www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      EMILY frowned as the flurries of snow ominously started to thicken into what her lifelong experience of these border hills told her threatened to be a fully grown blizzard.

      She was no fool—no town-bred child whose only real experience of the truly life-threatening danger of heavy snows on these hills came from watching televised newsreel film.

      Perhaps she ought to have put off her departure, but she had already spent two days longer with her parents than she had intended and, as she had explained to them, Uncle John had reached a critical point with his book and would be champing at the bit to get working on it, so she couldn’t really delay any longer.

      She had seen the wry, almost amused looks her parents had exchanged, and, even though she’d thought she had taught herself long ago to accept herself as she was, she had felt a sharp, painful flash of hurt, reminding her of her childhood.

      Perhaps it had been because Gracie had also been at home. Gracie: four years her junior, pretty, ambitious, self-confident, popular with everyone who knew her, and now engaged to be married to the tall and obviously besotted Australian she had brought home with her.

      Emily knew that her parents were baffled by her; she could imagine them wondering where she had come from, their quiet, introverted, almost prim little brown wren of an eldest child—her smallness somehow all the more noticeable in a family of tall Scandinavian-type blondes.

      And she was different in other ways, too. She had been conceived while her parents were walking in the Andes; although their home base was here in the border hills, her parents were intrepid adventurers, forever off to far-flung parts of the globe. Her father had the family talent with words and wrote very clever and witty travel books, wonderfully illustrated by her mother. Gracie, too, was a traveller, loving nothing more than to take off for far-away places at a moment’s notice.

      Emily, though, was different—she hated travelling, and she hated adventuring even more. She was the quiet, stay-at-home type. She knew she puzzled and sometimes disappointed her parents. They loved her, she knew that, but it was a love fraught with a lack of true understanding of her nature.

      After she had left university, they had talked enthusiastically and encouragingly of her taking a year off to travel the world, and had been rather like two hurt children when she had told them that that was the last thing she had wanted to do.

      When they had learned that she was going to work for her father’s uncle, an academic who had devoted his life to the mysteries of ancient Egyptian civilisation, they had been astounded. Bury herself in the quiet backwater close to Oxford where Uncle John held the Chair in Ancient Civilisations in one of the colleges? They hadn’t been able to understand her decision then, and she knew that they understood it even less now, four years later.

      Once it had hurt her knowing that they had probably dismissed her as dull and boring, because she did have her dreams and her hopes…dreams and hopes that were far removed from those of her parents and sister. Unlike them she had no craving for travel, no thirst for fresh sights and unfamiliar pastures—her dreams did not have wide horizons. It was the small, intimate world of domestic happiness she craved: a home, husband, children—love that could be shared.

      Unfashionable dreams, these days; dreams that she was afraid to voice, knowing how they would be received even by her parents. Once she had even thought they might come true.

      She had met Gerry while she was at university, and for the first time in her life she had been able to step outside the confines of her lack of selfconfidence…her feeling that, in being the way she was, she had somehow let both her parents and herself down. With Gerry she had felt different: self-confident, attractive, interesting. He had courted her and flattered her, wooing her skilfully and ardently, but not too ardently that she took fright.

      And then, just when she had been happily beginning to dream about engagement rings and weddings, the cruel revelation of the truth had come. Gerry hadn’t loved her at all. She had been the victim of a particularly nasty and cruel male joke.

      It had happened the weekend after she had gone home to see her parents. Gerry had come round to see her on the Monday. He had kissed her passionately…so passionately that she had been a little afraid.

      Sex had been something new and untried for her and, much as she had adored Gerry, his obvious experience and expertise had seemed to underline her own lack of them, making her hesitant to allow the feelings inside her to break through the barriers she had imposed on them.

      Normally so patient and understanding with her, this time Gerry had lost his temper. What did she want, he had asked her nastily—to remain a virgin all her life? Before she could speak he had gone on to tell her cruelly that she was lucky he was prepared to overlook her ignorance of sex, her inability to turn him on, her total lack of any kind of knowledge about how to make herself desirable.

      She had never seen him in a temper before, and she had shrunk from the uncontrollable anger emanating from him, her face tense and white as she had listened in disbelief to what he had been saying.

      Her lack of response had only seemed to goad him on. ‘Look at you,’ he had derided. ‘Did you really think I could possibly want you? Do you really imagine I’m going to all this trouble simply so that I can take your frigid body to bed? No way…’

      He