Secrets: One Night in His Arms / Taken for Revenge, Bedded for Pleasure

CHAPTER FOUR

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.

Turning her back on them, Sylvie stared thoughtfully at the house, trying to visualise how it would look once the stone had been cleaned. That alone would cost a small fortune and would, no doubt, take almost as long as it would take for the interior to be renovated. She must ask Ran to give her any formal records from when the hall had originally been built and the work done on it since then. She wasn’t sure, but she suspected that the stairway she had seen had been, if not the work of Grinling Gibbons, then certainly the work of one of his more innovative apprentices.

The tiny sprays of coral, the seashells and unbelievably realistic fish carved into the wood related, no doubt, to the fact that the money for the original house had come from the very profitable overseas trading its owner had been involved in. As a prominent member of King Charles II’s court, and one of his favourites, he undoubtedly had had access to many money-making activities.

Idly Sylvie wondered what it would have been like to live in such a time and in such a house. It was one of her indulgences that whenever she became involved with a new property she couldn’t help daydreaming about its past, its history, picturing herself as part of it … imagining how and what she would have chosen had she been its chatelaine and then translating that into …

Ran parked his Land Rover out of sight and sound of the house. The peafowl, on their way to their roosting place, saw him and started to flap their wings until he threw down the grain he had brought with him to silence them. No point in giving the intruders the same warning he himself had so helpfully received.

Abandoning her study of the Hall, Sylvie stepped back into the shadows and made her way back towards her parked car. As he rounded the corner of the building, for a moment Ran thought that its frontage was deserted, and then he saw someone moving in the semi-darkness.

Immediately he acted, crouching down low and using the shadows to conceal his presence as he ran light-footed and quietly towards Sylvie’s car and whoever it was who was trying to break into it. There wasn’t any time to waste—the Discovery’s driver’s door was already open. Launching himself towards the figure about to climb into it, Ran brought the thief down in a rugby tackle, pinning him down on the ground beneath him as he grunted, ‘Got you.’

Sylvie didn’t see her assailant spring out at her but she certainly felt him as the speed of his attack carried her to the ground, his weight keeping her there as his hands moved quickly and lightly over her body.

Frantically she tried to struggle, kicking out at him, clawing his back as he pinned her legs, imprisoning her beneath his own, and then reached out to imprison her hands. As she twisted and turned beneath him, trying to throw off his weight, Sylvie felt too furiously angry to be afraid, but then, suddenly, as he secured both her hands in one of his and ran his free one experimentally over her body, she froze, all her feminine instincts and fears awakened.

‘Keep still,’ Ran warned his quarry abruptly. It had come as a shock to discover that she was female. He had assumed that the attempted theft of the car was being carried out by a young boy.

As she heard and recognised Ran’s voice, Sylvie’s fear immediately changed to a mixture of relief and fury.

‘Let go of me,’ she demanded immediately.

‘Sylvie …?’ Ran stared at her in disbelief. ‘What the hell …?’

He had relaxed his grip on her hands but his weight was still holding her pinned to the ground and Sylvie wriggled protestingly beneath him, complaining.

‘Sylvie,’ Ran repeated, still obviously shocked by her presence. ‘I thought … I heard the peafowl and thought someone was … I thought you were trying to steal the car … I couldn’t tell who you were in the dark,’ Ran told her curtly as he read the disbelief in her eyes, her expression revealed to him as the moon grew in strength now that the dusk had given way to proper darkness.

‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he demanded sharply.

‘I needed some fresh air; the windows in my room won’t open and I … I decided I might as well walk over here and collect my car … And what about you? I thought you were supposed to be going on a date, not creeping around frightening people to death,’ Sylvie accused him angrily.

She was becoming acutely and very uncomfortably conscious of the way he was lying on top of her, her legs still entangled with his from when she had tried to escape from him, but now …

Sylvie drew a sharp self-admonitory breath at the direction her thoughts were taking. It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to breathe and not just because of Ran’s weight on top of her. She was all too aware of how, when she did breathe, her breasts were pressing against his chest and even more dangerously conscious of the way her pelvis was accommodating itself to the shape of him. She could smell the warm summer night air on his skin and with it the much, much more intimate musky male scent that was him. Somehow or other during their struggle her T-shirt had become separated from her jeans and she was hideously aware that it was too late to regret now the fact that in redressing herself she had not bothered to put back on the sensible white bra she had discarded when she had gone to bed. Instinctively her free hand went to her body to check just how far up her T-shirt had ridden.

‘What is it?’ Ran asked her, his attention caught by the movement of her hand.

‘You’re heavy, Ran, you’re hurting me,’ Sylvie told him, not entirely truthfully, as she tried to bury herself in the night’s cloaking shadows, but it was too late and she could see from the sudden narrowing of his gaze as it followed the action of her hand that he realised, as she had just done herself, that her wretched T-shirt had ridden up far enough to expose the lower curve of her breasts.

The last thing, the very last thing she wanted was for Ran to study her body in any way at all, so why … why, the moment his gaze fell to her breasts, did they suddenly decide to react to his presence by swelling and firming, her nipples sensually flaunting peaks of explicit womanhood?

‘You’re not wearing a bra …’

‘Thank you, Ran, but I am already aware of that fact,’ Sylvie snapped at him through gritted teeth, her face hot with colour as she tried to reach the edge of her T-shirt to tug it down. But before she could do so Ran forestalled her, his own fingers curling round the thin white fabric.

Sylvie was in no doubt that Ran did intend to pull it down to cover her breasts. She could read his intentions quite plainly in his eyes. So how on earth what happened next did happen she was at a complete loss to know.

She moved, and so did Ran’s hand. Sylvie froze tensely as she felt his knuckles brush the underside of her breasts; immediately she made an awkward lunging movement away from his touch, forgetting that Ran had hold of the edge of her T-shirt. As she moved Ran tugged and then Sylvie tugged back and Ran let go.

Sylvie wasn’t sure which of them it was that made the small hissing sound, expelling their breath as her T-shirt, Lycra added to the cotton to ensure its smooth neat fit, reacted automatically to their tugging action and shot upwards, fully exposing her naked breasts.

Sylvie heard Ran curse and then saw him go very still; motionless herself, Sylvie waited. The sensation of Ran’s hand gently cupping her naked breast made her close her eyes in self-defence as she tried to stem the rapture that flooded through her. It wasn’t just what he was doing, it was the fact that she had once longed for him to touch her, to hold her like this so very, very much, and it was as though all that long-ago feeling and all that long-ago need had suddenly risen up inside her.

‘Ran …’ She heard herself whisper his name, but the hands she put out to him were there to hold him, not to push him away, and as she felt him lower himself slowly against her again the shudder that ran through her was one of desire and not rejection.

Very slowly and gently his fingertips stroked her breasts, shaping them, exploring them. The night air felt velvet soft and sensual against them but nowhere near as soft nor as sensual as Ran’s hands.

Carefully he caressed her and she could see the fierce gleam in his eyes as he looked briefly into hers and then he was bending his head towards her, kissing her with a fierce, passionate intensity that left her totally defenceless. Helplessly she opened her mouth to the hungry demand of his, making a tiny soft keening sound deep in her throat as she responded and matched his passion.