Penny Jordan Collection: Just One Night (8 page)

He had done what he had thought was best at the time, the honourable thing to do...

CHAPTER SIX

W
EARILY
Sylvie looked at the luminous face of her watch. Half past one in the morning. She had been awake for the last hour, stubbornly courting sleep, angrily refusing to allow her thoughts to take control, to force her to remember.

She was too hyped up for sleep, too
afraid
to sleep just in case she... She what? Dreamed of Ran?

She looked across at the desk in front of the window. One of the small pleasures of living in the depths of the country was that one did not need to close the curtains at night. There was nothing Sylvie liked more than being able to see the night sky.

When her mother had first married Alex’s father and they had gone to live in his ancestral home, she had been overwhelmed at first by the darkness of the huge house. It had been Ran who had guessed her fears and apprehensions after he had found her sleepwalking that night. Ran who had been staying at the house instead of his cottage one weekend, ‘babysitting’ her in the absence of her mother, and who had taken her, not back to bed, but to his own room where he had made her a hot drink and talked to her, showing her the telescope he used to watch the night sky.

The binoculars beside it he had used for another, more mundane purpose. As the estate manager one of his jobs had been to keep a sharp look-out for poachers. The night had no fears for Ran, and through him she too had learned to appreciate its special beauties. It had been Ran who had taken her to watch the badger cubs at play, earning her mother’s anger. Sylvie quickly stopped that line of thought. Since she couldn’t sleep she might as well try to do some work; that at least would be a far more profitable way of spending her time than thinking about Ran.

Her mouth still felt slightly swollen and sensitive from the way he had kissed her earlier. Her face started to burn as she recalled again the comment he had made to her about her being a vixen—and about Lloyd being her lover.

What would he say if he knew that she had only had one lover and that lover had been a man who hadn’t really wanted her, a man she had had to coax and beg to take her to bed, a man who had told her that he felt no love for her, that what had happened between them had been a mistake, an error of judgement best forgotten?

No. No. No. Angrily, Sylvie buried her face in her hands, but it was too late; there was no pushing back the memories now, they were here, surrounding her, flooding out any kind of denial or rational thought.

She had been at university by then; had, in fact, gone there unwillingly. So intense and all-consuming had been the ferocity of her teenage love for Ran, so burningly immediate and sharp-fanged her desire for him, that she had not been able to bear the thought of putting any kind of distance between them. Every spare minute she had, every excuse she could use, she
had
used—to be with Ran. As Alex’s stepsister it had been easy enough for her to spend her free time at the estate, joining the group of local teenagers who were helping Ran with some of his environmental projects had given her even more opportunity to be with him. Not that Ran himself had seemed to be aware of her feelings, even though she had done everything she could to show him how she felt.

There had been that afternoon she had fallen into the muddy lake they had been cleaning. Ran had pulled her out, grinning at her mud-covered clothes and hair.

‘I need a bath,’ she had complained, grimacing.

‘A
bath
?’ Ran had laughed. ‘There’s no way Alex’s housekeeper is going to let you into the house like that. I’d better take you back to the cottage with me and hose you down outside before I let you go back, otherwise we’ll both be in real trouble.’

His cottage... How she had trembled at the thought, imagining not the prosaic cleaning-up operation Ran had so teasingly referred to but something far more intimate, her body soaking in a tub of blissfully hot water whilst Ran lovingly soaped her clean...

‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her, frowning at her. ‘You’ve gone very red. Are you feeling ill?’

Ill... Sick with love, with
longing
for him, would have been the appropriate answer, but she had been too naive, too shy to make it. Instead she had shaken her head and dutifully climbed into his battered Land Rover for the drive back to his small estate cottage.

The sensual intimacy she had so dangerously imagined had proved to be just that—a fantasy.

Ran had made her remove her clothes in his small back porch, sternly admonishing her not to move off the old towel he had put down on the floor and to give him a shout once she was undressed and wrapped in the towel he had left her.

‘I’ll put your stuff in the washer—Alex’s housekeeper will kill me if she sees it—and then you can have a quick shower upstairs. You’ll have to go home in my stuff but at least it will be clean.’

‘These towels are awfully thin,’ she had remarked critically once she was standing wrapped in the protection of the largest of them, and Ran had returned to scoop up her filthy clothes.

‘Mmm... I use them to dry the dogs,’ Ran had told her unromantically, grinning at her when he saw her expression. ‘They’re the ones who should be pulling a face,’ he said. ‘When
they
come back covered in mud they get hosed down outside before they’re even allowed in.’

‘I’m not a dog, I’m a...’ A woman, she had been about to say, but then she had stopped as Ran had stooped to pick up her white briefs from the stone floor, her face turning an unsophisticated shade of pink when she saw how small they looked held in his strongly masculine hand.

The wet had seeped right through her jeans to her briefs, but Ran’s eyebrows had risen as he’d studied them and then her.

‘It’s all right... I can go home without them; it won’t matter under...my...your jeans,’ Sylvie had told him helpfully, far too innocent and young then to understand just how sensuously provocative it could be for a woman to go naked beneath her clothes—and even more so when the clothes, the
jeans
she was wearing, were his and not her own.

‘It’s okay; I think I’ve got something you can wear,’ Ran had told her laconically.

She had been young and naive but not so young nor so naive as not to be able to guess where the tiny pretty lacy briefs Ran had given her might have come from, and the knowledge that they must have belonged to another woman had cast a shadow not just over the whole day, but over everything.

She had once heard Alex joking with Ran about his taste for older women.

‘I’m not in the market for commitment or marriage,’ Ran had returned. ‘But I’m not about to turn myself into a monk either,’ he had admitted frankly. Neither of them had known that she was listening as she hesitated outside Alex’s library door on her way past.

‘So a woman who knows what life’s all about, who’s been married and decided that it isn’t for her, suits me fine.’

She hadn’t been able to hide her massive crush on Ran before she’d left for university, in fact had openly offered her love to him, but he had determinedly pushed it away—just as he had also determinedly pushed her away.

She had noticed it again at Alex’s annual Christmas party. Her mother had been there, turning her nose up at such little country pursuits, but Sylvie hadn’t cared. She’d been determined that Ran was going to dance with her and that she was going to claim a Christmas kiss from him.

She had been wearing a new dress and high heels. She had put her hair up and worn make-up. Alex had looked at her with tender amusement when she had come downstairs, but there had been no tenderness in Ran’s eyes later that evening when he had removed her arms from around his neck, refusing to give her the kiss she had begged him for. It had taken three glasses of wine before she had had the courage to approach him and, horrendously, she could feel her eyes starting to fill with tears as he’d unlocked her arms from around his neck and started to turn away from her.

‘Ran, please...’ she had pleaded, but he had ignored her, stony-faced and blank-eyed, as he’d walked away from her.

And, as though that hadn’t been bad enough, to compound the evening’s heartache and humiliation, she had seen him less than an hour later dancing with the newly divorced wife of one of Alex’s tenants, holding her tightly against his body as he caressed her under the dim lights, bending his head to kiss her with heart-shaking passion before leading her outside.

She had been so jealous, so burned up with pain that even her skin had felt raw and tender.

Later, naively, she’d told herself that Ran hadn’t meant to hurt her, that he probably still thought of her as a child and not a woman, and so she had gone on clinging to her self-created delusions.

All through her first year at university, as much as she had wanted to hate Ran, she had also yearned for him, dreaming of him, longing for him, promising herself that one day it would be different, one day he would look at her and love her.

She had refused dates from the boys she met on her courses and only attended the regulation student parties because the other girls had teased her into it. Naturally gregarious, although no one could ever come to mean to her what Ran meant, she had nevertheless made several platonic friendships with various boys she had met at university. One of them she had particularly taken to; shy and self-effacing, David had only come to university because of family pressure. As the youngest of his family he’d been expected to follow in the footsteps of his elder sisters and brothers, all of whom had graduated with honours.

‘What did you really want to do?’ Sylvie had asked him.

‘Paint,’ he had told her simply.

Sylvie’s discovery that he was taking drugs had saddened but not particularly shocked her. They were, after all, a feature of university life, although she herself had stayed clear of them.

It had been David who had persuaded her to attend the rave party where he had introduced her to Wayne. She had guessed that Wayne was his supplier but had naively assumed then that Wayne was no more than a generous-minded individual who had the contacts to supply his friends with drugs, and that it was they who pressured him into obtaining them for them rather than the other way around. Without directly saying so, Wayne had implied that they were two of a kind, individuals who stood out from the crowd. His street-wise sophistication had reminded her in some odd way of Ran. Perhaps because, like Ran, Wayne was older than her and the friends she’d mixed with. She had listened half enviously when he had told her of his plans to spend the summer with a group of eco-warriors, travelling the country.

Sylvie had always been idealistic, and Wayne’s description of the way the group were dedicated to preventing the destruction of the countryside by greedy power barons had increased her sense of comradeship with him and with the group he was joining.

Just as importantly, Wayne had seemed to understand the problems she was having in convincing her mother that she was now an adult.

‘She’s such a snob,’ she had told Wayne ruefully, wrinkling her nose.

‘She wouldn’t much approve of me, then,’ he had countered, and although she had shaken her head Sylvie had been forced to admit that he was right. She had confided to Wayne how uncomfortable it often made her feel that she should be so privileged. Alex gave her an allowance and her mother was constantly visiting her and fussing over whether or not she was eating properly and wearing the right kind of clothes. Her mother had never wanted her to go to university. She had bemoaned the fact that girls like Sylvie no longer had the opportunity to ‘come out’ properly, as she had done as a girl. Alex had been the driving force behind her moving off to university. Time, he said, for her to grow and find out about herself.

It had not been long after her disclosure that she received an allowance that Wayne had asked to borrow money from her. Of course she had given it to him. He was a friend...

And then, after she had given Wayne the money he had asked for, she had discovered that she needed to buy some new course books, and that stupidly she had not realised that she had an advance rent bill due for the small flat she lived in.

She had had to telephone Alex to ask him for an advance on her forthcoming allowance. She had felt uncomfortable about doing so, but after a small pause, when she had stammeringly explained that she had loaned some money to a friend, he had said quietly that she could leave the matter with him.

Naively she had assumed that that meant that he would send her a cheque, and suddenly she’d had more important things to worry about than money. David, her friend, was dead. He had collapsed at a rave party and been rushed into hospital, but it had been too late to save him.

His family had taken him home to bury him and they had also made it plain that they did not want any of his university friends to attend his funeral.

‘They blame us for what happened to him,’ one of his other friends told Sylvie angrily. ‘They’re the ones who are at fault. He never wanted to come here...’

Sylvie was too upset to make any comment when Wayne asked for another loan, and he was moody and sharp-tempered with her, mocking her upbringing and taunting her with her naiveté and innocence.

That hurt Sylvie but she said nothing. She knew that he would soon be leaving the city to join the eco-warriors, who were beginning to drift away from the site of their recent defeat over a large motorway extension and to make their way south to meet up with another group, who were trying to persuade the Government to give permission for some land previously owned by the Army to be opened to the general public.

To Sylvie it sounded a good cause.

‘Come with us,’ Wayne suggested, and then he laughed sneeringly as he added, ‘But no, of course you won’t... Mummy wouldn’t like it, would she?’

Sylvie said nothing. She was still too numbed by David’s death. University life, which at first had seemed to promise so much freedom...which she had hoped would be the passage which would carry her effortlessly into womanhood and Ran’s love...was proving to be far more painful and difficult than she had envisaged.