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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?
CHAPTER TWO
OF COURSE, Sybilla could not now go straight into the office as she had originally planned. She would have to go home and change her clothes, do something about her damp hair, and generally make herself look a bit more like the efficient and well-groomed businesswoman she purported to be, before she went through Belinda’s diary and dealt with her workload for the day.
Fortunately, Belinda’s first appointment wasn’t until lunchtime, according to their shared secretary.
Five years ago, when the two girls had decided to start up an agency providing temporary secretarial services, neither of them had envisaged how successful they were going to be. The town had been very small and parochial in those days, and it had only been with the opening up of a new motorway system and the consequent increase in small businesses establishing themselves in the newly developed business park just outside the town that the whole area had become more prosperous. Now, in addition to having on their books twenty very proficient secretaries, they could also provide clients with a wide range of other staff, including computer-operators and programmers.
Sensibly so far they had concentrated on ploughing back the profits they’d made into the business and on expanding it slowly and carefully, and only the previous week they had been approached by their local newspaper, who were keen to include them in an article they planned to run on successful local enterprises.
One of the drawbacks of running one’s own business, as Sybilla had discovered, was that it left little time for social and leisure activities.
She had a good circle of friends, some from her schooldays, others she had made since through the business; at least twice a week she attempted to visit the town’s new leisure centre and spend an hour or more in the swimming pool there, but of late she had found that the demands of their growing business meant that she had less and less free time.
Belinda had said ruefully just the other day that her husband and two teenage children were beginning to complain that they never saw her, and had told her friend, ‘It’s not so bad for me, but you don’t seem to have any social life at all these days, and you know what they say about all work and no play…’
Sybilla had laughed, but too many of her friends were beginning to make the same comments to her, and only last week the next-door neighbours, for whom she had done this morning’s shopping, had warned her that she was never going to find herself a nice young man and settle down if she wasn’t careful.
Because she liked and respected the Simmondses, Sybilla had refrained from telling them that she was quite happy as she was. Perhaps she had an over-jaundiced view of the male sex, but it seemed to her that, even in this day and age, once a woman was married and had children it became incumbent on her to juggle so many demanding roles that Sybilla felt it was small wonder that so many potentially very successful career women found themselves abandoning the unequal struggle of competing successfully with their male colleagues for promotion at the same time as they tried to meet the demands of their husbands and children.
When she fell in love she would feel differently, Belinda had told her when she’d voiced this view to her, agreeing that, without that leavening magic, to an outsider it could seem that it was always the woman who seemed to have the responsibility for making relationships work, for keeping life harmonious and happy.
Sybilla had contented herself with lifting a cynical eyebrow. She knew quite well that to those who thought they knew her she represented something of an enigma. With her close friends she was warm and affectionate; to those who needed her help—like her neighbours, like Thomas Seymour—she gave it generously and happily, but when it came to men, especially those who indicated that they found her attractive and wanted to get to know her better, she was cool and off-putting.
She knew that her friends presumed that this was because she had dedicated herself to her career and that there was no room in her life for a man who might demand too much from her.
But the truth was that she was afraid of allowing herself to become emotionally involved with anyone.
She had seen too many marriages and relationships break up under the kind of strain that her own responsibility to the business would put on her to want to risk the same thing happening to her. The truth was that, for all her outward demeanour, at heart she was still the same idiotically romantic girl she had been at fifteen.
When she loved she wanted it to be completely and without reserve; and she wanted it to be forever.
Logic told her that she was being both na?ve and foolish, and that in setting such impossibly high goals for herself she was almost deliberately making it impossible for her to form any kind of man-to-woman relationship. Instead of lowering her ideals a little and accepting reality she was deliberately withholding from herself the pleasure and happiness she might have found by doing so, and all because she was still punishing herself for being such a fool over Gareth.
She had been fifteen, for heaven’s sake. Little more than a child. All right, so she had behaved embarrassingly and idiotically, but she wasn’t the only girl who had ever had a crush on someone. All right, so it was unfortunate that Gareth had realised how she’d felt, but that was no reason for her to feel that to allow any man to believe she cared for him was to open herself to humiliation and hurt.
Mentally she might be twenty-five, she acknowledged wearily as she parked her car in her drive, but emotionally she was still trapped in the time-warp of the girl she had been at fifteen. Not an admission she liked making, even to herself.
Ten years on and she was still afraid of making a fool of herself over another man in the way she had done over Gareth Seymour.
Perhaps Belinda was right. Perhaps if she actually was to fall in love…But in order to allow herself to fall in love she would need first to feel secure in her relationship with the man concerned, and before that could happen…
She sighed to herself as she got out of her car. If Belinda were privy to her thoughts no doubt she would tell her that she was trying to put the cart before the horse, and chide her that one did not allow oneself to fall in love…that love was an inescapable force, too powerful to resist.
Her house was one of a small row of traditionally built stone cottages a mile or so outside the town.
She had bought it three years ago when her parents had moved away; it was large enough for her needs but small enough not to overwhelm her, and, best of all, it had a long back garden, with views from the upstairs windows of the surrounding countryside.
Most of her neighbours were retired couples, although in recent months two young married couples had moved into the terrace, both of them working for the new companies springing up in the town.
The neighbours for whom she had been shopping were both in their eighties and very independent. They had two sons and a daughter, and several grown-up grandchildren, but their daughter and her family now lived in Australia, and their sons lived too far away from them to be able to do much more than visit a handful of times a year, so Sybilla had found that she had taken on the role of an ‘adopted’ granddaughter to her neighbours.
Now, as she headed for her own back door, Emily Simmonds had obviously seen her and came out of her own house, exclaiming, ‘Heavens! What on earth has happened to you?’
Sybilla quickly explained her trauma with the shopping trolley, but had to refuse Emily’s compensatory offer of a cup of tea, saying that she had to get changed and rush back to her office.
Once she had carried Emily’s shopping into her kitchen for her, she hurried back to her own house, hastily unpacking and storing away her own purchases before running upstairs and into her bedroom.
The image thrown back to her by the full-length mirror there confirmed her worst fears about her appearance.
Her hair had dried now, but the rain had destroyed the sleek silkiness of its normal style and it would have to be rewashed, her skirt was spattered with mud-stains and would have to be cleaned, and as for her shirt…the front of it was still slightly damp, and to her chagrin she realised that where the fine fabric was clinging to her body it had become virtually transparent. The bra she was wearing beneath it was silk too, and her face flamed with angry colour as she realised that in all probability the rain had soaked through that as well, and that Gareth must have…
She swallowed hard, telling herself fiercely that she was a fool and worse if she thought for one single moment that Gareth Seymour would have had the slightest interest in looking at her body either clothed or unclothed.
It didn’t take her long to change and redo her hair, and within the hour she was parking her car outside the office she and Belinda rented in the centre of the town.
‘Sorry about the delay,’ she apologised to Meg as she hurried in.
‘No problem,’ the other girl assured her. ‘Oh, and Belinda rang in to say that Tom’s fine, and that she’ll be back in tomorrow if you want to take your day off then. I’ve been through her diary for you. She’s got a lunch booked for today with Talbot Engineering. Ray Lewis from Talbot Engineering.’
Sybilla’s heart sank. Ray Lewis was a very good client, but as a man…From the moment they had met he had made it plain to her that he wanted more than a business relationship with her, but he was a married man, and even if he hadn’t been he was not the type to appeal to her. She realised that his personal good looks and smooth charm might have deceived another woman, but to her they were simply a mask he used to conceal his insincerity and sexual greed.
She had met his wife and had instantly felt sorry for her. It was plain that she adored her husband, and equally plain that she was terrified of losing him, as she most probably would do, Sybilla thought cynically.
Ray Lewis was a rich and successful man, and he was the kind of man to whom loyalty…love…the promises he had made in marriage meant nothing. Sooner or later he would start looking around for a woman he could show off…the kind of woman a man of his financial success ought to have as a wife. Until then, no doubt, he would content himself with a series of unimportant little affairs…but one day…
Sybilla’s mouth curled in disgust. She had made it as plain to him as she knew how that the only relationship she was interested in having with him was limited strictly to business, but he had refused to take the hint, and because of this she and Belinda had agreed that he would become Belinda’s client.
Socially it wasn’t always possible for her to avoid him, but she had begun to hope that he had at last taken the hint. The last thing she wanted to do was to have lunch with him, but Meg was saying quickly, ‘He’s thinking of expanding the company, and he wants us to provide him with extra part-time staff while he gets things off the ground. I know that when he made the appointment he told Belinda that this was the only day he had available as he was involved in negotiations with his bank for the rest of the week.’
It was the kind of business they just could not afford to turn down. She had, Sybilla acknowledged, no real option other than to take Belinda’s place over lunch.
The morning was already virtually gone, and as soon as she had gone through the post it was time for her to leave for her lunch appointment.
Belinda had arranged to meet Ray Lewis at a very popular and very expensive restaurant some miles outside the town. It was the kind of place that was favoured by the well-heeled business fraternity during the day, and the local ‘in’ crowd at night.
Privately Sybilla found the atmosphere rather oppressive and rich; she preferred both a less rarefied atmosphere and a plainer diet, but it was typical of the kind of place Ray Lewis would choose…the kind of place designed to impress.
She had changed into a smart navy suit and a fresh silk shirt. Outside it was still raining but this time she was prepared. Her navy pumps and tights wouldn’t show the rainspots, and she was armed with her umbrella just in case she had difficulty in parking outside the restaurant.
‘I’ve no idea what time I’ll be back, although I’ll try to keep it as short as possible,’ she promised Meg.
The other girl laughed and suggested mischievously, ‘I could, if you like, telephone you at the restaurant.’
Sybilla groaned. ‘No…don’t you dare. It’s the kind of place where they bring the phone to the table. Horrendous.’
She was a few minutes later arriving at the restaurant than she had planned. The bar was full, but she could see Ray Lewis. He was standing with a group of people and had his back to her.
As she approached him he turned round and, on seeing her, exclaimed loudly, ‘Sybilla!’
And then, before she could stop him, he had taken her in his arms and was kissing her on the mouth.
As she froze with anger and rejection he whispered in her ear, ‘I knew that sooner or later you’d start to see things my way. You and I—’
‘Belinda isn’t available. It was too late to cancel and so I’m taking her place,’ Sybilla told him curtly. She couldn’t create a scene here in this crowded bar, however much she deplored Ray’s behaviour. Nor could she take the risk of publicly humiliating him, much as she would have liked to do so, for his wife’s sake if not for her own.
As she tried to manoeuvre herself away from him he held on to her, taking a very obvious delight in refusing to let her go.
She could feel both her temper and her embarrassment increasing, but refused to allow him to see it, instead saying coolly, ‘I suggest you let me go, Ray. We’re being watched, and I don’t think you’d want your wife…’
She didn’t have to continue. He was already releasing her and stepping back from her. He really was a most despicable man, she reflected, refusing to give in to the craven impulse to look quickly around the bar to see who might have witnessed his unpleasant behaviour. She could only hope that none of their other clients had seen it.
‘If I’d known I was going to have the pleasure of your company I’d have arranged to take you out to dinner. Somewhere very private and very discreet, if you take my meaning.’
Sybilla most certainly did. She made no attempt to hide her revulsion from him as she told him curtly, ‘This is a business lunch, Mr Lewis, nothing more.’
‘Hey, come on, what’s with the “Mr Lewis”? And as for all that crap about business…you and I both know that potentially we’ve got a lot more than business going for us. I like you, Sybilla. I like you one hell of a lot. You’re a very desirable woman. A very successful woman. Some men might find that threatening, but not me. In fact…’ He was reaching out towards her again, and instinctively she stepped backwards, tensing as she bumped into someone.
As she turned her head to apologise to them she heard Ray adding sickeningly, ‘I find it a turn on. I find you a turn on.’
And she knew that the person standing behind her had heard him as well.
Trying not to let either her embarrassment or her anger show, she forced a polite smile to her lips and turned round properly to apologise. And then her face froze as she saw that the man she had bumped into was Gareth Seymour.
Her apology died in her throat. The look he was giving her was contemptuously disdainful, the way he withdrew from any further physical contact with her bringing a hot wash of colour to sting her face.
This was the last person she would have wanted to witness Ray’s unwanted advances towards her. Twice in one day now she had been humiliated in front of Gareth; twice she had been made to feel a fool in front of him.
At her side, Ray was asking her what she wanted to drink. Automatically she told him mineral water, unable to drag her eyes away from Gareth’s face and the cold contempt so plainly portrayed there.
‘Oh, come on. You can have something more exciting than that,’ Ray was pressing her.
She shook her head. She rarely touched alcohol and never when she was involved both in business discussions and driving, but Ray was one of those men who seemed to think it clever to insist on overruling anyone who refused a drink, and she suspected that in the end she would be forced to give in and let him buy her a drink she didn’t want and had no intention of consuming.
‘I know this is supposed to be a business lunch, but there’s no law that says we can’t combine business with pleasure, and you know already how much I’d like to give you pleasure,’ Ray was saying suggestively and far too loudly. Certainly loudly enough for Gareth to have heard him, to judge from the look of distaste that crossed his face.
As she started to turn away from him he said curtly to her, ‘The owner of the shaving-foam, presumably. I can’t say I’m impressed by your choice of…friends these days, Sybilla.’
It was outrageous, unforgivable, and totally and completely uncalled for that he should make such a comment to her. They hadn’t seen one another for ten years; they were virtually strangers to one another, and he had no right, absolutely no right at all to pass criticism on her regarding matters about which he was completely uninformed and completely wrong!
She was halfway to opening her mouth to tell him so when she realised what she was doing. Quarrelling with Gareth, and in public too, was the last thing she needed. Far better to treat his unfounded and ill-judged condemnation of her with the contempt he seemed to think she deserved.
Even so, as she turned away from him she couldn’t resist saying under her breath, ‘Fortunate for me, then, isn’t it, that your opinion of me…or my friends doesn’t rate very highly in my personal scale of life’s vital statistics?’ And then, as she caught sight of the woman she had seen with him earlier in the day coming towards them, she added for good measure, ‘As it happens, I wasn’t too impressed with your friend either. Scarlet nail-polish at nine o’clock in the morning is rather overdoing things a little, isn’t it?’
With that she turned back to Ray and said quickly, ‘I’m rather hungry and short of time. Do you mind if we go straight into the restaurant?’
Before he could object she started to walk towards the restaurant, praying that Ray would follow her.
Of all the people to have run into. And why, oh, why had she allowed herself to be baited into that extraordinary and totally out-of-character bitchiness about his woman friend? It had been completely unnecessary…completely over the top. The smart thing, the sensible thing to do would have been to quietly ignore his gibe and just walk away from him. Instead of which she had had not just to go running headlong into trouble, but to actually verbally invite it. Even in the white heat of her resentment and anger she had been able to see that Gareth hadn’t been too pleased by her attack on his woman friend, and who in his shoes could blame him?
She remembered how overawed and diminished she had felt by the girls he used to bring home, how young and vulnerable she had felt in comparison, and wondered a little grimly if it had been those old memories, memories she ought to have rooted out and destroyed long, long ago, which had been responsible for today’s outburst.
Whatever the cause, it was pointless regretting it now. All she could do was to hope that she and Gareth did not come into contact with one another again.
With a bit of luck they shouldn’t do so. He, after all, couldn’t be staying around for very long. He would doubtless arrange for Thomas’s business to be put up for sale or perhaps even closed down, and he would then return to America, and she doubted that anyone in the town would ever see him again. Over the last few years it had been only his love for his grandfather that had brought him back, and now that Thomas was dead…
Despite the fact that Gareth had refused to join the family business, had wanted to make his own way in life, he and Thomas had always remained close. Always after his visits Thomas was full of what he had done…what he had achieved. Sybilla had nerved herself to listen to Thomas singing his praises because she knew how much he meant to the older man.
After Gareth’s parents had been killed in an accident Thomas had brought him up, and there was a very, very strong bond between them.
Once, na?vely, she had asked Thomas if he had not been upset by Gareth’s decision to branch out on his own, but wisely Thomas had told her that Gareth must have the right to define and shape his own life, and that to try and keep him within the confines of their small town when he wanted to be elsewhere would be to destroy the bonds between them and would eventually destroy their relationship completely.
She hadn’t understood that then, at seventeen, but she did now. She had already heard from those who had been there how grim-faced Gareth had been at the funeral, and how obvious it had been to the onlookers that he was deeply upset by the loss of his grandfather, even though he had kept his emotions under control.
