Free Penny Jordan Collection: Just One Night by Penny Jordan Page A

enough.
    ‘Wayne’s the man I love,’ she had said, throwing the words at him like weapons, and he, too furious, too jealous to respond, had simply walked away without explaining to her that she was a wealthy man’s daughter and he might have nothing, but at least, unlike her precious Wayne, he genuinely cared about her, hadn’t just been using her!
    He had spent the next two days searching Oxford from top to bottom for her, but by then it was too late—she had disappeared. The next time he had seen her she had been with the band of New Age travellers who had invaded Alex’s land, quite plainly enjoying flaunting her relationship with its leader in front of him.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ she had taunted him. ‘ You didn’t want me...you told me so and you were right, Ran, you’re not the one for me...not very much of a man at all compared with Wayne,’ she had purred with a sensuously knowing look that had made him feel as if someone was ripping out his guts.
    ‘She and Wayne seem to be lovers,’ Alex had confided to him unhappily, and now another man had taken over that role in her life, that place in her bed, and he had no right...
    Helplessly he stared at the stars. Why the hell had he done it, given in to the temptation to resurrect for himself all the old ghosts, all the old pain? Hadn’t he already spent enough nights lying alone in his bed, aching for her, wanting her?
    Perhaps Alex was right; perhaps it was time that he looked around for a woman to settle down with, and perhaps once this business was finished and Sylvie was finally out of his life that was exactly what he would do... Perhaps...

CHAPTER FIVE
    S YLVIE frowned as she started to double-check what she had just been reading. In a detailed account for the work involved in treating both the wet and dry rot to Haverton Hall, she had only just noticed that slipped in at the back was an additional sheet reporting on some dry rot infestation in the Rectory, Ran’s private property, and with it was a brief note confirming that the work on the Rectory would be put in hand before the contractors started working on Haverton Hall itself.
    Sylvie could feel her heart starting to thump heavily with a mixture of anger and pain as she re-read the sheet. It wasn’t unknown for the owners of the properties the Trust took over to try to drive as hard a bargain as they possibly could. It had fallen to Sylvie on more than one occasion to tactfully inform very grand personages that odd pieces of furniture they had listed as antiques had turned out, on further inspection, to be in fact extremely good copies and therefore not worth the value which had originally been attributed to them. On such occasions a very large supply of tact plus an even larger helping of erring on the side of generosity was called for, but for some reason the possibility of having caught Ran out in such a way evoked within her such strong and confusing emotions that she had to get up from her makeshift desk in front of her bedroom window to pace her bedroom floor whilst she mentally rehearsed exactly how she was going to confront him with her discovery of what he had done. The sum involved wasn’t particularly large—and, had Ran gone about things in a different way, she knew perfectly well that the Trust would probably have large-mindedly and generously offered to bear the cost of the work on the Rectory. It was the fact that he had tried to cheat them...to deceive and trick her...that Sylvie found so unacceptable, the fact that he probably thought he had deceived her, the fact that he was probably secretly laughing at her behind her back. Well, he wasn’t going to be laughing when she confronted him, she decided angrily.
    A knock on her bedroom door stopped her in her tracks, her body tensing as she called out tersely, ‘Come in,’ whilst mentally deciding how to mount her attack. But when the door opened it wasn’t Ran who walked into her room but the housekeeper, Mrs