Naive Awakening

Lady Jessica uncoiled her elegant body from the sofa and stood up, towering over Leigh in her flat shoes.

‘Of course,’ she murmured in agreement, ‘I suppose this must be quite a late night for you, especially with all the excitement of coming down here.’

Really, Leigh thought, did this silly woman imagine that everyone who lived outside London retired to bed promptly at seven o’clock with their cups of Horlicks?

‘Yes,’ Leigh said, unable to resist a few parting words of sarcasm, ‘I can hardly cope.’

She didn’t know why she bothered because Lady Jessica looked at her blankly, then she said in a slow, careful voice, ‘I shouldn’t be too impressed by everything you see here, my dear. And I particularly shouldn’t be too impressed by Nicholas. I know he’s an extremely attractive man, but you take it from me that the last thing he wants is to be bothered by some wide-eyed innocent becoming infatuated with him.’

Leigh looked at her, speechless. This was the limit.

‘And you can take it from me,’ she answered in a cool, cool voice which masked her icy anger, ‘that the last person in the world I could ever find interesting would be Nicholas Reynolds. I could no more be infatuated with him than I could be with a toad from the bottom of the garden. But thank you so very much for your advice…’ She paused and subjected Lady Jessica to one of her own looks of disdain. ‘I’m sure every word of it was uttered with my welfare at heart.’

She turned away and swept out of the room, her head held high, her fists clenched at her sides.

She almost collided with Nicholas, who was coming down the stairs.

‘Going to bed?’ he asked, staring at her flushed face, but not commenting on it.

‘We country people need our rest,’ Leigh said, her voice taut. ‘We’re not used to late nights!’

Then she continued walking quickly up the staircase, not slowing down until she was outside her bedroom door.

She didn’t think that she had ever been so enraged or so insulted in her whole life. She could feel the anger thudding inside her, with a life of its own.

She was still fuming by the time she was finally under the covers and the lights were switched off, even though she told herself that she was stupid to let anything Lady Jessica said get to her.

She and Nicholas Reynolds richly deserved each other. Both as hard as nails, and ruthless in their own individual ways.

The whole evening, she thought, which had been so enjoyable with Sir John, had been spoilt by Lady Jessica. And, Leigh thought dimly, by Nicholas, because she might as well bracket them together. They were a couple, and that, Lady Jessica had made patently clear, was how she intended it to stay.

Not that she needed to make a point about it. Leigh could have told her for free that Nicholas Reynolds was not her kind of man. If he got under her skin, it was because he was arrogant and so totally out of her league that it was laughable.

And that, she thought dimly as she drifted off to sleep, was precisely how she meant to keep it.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_d594f37f-8483-5ec2-9d14-e13a67cbaf58)

SIR JOHN, the following morning, was horrified to learn that Leigh intended starting work as soon as possible. He was sitting in front of a plate of toast and honey at the breakfast table and he turned to face his grandson.

‘You never told me that you had offered Leigh a job,’ he accused.

‘Didn’t I?’ Nicholas sipped from his cup of black coffee and glanced down at his watch.

He was dressed in a charcoal suit, his dark hair swept back from his face, and as Leigh tucked into her plateful of bacon and eggs she eyed him surreptitiously across the table.

He really was flawlessly handsome. Not in a rugged way, but with a certain cold hardness that was emphasised by the perfect chiselling of his features.

Freddie was busily eating, paying scant attention to the conversation around him, his mind dwelling, Leigh suspected, on far more trivial things.

‘No, you didn’t,’ Sir John said testily. ‘When did all this take place?’

‘When I went up to Yorkshire,’ Nicholas replied smoothly. His eyes skimmed across to Leigh and she hurriedly looked down at her plate of food. ‘We both felt that it was a good idea for her to work for me,’ he was adding, then he paused for a fraction, as if giving her the opportunity to object, which she didn’t. ‘I’ve been looking for a replacement for Karen for a few weeks, and Leigh didn’t want to feel as though she was accepting charity. Did you?’ The grey eyes fixed on her face.

‘Charity?’ Sir John spluttered. ‘My dear, it’s a delight having you here. Nothing charitable about it at all.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Leigh said awkwardly. ‘But Nicholas is

right—’ in a loose manner of speaking, she added to

herself ‘—I want to go out to work. I resigned from my job at the library, and I need the money to put towards the cottage…’ Her voice trailed off.

‘But you could have spent a bit more time relaxing. When do you plan on starting?’

Leigh looked questioningly at Nicholas, feeling very much like one of the serving staff whose fate lay in the hands of the master of the house.