortly after the war, but, from what she had seen of it from photographs, there was no reason to regret its destruction. It had been a rather ugly and over-large building which her father remembered as being extremely cold and uncomfortable.

The cottage must have originally been a part of one of the farms and had probably been built to house a farm labourer and his family.

It had a good-sized garden, now completely overgrown and something of an eyesore.

That had been another of Eric Barnes’s complaints. Her cousin, as his landlord, should have done something about the garden, he had told her when Lucy had visited him in an attempt to try and explain to him her situation.

It had not been a pleasant meeting. Eric Barnes was, in Lucy’s opinion, a misogynist. He had been aggressive and unpleasant towards her, making all sorts of impossible financial demands, but against her immediate dislike of him was the fact that the cottage was in a disgraceful condition.

The roof leaked, and one bedroom was virtually uninhabitable because of this. The house had no proper heating; just an ancient stove in the kitchen and open fires in the other rooms. The bathroom had horrified Lucy as she had surveyed the fungus-and mould-tainted walls and the cracked, grimy tiles. And as for the kitchen…She suspected it was probably a health hazard, but this was as much Eric Barnes’s fault as the cottage’s.

He had seen the swift look of distaste she had not quite been quick enough to hide when she had seen the greasy grey water in the washing-up bowl, the remains of food on a table which had looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, and he had immediately jeered at her, taunting her, making totally invalid comments about her supposed wealth and her family’s position, even threatening to reveal her negligence to the local Press.

Lucy had been taken aback by his vindictiveness. She had come fully prepared to apologise for the state of the cottage and to explain to him her own position, but his attitude had made this impossible.

Since then she had learned that he had the reputation of being a very difficult old man, who apparently conducted a series of running battles with all the local care agencies, alternately demanding their services and then rejecting them with a barrage of unfair complaints.

‘He just likes causing trouble; he’s that kind of man,’ someone had feelingly told Lucy, but none of that altered the fact that the cottage was not really fit to live in, nor that it was her responsibility.

Her solicitor had gently pointed out to her her obligations as a landlord, adding that, because of her cousin’s mental health, it would have been impossible for any real case to have been brought against her, but that Lucy was not similarly protected.

‘But what can I do?’ she had asked helplessly.

Her solicitor had shaken his head. They both knew there was nothing she could do. Not unless she sold her own home.

Lucy slowed down as she approached the cottage. It was set back from the main road in its tangled, untidy garden, surrounded by green fields. It should have looked a pleasant spot, but instead…

Lucy sighed as she surveyed it. Upstairs a window yawned emptily where apparently the distorted frame had fallen out in the winter storms. The black polythene which had been used to cover it did not present an attractive sight. The remainder of the window-frames were warped, what paint there was left on them blistered and flaking off. Grimy net curtains covered the downstairs windows. There was an ominous bulge in the wall at the side of the cottage where apparently there were some serious structural defects, and on the other side a lean-to of sorts had been constructed with a corrugated-iron roof, which was now rusting and even holed in places.

It was in there that Eric Barnes stored the coal for his fires, and he had complained to Lucy that the holes in the roof were making the coal almost too damp to use.

In the garden, overgrown shrubs and brambles almost but not quite concealed several rusting piles of rubbish, items which Eric Barnes claimed had been in the house when he had taken up occupation. The wooden gate fronting the lane was hanging off its hinges and rotting.

Her heart heavy, Lucy drove on. Even without its unpleasant tenant it would have been difficult to sell the cottage. Sell it! It would have been difficult to give it away in its present state, she admitted.

Her hands clenched on the steering-wheel. She tried to force herself to relax. She was fine-boned and slim, but recently friends had begun to comment that she was looking a little too drawn, a little too fragile.

That was the cost of her outward serenity, the fact that inwardly she worried and that that worrying cost her weight she could not afford to lose.

It was almost six o’clock and she realised that her detour had meant that she was going to have to rush to be ready when Tom came to pick her up.

She decided to take a short cut through the new business park.

The mayor had opened it less than a year ago, and she had to admit that it was well designed and laid out, or at least it would be once the newly planted trees started to mature.

Now, on a Saturday afternoon, it was relatively quiet. Most of the units were quite small; this was not a big industrial area, after all, and none of them was above three storeys in height.

One of the largest units was the complex taken up by Niall Cameron for his software company.

She had been a little surprised when Don had first told her about Niall Cameron. ‘Why on earth is he relocating down here?’ she had asked him.

‘Personal reasons,’ Don had told her. She presumed now, after listening to Verity, that those personal reasons must in some way concern the woman with whom he was living. Perhaps, since she was presently working in New York, her work took her abroad a good deal and they were reasonably close to the airport here, and Manchester Airport was expanding rapidly to provide most international flights.

Without being aware of what she was doing, she had slowed down slightly as she had approached the Cameron complex. A brand-new Discovery was parked outside it. Lucy grimaced to herself as she surveyed its gleaming paintwork.

It wouldn’t stay like that for very long if he actually moved into the farm. The lane to the farm was rutted and invariably muddy whenever they had any rain.

She stiffened as she saw a man emerge from the building and walk towards the Discovery. He was tall, bare-headed and in his mid-thirties, his dark hair lifting in the breeze. Those immaculately polished shoes wouldn’t last very long in that state either, she decided sardonically as she watched him. He was dressed in city-smart ‘casual’ clothes—a leather blouson jacket, immaculately pressed trousers, a fine-checked wool shirt—all very smart and all very expensive. Her top lip curled a little.

The right clothes, the right accent…Oh, yes, she could see why Verity was so impressed by him. He had stopped moving and he was, she realised with a small stab of disquiet, watching her. There was no reason why she should not be where she was, but for some reason she immediately panicked, putting the car into gear and almost stalling it as she did so, her face suddenly hot and flushed, her breath coming far too quickly.

She didn’t like him, she decided as she drove jerkily away.

She did not like him one tiny, little bit.