‘Caryn, wait!’ He was right behind her, seizing her by the shoulder to spin her back towards him. There was regret in the grey eyes. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘Why not?’ she asked huskily. ‘It’s true. I threw myself at you.’
‘But I didn’t have to respond,’ he said. ‘If I’d packed you off home that night the way I should have done, it would never have happened. I was the one at fault, not you.’
She was silent, gazing up at him, conscious of the burning warmth of his fingers reaching through to her skin—those same fingers that had once caressed her with such tender passion; her breasts tingled at the very memory of it. He aroused the same feelings in her now as then, she acknowledged, distressing though it was to admit it. Only it made no difference to her hatred of him.
‘Let go of me!’ she said through her teeth. ‘I can’t bear you to touch me!’
He did so immediately, standing back with hands raised in a gesture of defence, expression wry. ‘All right, then, I won’t. Just listen to what I have to say.’
‘There’s nothing to say,’ she fired back at him. ‘Nothing I’d want to hear—unless it’s to tell me you’ll be leaving again tomorrow.’
Logan was silent for a long moment, studying her face, his own blanked now of all expression. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ he said at length.
‘Then if not tomorrow, when?’
It was another moment or two before he answered, still giving little of his thoughts and feelings away. ‘I’m home for good—or at least for the foreseeable future.’
Caryn felt her heart give a painful lurch before settling back down to a steady if somewhat faster beat. ‘I thought you had business interests overseas,’ she got out at last.
‘So I have,’ he acknowledged. ‘And still shall have. My partner will continue to run the stud farm in Australia, while I take over here.’
‘I’d have thought,’ she said, ‘that the time to do that would have been after your father died last year. Assuming, of course,’ she added pointedly, ‘that you weren’t actually disinherited.’
Broad shoulders lifted. ‘Let’s just say there was a condition I wasn’t prepared to fulfil at the time.’
‘But now you are?’
‘Now I must.’ He paused, eyes reflective as they dwelt on her face. ‘My mother has less than a year to live. I intend to see she has everything she wants—whatever the cost. She wants me here, so I stay. I’m sorry if that doesn’t meet with your approval, but I really don’t have any other choice.’
Caryn bit her lip. There was no way she could oppose that statement. Logan was home, and she would simply have to grin and bear it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘About your mother, I mean. Can nothing be done?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing that hasn’t already been tried. It’s a form of leukaemia, arrestable for a time but incurable in the long term. It’s all downhill from here.’
‘She knows the prognosis?’
‘Of course. She insisted on it.’ His smile was brief. ‘She was always the brave one.’
Caryn knew the woman only by sight. The Bannisters moved in a different social circle. If Margot Sinclair’s younger brother hadn’t invited her to that party two years ago, she would probably never have met Logan either.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I really am. It must be dreadful to know you’re going to die.’ She hesitated, searching for some way of extricating herself from this whole situation with a degree of dignity. ‘I’d better be getting back,’ was all she could come up with. ‘Mom will be wondering where I got to.’
‘How are your parents?’ Logan asked as she began turning away, and she looked back at him with reluctance.
‘They’re fine.’
‘Good.’ For a brief moment he seemed to hesitate, as if about to say something else, then he shook his head and swung himself back up into the saddle, holding the animal on the spot for a moment to lift a hand in a brief salute.
Caryn stood gazing after him as he cantered off in the direction from which he had come. It was still there. Just the same. Hatred was no barrier, it seemed, against physical attraction. She could remember as if it were yesterday that heart-jerking moment when she had looked up into those grey eyes for the very first time.
At sixteen, her emotions had been so intense, so immediate, so indiscriminate, his fifteen years’ seniority no obstacle. To Logan neither, it had turned out, but only up to a point.
With Whitegates only a couple of miles up the coast, and Barston the nearest town, there was little doubt that she would be seeing him around in the weeks and months to come, disturbing though that fact might be. She would simply have to learn to live with it.
Home was no more than a ten-minute walk from the beach in a suburb that had once been a village in its own right before earlier prosperity had spread Barston out to encompass it. It had been a very wet May and early June this year, giving no boost at all to the holiday trade on which the town depended. One of the few unspoiled coastal townships left in England, boasted the seasonal brochure with some truth, but that very lack of modernisation made the weather all the more vital to its viability as a resort.
Detached from its neighbours, and built to a cottagey style that blended well with the general Norfolk landscape, the house had been in the Gregory family for three generations. In today’s financial climate, maintenance had lapsed a little, lending the place a slightly shabby appearance due to peeling paintwork. Caryn’s father was no handyman, and he knew it, preferring to hire professionals as and when he could afford it. Caryn had offered to try her hand at the job, but he wouldn’t hear of it. No daughter of his, he said, was to go climbing ladders on his behalf.
Indoors, she followed the aroma of newly baked bread to the comfortable family kitchen, smiling at the woman washing up pans at the sink.
‘That smells good! Thank heaven for an old-fashioned mother!’
Susan Gregory laughed, pushing back a straying lock of fair hair with a soapy hand. ‘If liking to bake is old-fashioned, then that’s what I am. It wouldn’t do you any harm to learn.’
‘My hand would never be as light as yours,’ Caryn disclaimed. ‘It’s more used to hammering on a typewriter. One of these days, Taylor, Taylor and Simmerson might step into the twentieth century and acquire a wordprocessor. It would certainly make life easier.’
‘Why don’t you suggest it?’ asked her mother, and received a wry shrug.
‘I have, but the words fell on deaf ears. We “have no need of new-fangled notions”, to quote Mr Taylor senior. I don’t suppose they have while they can find someone mad enough to tackle the job as it stands.’
‘They pay you well,’ Susan responded on a faintly reproving note. ‘You’re not thinking of looking for another job, are you?’
‘In Barston?’ It was Caryn’s turn to laugh. ‘I’d be lucky to find one that wasn’t seasonal. Short of moving elsewhere, which I’ve no intention of doing, I suppose I must count my blessings.’
‘If you’d done as well in school as everyone expected you to do, and stayed on to take your A levels, you’d have had far more scope,’ her mother pointed out, not for the first time. ‘I could never understand why you finished up with such low marks in most of your GCSE subjects.’
‘Exam nerves, I expect,’ claimed Caryn with a lightness she was far from feeling. ‘Anyway, I did well enough in business college, even if the prospects round here are somewhat limited.’ She went to pick