Penny Jordan Collection: Just One Night (16 page)

‘I thought you hated me,’ Sylvie whispered. ‘You were so angry with me when I came to Otel Place with Wayne and the travellers.’

‘That wasn’t anger, it was jealousy,’ Ran told her dryly. ‘You’ll never know how many, many times the only thing that kept you out of my bed was that “anger”. It was either alienate you or...’

‘Why didn’t you...? Why didn’t you take me to bed then? You must have known how much I wanted it, how much I wanted
you
,’ Sylvie said.

‘No. No, I didn’t. Oh, yes, I knew you’d had a crush on me at one stage, but when I saw you with Wayne, when you told me that you wanted him...’

‘I thought you were rejecting me. I had my pride, you know,’ Sylvie told him ruefully. ‘You’d pushed me away so many times before—’

‘For your own sake,’ Ran interrupted her. ‘As your mother had already pointed out to me, I had nothing to offer you.’

‘
Nothing
...?’ Sylvie protested emotionally, her eyes shining with suppressed tears. ‘You had
everything
, Ran, were
everything
to me...still are everything.’

As he took her in his arms and kissed her, white petals from the roses drifted down onto them both.

‘Like confetti,’ Ran said softly when he finally, reluctantly lifted his mouth from hers. ‘Traditionally we should be married from the private chapel at Haverton Hall, but it’s badly in need of restoration and I can’t wait that long.’ As he kissed her again he whispered against her mouth, ‘Perhaps our first child can be christened there.’

Immediately Sylvie opened her eyes.

‘You know...about that,’ she guessed. ‘You...you felt it too...’

‘Yes,’ Ran acknowledged. ‘How could we have been such fools, Sylvie, so blind? Surely that alone should have told us both, shown us both. What we shared that night, what we
created
, could only have come from mutual love.’

‘Yes,’ Sylvie admitted huskily. ‘I still can’t quite believe it...’ she added, brushing white rose petals off his arms. ‘It’s...it’s still so... It’s less than an hour since I thought that I’d be driving away from Haverton and you, for ever. What made you come back? What—?’

‘You did,’ he told her promptly, and then relented when he saw her face.

‘Mollie talked to me...made me think...see...’

‘Mollie? But she never said a word when she rang me—’ Sylvie began indignantly, and then stopped. ‘Oh, Ran,’ she whispered, ‘I can’t bear to think how close we came to...to not having this...not having one another.’

‘It wouldn’t have ended here,’ Ran comforted her.

‘I don’t know what Lloyd’s going to say when I tell him that I’ve changed my mind and I want to stay at Haverton...’

‘For ever,’ Ran told her.

‘For ever,’ Sylvie agreed.

‘Let’s go inside,’ Ran said abruptly, ‘I want to hold you...make love with you...
show
you how much I love you...how much I need you.’

Ten minutes later, as she lay in his arms on his bed, tracing the strong shape of his nose, she told him huskily, ‘There’s only ever been you, Ran. I couldn’t bear...didn’t want...’

‘Do you think it’s been any different for me?’ he demanded rawly.

Uncertainly Sylvie looked at him.

‘But you’re a man,’ she protested. ‘There was always someone...one of your sophisticated women-friends...’

‘
Friends
, yes,’ Ran agreed, ‘but lovers, no. Oh, I had some meaningless encounters in the early days, but I’ve not slept with anyone for a long time. It isn’t so very much different for a man, Sylvie, not when he loves a woman the way I love you. Perhaps that was part of the reason why... Will it be a boy or a girl, do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sylvie answered. ‘What I do know, though, is that he or she will be a creation of our love.’

‘We shall have to marry quickly and quietly,’ Ran told her. ‘Your mother won’t like that...’

‘I’d like to be married at Otel Place,’ Sylvie said softly. ‘Where we first met. I do like this room, Ran,’ she added dreamily. ‘It’s very you.’

‘Do you? I’m very glad to hear that since from now on you’re going to be seeing an awful lot of it,’ Ran told her mock-solemnly before drawing her down against him and cupping her face so that he could kiss her.

* * *

They were married five weeks later at Otel Place with just their immediate family in attendance and, of course, Lloyd, whom Sylvie had especially wanted to be there.

Alex gave her away whilst her mother, who had been overjoyed to discover that she was to marry Ran, sobbed into her handkerchief. Alex and Mollie’s child was their only attendant, carrying the ring with solemn determination on a velvet cushion embroidered with Ran’s family’s arms. Sylvie’s dress was cream and gold.

‘White has never suited me,’ she had told Mollie, adding, tongue-in-cheek, ‘Besides, it wouldn’t be appropriate.’

‘I should hope not,’ Mollie had agreed. ‘After the years you and Ran have been apart, I’m surprised he let you out of bed long enough to
get
married,’ she’d added forthrightly.

Sylvie had laughed and then asked demurely, ‘What makes you think that he’s the one keeping me in bed? I love him so much, Mollie,’ she’d added seriously, ‘and it’s all thanks to you that we’re together.’

‘Well, don’t try to repay me by naming this after me,’ Mollie had warned her as she’d gently patted Sylvie’s still flat stomach.

Sylvie had stared at her.

‘You know? But how...? I...’

‘I saw the colour you turned at breakfast the other morning,’ Mollie had told her wryly. ‘And besides... Well, let’s just say that Ran has that certain look about him. He loves you so much, Sylvie.’

Involuntarily Sylvie’s glance now went to her new husband, her heart starting to thud heavily. Much as she loved her family, right now the
only
person she wanted was Ran. Quietly she made her way towards where he was talking with Alex, linking her arm through his as she suggested softly, ‘Let’s go home, Ran...’

* * *

‘I really think that Haverton is my favourite of all our buildings,’ Lloyd confessed to Sylvie as they both stood together in the ante-chamber to the small family chapel where Sylvie and Ran’s baby son and Lloyd’s godson had just been christened.

‘You say that about every one of them,’ Sylvie teased, but Lloyd shook his head.

‘No, Haverton
is
special,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve done a fine job here, Sylvie. Are you sure I can’t tempt you to come back to work for me? There’s a palace I’ve seen in Spain...’

‘No.’ Laughing, Sylvie shook her head. ‘I have another project to occupy me now,’ she reminded him, looking lovingly towards her son, who was being cradled by his father.

The work on Haverton had been finished just in time for Rory’s christening. The official opening of the house to the public was scheduled for the end of the month.

Ran hadn’t put any pressure on her to make her project on Haverton the last one. She
wanted
to be with Rory and, of course, with Ran. Maybe in years to come she might pick up her career again, although she doubted it. She was the Trust’s official caretaker for Haverton, and looking after the house and its grounds was going to prove more than stimulating enough.

Already, even before the house officially opened, she had bookings for a string of weddings, carrying right through the coming year, never mind the conferences and private parties who had expressed interest in hiring the house. It was extremely satisfying to know that simply on the interest that had already been shown in the house her costings indicated that it would earn enough to pay for its own upkeep.

‘Even if you had managed to run away from me,’ Ran had told her only the previous night, ‘sooner or later I would have seen Rory, and once I had I would have known that he was mine and then...’

‘And then...?’ Sylvie had demanded challengingly.

‘And then I would have remembered how he came into being and then somehow I’d have found a way to become a part of his life— and yours,’ Ran had told her quietly.

‘Because he’s your son?’ she had asked him.

‘Because you’re my woman...my love...’ Ran had corrected her.

Sometimes, even now, she couldn’t believe how lucky she had been, how wonderful her life was. Living at the Rectory was fulfilling part of her childhood dream—the house so closely mirrored the secret home she’d used to create for herself. But it wasn’t, of course, her home, wonderful though it was, that made her feel that she had been so especially blessed... She looked tenderly at Ran.

If the Rectory was her dream home then Ran was certainly her dream man, although to describe him as such in no way did either him or the depth and intensity of the love they shared true justice.

Ran was her man, her mate, her soul and the real heart of her life... Without him... Without him she wouldn’t have her beautiful kitchen floor covered in mud as it had been the other morning when he had come in shouting triumphantly that the poachers he had suspected of taking their stock had finally been caught poaching from a neighbour’s property.

She smiled secretly to herself. Rory was six months old and she suspected that well before he reached his second birthday he would have a sibling, a brother or a sister.

‘What are you smiling for?’ Ran asked her as he came over to her with Rory and kissed her lovingly on the mouth.

‘You know that avenue of limes we planted at Haverton to mark Rory’s birth?’

‘Mmm...’

‘Well, do you remember you said that we’d plant a cross walkway to mark the birth of our second child?’

‘Mmm...’

‘Well,’ Sylvie told him with a twinkle in her eyes, ‘I think you’d better think about ordering saplings now...’

‘Sylvie...?’ Ran queried, but she was already turning away from him to speak to someone else. ‘Just you wait until later,’ he mock-growled in her ear, but as she answered the interested questions of one of his elderly aunts about the restoration work on Haverton Ran looked down into the alert eyes of his son and told him softly, ‘Something tells me you’re going to have to get used to the idea of being a big brother, Rory.’

* * * * *

ONE INTIMATE NIGHT

I should like to dedicate this book to everyone at the Cheadle and Cheadle Hulme Dog Club and,

of course, to Sheba and Kerry.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

‘G
EORGIA
...good... I’m sorry we’ve had to drag you in on your day off but there’s a bit of a flap on.’

Georgia Evans’s smile turned to an anxious frown as she saw the concern shadowing the eyes of the senior partner of the veterinary practice where she had worked since becoming a fully qualified vet six months earlier.

‘I wasn’t doing anything special,’ she responded, ignoring the accusing mental image she had of her half-painted flat walls—a task she had willingly abandoned when she had received the telephone call from the surgery’s receptionist asking if she could come in.

‘What’s—?’

Pre-empting her question, Philip Ross told her quickly, ‘It’s the mare out at Barton Farm; she’s foaling and there are complications. Gary is with her but I suspect we may have to operate. I’m on my way over to join him now. Jenny will take over my morning’s ops and Helen will take Gary’s surgery, which will leave you as our emergency on-call vet, and if you could take the morning’s dog-training class as well...’

As he spoke Philip was on his way out of the room, and, aware of the seriousness of the situation, Georgia made no attempt to delay him.

Once he had gone she walked into the main office and reception area of the practice.

Although all the small pets due to have operations had already been delivered by their owners, the main clinic of the day hadn’t started as yet and Georgia was free to make herself a cup of coffee and check to see if she had any post, whilst discussing what had happened with the other two more senior vets she worked alongside.

‘I hope we don’t get any emergencies,’ she confided to Jenny. ‘I’m not sure...’

‘If I were you I’d worry more about the dog-training class than any emergencies,’ Jenny advised her wryly. ‘Ben will be there...’

‘Ben? Mrs
Latham’s
Ben?’ Georgia questioned, groaning when Jenny nodded.

‘Oh, no!’

Mrs Latham’s Ben was an English setter. A beautiful dog without an ounce of aggression in him, but unfortunately with more than his share of scattiness. To make matters worse Ben was a rescue dog, with Mrs Latham his second owner. Ben had been rescued from ending up in a dog’s home thanks to her decision to give him a place to stay with her, and Georgia could well remember the first time she had seen him.

She had been working at the surgery for less than a month when a harassed young woman had turned up with Ben, who was just over a year old then and physically fully grown. He was a handsome, lovable, charming and completely dizzy dog, and Ben’s then owner had complained to Georgia, who had been the vet on duty when she had brought him in, that with an elderly father to care for, a husband whose work took him away for days at a time and two young children she simply could not cope with a boisterous, energetic large dog.

As she’d looked from the woman’s anxious eyes to the dog’s trusting ones Georgia’s heart had sunk. Ben was a beautiful dog, healthy, young, and as a fully bred pedigree had no doubt cost his owner an awful lot of money, but here she was telling Georgia defensively that there was simply no way she could keep him.

It had been at that moment that Mrs Latham had walked in, and Georgia’s heart had sunk even further.

Mrs Latham was the owner of a raffish ginger tom cat who had adopted her when his previous owners had moved house. Ginger had cynically pounced on Mrs Latham’s tender heart and the equally tender choice cuts of fish and meat she supplied him with and had moved himself in to Number One Ormond Gardens. But Ginger was, at heart, an independent warrior, and his night-time clashes with other cats in the neighbourhood meant that he was a regular visitor at the surgery.

Having reassured Mrs Latham that Ginger was recovering very well from the small operation he had had to repair a tear in his ear, Georgia had left Mrs Latham in the waiting room with Ben’s owner whilst she went to collect Ginger from the cattery.

On her return she had discovered that Ben’s owner had left but that Ben was still there, with a rather bemused Mrs Latham, who’d announced breathlessly to her that she was now Ben’s new owner.

In vain had Georgia gently tried to dissuade her, pointing out all the problems she was likely to encounter with such a big dog in her small, pretty town house. Mrs Latham, however, had proved unexpectedly resistant to her arguments. Ben was now hers.

And so Ben had gone to live with Mrs Latham and Ginger, and a more indulged, pampered pair of pets, everyone at the surgery agreed, it would have been hard to find.

Ben, despite all Mrs Latham’s attempts to ‘train’ him, was still regularly disrupting the weekly training class the surgery organised for dog owners.

‘The problem is that Mrs Latham simply can’t bring herself to be firm with Ben and show him who’s boss,’ Jenny had complained wryly after Ben had totally disrupted her own training session.

‘He’s a lovely dog but he needs a firm hand. As a breed, setters are scatty for the first two years. They need exercise and space and an owner who knows how to handle them. Mrs Latham loves him but she’s sixty-two, and before Ben’s eruption into her life she lived for her weekly bridge sessions.’

Helen had giggled. ‘Has she told you about when she took Ben with her and apparently he was lying under the table and then got up at the wrong moment and sent it and the cards flying? He’s banned from going now...’

Georgia, whose heart was just as tender as Mrs Latham’s, had sighed.

‘It’s a shame, because he’s such a lovely dog.’

‘Try telling yourself that
after
you’ve taken a class with him in it,’ Helen had advised her.

‘I already have,’ Georgia had told her, ‘and I know just what you mean, but there’s no malice in him; he’s just—’

‘He’s just not the dog for a woman with Mrs Latham’s lifestyle,’ Helen had interrupted her.

It was true. Mrs Latham lived virtually in the centre of their small market town which, although quiet by modern-day standards, and surrounded by the farmland whose needs it serviced, was still no place for a dog who needed long, long country walks and a physically energetic owner.

Predictably, perhaps, Ben’s original owner had proved impossible to trace—a ‘visitor’ unknown at the surgery. They had no record of either her or Ben.

They had all tried to suggest to Mrs Latham that a new owner ought to be found for Ben, but still she’d refused to be swayed.

‘He’s already been abandoned once,’ she had told Helen firmly. ‘So traumatic for him, poor boy. Why, when he first came to me he was so frightened of being left that he insisted on sitting on my sofa right up next to me. So sweet...’

Helen had rolled her eyes at the others as she’d related this piece of canine emotional manipulation.

‘So
sweet,
’ she had scoffed. ‘That dog knows when he’s on to a good thing. Talk about spoiled...’

Smiling to herself now, Georgia picked up her post. A small, pretty girl with dark red curls and huge violet-blue eyes wide-spaced in a creamy-skinned, delicately small-boned face, she had wanted to be a vet ever since she could remember.

Getting this job in such a busy, prestigious practice and within a two-hour drive of her parents’ home had been ideal, and she had soon settled down in the small flat she’d bought and begun to make new friends amongst her colleagues.

There was no man in her life: the years she had spent studying to qualify as a vet had meant that there had been neither the time nor the space for a permanent relationship. She had good friends, though—of both sexes—and enjoyed socialising. Ultimately she wanted to meet a special ‘someone’, fall in love, commit herself to their relationship and raise a family, but she was not in any hurry. Her warm personality and sensual good looks meant that she was never short of admirers. But right now her career was her main priority. Her elder brother often teased her that it was just as well that he was married with a young family because, otherwise, their parents would have had to wait a long time for their grandchildren.

Much as she loved her work, and the animals who featured in it, Georgia had no pet of her own, mainly because of the long hours she worked.

Quickly she checked her watch. Ten minutes to go before the owners and their dogs arrived for the week’s training class.

This was an extra service the practice provided along with access, should their owners wish it, to a pet psychologist—every vet who took the class had to go on a special course themselves to make sure their own training skills were up to the mark. They ran two courses, one for adult dogs and one for younger puppies, and it was Georgia who normally took the puppy classes, which was a duty she loved.

The practice was very fortunate in that, having been established for many years, and initially having been set up by the present senior partner’s grandfather, it owned the large garden to the rear of the Edwardian house which had been converted into its offices, operating theatre and surgeries. In addition to the cattery and kennels, the practice also had a large indoor training area, which was where the morning’s class was to be held. Picking up her box of rewards, and making sure she had everything else she would need, Georgia opened the door and walked into the passageway which led to the training room.

* * *

Piers Hathersage grimaced as he surveyed the back seat of his once immaculate car, now covered in dog hairs and the papier mâché mess which had originally been a magazine he had inadvertently left there.

‘Bad dog,’ he told the culprit sternly.

Ben responded by barking sharply and rearing up on his hind legs. He was a powerful dog, and Piers wondered for the umpteenth time what on earth his godmother had been thinking of when she had decided to give him a home.

It was true that he was a very handsome dog—his coat shone and his eyes sparkled with humour, intelligence and mischief, whilst he bounded impatiently on his lead, trying to pull away in the opposite direction from which Piers intended to lead him.

Piers had arrived at his godmother’s last night intending only to pay her a fleeting visit on his way back from his parents’, but on finding that she had sprained her ankle whilst falling over her wretched dog, and that her main concern about her incapacity was the fact that she would be unable to take him to his weekly training class, he had felt obliged to offer to perform this chore for her.

‘Oh, Piers,
would
you?’ she had breathed with such evident relief. ‘Do you hear that, Ben?’ she had cooed at the miscreant.

‘Uncle Piers is going to take you to your training class.’

Uncle Piers! Piers had gritted his teeth and manfully resisted the temptation to say what he was thinking.

Five months earlier, when his godmother had first got Ben, his parents had told him how concerned they were about the wisdom of her acquiring such a large, unruly dog.

‘Why on earth
has
she got him?’ Piers had asked them frowningly.

‘Well, she was a bit vague on the subject,’ his father had told him. ‘However, it seems that he came to her via the veterinary practice where she takes that dreadful cat she’s adopted.’

Piers’s parents were both slightly younger than Emily Latham, who had befriended them as a young couple when they had first married.

Ten years ago, just after Piers had returned from a stint of working abroad, her husband had died and, remembering all the small kindnesses she had done for him as a boy and her generosity as a godmother, both with her time and her love as well, Piers had made sure that he continued to visit her just as often as he could.

She and her late husband had had no children, and Piers suspected it was because of this that she was inclined to have such a rose-coloured and sentimental view of children and animals.

Listening to his parents, Piers had well been able to imagine how easily she had been prevailed upon to take in someone else’s abandoned dog, and he had further gathered from a chance remark of his godmother’s that some young woman at the practice had been responsible for ‘introducing’ her to Ben. To encourage an elderly widow to take on a dog that was plainly quite unsuitable for her was, in his opinion, a highly irresponsible thing for
anyone
to do, much less someone who was supposed to be professionally involved with animals. But despite all his carefully logical arguments his godmother had remained obdurate: Ben was one of life’s victims, a poor, misunderstood canine who, far from needing the strong hand of a firm disciplinarian, rather needed to have his psychoses treated with tenderness, love and indulgence.

Surveying the carnage Ben had wrought in his godmother’s once immaculate garden, Piers had been unconvinced. However, his visit to Emily Latham had a dual purpose. Thanks to the increasing demand for the complex software programs produced by the business Piers ran, he was having to look for larger premises, and that had prompted him to consider moving away from the city, where he currently lived and worked, back to the town where he had grown up and where he knew that property was much less expensive.

He was, he reflected now, at the dangerous age of thirty-seven, not so very far off the landmark birthday of forty, and ready to eschew the fast-paced city life he had lived for the last decade for something a little gentler. He was also ready to trade the single life he had enjoyed, for something more companionable and cosy. A wife? Children? He wasn’t
against
marriage as such, but perhaps he was too choosy because, as yet, he had not met ‘the right woman’, nor even come close to doing so.

Now, thanks to Ben and his godmother’s painful ankle, he had had to put back the appointments he had made to view several properties in the area in order instead to take Ben to his training class.

‘How many has he been to?’ he had asked his godmother as she had tussled with Ben and the dog’s reluctance to wear his collar, tenderly loosening it a notch.

‘Oh, I’m not sure. I think this is his third. Of course, we did miss some of the classes in the first set I took him to. He got dreadfully upset because there was a dog there he didn’t like, and the teacher suggested that it might be as well if he didn’t attend for a few weeks. He was so disappointed, poor dog, and I really felt for him when all the other dogs graduated with good marks. He looked so downcast.’