Читать книгу Fantasy For Two - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

MOLLIE’S pretty heart-shaped face was screwed up into a despairing glower, her topaz-flecked sherry brown eyes minus their usual sparkle as she studied the contents of her office diary. ‘2.30 p.m. drive to Edgehill Farm to interview the farmer’s wife, Pat Lawson, re her special preserves recipe’. It wasn’t exactly adrenalin-pumping, heartbeat-raising stuff, and working on a small-town local newspaper deep in the heart of rural England certainly wasn’t what she had had in mind when she had been studying for her media degree, but realistically she knew that she was fortunate in having found a job at all. A good many of her peers had not done so and at least it was a start—a toe-hold on the career ladder which she hoped ultimately would lead to a much higher profile post, hopefully as either a newspaper or television journalist, covering all the important events of the day both at home and abroad.

It had been her parents, both of them careful and realistic in their outlook on life, and as different from Mollie with her vibrant and sometimes turbulent personality as it was possible to be, who had urged her to accept the job offer which had come up via one of her tutors at university.

‘Dad, writing up weddings and country fairs for the local rag in some old-fashioned country market town isn’t what I want,’ Mollie had protested to her father when they had originally discussed the job.

‘Maybe not,’ her father had returned equably, giving her a small smile before adding dryly, ‘You have to learn to walk before you can run, though, Mollie.’

‘At least it’s a job, darling,’ her mother had chimed in. ‘Although I wish you could have found something closer to home.’

Her parents lived in a comfortable London suburb and Mollie’s new job was going to take her deep into a remote part of the West Country, a small country town on the coast which looked as though it would be more at home featuring in some TV historical drama than being the kind of place which could produce anything remotely newsworthy.

And Mollie, if she was honest about herself, had the kind of personality that dearly loved, even needed some kind of challenge, some kind of cause or person to champion, something or someone into which she could pour all the strong energy of her femininely fiery nature.

And she very much doubted that she was going to get that kind of stimulation writing about Mrs Lawson’s family chutney recipes, even though she knew that it was the kind of thing that her mother, a very keen and skilled cook, would have fallen on with real pleasure.

She had only been in her new job—her first job—for just under a week, having spent her first weekend in Fordcaster settling into the small rented cottage which was to be her new home, and then her first three working days at the Fordcaster Gazette’s offices studying back copies of the paper and, as she had been instructed by the paper’s owner and chief executive-cum-editor, ‘absorbing the ethos’ of his paper.

‘You’ll find Bob Fleury interesting to work for,’ her tutor had told her when she had confirmed to him that she had accepted the job. ‘He’s a bit of an individualist, someone out of the common run—not entirely unlike yourself,’ he had added wryly, watching as Mollie had struggled to suppress the desire to defend herself hotly against his subtle dig.

They had had several run-ins during her time at university. She was too impulsive, too inclined to react with her emotions and not her brain, he had often told her.

‘Fleury—that’s an unusual name,’ she had managed to content herself with.

‘Mmm...’ he’d commented. ‘He’s got French blood. That part of the coast was heavily involved with smuggling during the years of the French Revolution, and the contraband they landed wasn’t always merely inanimate objects.

‘Bob’s a traditionalist who, alongside seeing life in a very individual manner, can also be very set in his ways,’ he had further told her. ‘He believes there’s a certain order to things and to people. Fordcaster is very much an archetypical English market town, and Bob represents its views and its determination to preserve the status quo.’

Mollie had listened ominously. The job was the absolute antithesis of everything she had hoped for when she had been studying for her degree, but she was realistic enough to know that it took more than a firstclass degree to land the kind of plum job she had yearned for. She simply didn’t have the kind of influence that would get her an entree into the world she wanted to inhabit—at least not at this early stage in her career—and she suspected that her mischievous tutor was deriving great satisfaction from having persuaded her to accept a job which they both knew would demand far more of her emotional self-control and patience than it ever would of her degree skills.

‘You can learn a lot from Bob, Mollie,’ her tutor had told her more seriously before she’d left. ‘Before he took over the paper—which, incidentally, has been in his family for several generations—he worked for a TV channel as one of their foremost foreign correspondents. What Bob doesn’t know about that kind of reporting isn’t worth knowing.

‘Furthermore, many of the people he worked with in the field have gone on to fill very high-ranking posts within the corporation and the media in general.’

The smile he had given her then had done much to restore Mollie’s faith, not just in him, but more importantly in herself. The job itself might not seem to offer much, he had subtly been telling her, but there were quite obviously potential opportunities that went with it that could promise a great deal.

Even so, she suspected that it was not going to be easy for her, working with Bob Fleury, and that she was going to have to do a good deal of biting on her tongue to keep her conflicting and often fiery independent views to herself.

They had already clashed once on the subject of hunting and Mollie suspected that there were going to be many other points of contention between them.

He must have some saving grace, though, because his wife, Eileen, to whom he had introduced Mollie, was a surprisingly modern-minded woman with a decided twinkle in her eye and a warm smile that belied her quite formal country woman appearance.

Both Bob and Eileen were in their late fifties, but Eileen had some very up-to-the-minute ideas and their home, with its elegant simplicity, like Eileen herself, had impressed Mollie considerably.

It wasn’t of Eileen, though, that she was thinking as she drove up a track which hopefully would lead to the farm.

She had already taken a couple of wrong turnings, the reason being that virtually all the land that surrounded the town was privately owned and subsequently its narrow lanes were bereft of any kind of sensible signposts.

Now, finally, she hoped she had found the right lane, but she was already running late for her appointment and Bob, as she knew, was a stickler for the old-fashioned kind of good manners which included being very strict about good timekeeping.

The sharp wind blowing across the Atlantic, up the English Channel and over the cliffs had tousled Mollie’s hair when she had got out of the car earlier to check on her bearings, and now she pushed it irritably out of her eyes—a dark rich red heavy mass of glossy curls which, together with her small-boned frame, gave her an air of feminine fragility which she privately thoroughly resented.

She was a modern woman, strong-minded and independent, and she wanted to be treated as such. Her spirit and her personality more than made up for what she lacked in terms of physical strength and size.

She put her foot down a little harder on the accelerator. The lane was single track only, and not tarmacked, and she winced as her small car bumped uncomfortably over the deeper ruts.

Her mind on the coming interview, she neglected to hear or see anything of the battered Land Rover coming round the bend towards her, but fortunately its driver saw her and he brought his vehicle to an immediate brake-protesting stop which caused Mollie to realise her own danger and likewise apply her own brakes.

Her car stopped just inches short of the mud-spattered nose of his. Cursing under her breath at the delay, she saw the Land Rover’s driver swinging open his door.

The last thing she needed now was to waste any more time. Angrily she pushed open her own door and got out. Whoever was driving the Land Rover wasn’t the farmer. Bob had described him to her as a man in his sixties, and this man was nowhere near that. Nowhere near, she acknowledged, sucking in a sharp breath as she took a good look at him.

Tall—taller even than her father, who was just exactly six feet—and broad, extremely broadshouldered, in the worn checked shirt he was wearing open at the throat to reveal a male vee of flesh disconcertingly shadowed by a soft sprinkling of very male-looking body hair.

His hair was black and very thick, his eyes an extraordinarily piercing shade of crystal-clear blue. They also possessed a certain steely look that for some obscure reason made her heart beat just a little bit faster and her chin go up as she fought down the odd mixture of nervousness and excitement that shot hotly through her veins.

She estimated that he was around thirty-two or three, almost a decade older than she was herself. But although his skin looked warmly tanned, suggesting that he spent a good deal of his time out of doors, and despite the fact that he was driving an extremely battered and shabby-looking Land Rover, and in defiance of the casual and well-worn clothes he was wearing, he had about him an air if not exactly of some dangerously good-looking predator, then certainly not one that fitted her mental image of a farmer.

He was far too sure of himself for one thing, far too arrogant and dominant in the way he approached her car and her, holding the door open for her in a gesture which, at face value, might seem courtly and polite but which Mollie assessed more darkly as a demeaning male act of aggression, an unspoken command to her to get out of her car.

If she hadn’t already been doing so she would have firmly refused and remained where she was, but as it was she was already halfway out, and had very little option other than to complete the manoeuvre.

She wasn’t going to allow him to think he had got the upper hand, though. No way.

Standing opposite him, she demanded aggressively, ‘You do realise, don’t you, that this is a private road?’

She could see from his expression that she had caught him off guard. He choked briefly and started to frown, his mouth hardening as he surveyed her grimly.

‘A private road along which you were travelling too fast,’ he retaliated smoothly.

He had a voice like rich, dark chocolate, Mollie recognised weakly. Very bitter rich, dark chocolate. She had always been susceptible to voices, and his was... She gulped and swallowed. His was.,.

Stop it, she warned herself severely. He isn’t your type of man at all. You don’t like dark-haired, darkbrowed, shockingly handsome and seriously sexy men. You never have, and besides...

His lordly assumption of control plus his arrogant attitude, coupled with her own quick-to-take-fire emotions and her uncomfortable awareness that she had been driving just a bit too fast, had a predictably explosive effect on Mollie’s temper.

‘I was not driving too fast,’ she contradicted him immediately—and untruthfully—and then added with what to her was perfectly reasonable logic, ‘And besides, you were driving a Land Rover, so you must have seen me coming...’

‘I did,’ he agreed grimly, adding as though to underline his point, ‘I stopped.”

‘So did I.’

The look he gave first the nose of her small car and then her made Mollie’s face burn pink with angry colour.

‘This is a private road over private land,’ she began again. ‘I have the permission of the owner to be driving along it—’

‘You do?’ She was interrupted softly.

‘Yes, I do. I work for the Fordcaster Gazette.’

‘Oh, you do, do you...?’ he said gently, but Mollie was far too incensed to pick up on the subtle undercurrent of danger held in the softly spoken but very inflexible words.

‘Yes, I do,’ she agreed, recklessly ignoring the small warning voice trying despairingly to make itself heard, its protest drowned out by the hot, angry turmoil of her need to get the better of her foe as, tossing her head, she lied bravely, ‘And anyway, the owner of this land happens to be a personal friend of mine.’

The dark eyebrows rose, the blue eyes suddenly looking coolly amused and holding an expression that was extremely cynical.

‘I think not,’ he corrected Mollie crisply, adding before she could say anything, ‘You see, I happen to be the owner of this land, and this private road happens to be my private road.’

Mollie’s mouth opened and then closed again. For sheer effrontery she had never met anyone like him.

‘You’re lying,’ she told him fiercely once she had got her breath back. ‘This road goes to Edgehill Farm, the Lawsons’ farm.’

‘To Edgehill Farm, yes, but it does not belong to the Lawsons; it belongs to me. The Lawsons are my tenants.’

‘I—I don’t believe you,’ Mollie managed to stutter defensively.

‘You mean you don’t want to believe me,’ he corrected her with a malign and very cold smile.

‘Who are you anyway?’ Mollie challenged him.

The cold smile became even colder, cold enough to make her shiver slightly, although she fought valiantly to conceal that fact from him.

‘I,’ he told her, pausing for effect and spacing each separate word carefully and precisely, ‘am Peregrine Alexander Kavanagh Stewart Villiers, Earl of St Otel.’

Mollie gaped at him.

She had heard Bob Fleury mention his name in terms of revolting awe and admiration—to her at least; she knew he owned vast tracts of land not only locally but elsewhere in Britain as well, and that he was the holder of several ancient hereditary titles—none of which had impressed her in the least when she had heard Bob Fleury talking about him. But now...

She gulped and swallowed hard on her chagrin and the impulse to deny what he was saying and accuse him of deceiving her—something, some hitherto slumbering instinct, told her that would not be very wise.

She couldn’t allow him to think he had totally routed her, though; it would not only go against the grain but would allow him to think that she was cowed, or even worse impressed, when the truth was that if anything the discovery of who he was had made her dislike him even more.

An earl. Well, she had no time for anything like that. She only accorded other people respect when she felt they merited it, and if he thought for one moment that just because he had flaunted his precious title...

‘Well, I don’t care who you are,’ she told him defiantly, well beyond listening to any inner voice of caution or restraint. ‘And if you think for one moment that I’m going to be intimidated by having you standing there like...like some Jane Austen character threatening to exercise some kind of...of droit du seigneur...’

The dark eyebrows shot up, the blue eyes gleaming with something that Mollie did not dare to try to analyse as he interrupted her suavely to say, ‘I somehow doubt that Jane Austen ever bestowed upon her male characters any kind of rights of that nature... In fact, I suspect she would have strongly disapproved of any such suggestion.’

‘Unlike you,’ Mollie retorted dangerously.

‘That depends... But since you seem so determined to cast me in the role of villain and rake...’

Before she could guess what was happening he had closed the distance between them and Mollie found she was locked firmly against his body—a body which felt far too robustly male for her feminine susceptibilities. He smelled of fresh air and the wind, and beneath the protesting defensive hand she had put out too late to ward him off she could feel the firm thud of his heartbeat and the crisp roughness of the body hair covering his skin.

He was all man. There was no doubt about that, she acknowledged weakly.

Whilst she was trying to control her unwanted and treacherous thoughts he was busily using one hand to keep her secured against his body as the other cupped her face and turned it to just the right angle for the downward descent of his mouth. He was so skilful that her last thought before his lips touched hers was that it was a manoeuvre at which he was extremely practised.

As though he had read her mind, she felt him whispering against her lips.

‘I once had to play the villain in the village pantomime...’

‘I doubt there was much playing necessary,’ Mollie managed to mouth back through gritted teeth, before the firm pressure of his lips on hers made further speech not just difficult but downright dangerous. To even try to open her mouth now, whilst it was being caressed so...so...by his, would be to invite...to...

‘Mmm...’ Giddily Mollie breathed a soft, appreciative sound of bliss as his lips stroked hers, and her own lips, her body, her ravished senses responded hedonistically to the delicious sensual mastery.

‘Mmm...’

‘Mmm...?’

To her chagrin Mollie recognised that he was repeating her soft sound of appreciation—not in confirmation of his own corresponding enjoyment of the kiss they were now sharing, but in fact as a question.

Immediately she stopped kissing him. Not that she had actually been kissing him, she tried to reassure herself as she primly filmed her kiss-softened lips against the provocation of the warmth of his breath and the tantalisingly gentle movement of his lips on hers... No, what she had been doing had quite simply and surely excusably been making an instinctive and automatic female response to the erotic mastery of a man who quite plainly knew far more about how to coax a woman into responding to him than was good for him—or for her.

Determinedly Mollie told herself that it wasn’t disappointment that was chilling her blood as he allowed her to put some distance between them.

‘How dare...?’ she began shakily.

‘How dare you, sir? Unhand me!’ he finished for her promptly.

Mollie glared at him. Now he was quite definitely making fun of her.

‘You had no right to do that,’ she told him angrily, now that she was safely out of range of the strange and highly dangerous effect he had on her senses when he was close up against her. Talk about close up and personal—but she was not the sort of woman to be misled or deceived by her hormones. Just because he was skilled at the kind of kissing that made her feel as soft and squishy inside as—

‘No? I thought you just said I had the right of droit du seigneur,’ he reminded her softly.

He was laughing at her, Mollie decided—enjoying a very male-orientated joke at her expense. Now she really was angry.

‘You do realise that what you’ve just done could be construed as sexual assault?’ she began heatedly, only to have the fire really taken out of her argument.

‘Is that why I’m going to have nail-marks on my arm from where you were holding onto me...?’ he returned blankly.

Nail-marks. Mollie’s eyes widened in a combination of embarrassment and fiery protest.

‘I did not...’ she began, only to stop as he started to roll up the sleeve of his shirt.

‘You’re in my way,’ she told him instead, ‘and I’m already late for my appointment with Mrs Lawson.’

‘Pat won’t mind,’ he assured her easily. ‘She’ll be busy looking after her grandchildren.’

Pat Lawson might not mind but Bob Fleury would if news of her tardiness ever got back to his ears, Mollie recognised.

‘If you won’t move that...that thing,’ she told him heatedly, tossing her curls in the direction of his Land Rover, ‘then I’m just going to have to walk.’

As she started to turn determinedly away from him she thought she heard him laughing, but the next moment he was striding back to his Land Rover and climbing into it, throwing the engine into reverse and allowing her to drive her own car further up the lane to where there was a convenient passing place.

Arrogant brute, Mollie mentally slated him when she actually drove past, assiduously avoiding looking at him, her nose firmly in the air. And if he thought for one moment that she had actually enjoyed his odious and unwanted kiss, then...then...! Hot colour flooded her face as she missed a gear and heard the harsh. grating sound her car engine made in protest.

Half an hour later, standing in his study in the library of Otel Place drinking a coffee he had just made himself, Peregrine Alexander Kavanagh Stewart Villiers, or Alex as he was known to his close friends and associates, reflected ruefully on his recent run-in with Mollie and mentally admitted that he hadn’t behaved very well.

His only excuse was that he had had a so-and-so of a morning, starting with a long-winded and petulantly plaintive telephone call from his stepmother complaining about the fact that her daughter—his stepsister—had announced that instead of completing her university course she had decided to take to the road with a band of travellers.

‘Alex, you’ll have to do something,’ his stepmother had insisted. ‘She’s always listened to you.’

‘Belinda, she’s twenty and an adult,’ Alex had wearily reminded her, forbearing to mention that the main cause of Sylvie’s rebellion was her own mother, and the clinging possessiveness with which she had always treated her, refusing to allow her to grow up and be properly independent.

Sylvie, in his opinion, was a very unfortunate young woman, and his stepmother would have been the first person to complain if Alex had tried to interfere in their relationship—as had been proved in the past.

And then there had been an equally lengthy telephone call from the charitable trust, to whom his father had handed over the family’s ancestral castle in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands. They had wanted to know the possible history of a tapestry which had just been discovered hidden behind a piece of Victorian panelling.

In the end Alex had had to refer them to the archivist of the family, a second cousin of his father’s who was currently living in a house on another of the family’s estates in Lincolnshire.

Like a good many other of the properties he owned, it was let out at a laughably nominal peppercorn rent. His financial advisors were constantly reminding him that by being so soft-hearted and housing not only several members of his family, including his stepmother, who lived in a very grand and expensive-tokeep apartment in London, but also various retired employees, and by paying for the upkeep of the properties they inhabited, he was depriving himself and, more importantly, the estate of income that was badly needed.

Very grimly Alex had had to remind them that so far as he was concerned there were more important things in life than money—and far more important duties and responsibilities.

The now retired employees living all but rent-free in his properties had, as he had explained to the accountants, served his family virtually all of their working lives and deserved some comfort and security in their retirement.

‘But, my lord, surely you can see how advantageous it would be if you were to revoke their tenancy agreements and either let out the properties on short-term leases at much higher rentals or simply sell them.

‘It isn’t just a matter of the revenue you are losing by allowing these people to live in them at such ridiculously low rents, there’s the additional fact that you are maintaining the properties for them. Only last year you paid for a full row of terraced farmworkers’ cottages on your Yorkshire estate to be completely modernised.’

‘I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to accept that I’ve made my decision so far as the tenancies are concerned and I don’t intend to change it,’ Alex had told them crisply.

The days when inheriting an earldom had meant inheriting a life of ease and indolence were long gone—if they had ever existed. Running large tracts of land, not to mention the properties and farms that stood on them, was, these days, sometimes a nightmare of complex legislation and red tape coupled with a never-ending battle to make financial ends meet.

Without the benefit of some very shrewd investments made by his great-grandfather, he doubted that he would have been able to afford the luxury of keeping the elegant Palladian mansion, Otel Place, which had been his father’s and was now his own principle dwelling. His great-grandfather’s money, though it might not make him wealthy, had certainly made the vital difference between his being able to keep most of his inheritance and potentially having to sell off a major part of it.

In fact, Alex now thought, the only bright spot in an otherwise extremely fraught day had been the run-in with his fiery, feisty redhead.

His? Momentarily he checked, and then frowned. She had certainly been furious with him, and perhaps with good reason, he acknowledged ruefully. He could have set her right earlier and explained who he was instead of helping her to dig the trap she had hurled herself into so recklessly.

Had her eyes been topaz or gold? He closed his own eyes—the smell of her perfume, light and tantalising, still clung to his shirt. She had felt good in his arms, against his body, beneath his mouth—warm and curvaceous, vibrant and alive.

He had known who she was, of course. Pat Lawson had told him that she was coming to interview her and he would probably have guessed anyway. Bob Fleury had informed him of her appointment when he had asked him if she could take up the tenancy of the empty cottage in the square he owned down by the river.

He had behaved rather badly, he acknowledged, even if she had invited him to do it, and there had certainly been no excuse for the way he had reacted to her idiotic charge of him using any kind of right to droit du seigneur. No, kissing her like that had been wholly out of order—and wholly enjoyable. More, in fact, than merely enjoyable.

She had had an effect on him that... Hastily he reassembled his thoughts. He was thirty-three, for heaven’s sake, and certainly a long way from allowing his hormones to dictate his behaviour to him.

No. He quite definitely owed her an apology and an explanation. He glanced at his watch. It was too late to call on her now, but he had to go into town later and he would call on her then to apologise.