Immediately she froze, recognising it instantly, even though she knew it must be all of a decade since she had last heard it. True, in that decade it had altered, deepened, hardened perhaps…certainly matured, but there was no evidence that his years of working in America had altered his speech pattern. As the man put out his hand to help her to her feet Sybilla withdrew icily from him and, without bothering to lift her head and look at him, was just starting to say coldly and admittedly untruthfully that she could manage when the passenger-door of the Daimler opened, and a woman wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes even more expensive and less weatherproof than her own came clicking across the tarmac towards them, exclaiming in a bored voice, ‘Gareth, what on earth is going on? We’re going to be dreadfully late, although why on earth you couldn’t have got your grandfather’s solicitor to come up to the house instead of our having to trail down here into this dreary little town…’
The sharp, petulant words suddenly ceased. Deliberately refusing to look at or acknowledge either of them from her semi-squatting position, Sybilla turned her back on them and then started to get to her feet.
Behind her she could hear the woman saying contemptuously, ‘For goodness’sake, Gareth, let’s go. What an idiotic thing to do. Stupid woman.’
Sybilla could feel the hot angry colour rising up under her skin. She had always cursed its fairness, just as she had always hated her soft fair hair, longing for the more dramatic colouring she so envied in others: thick, curly, almost black hair, warm olive-tinted skin that tanned quickly and, well, eyes that were a sharp definite colour rather than softly luminous and somewhere between lavender and grey.
In the old days Gareth had always favoured girls with exotic semi-Mediterranean looks. She remembered one whom he had brought home from London with him, a dark gypsy-like wildness about her, a full, pouting red mouth, sparkling brown eyes…She and Gareth had been inseparable. She remembered how she had envied her…resented her. She had been fifteen at the time, Gareth almost twenty-two.
She suppressed the small stab of remembered pain. She had been such a child, nursing a huge crush on someone so unobtainable that her silly childish love for him had been totally ludicrous.
She had heard him say so himself. Not to her, of course. No, the conversation she had overheard had been between Gareth and his grandfather.
She had gone up to the house on the pretext of visiting Gareth’s grandfather, but in reality hoping for a glimpse of Gareth, and perhaps, just perhaps he might deign to spend a few heavenly minutes with her, talking with her.
She had used the side-gate to the garden, scrambling through the undergrowth, pausing as she’d reached the summer house and heard Gareth’s voice.
What had prompted their conversation she never knew. All she did know was that, as she’d frozen outside the summer house, hearing with awful clarity every single word of what was being said, in that handful of seconds her childish adoration for Gareth had changed into a corrosive and bitter self-contempt, a loathing of her own immaturity, her foolishness, so that in that moment it was as though she had been split in two, one half of her still being the foolish child who had so stupidly worshipped Gareth, the other a new Sybilla, an adult, aware Sybilla, who could see her folly for all that it was.
Yes, of course—he had eyes in his head, Gareth had said. Of course he could see how Sybilla felt about him. Of course he was aware of the dangers of the situation, and of course he intended to do all that he could to remedy it. It would make his task easier, he had pointed out grimly to his grandfather, if he had not encouraged Sybilla to treat the Cedars as though it were her second home.
‘I like the lass,’ Thomas Seymour had replied gruffly, warming Sybilla’s chilled heart. ‘She’s got a kind heart, bless her. This place is like a morgue when you aren’t here, Gareth.’
‘Well, you know the remedy for that, don’t you? Sell it and buy something smaller. Move closer to town.’
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,