CHAPTER ONE

      MIRANDA SHEPHERD paused on the pavement, staring up through the scaffolding at the building in front of her. Her heart sank. So it had started, then. What had once been an admittedly shabby but untouched Georgian town house had now fallen victim to the developers’ greedy and uncaring hands.

      It had been happening so often lately, especially since their quiet country town had become so easily accessible to London.

      Whereas once shoppers had clustered happily and untidily around the small market square and its surrounding warren of narrow cobbled streets, they were now abandoning these old-fashioned local shops for the new hypermarket and enclosed shopping centre which had recently been constructed on the edge of the town, leaving its once thriving centre empty.

      As the leases had fallen due for renewal they had been bought up, and slowly, one by one, the shabby Georgian town houses were being redeveloped and sold off to the new breed of businesses taking over the centre of the town; building societies, banks, estate agencies like her father’s, and offices.

      This building had been a particular favourite of Miranda’s and to see it fall into the hands of what she privately considered to be one of the town’s least sympathetic and most greedy builders had saddened and outraged her. She wasn’t alone in her resentment and anger either, even though her father might gently point out that people had to make a living and that the rash of newcomers and new businesses to the area was also bringing with it new jobs. A conservation group had sprung up to protect what was left of the town’s heritage, although in the case of this particular house it was already too late.

      The building had, she learned from her father, been sold to another newcomer; a businessman from London who wanted to base his computer-software business in the town.

      She shuddered inwardly, able to imagine all too easily how the house would look when it was finished, stripped of its faded elegance and ‘improved’ to meet the demands of its new owner.

      As she was staring sadly at the yawning windows, now minus their elegant sash frames, she was hailed by a man coming out of the front door.

      ‘Well, if it isn’t Miranda, and looking as stunning as ever … Looking for me, were you, my lovely? I’m just about to knock off. Fancy coming and having a bite of lunch with me?’ Miranda froze, cursing her own folly in stopping. She might have known that, with her luck, Ralph Charlesworth would be here. It was his building firm which was doing the renovations, and that on its own would have been sufficient to ensure that she was not well-disposed towards him; but added to that was the fact that he was a swaggering, unpleasantly arrogant man, who at thirty-five with a wife and three small children still seemed to think he was free to behave as though they simply did not exist.

      For some reason he was at present insisting on pursuing Miranda, although she had made it more than plain to him that she was not only not interested, but she found his heavy-handed flirtatiousness offensive and unwelcome. Even if he had not been married, she would not have found him attractive, either physically or mentally.

      He was a big man, rather overweight, with small, rather unpleasantly close-set eyes and a manner of looking at her that made her skin crawl.

      Now, as she inwardly cursed the misfortune which had made her stop to look at the house just as he happened to be emerging from it, she told him coldly, ‘No, as a matter of fact I wasn’t looking for you.’

      ‘No?’

      The disbelieving leer he gave her made her face flush with renewed anger.

      In her view it was unfortunate that, through her job as a very junior partner in her father’s estate agency business, she was obliged in certain circumstances to come into contact with Ralph.

      On these occasions she was always icily and coldly formal with him, making sure she never gave him any reason to believe she was anything other than repulsed by his apparent interest in her.

      Her father had sympathetically offered to make sure she came into as little contact with the builder as possible, but she had shaken her head determinedly. After all, she couldn’t hide behind her father’s protection all her life. Ralph Charlesworth and men like him were just one of the more unpleasant aspects of her chosen career.

      She was a tall woman, but very slenderly built, with fragile-looking bones, and a delicately heart-shaped face framed by a soft straight bob of silky black hair.

      In her own view her eyes were her best feature, being almond shaped and wide apart, and a colour which varied from blue to lavender, depending on her mood.

      Right now they were the colour of the storm clouds which lined the horizon on blustery days, tinged almost purple with the weight of her anger and dislike.

      Up above her on the scaffolding she could hear some of Ralph’s men calling out jocular comments to him. No doubt his men didn’t mean to be personally offensive to her, she reflected bitterly as she turned away from the building; no doubt, working as they did for a man like Ralph, they took their cue from him and perhaps thought it flattering to call out personal and often offensively personal remarks to any woman foolish or unwary enough to walk past them. She personally found such behaviour unwarranted and unpleasant.

      ‘Aw, come on … With a figure like yours, you can’t need to worry about calories,’ Ralph leered, openly letting his gaze slide lasciviously over her body.

      To her humiliation, Miranda felt her face flushing as guiltily as though she had in some way invited the intrusiveness of his sexual appraisal of her.

      Surely her neat pleated skirt, with its complementary tailored jacket over a crisp white blouse, could never be even remotely described as provocative, and as for her manner … she was sure that at no time had she ever given Ralph Charlesworth the slightest reason to believe that she even liked him, never mind …

      All