www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘AND then he said that he had to work late again; that’s the third time in a fortnight. I know how much of his time your business is taking up now that it’s expanding so much, Holly, and with all this media attention you’ve been getting, but honestly do I look like a fool? Working late…not on your accounts, I’ll bet, and that new secretary of his had the gall to tell me that he was in a meeting when I rang him yesterday.’

      Smoothing the neat straight skirt of her primrose yellow suit, Holly let Patsy’s diatribe wash over her; not because she wasn’t interested or didn’t care about her old friend’s problems—after all, instead of being here listening to Patsy complaining about Gerald, she had intended to spend her precious few hours helping Rory put in the tulips and forget-me-nots that were going to make such a lavish display of blue and yellow in the spring.

      When Patsy had telephoned her, announcing that she had to see her because there was something she had to talk to her about, she had immediately assumed from the tragic tone of her friend’s voice that something catastrophic had occurred.

      Poor Gerald, the last thing he was likely to do was to be unfaithful to his volatile red-haired wife; Patsy was the one who had always had a rather elastic view of her marriage vows.

      She tried to concentrate on what Patsy was saying and discovered that her friend had ceased complaining about Gerald’s new secretary and was now complaining about the amount of work her own business was causing Gerald.

      ‘I know Gerald himself would never mention it, but it isn’t as though he’s actually on your board or anything, is it? I mean, I know he’s your accountant, but he does have other clients.’

      Holly suppressed a grim smile. She ought to be used by now to the fact that some of her friends were inclined to be either envious or resentful of her unexpected commercial success. Many of them, like Patsy, also seemed to have a very inflated idea of her imagined new-found wealth. It was true that her company had become startlingly profitable, but the majority of those profits were being ploughed back into the business, the one luxury she had allowed herself being the purchase of the long low-built Tudor farmhouse several miles outside town.

      Even as a girl she had loved Haddon’s Farm, not quite as much as she had loved the Hall perhaps, but then what did one single woman want with a home that boasted over twenty bedrooms, a ballroom, and a drawing-room large enough to accommodate the entire downstairs of her own home, plus a library, two sitting-rooms, and a whole village of small dark and dank pantries and kitchens, even if she had been able to afford it?

      No, the farm was much more her style…much more in keeping with the way she wanted to live. It had roots that went back almost as far as the village itself, pre-dating the Hall by almost a century, and best of all it had a wonderful range of outbuildings, even if they were half falling down and even if the gardens that surrounded the house had resembled a wilderness when she moved in.

      All the more scope for her to implement her own ideas and desires, she had told Gerald and Paul mischievously when they had complained that she must be mad to take on such a time-consuming task, when by rights every bit of her time ought to be devoted to the business.

      The business…The slim hand smoothing the yellow silk of her skirt went still.

      Even now she found it hard sometimes to come to terms with the way the small business she had started at home in her father’s garden shed had mushroomed into the high-profile success it was today.

      Fresh from university, newly qualified as a chemist, she had found herself uneasy and unhappy with the modern emphasis on chemically produced beauty products. It had been the gift of a dog-eared Housekeeper’s Receipt Book-cum-Herbal dating from the seventeenth century which had set her off along the alternative avenue of exploring the simpler, kinder methods of producing beauty products from natural sources which had eventually led to the successful business she had today. Things she had made initially just for herself or to test out the recipes in her herbal, their reputation initially spreading by word of mouth, loyally encouraged by Paul, her brother, who had entrepreneurially taken charge of the marketing side of her small business. She vividly remembered their début into the world of country fairs and market stalls. She had enjoyed those days, enjoyed that life, when she had been free to dress in a pair of tatty old jeans and a sweatshirt and to leave her hair free from the time-consuming restrictions of style and image.

      Now things were different, especially over the last couple of years when she had been named ‘New Businesswoman of the Year’, and had somehow or other been swept up in a public-relations exercise which had now left her feeling uncomfortably at odds with herself, unfamiliar and sometimes very out of charity with the woman she saw in the mirror, a woman who had swapped her jeans for designer suits, a woman who no longer went bare-legged but who wore silk stockings, a woman whose silky fine hair had been skilfully cut and even more skilfully highlighted so that it fell in a soft blonde sheeny bob that emphasised the delicate purity of her skin and bone-structure…but most of all a woman who she was suddenly recognising had become a woman, and was no longer a girl.

      She was thirty now…where on earth had the years gone? When she looked back to her late teens her life had worked out so differently from what she had imagined. Then she had expected and believed that she would marry, would have children, would be content and absorbed by the fulfilment of being the axis on which her husband’s and her children’s lives turned, just