India Grey - Secrets

Quickly she opened the bedroom door and hurried back down the stairs.

She found Ran in a huge ill equipped kitchen at the back of the house. As she pushed open the door he was heading towards it carrying a tray of tea.

‘Who’s that for?’ Sylvie demanded suspiciously.

‘You,’ Ran told her promptly. On the tray Sylvie could see a small packet of a familiar brand of headache tablets. The temptation to tell him that she didn’t want either his tea or his tablets was so strong that she had to fight hard to ignore it. Where on earth had such perversity come from—and when she had come downstairs especially to ask him for them?

‘I can manage it for myself,’ she told him ungraciously, and she held out her hands for the tray. The look he gave her made her flush but doggedly she stood her ground. Even so, she doubted that he would have handed the tray over to her if the telephone in the hallway had not rung.

As he went to answer it Sylvie headed for the stairs.

‘Vicky …’ she heard him saying warmly, and then, ‘Yes … it’s still on … I’m looking forward to it too,’ he confirmed, his voice dropping and deepening. ‘Look, I have to go …’

Sylvie was halfway up the stairs when she heard him replacing the telephone receiver.

‘Sylvie—’ he began.

But she cut him short, turning round and telling him crisply, ‘Don’t let me delay you if you’ve got a date, Ran. I’ve got plenty of work to read up on.’

‘You need to sleep off your headache,’ Ran told her curtly.

‘On the contrary. I need to work,’ Sylvie corrected him sharply as she continued on her way upstairs.

Ran stood and watched her. God, but she got under his skin. Why did he let her? Why hadn’t he simply told her that the only date he had this evening was with a damaged fence?

Angrily he turned on his heel and strode towards the front door.

As he closed it behind him Sylvie’s body slumped slightly; tension had invaded each and every one of her muscles and it wasn’t just her head that pounded with stress now, it was her whole body. Wearily she made her way to her bedroom, took two of the tablets, drank her tea and then, having removed her outer clothes, crawled into bed in her underwear. It was only when she was on the verge of sleep that she remembered that she had neglected to ask Ran to do something about the window she had been unable to open.

RAN grimaced as he studied the very obviously cut-through pieces of fencing wire. No accident, that. Someone had quite definitely used wire cutters on them, which meant …

The lambs which had been born early in the spring had all gone now, his breeding stock the only flock that remained. It was an unpalatable thought though, that the deer roaming the home park made a tempting target for rustlers, all the more so because those animals were tame and not used to being hunted.

The last time he had seen Alex, the two of them had discussed the pros and cons of tagging their deer. Like him, Alex had a small herd on his estate, but since their marriage Mollie, his wife, had added a new strain to them in the shape of the same miniature deer that the Duchess of Devonshire had bred so successfully.

As Ran glanced towards the ha-ha which separated the parkland from the main gardens to the Hall he could hear the peacocks screeching their warning that someone was approaching the house.

Frowning, he got up, dusting the twigs and grass from his jeans as he headed back to the Land Rover.

It was almost ten o’clock, hardly the time for anyone to be visiting the Hall for any legitimate reason. Still frowning, he started the Land Rover’s engine.

Sylvie had woken up abruptly, wondering where on earth she was and why she couldn’t breathe properly. The dying sun had heated the already stuffy air in her bedroom to the point where she could actually taste its staleness in her mouth. The sharp intensity of her earlier headache had, thankfully, eased, but she knew there was no guarantee of its not returning if she continued to breathe such unhealthy air.

What she needed was some fresh air. After sluicing her face with cold water she pulled on her jeans and T-shirt, grimacing slightly as she did so. New York had effected some changes in her, she reflected wryly. Once she would have been quite happy in grubby clothes, but now …

Lloyd often teased her for the preppy look of loafers, jeans and white T-shirts which had become her trademark, but, as she had loftily told him, they made good sense for her job in that they always looked workmanlike and enabled her to climb scaffolding and straddle platforms whilst at the same time looking smart and businesslike enough to command the respect of the sometimes very chauvinistic men she had to deal with. Women too, especially in Italy, the home of style with a capital S, had been discreetly impressed with her working ‘uniform’, she had noticed. Now it was second nature to her always to wear immaculate white T-shirts and equally immaculate jeans, and the act of putting on clothes she had already been wearing all day was not one she enjoyed.

She had a spare set of car keys in her purse—another trick she had learned from her work. Spare keys to anything and everything were a necessity, as she had quickly discovered the first time she had allowed one of the workmen to accidentally lock her out of a building and then go home with the keys—it would be a simple enough matter for her to walk back to Haverton Hall and pick up her Discovery. The last thing she wanted was to be dependent on Ran for a lift to the place in the morning, and besides—a small triumphant smile curved her full mouth—it would be good to be able to point out haughtily to him that whilst he had been out enjoying himself with his girlfriend she had been working.

She had a well-developed sense of direction and the walk to the Hall, which someone else might have found a daunting prospect, was nothing to her.

Humming happily to herself, Sylvie set out.

It was a warm summer’s evening, with just enough remaining light for her to avoid the occasional cloud of midges hovering on the still air.

Being on foot gave her the opportunity to assess the land far better than she had been able to do from inside Ran’s Land Rover. She had spent enough time on Alex’s estate to appreciate that it was going to take a considerable amount of good husbandry on Ran’s part to bring this land into the same productive state as her stepbrother’s. Oddly, she envied him the challenge, but not so much as she envied his wife the pleasure she would have in lovingly restoring the Rectory; in making it the home that Sylvie knew it could be. Oh, yes, she envied her that.

Only that? Sylvie paused, shaking her thick hair back from her head. Of course only that. She couldn’t possibly envy her Ran, could she—Ran and the children he would give her? No, of course she couldn’t.

It was almost dark when Sylvie eventually reached the Hall, its bulk throwing long shadows across the gravel, cloaking both her and the Discovery as she walked towards it.

The sound of other feet on the gravel momentarily made her freeze until she recognised the familiar shapes of half a dozen inquisitive peacocks and peahens. The cocks were sending their shrill cries of warning up into the still night air.

Sylvie laughed as she heard them, relieved, and shook her head at them as she told them cheerfully, ‘Yes, I may be an intruder now, but you’re going to have to get used to me. You and I shall be seeing an awful lot of one another, you know.’

She stayed with them for several minutes, watching them and talking to them. Soon, no doubt, when it became fully dark, they would be roosting somewhere out of the way of any predatory hunting foxes.