Stranger From The Past

Sybilla had crept away while they were still arguing.

She knew all about Gareth’s desire for his grandfather to sell the large house where he lived virtually alone and to move to something smaller and more convenient; but Thomas Seymour was as stubborn as his grandson. The Cedars had been in the Seymour family since the first Seymour had set up business in the town during Queen Victoria’s reign.

That business still existed, and Thomas Seymour had continued to run it right up until his death three weeks ago.

Sybilla knew that Gareth was back, of course. She could not have failed to do so. Everyone knew. What no one knew as yet was what Gareth intended to do with the business he had inherited from his grandfather.

The two men, so close in so many ways, had never been able to work in harness. They had tried it when Gareth left university, but had quarrelled too often and too passionately for it to work. Gareth had gone to America, carving a new and very successful career for himself in the development of the kind of laser technology he had wanted to introduce into the family firm and which his grandfather had steadfastly refused to allow.

As a result of Thomas Seymour’s refusal to move with the times the Seymour business had over the last decade slowly fallen into a decline. The rumours in the town were that, now that Thomas was dead and Gareth had inherited, he would find a buyer for the business or close it down altogether.

Sybilla had refused to be drawn into any kind of verbal speculation about what Gareth might or might not do. She told those who commented on it that she really had no interest in either the business or Gareth himself, her voice losing a little of its normal husky thread of amusement and becoming instead cool and just a little withdrawn. Her too-fair skin might still betray her on occasions, but she had learned over the years how to skilfully deflect attention from areas that caused her anxiety and discomfort, and unfortunately Gareth Seymour had continued to remain one of those areas.

Of course, she was long over that idiotic crush, but the soreness, the humiliation, the sheer mental angst of discovering that not only did he know how she felt about him, that he was aware of what she had truly believed to be her own secret and very personal feelings, but that he could so callously and cruelly make light of them, still lingered.

That was when she had realised the huge gap that yawned between a girl of fifteen and a man of twenty-two, when she had actually realised the difference between being a child and an adult, when she had realised that in order for her to bridge that gap, in order for her to become an adult herself, she was going to have to become like him: cruel, unfeeling, unkind. And she had known that she was not ready to take such a drastic step, that she preferred to remain as she was, and so she had stopped surreptitiously dabbing on immature touches of make-up, had stopped trying to behave and dress in a way she considered grown-up, and had instead reverted to the safe comfort of adolescence; back to her ancient jeans and old sweatshirts, back to tying up her hair to keep it off her face…back to spending her time roaming the countryside about her home instead of poring over fashion magazines and wishing that there was some way she could transform herself into the kind of dark beauty she had known Gareth preferred.

The hair colourant, bought on impulse but not as yet used, had been thrown into the dustbin, the allure of its promise of shining raven locks ignored, the make-up she had bought with her precious earnings from her paper-round pushed to the back of her dressing-table drawer.

If her parents had wondered why, after haunting the Cedars, she never went near the place until she was sure that Gareth had returned to London, they had been too tactful to mention it.

In the intervening decade she had meticulously seen to it, then, on his brief visits home, that they never ran into one another, and she had intended to keep things that way.

However, if fate had decreed that their paths must cross she would have chosen for them to do so under far different circumstances from those occurring right now, with her virtually kneeling at his feet, looking for all the world very much like the ungainly, scruffy fifteen-year-old she had been and not the elegant, assured twenty-five-year-old businesswoman she now was.

No, she decided bitterly, today was most definitely not her day.

She stayed where she was, praying that he wouldn’t recognise her, waiting for him to answer his companion’s imperious summons and walk away, but to her consternation he stayed right where he was, ignoring the rejection of her tense back, ignoring her determination to pretend that he wasn’t there, ignoring, it seemed, everything else and everyone else.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him right her recalcitrant trolley and then start to pick up her shopping.

Both of them reached for the can of shaving-foam she had bought for her neighbour’s husband at the same time, his hand impossibly brown, his fingers hard and warm as just for a second they touched hers.

Once that casual, inadvertent touch would have sent her into transports of teenage delight, would have stirred her as intimately and erotically as a far more personal and passionate touch, and perhaps it was because of that…because of her memories…her awareness of how vulnerable to him she had once been that she snatched back her hand, curling her fingers closed, not quite able to stifle her small betraying gasp of shocked protest.

Of course, all that did was to have exactly the effect she had feared, making him focus on her and study her, and even with her head averted, and her hair swinging forward to conceal her profile he still managed to recognise her.

‘Sybilla. It is you, isn’t it?’

What could she say? Undignified and idiotic to continue to try to ignore him.

Instead she had to struggle to her feet and from somewhere find some semblance of a polite contained smile, one that acknowledged his recognition of her and at the same time made it clear that the past was exactly where she wanted to keep her memories of him.

‘Gareth, I’d heard you were back.’

‘You didn’t attend the funeral.’

Was that a hint of criticism in his voice? She swallowed hard, refusing to allow it to jar her conscience. It was true that she had stayed away from Thomas’s funeral, and equally true that she had done so simply because she had not wanted to run into Gareth. On the face of it it could seem as though she had simply not cared enough for the old man to pay her last respects, but that had not been true. She had loved him almost as if he had been the grandfather she had never had, had loved him and had respected him, even though in recent years she had become increasingly aware that his once firm grip on his business affairs was slackening…that the company was in fact going downhill.

She had made sure she was out of town on the day of the funeral.

Her father was now retired and he and her mother were living fifty miles away, close to her brother and his family. They had been away on holiday when Thomas died, and she had used their absence as an excuse to pay a duty visit to their home to make sure that everything there was in order and safe from burglars or any other damage—a weak excuse, but it had been the only one she could find, unable to face the thought of confronting Gareth and dealing with her grief.

If her friends were surprised by her decision, knowing how close she had been to Thomas towards the end of his life, they were too tactful to make any comment.

His death had come as a surprise to the whole town. It was true that he was well into his eighties, but he had always seemed so strong…so alive.

Privately Sybilla believed that, given the choice, he would have much preferred the immediacy of his fatal heart attack to a long-drawn-out period of illness, but that did not stop it being a shock to all those who had been close to him, herself included.

His only close family had been Gareth, but he had had many friends, and, even though a manager had been appointed to run the business, Thomas had still put in an appearance at the factory every working day.

His presence would be missed in the town.

‘My parents were away and I had promised them I’d keep a check on their house,’ she responded coolly now to Gareth’s comment.

She had no alternative but to stand up and confront him. He was, she noticed, still holding the can of shaving-foam…and he was looking at it in a very odd and angry way.

She swallowed hard, averting her face, determined not to allow herself to be affected by his maleness…his presence…his sheer irritating but overwhelmingly undeniable masculinity.

‘Please don’t let me delay you,’ she told him in a controlled frosty little voice.

‘You’re not,’he responded quietly and, she suspected, untruthfully. Certainly his elegant female companion seemed to think so, to judge from the increasingly petulant expression marring the model-like perfection of her features.

Surprisingly she wasn’t a brunette but a blonde, a rather cold and icy-looking blonde in Sybilla’s opinion, for surely those sharp blue eyes were a touch too sharp, a touch too hard. Certainly they were assessing her in a very critical and condemning fashion, subjecting her to surely a far more intense scrutiny than she actually merited.

‘Gareth, we’re going to be late,’ she protested a second time as Sybilla firmly turned her back on him and started to gather up the remainder of her purchases.

He was still holding the shaving-foam, and as she stood up, dropping her armful of things into the trolley he, instead of adding it to the pile, handed the can directly to her so that she was obliged to reach out towards him for it.

‘Yours, I believe.’

Something about the way he said it made her focus on him.

The grey eyes were regarding her almost remotely, his face a mask she couldn’t read. In maturity it had a hard-boned masculinity that made her suddenly sharply aware of him as a man in several ways her innocent teenage self would never have been able to be aware of. Not that she was exactly what one might describe as a woman of the world. Far from it—unlike Gareth’s woman friend, to judge from her appearance and demeanour.

There had been boyfriends, of course; dates, parties, the usual round of social entertainments, but for some reason she had never felt comfortable enough with any of the men who had dated her to allow them to get too close to her or too intimate with her, either emotionally or sexually.

She reached out to take the shaving-foam from Gareth, conscious as she did so of a certain mental withdrawal, a discernible coolness in the way he was regarding her.

Well, why should that surprise her? He had always treated her with a certain aloof disdain, even if for a while in her teens she had foolishly managed to persuade herself that there was an imagined degree of warmth, of caring in his manner towards her.

But then, teenage girls were notorious, weren’t they, for building their castles of dreams on impossibly insecure foundations?

She couldn’t really blame Gareth for deriding her foolish adoration of him, but she was determined never to allow him or anyone else to affect her emotions so dangerously again, and, even more importantly, to make it abundantly clear to him that, however foolish she might have been at fifteen, that foolishness was now safely behind her.

The teenager Sybilla had been had lost no opportunity to be with him, seeking him out on the flimsiest of excuses, haunting the house where he had grown up under the guardianship of his grandfather, hanging adoringly and blushingly on his every word…silently begging him to notice her…to want her…to love her.

But that teenager no longer existed. Firmly from the moment she had overheard and realised that he knew how she felt about him, and that it was the subject of open discussion between himself and his grandfather, she had been determined to show him that he was wrong, that he meant nothing to her, and it was for this reason that she had so strictly adhered to her resolve to ensure that she never came into any kind of contact with him, either by accident or design.