Читать книгу So Close And No Closer - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 6

AT TEN past nine on Monday morning Rue had just returned from checking her field—something she did meticulously twice a day during the height of the summer and early in the autumn, those all-important times of the year for her when even a couple of days’ neglect could mean the difference between picking her flowers at their very best or finding she had left things too late and the petals were already beginning to shed—when the telephone rang. She picked up the receiver in one hand while she poured herself a cup of coffee with the other.

The unexpected sound of her solicitor’s voice, faintly hesitant and apologetic, surprised her.

‘I wonder if you could come in and see me,’ he asked her. ‘There are one or two things I need to talk over with you.’

Instantly suspicious, Rue told him, ‘If it’s about Neil Saxton’s offer to buy the cottage and my land, then I might as well tell you that I’m not interested.’

‘It isn’t something we can discuss over the telephone,’ her solicitor told her and, sensing his determination and knowing how much he had her interests at heart, Rue gave in and agreed reluctantly that she would drive in to the local market town and see him. He suggested taking her out for lunch, but Rue turned his invitation down, explaining to him that she was far too busy to be able to spare him more than half an hour of her time. She didn’t add that she wouldn’t have been able to spare him as much as that if she hadn’t needed to go into her local market town to stock up on supplies. The village, lovely though it was, only had one very small general store, and Rue normally made the trip once a month to the local market town to stock up on groceries.

At eleven o’clock she bundled Horatio into the ancient estate car she had bought three years ago when her business had first started to grow. The car was old but reliable, its roomy rear-section ideal for carrying her stock.

It took her just over half an hour to drive into town. She parked her car in the pretty market square, empty on a Monday of the bustle of traffic which filled it to capacity on Wednesdays and Saturdays—market days.

Her solicitor’s office was up a rickety flight of stairs in a tiny Elizabethan building, part of what had once originally been the old Shambles. Now the whole street was a conservation area, the shop beneath the offices a prestigious book store.

It was still possible, from the attic room at the top of the house, to reach out from the window and shake hands with somebody doing the same thing in the house on the opposite side of the street, but it wasn’t the building’s history which was on Rue’s mind as she rapped on the outer door of her solicitor’s office and walked into the small reception area.

David Winten had originally been her father’s solicitor, and the two men would have been about the same age if her father had been alive. As always when she was invited into the tiny, cramped office, Rue was reminded unbearably of her father. He had married fairly late in life, and she had been born eighteen months after her parents married.

Tragically, her mother had died within hours of her own birth, and because of that, she and her father had shared a closeness which even now, six years after his death, she still missed.

‘Rue.’ Her solicitor’s face creased in a delighted smile as he swept some papers off the chair and dusted it down apologetically before offering it to her. ‘My dear, how lovely it is to see you.’

Rue hid a tiny smile as she accepted the chair. How on earth he managed to make a living out of his practice she had no idea. Every surface in the small room was piled high with pink-tied bundles of legal papers, files gaped open in half-open drawers, and a tortoiseshell cat drowsed in the sun coming through the small window.

‘Neil Saxton came here to see me first thing this morning,’ he told her rather breathlessly as Rue sat down. ‘In fact, he was here waiting for me at half-past eight when I arrived.’

Immediately he mentioned Neil Saxton’s name, Rue’s face hardened. ‘It’s no good,’ she told him firmly. ‘Nothing you can say to me will make me change my mind. I’m not going to sell Vine Cottage or the land.’

‘My dear child, think,’ her solicitor pleaded with her. ‘I assure you he’s prepared to be very generous—very generous indeed. With that money…’

‘I have more than enough money for my needs,’ Rue cut in ruthlessly. ‘I own the cottage and the land and its freehold. I have no debts.’

‘And no assets, either,’ her solicitor pointed out firmly, surprising her a little. ‘Rue, think: at the moment your business is doing very well, but you have precious little behind you. A bad season, any other kind of accident…’

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ Rue interrupted him. ‘But it isn’t going to happen.’

‘My dear, I can understand your attachment to the cottage and to the village, but surely there must be other properties.’

‘I’m sure there are,’ Rue agreed obediently, ‘but I suggest you try telling that to Neil Saxton, and not to me.’

‘But you must realise why he wants your property.’

‘Of course,’ Rue agreed.

‘It was, after all, originally part of the estate,’ her solicitor pointed out. ‘He has told me that he is concerned that, if for any reason anything were to happen to you, the land could be sold away completely, and that is the reason he is prepared to make such a very generous offer.’

Rue’s eyebrows climbed a little as she listened to this rather hesitant statement, hardly surprising, she reflected inwardly, in view of her comparative youth.

‘You may reassure Mr Saxton that I have no intentions of selling the land either to him or to anyone else,’ she said firmly, standing up. ‘I’m sorry. I know you’re only thinking of my future and my security, but Vine Cottage is my future and my security. I refused to sell it to that builder last year and now I’m refusing to sell it to Neil Saxton. I’m sorry if he finds that knowledge unpalatable, but he’ll just have to accept it.’

She saw that her solicitor was looking very unhappy, and hesitated, frowning a little.

‘He’s a very determined man,’ her solicitor offered nervously. ‘He asked me a lot of questions about you…about the land…’

Rue’s frown deepened. ‘What did you tell him?’ she questioned sharply.

Her solicitor looked even more unhappy, and a tiny sigh of irritation escaped Rue’s soft mouth. She should have known that a man like her solicitor would be no match for the Neil Saxtons of this world. By now, no doubt, he knew the whole sordid story of her past and the folly she had committed. She shrugged inwardly. What did it matter? He would think her a fool, of course, but what did his opinion matter to her?

‘Well, if he gets in touch with you again, please tell him that there is absolutely no question of any selling the land either to him or to anyone else,’ Rue said firmly.

‘I don’t think he’s going to give up easily,’ her solicitor told her warningly, ‘not a man like that, who’s built up a multi-million international company almost out of nothing.’

Rue hesitated, her interest caught in spite of herself. ‘What exactly does he do?’ she questioned her solicitor thoughtfully.

‘His company deals in computer software of a highly specialised sort.’ Her solicitor made a vague movement with his hands. ‘I believe it’s very highpowered, and that he himself has made a personal fortune from his own innovative ideas.’

‘A self-made millionaire,’ Rue mocked a little bitterly, ‘and now that he’s made it he’s decided to buy himself a part of England’s heritage in the shape of Parnham Court.’

As though he knew the pain that underlay her cynical words, her solicitor looked sympathetically at her.

‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said softly. ‘I know how it must hurt you.’

Rue brushed aside his words impatiently.

‘No, no, it doesn’t at all,’ she told him fiercely. ‘I’m not so much of a dog in the manger.’

Her solicitor looked at her and waited, and Rue knew he was waiting for her to explain her antipathy towards Neil Saxton. Unfortunately, it was something she just couldn’t do. She couldn’t analyse even to herself the true reasons underlying her instinctive dislike of the man. One thing she did know, though, was that, no matter what her financial circumstances might be, she would never sell Vine Cottage or its land to him.

And yet, when she stepped outside into the shadowed coolness of the narrowed street, it wasn’t with a feeling of confident assertiveness because she had made it plain to her solicitor that she had no wish to enter any kind of negotiation for the sale of her property, but rather with a feeling of deep and unwanted unease. The kind of unease that prickled under her skin and made her muscles tense, almost as though she half expected Neil Saxton to appear out of nowhere and demand that she sell her land to him.

Horatio was waiting patiently in the car for her when she got back with her shopping. She stowed it away economically and then got into the driver’s seat. She had wasted far too much time over Neil Saxton already, she told herself grimly as she drove towards home.

Once there, she removed her shopping from the car and packed it away, and then went upstairs to change into her working uniform of cotton T-shirt and jeans. The neat skirt and top she had donned for her visit to her solicitor were clothes that belonged more properly to the period before her father’s death. She rarely wore such formal things these days, and indeed, had only put them on in the first place because she knew that her solicitor, old-fashioned perhaps about such things, would not have felt comfortable at the sight of one of his female clients clad in a pair of disreputable old jeans and a shabby T-shirt. Nevertheless, these were the clothes she now felt most at home in, she told herself, pulling the T-shirt on over her head and disturbing the smooth sleekness of her blonde hair as she did so.

She just had time to snatch a quick salad lunch before going outside into the field with her secateurs and her trug, ready to start harvesting those flowers that were at their peak. It was hard, backbreaking work, especially with the heat of the sun beating down on the back of her neck and her upper arms.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, as she straightened up tiredly, she acknowledged that she ought to have worn a hat. Her head was already beginning to ache, the pain pounding in her temples as she raised a grubby hand to massage the too-tight skin. Horatio had long ago deserted her to go and lie down in the shelter of the hedge. She thought longingly of her cool kitchen and the lemonade in the fridge there.

She was just on the point of giving in and going back to the house to get some when an all too familiar male voice hailed her. Furiously she watched as Neil Saxton climbed over the stile that separated his land from hers and came towards her, carefully weaving his way among the tall spires of her flowers.

Unlike her, he looked immaculate and cool. He was wearing a pair of white cotton trousers and a thin white cotton shirt open at the throat. His skin, like hers, was tanned, but his tan was much darker, richer. As he came towards her she felt a tiny pulse of fear beat frantically deep inside her body, and she had a compulsive urge to throw down her trug and take to her heels.

Telling herself that she was being idiotic, she remained where she was, unaware of how revealing the tight, defensive look on her face was to the man approaching her. He had learned a good deal from her solicitor this morning, and as he drew level with her Rue saw that knowledge in his eyes.

Mentally cursing her solicitor for his naı¨vete´, she said coldly, ‘If you’ve come to try to persuade me to sell my land, you’re wasting my time.’

Instead of responding to her challenge, he turned away from her and gestured over to where the neat beds of herbs nestled in the shelter of her walled garden.

‘Who buys those from you?’ he asked her thoughtfully.

Surprised into giving him a response, Rue told him, ‘Restaurants, sometimes gardeners wanting plants of their own, health food shops, and even people wanting to buy them for medicinal purposes.’

‘You’re joking.’ His amused cynicism irritated her.

‘No, I’m not joking at all,’ she told him sharply. ‘After all, herbal medicine existed long before our so-called modern drugs.’

‘Well, yes, but they were hardly as powerful.’

His self-assurance annoyed her, and she had a sudden longing to destroy it.

‘Some of them are,’ she argued firmly. ‘Take ergot, for instance…’

‘Ergot…What’s that?’ She had his attention now, he was looking at her in a direct, uncompromising way that she knew that she ought to find intimidating, but which instead for some odd reason she found challenging.

‘Ergot is the fungus on the rye,’ she told him knowledgeably. ‘It used to be used, among other things, for aborting unwanted foetuses. Unfortunately, its side-effects can be devastating. Used unwisely, it can give rise to a whole range of things from gangrene to madness.’ She saw the look on his face and laughed harshly. ‘It’s still used today as a base for migraine drugs. Doctors prefer only to prescribe it for men,’ she added drily.

‘You obviously know a lot about it.’

Without thinking, she shrugged and said, ‘It was my father’s hobby. I grew up with it, so to speak.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed grandly. ‘I think I can see why a man who’s fortune was founded on modern drugs could be interested in herbal medicine.’

Instantly Rue tensed. He had ticked her—and she had let him, fool that she was, carried away by her enthusiasm for one of her favourite subjects—into betraying herself and giving him exactly the kind of lever he wanted to pry into her most private affairs. He wouldn’t hesitate to use it, she could see that in his eyes as he looked at her.

‘Your solicitor was telling me this morning about your father,’ he added, still watching her. ‘What happened?’ he demanded abruptly when she refused to either look away or make any comment.

The abruptness of his question caught her off guard. ‘To what?’ she asked him uncertainly, not sure of the meaning behind his question.

‘To the fortune your father left you?’ he answered harshly. ‘He died six years ago, apparently a millionaire, and yet you, his only child, are now living here in this cottage, instead of Parnham Court which he left to you, and apparently earning your own living—a rather curious state of affairs, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

‘To you, perhaps,’ Rue answered him in a suffocated voice, almost totally unable to believe that she had heard him correctly. His rudeness was really insufferable. She opened her mouth to tell him as much and then, to her own shock, heard herself saying instead, ‘If you really must know, my husband gambled it away and I let him.’

She faced him proudly, waiting to see the pity and contempt form in his eyes. But, whatever feelings her words had evoked inside him, he betrayed nothing of them as he said coolly, ‘You must hate him for that.’

‘No, not really. Odd though you might find it to believe, I’m far happier now than I ever was when I was my father’s heiress. I was a spoiled, arrogant child. You could even say that I deserved everything that happened to me. There’s no way today, for instance, that I would ever be remotely attracted to a man like Julian, and certainly I’d never be stupid enough now to believe him capable of loving me.’

‘Him, or any man?’ Neil Saxton asked her quietly.

The shock of it was reflected in her expression as her eyes darkened and widened. How had he known that? How had he known of the iron that had entered her heart when she’d found out the truth about Julian? How had he known that she had sworn that never again would she allow any man to deceive her into believing he cared about her?

She fought to regain her self-control, shrugging her shoulders and saying as coolly as she could, ‘It’s true. I’m afraid I don’t have a very high opinion of your sex.’

‘Or of yourself,’ Neil Saxton told her, softly and unforgivably.

She turned her back on him then, gripping hold of her trug tightly in order to stop her hand from trembling.

‘You’re on my land, Mr Saxton,’ she told him emotionlessly, ‘and I would be very grateful if you would remove yourself from it immediately.’

‘You know, you interest me,’ he told her conversationally, totally ignoring her command. ‘It must have taken guts to establish all this—’ he waved his hand over the flowing river of colour surrounding them ‘—out of nothing. To turn yourself from a dependent child into an independent business-woman.’

Rue smiled mirthlessly at him. ‘And men don’t like women with guts, especially successful women with guts—is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

To her astonishment he laughed, throwing back his head to reveal the hard, masculine line of his throat. ‘Is that what you think?’ he marvelled, looking at her. ‘Is that the reason for this?’ He reached out and touched her tightly drawn back hair and then her make-up-less face. It was only the briefest of touches, no more than a mere brushing of hard muscles against the softness of her smooth skin, but it was still enough to make her jump back from him as though she had been burned, rage and panic warring for supremacy in her eyes.

‘You’re out of date,’ he told her mockingly. ‘At least where I’m concerned. I admire a woman with guts. She’s so much more of a challenge, both in bed and out of it.’

‘Your personal views of my sex are of no interest to me whatsoever,’ Rue ground out at him from between clenched teeth when she had recovered from the shock of his unashamedly taunting comments.

‘No, I can see that,’ he agreed, and for some reason the cool, insolent way his glance roved over her body, from the crown of her head right down to her bare toes with their unvarnished nails, made her want to turn and run and hide herself away from him. Stupidly, she had a vivid mental image of herself as she had been at eighteen, pretty and silly, her blonde hair a flowing mane, her nails long and painted, her clothes the very best that Knightsbridge could provide and her head empty of a single thought that did not concern having fun and enjoying herself.

It was too easy to blame her father for her hedonistic naı¨vete´. He had loved her and indulged her shamelessly, but he had been too old to understand the pitfalls lurking to snare such a very young and unworldly girl as she had been.

She had had very few friends of her own age, and no female relatives at all. No relatives of any kind in fact, apart from her father. She had been taught privately at home and, although her father had taken her all over the world with him and had showered her with jewellery and pretty clothes, she had had no real experience of life at all. His death when she was nineteen had come as a tremendous shock, even though it seemed that the doctors had been warning him for years that he was overdoing things.

She was his only child and sole heiress and, more scientist than businessman, he had never thought to tie up her inheritance in a way that would ultimately protect her so that when Julian…

‘I came over to ask whether you’d like to have dinner with me.’

The invitation shocked her out of her thoughts. She stared at him in disbelief.

‘Dinner? With you?’ Her mouth compressed. She was no longer an idealistic nineteen-year-old. She knew very well now that, when men paid pretty compliments and spoke falsely of love, their words were simply being used to mask other desires and other needs. Men were predators on her sex, using women to further their own aims and their own ambitions. ‘Dinner? Are you crazy?’ she questioned him sharply. ‘I’ve already told you you’re wasting your time. I have no intention of selling my home.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t as a possible purchaser of your land that I wanted to give you dinner,’ he told her, enjoying the confusion which suddenly darkened her eyes before suspicion drove it away. ‘No, it’s your expertise in the art of floral de´cor I’m interested in at the moment. Don’t think I’ve given up on getting your land, though,’ he warned her. ‘I can be very determined when I want something.’

‘I’m sure,’ Rue told him drily.

He laughed, apparently completely unabashed by the cool tone of her voice.

‘My mother is coming to stay with me in a few weeks’ time. I bought the house as it stands, but some of the rooms look a little bit dreary. I thought some dried flowers might add a slightly more welcoming touch, and I wanted to seek your professional advice and expertise.’

Rue looked at him, not sure of whether to believe him or not.

‘Of course,’ he added carelessly, ‘I quite understand if you prefer not to come up to the house. I can see that visiting it might prove too painful.’

His suggestion that she might be jealous, that she might for one moment resent the fact he was living in her old home, goaded Rue into immediate retaliation.

‘Not at all,’ she told him swiftly. ‘I don’t think I have anything on tonight. If you’d tell me what time you’d like me to call—but there would be really no need for you to provide me with dinner.’

‘It will be my pleasure,’ he interrupted smoothly. ‘I much prefer to cook for someone else other than myself. It’s so much more rewarding, don’t you agree?’

And, before Rue could hide her astonishment that such a very masculine man should actually admit to being able to cook, he turned and looked at her, his grey eyes alight with amusement. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t mind some cuttings from your herbs, once I’ve got the kitchen garden re-established. It’s in a very run-down state at the moment.’

‘Yes,’ Rue remarked absently. ‘The previous owners only visited the house on very rare occasions, and it’s been badly neglected.’

She was curious to know why an apparently single man should choose to buy himself such a large house, and on an impulse she couldn’t quite analyse she asked quickly, ‘Do you live alone, or…?’

‘Am I married or otherwise attached?’ he supplied drily, making her flush with embarrassment and irritation. ‘Neither. Just as for many another successful businessman, there never seems to have been time to establish any deep-rooted relationships, which is why I now find myself in my mid-thirties and somewhat isolated from the rest of my peer group. Everywhere I look these days I seem to see happily married men with wives and families.’

‘A wife and family shouldn’t be too difficult for a man of your wealth to find,’ Rue told him cynically.

‘That depends,’ he responded and, without waiting for her to question him, he added, ‘on how high one’s standards are. Mine are very high,’ he told her evenly, which meant, Rue reflected bitterly, that if and when he married it would be to some pretty and possibly well-born young woman whose looks would be a perfect foil for his success.

‘I’ll pick you up at eight o’clock,’ he announced. ‘We can eat about half-past eight and over dinner we can talk about the kind of floral arrangements you might be able to provide that would add a slightly softening effect to the house’s austerity.’

‘There’s no need for you to pick me up,’ Rue told him sharply. ‘Heavens, it’s only half a mile or so to walk, and besides, I do have transport.’

‘I’ll pick you up,’ Neil reiterated in a voice that warned her that he was not prepared to listen to any further argument.

After he had gone, Rue stood where she was in the middle of the field, in a daze, wondering why on earth she had been mad enough to allow him to talk her into having dinner with him. The last thing that she wanted was to spend time in his company.

She didn’t like him. Since Julian’s death and the end of her marriage, she had kept her distance from all men, but most especially from those men like Neil Saxton, from whom emanated an almost tangible aura of male sexuality. She no longer deceived herself. The pretty, girlish bloom she had once had was long gone. She was not beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, nor did she want to be.

She had no desire at all to excite male admiration, and she was certainly not so stupid as to imagine that Neil Saxton wanted her company because he found her attractive as a woman. Once, long ago, she had been foolish enough to believe that a man loved her. She had paid a very heavy price for that folly, and it was a mistake she was never going to repeat.

As she bent over her work she told herself that it was stupid to waste time thinking about Neil Saxton. If there was any way she could have got out of their dinner date she would have done so, but she had to acknowledge that he was perfectly capable of coming into the cottage and dragging her out by force if he felt it necessary.

No, she would have dinner with him tonight, and afterwards she would make it plain to him that she wanted no further contact whatsoever with him.

At five o’clock, her back feeling as though it was about to break in two, she made her last journey towards the drying shed to empty her trug. The long worktop under the window was inches deep in the flowers she had picked that afternoon.

She had several hours’ work ahead of her now, preparing the flowers for drying. Over the years, mostly by trial and error, she had evolved several different methods of drying flowers according to their various needs. Some of them could quite easily be dried in bunches suspended from the ceiling beams, others needed more delicate handling, and these she spread in very fine nets which she suspended between the beams. Others still needs drying in the warmth and darkness of the heated room, and for that purpose she used the lower part of the old stable, closing the heavy shutters on the window to keep out the daylight. Some of the flowers she left in their natural state, others she dyed in the more vivid shades that were becoming popular, especially among her more sophisticated clients.

Really, this evening she should have been devoting every minute of her time to her work. Angry with herself for wasting precious hours with a man whom she already knew she ought to be doing everything in her power to avoid, Rue made her way back to the house.

It was almost the end of the financial quarter. Soon it would be time to go through her books and prepare the returns for the accountant and the VAT officials. Her bookwork was the bane of her existence. She dreaded the two or three days a quarter she had to spend cooped up at her desk, checking and rechecking the tiny columns of figures she kept meticulously.

As she poured herself some lemonade, her mind shied away from the reality of her almost paranoic dread of this quarterly ordeal. It had nothing really to do with her ability to cope with the long columns of figures, and in fact sprang from the past. Julian had worked for her father’s accountants. He had come to see her two months after her father’s death. He had been so sympathetic and charming, so ready to spend time with her and listen to her, and she, lonely and bereft in those early months after her father’s death, had been only too eager to have someone to lean on.

He had been ten years older than her, sophisticated and mature, and he had known exactly how to flatter and coax her, so that by the time he actually proposed to her she was half wild with love for him, or rather she had believed that she was.

It had taken just one disastrous night of marriage to show her the real Julian, the man behind the mask he had worn to woo her, the man who cared nothing for her at all and had only wanted her father’s fortune. As always when her memories of the past threatened to spill over into the present, she fought to subdue them, to push them away, and she was glad when the telephone rang, giving her an excuse for doing so now.

It was one of the large city shops she supplied, asking if she could let them have some extra stock. It didn’t take her long to run through her stockbook. Luckily she had plenty of what they wanted already dried.

Because she was so busy, she informed them that they would have to send someone out to collect their order, and by the time she had replaced the receiver she had got the past firmly back where it belonged—out of her mind.