and it’s been badly neglected.’
She was curious to know why an apparently single man should choose to buy himself such a large house, and on an impulse she couldn’t quite analyse she asked quickly, ‘Do you live alone, or…?’
‘Am I married or otherwise attached?’ he supplied drily, making her flush with embarrassment and irritation. ‘Neither. Just as for many another successful businessman, there never seems to have been time to establish any deep-rooted relationships, which is why I now find myself in my mid-thirties and somewhat isolated from the rest of my peer group. Everywhere I look these days I seem to see happily married men with wives and families.’
‘A wife and family shouldn’t be too difficult for a man of your wealth to find,’ Rue told him cynically.
‘That depends,’ he responded and, without waiting for her to question him, he added, ‘on how high one’s standards are. Mine are very high,’ he told her evenly, which meant, Rue reflected bitterly, that if and when he married it would be to some pretty and possibly well-born young woman whose looks would be a perfect foil for his success.
‘I’ll pick you up at eight o’clock,’ he announced. ‘We can eat about half-past eight and over dinner we can talk about the kind of floral arrangements you might be able to provide that would add a slightly softening effect to the house’s austerity.’
‘There’s no need for you to pick me up,’ Rue told him sharply. ‘Heavens, it’s only half a mile or so to walk, and besides, I do have transport.’
‘I’ll pick you up,’ Neil reiterated in a voice that warned her that he was not prepared to listen to any further argument.
After he had gone, Rue stood where she was in the middle of the field, in a daze, wondering why on earth she had been mad enough to allow him to talk her into having dinner with him. The last thing that she wanted was to spend time in his company.
She didn’t like him. Since Julian’s death and the end of her marriage, she had kept her distance from all men, but most especially from those men like Neil Saxton, from whom emanated an almost tangible aura of male sexuality. She no longer deceived herself. The pretty, girlish bloom she had once had was long gone. She was not beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, nor did she want to be.
She had no desire at all to excite male admiration, and she was certainly not so stupid as to imagine that Neil Saxton wanted her company because he found her attractive as a woman. Once, long ago, she had been foolish enough to believe that a man loved her. She had paid a very heavy price for that folly, and it was a mistake she was never going to repeat.
As she bent over her work she told herself that it was stupid to waste time thinking about Neil Saxton. If there was any way she could have got out of their dinner date she would have done so, but she had to acknowledge that he was perfectly capable of coming into the cottage and dragging her out by force if he felt it necessary.
No, she would have dinner with him tonight, and afterwards she would make it plain to him that she wanted no further contact whatsoever with him.
At five o’clock, her back feeling as though it was about to break in two, she made her last journey towards the drying shed to empty her trug. The long worktop under the window was inches deep in the flowers she had picked that afternoon.
She had several hours’ work ahead of her now, preparing the flowers for drying. Over the years, mostly by trial and error, she had evolved several different methods of drying flowers according to their various needs. Some of them could quite easily be dried in bunches suspended from the ceiling beams, others needed more delicate handling, and these she spread in very fine nets which she suspended between the beams. Others still needs drying in the warmth and darkness of the heated room, and for that purpose she used the lower part of the old stable, closing the heavy shutters on the window to keep out the daylight. Some of the flowers she left in their natural state, others she dyed in the more vivid shades that were becoming popular, especially among her more sophisticated clients.
Really, this evening she should have been devoting every minute of her time to her work. Angry with herself for wasting precious hours with a man whom she already knew she ought to be doing everything in her power to avoid, Rue made her way back to the house.
It was almost the end of the financial quarter. Soon it would be time to go through her books and prepare the returns for the accountant and the VAT officials. Her bookwork was the bane of her existence. She dreaded the two or three days a quarter she had to spend cooped up at her desk, checking and rechecking the tiny columns of figures she kept meticulously.
As she poured herself some lemonade, her mind shied away from the reality of her almost paranoic dread of this quarterly ordeal. It had nothing really to do with her ability to cope with the long columns of figures, and in fact sprang from the past. Julian had worked for her father’s accountants. He had come to see her two months after her father’s death. He had been so sympathetic and charming, so ready to spend time with her and listen to her, and she, lonely and bereft in those early months after her father’s death, had been only too eager to have someone to lean on.
He had been ten years older than her, sophisticated and mature, and he had known exactly how to flatter and coax her, so that by the time he actually proposed to her she was half wild with love for him, or rather she had believed that she was.
It had taken just one disastrous night of marriage to show her the real Julian, the man behind the mask he had worn to woo her, the man who cared nothing for her at all and had only wanted her father’s fortune. As always when her memories of the past threatened to spill over into the present, she fought to subdue them, to push them away, and she was glad when the telephone rang, giving her an excuse for doing so now.
It was one of the large city shops she supplied, asking if she could let them have some extra stock. It didn’t take her long to run through her stockbook. Luckily she had plenty of what they wanted already dried.
Because she was so busy, she informed them that they would have to send someone out to collect their order, and by the time she had replaced the receiver she had got the past firmly back where it belonged—out of her mind.
CHAPTER THREE
RUE worked until seven o’clock, grimly refusing to allow herself her normal break as a punishment for her folly in being trapped into having dinner with Neil Saxton. It was just gone seven when she returned to the house. Her bedroom wasn’t the largest of the upstairs rooms, but as far as she was concerned it had the best view. Its tiny dormer window looked out on to fields and, beyond them, the hills of the Cheviot countryside. It was a view of which she never grew tired or bored and, as she stood by the window breathing in the fresh coolness of the early evening air, she reflected on how very fortunate she had been that fate had stepped in just in time, allowing her to salvage this cottage and its land from the destruction of her father’s estate.
What she had not known about Julian at the time she married him was that, not only did he not love her, but he was also an inveterate gambler. He had married her quite cold-bloodedly, seeing her fortune as his only means of paying off his even then huge gambling debts, and once having paid them off he had gone on to gamble away not only all her father’s careful investments, but every single asset that Rue had been left—and she had known nothing at all about it.
It had been shocking enough to learn about his death, even though by then they had been living apart for five of the six months of their marriage. That another woman had been driving the car in which they had died had not really come as any surprise to her. He had made it more than plain to her, after
