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paid lip-service to the ethics that lay behind them.
But then, as Paul had wisely pointed out to her, the more people who bought her products, the more people would become aware of how precious and how vulnerable nature’s resources were, and the profits her business made were even now helping to preserve those resources, to fight off the effect of their destruction.
She smiled wryly to herself as she unlocked her car. Environmentally speaking, she supposed she ought to have owned a bicycle and not a car…She did use lead-free petrol, however, even if Paul, who was in charge of the fleet-purchasing of cars for the company, had stunned her by presenting her with the keys for this bright red convertible model of the same car he had leased for the other company executives.
When she had protested that it was far too vibrant, and far too high-powered for her, he had grinned at her and said, ‘OK, I’ll send it back, shall I?’ and they had both burst out laughing.
‘You’re a rat,’ she had told him affectionately. ‘You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist it.’
‘Well, someone has to bring you down from the lofty heights and remind you occasionally that you are human and subject to the same vices as the rest of us,’ he had told her, and behind his teasing she had realised what he was trying to say to her. She had never deliberately tried to appear holier than thou, and that was the last way she wanted people to perceive her, and so, feeling rather chastened by his comment, she had allowed Elaine to sweep her off to London and equip her with the new wardrobe she would be wearing for the rash of interviews she would be forced to face in October.
As she drove away from Patsy’s, she thought how lucky she was to be able to work in a country environment.
The business had expanded to such an extent now that they had their own purpose-built factory and office complex, on a small industrial site outside their local market town and close to the nearest motorway complex, and it was there that she headed for now.
She had a meeting this afternoon to discuss the packaging for a new make-up range they hoped to bring out in time for Christmas. She glanced at the dashboard clock and realised she had spent rather longer with Patsy than she had intended. There was a short cut she could take, a narrow dusty country lane which would cut a good few miles off her journey, even though, strictly speaking, it was a privately owned road.
She turned off on to it a mile away from Patsy’s house. It had been a hot summer; the grass that grew either side of the lane was just beginning to die back, blackberries glistened on the hedgerows. The thought of her mother’s blackberry and apple crumble made her mouth water, but she wasn’t likely to taste one this autumn. Her parents had only just embarked on a world cruise, something her father had been promising her mother they would do once he had retired. Even though she now had her own home, she missed them. Like her, her mother was a keen gardener, and together they would have spent the autumn months poring over plant catalogues.
Her mind on her garden and the pleasure of the work that still lay ahead of her there, she drove down the lane, the land to either side of her obscured by the overgrown hedges, so overgrown that as she approached a particularly bad bend the branches actually scraped against the sides of her car. It was a blind bend, impossible to see round and the lane was only wide enough for one car, so to be confronted by the imposing black bonnet of a brand new and very large Mercedes saloon coming in the opposite direction made her reach automatically for the brake-pedal, her heart in her mouth, guilt and tension tightening her stomach muscles as she immediately recognised Robert Graham as the driver of the other car.
Guilt because she knew quite well that this lane was the private rear entrance to the Hall, continuing on past it to rejoin the main road on the other side of the village, and tension because…well, because Robert had stopped his car and was getting out.
Why on earth had she ever implied that a man of thirty-odd was a man well past his sexual prime? A tiny shiver of a sensation she did not want to recognise ricocheted down her spine as she sat virtually frozen in her own seat, staring at him as he walked towards her.
CHAPTER TWO
DISTURBINGLY Robert was dressed not as the image projected both by the financial Press and the sleek bulk of his expensive car suggested—in the immaculate formality of a business suit and shirt—but in jeans and a checked shirt worn under a soft leather blouson jacket, the clothes soft and well-worn, lacking the image-conscious stiffness of clothes conspicuously brand new and bought ‘for the country’.
No, these were clothes he was used to wearing, familiar and chosen for comfort. And yet for all the casualness of his clothes there was about him a very strong aura of power and control, emphasised by the impatient, semi-hostile way he was approaching her car, his forehead creased in a frown as he called out curtly to her once he was within earshot.
‘I’m sorry, but you must have missed your way. This is a private lane—’
He stopped speaking abruptly, his frown deepening as he stared into the car and then demanded incredulously, ‘Holly?’
She forced herself to remember that she was thirty and not eighteen. Her face felt as stiff as wood but somehow she managed to get her lips to creak into a facsimile of a polite and distant smile.
‘Hello, Robert—’ she began, but before she could continue he interrupted her, demanding,
‘Were you looking for me?’
Looking for him? Now she was thirty, the spell of his unexpected appearance broken as she stared at him with cool irritation, not unmixed with anger at his arrogance. Did he think she was still a silly little girl of eighteen, needlessly running after a man who no longer wanted her?
‘No, I wasn’t,’ she told him. ‘Actually I didn’t realise you were here. I had heard that you’d bought the Hall, of course, but I’m afraid I was just using your lane to take a short cut back to the main road. Something I’ll have to get used to not doing…’
It gave her a sharp sense of pleasure to be able to deny his assumption that she had been looking for him and even more to know that it was the truth.
‘The Hall’s been empty for so long—’ she started to add, but he cut across her comment, telling her,
‘Well, I intend to have gates placed at either end of the lane, which should deter future trespassers, although in your case you could always have planned your journey so that you didn’t need to take a short cut. As it is, one of us is going to have to reverse.’
Meaning that she was going to have to reverse, Holly suspected as she deliberately refused to make any response to his comment about the gates. The Hall had been empty for so long that she wasn’t the only person using the lane as a short cut, and, while she could understand that any new owner would want to maintain his privacy, she felt that Robert’s comment to her had been double-edged, a means of warning her that the lane wasn’t the only thing that was out of bounds as far as she was concerned.
Was he really so arrogant as to imagine that she still cherished the idealistic and stupid daydreams she had held at eighteen? Or was she simply being over-sensitive, over-reacting because of what Patsy had said earlier and because of the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly, of realising that, no matter how many times she had seen his photograph in the papers, it had not prepared her for the reality of him, for the sheer maleness of him, and for all the ways in which her stupefied senses were being bombarded by their awareness of him?
All right, so he was still one hell of a sensually attractive man, she fumed inwardly, and, all right, so a part of her was dismayingly vulnerable to that sensuality, but it was surely a vulnerability which was being heightened by shock—a vulnerability she would soon have under control?
After all, nothing was as great a deterrent to the headiness of physical excitement and awareness as the dulling mundaneness of proximity.
‘I’d better be the one to reverse,’ she heard Robert saying to her. ‘After all, we’re closer to the house than we are to the main road.’
She