www.millsandboon.co.uk

      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