Stranger From The Past

At least no one could ever claim that today’s unfortunate accident could be anything other than an unwanted coincidence. Not even Gareth himself.

She took a box of tissues from him, almost snatching at it in her desire to escape from him just as soon as she could. And why on earth the sight of a can of Mr Simmonds’ shaving-foam should cause him to glare at her so disapprovingly, she really didn’t know.

‘Oh, do come on, Gareth.’

The blonde was glowering at her now, making it plain how she regarded her, her hand reaching possessively for Gareth’s arm, scarlet nails gleaming dangerously against his suit-clad arm.

‘You know you’re mentioned in the will?’

Sybilla had almost turned away from him, but his curt, almost acid words stopped her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed tonelessly, without looking at him. Henry Grieves, Thomas’s solicitor, had already been in touch with her about the collection of Dresden figures, which Thomas had directed were to be hers.

She had been a little girl of no more than six or seven the first time she had seen the figures and fallen in love with them. Now she blinked away emotional tears, trying not to remember how at Christmas Thomas had told her that he had left them to her.

He had always said that eventually the figures were to be hers, but she had treated his comments as a joke, knowing how valuable they were, and knowing also that Thomas knew that her love for them had been formed in the days when she had had no knowledge at all of their financial worth.

In many ways she would have preferred that he had not left them to her, even though she appreciated that they had been a gift of love.

Now though, sensitively suspecting that Gareth was somehow criticising her…perhaps even suggesting that she had pressurised Thomas into leaving her such a valuable gift, she tensed defensively.

‘I only mention it because you haven’t come to collect the figures.’

His mildness confused her, coming so quickly after his earlier apparent coldness.

She couldn’t tell him that the reason she hadn’t been up to the house was because she had known he was there.

In the distance a church clock struck the hour, causing Gareth to frown. ‘I have to go now, but…we really ought…’

‘Gareth, for goodness’ sake…’

Sybilla was already turning away from him, determinedly pushing her trolley in the direction of her own car. She was, she discovered, trembling slightly, her legs oddly weak.

She told herself it was the shock of her trolley’s overturning, but in her heart of hearts she knew it was more than that. That the reason for her unfamiliar and unwanted weakness lay with the six-feet-odd of lean hardened maleness she had just walked away from.

Shaking because of one inadvertent meeting with Gareth Seymour. Ridiculous. She had stopped being vulnerable to him or any other man when she was fifteen years old. Hadn’t she?

CHAPTER TWO

OF COURSE, Sybilla could not now go straight into the office as she had originally planned. She would have to go home and change her clothes, do something about her damp hair, and generally make herself look a bit more like the efficient and well-groomed businesswoman she purported to be, before she went through Belinda’s diary and dealt with her workload for the day.

Fortunately, Belinda’s first appointment wasn’t until lunchtime, according to their shared secretary.

Five years ago, when the two girls had decided to start up an agency providing temporary secretarial services, neither of them had envisaged how successful they were going to be. The town had been very small and parochial in those days, and it had only been with the opening up of a new motorway system and the consequent increase in small businesses establishing themselves in the newly developed business park just outside the town that the whole area had become more prosperous. Now, in addition to having on their books twenty very proficient secretaries, they could also provide clients with a wide range of other staff, including computer-operators and programmers.

Sensibly so far they had concentrated on ploughing back the profits they’d made into the business and on expanding it slowly and carefully, and only the previous week they had been approached by their local newspaper, who were keen to include them in an article they planned to run on successful local enterprises.

One of the drawbacks of running one’s own business, as Sybilla had discovered, was that it left little time for social and leisure activities.

She had a good circle of friends, some from her schooldays, others she had made since through the business; at least twice a week she attempted to visit the town’s new leisure centre and spend an hour or more in the swimming pool there, but of late she had found that the demands of their growing business meant that she had less and less free time.

Belinda had said ruefully just the other day that her husband and two teenage children were beginning to complain that they never saw her, and had told her friend, ‘It’s not so bad for me, but you don’t seem to have any social life at all these days, and you know what they say about all work and no play…’

Sybilla had laughed, but too many of her friends were beginning to make the same comments to her, and only last week the next-door neighbours, for whom she had done this morning’s shopping, had warned her that she was never going to find herself a nice young man and settle down if she wasn’t careful.

Because she liked and respected the Simmondses, Sybilla had refrained from telling them that she was quite happy as she was. Perhaps she had an over-jaundiced view of the male sex, but it seemed to her that, even in this day and age, once a woman was married and had children it became incumbent on her to juggle so many demanding roles that Sybilla felt it was small wonder that so many potentially very successful career women found themselves abandoning the unequal struggle of competing successfully with their male colleagues for promotion at the same time as they tried to meet the demands of their husbands and children.

When she fell in love she would feel differently, Belinda had told her when she’d voiced this view to her, agreeing that, without that leavening magic, to an outsider it could seem that it was always the woman who seemed to have the responsibility for making relationships work, for keeping life harmonious and happy.

Sybilla had contented herself with lifting a cynical eyebrow. She knew quite well that to those who thought they knew her she represented something of an enigma. With her close friends she was warm and affectionate; to those who needed her help—like her neighbours, like Thomas Seymour—she gave it generously and happily, but when it came to men, especially those who indicated that they found her attractive and wanted to get to know her better, she was cool and off-putting.

She knew that her friends presumed that this was because she had dedicated herself to her career and that there was no room in her life for a man who might demand too much from her.

But the truth was that she was afraid of allowing herself to become emotionally involved with anyone.

She had seen too many marriages and relationships break up under the kind of strain that her own responsibility to the business would put on her to want to risk the same thing happening to her. The truth was that, for all her outward demeanour, at heart she was still the same idiotically romantic girl she had been at fifteen.

When she loved she wanted it to be completely and without reserve; and she wanted it to be forever.

Logic told her that she was being both na?ve and foolish, and that in setting such impossibly high goals for herself she was almost deliberately making it impossible for her to form any kind of man-to-woman relationship. Instead of lowering her ideals a little and accepting reality she was deliberately withholding from herself the pleasure and happiness she might have found by doing so, and all because she was still punishing herself for being such a fool over Gareth.

She had been fifteen, for heaven’s sake. Little more than a child. All right, so she had behaved embarrassingly and idiotically, but she wasn’t the only girl who had ever had a crush on someone. All right, so it was unfortunate that Gareth had realised how she’d felt, but that was no reason for her to feel that to allow any man to believe she cared for him was to open herself to humiliation and hurt.

Mentally she might be twenty-five, she acknowledged wearily as she parked her car in her drive, but emotionally she was still trapped in the time-warp of the girl she had been at fifteen. Not an admission she liked making, even to herself.

Ten years on and she was still afraid of making a fool of herself over another man in the way she had done over Gareth Seymour.

Perhaps Belinda was right. Perhaps if she actually was to fall in love…But in order to allow herself to fall in love she would need first to feel secure in her relationship with the man concerned, and before that could happen…

She sighed to herself as she got out of her car. If Belinda were privy to her thoughts no doubt she would tell her that she was trying to put the cart before the horse, and chide her that one did not allow oneself to fall in love…that love was an inescapable force, too powerful to resist.

Her house was one of a small row of traditionally built stone cottages a mile or so outside the town.

She had bought it three years ago when her parents had moved away; it was large enough for her needs but small enough not to overwhelm her, and, best of all, it had a long back garden, with views from the upstairs windows of the surrounding countryside.

Most of her neighbours were retired couples, although in recent months two young married couples had moved into the terrace, both of them working for the new companies springing up in the town.

The neighbours for whom she had been shopping were both in their eighties and very independent. They had two sons and a daughter, and several grown-up grandchildren, but their daughter and her family now lived in Australia, and their sons lived too far away from them to be able to do much more than visit a handful of times a year, so Sybilla had found that she had taken on the role of an ‘adopted’ granddaughter to her neighbours.

Now, as she headed for her own back door, Emily Simmonds had obviously seen her and came out of her own house, exclaiming, ‘Heavens! What on earth has happened to you?’

Sybilla quickly explained her trauma with the shopping trolley, but had to refuse Emily’s compensatory offer of a cup of tea, saying that she had to get changed and rush back to her office.

Once she had carried Emily’s shopping into her kitchen for her, she hurried back to her own house, hastily unpacking and storing away her own purchases before running upstairs and into her bedroom.

The image thrown back to her by the full-length mirror there confirmed her worst fears about her appearance.

Her hair had dried now, but the rain had destroyed the sleek silkiness of its normal style and it would have to be rewashed, her skirt was spattered with mud-stains and would have to be cleaned, and as for her shirt…the front of it was still slightly damp, and to her chagrin she realised that where the fine fabric was clinging to her body it had become virtually transparent. The bra she was wearing beneath it was silk too, and her face flamed with angry colour as she realised that in all probability the rain had soaked through that as well, and that Gareth must have…

She swallowed hard, telling herself fiercely that she was a fool and worse if she thought for one single moment that Gareth Seymour would have had the slightest interest in looking at her body either clothed or unclothed.