country’s farmland was quickly becoming one vast mechanised food-production plant over which a small number of ever increasingly vastly wealthy individuals were acquiring total control—a business based merely on profits with no room in it for humanity nor for humans.
Sombrely Mollie watched now as a pair of geese flew over the river. Pat Lawson had mentioned during their conversation that there was a small nature reserve several miles away, the land and the small lake it included having been donated by a local philanthropist—some kindly elderly person, Mollie decided absently as she watched the geese disappear out of sight.
Alex grimaced as the Land Rover jolted out of a pothole in the road with a teeth-clenching rattle. He would dearly love to be able to replace it but he simply couldn’t afford to. For him to spend money on a new vehicle for himself would mean that he would have to take money from some other project, such as replacing an essential piece of farm equipment or ensuring that all his tenanted cottages were properly repaired.
He frowned briefly and then made a determined effort to switch off from thinking about the problems that came from trying to turn ancient privilege and everything that went with it into a modern, self-financing environment fit to go forward into the new millennium—something which hopefully his children would inherit with serenity and joy instead of the grim near despair which he had had to take on with his inheritance following his father’s unexpectedly early death. Death duties had been only the start of his problems, but hopefully they were now through the worst of things... Hopefully.
He looked ruefully at the small peace-offering on the passenger seat—a basket of peaches from the orangery that was the focal point of the house’s kitchen garden. Built at the time of the original mansion, and modernised early on in the Edwardian era, its heating was provided by a complicated labyrinth of pipes and hot water fuelled by an ancient and temperamental boiler.
He himself had been on the point of deciding that the place would have to be emptied and closed down when a retired local gardener had come forward with the proposal that a local group of amateur enthusiasts take over not just the orangery and the succession houses that lined the south wall of the kitchen garden, but also the kitchen garden itself.
This collective, of which he himself was now a part, in that he was an honorary member of their group, shared the produce which the garden gave. The peaches he had packed carefully in a basket surrounded by tissue paper were his share of this season’s.
For reasons which he had no intention of going into, their lush promise reminded him very much of the person for whom his gift was intended. Their fruit would be sweet and juicy but with an explosive and challenging sharpness. Deftly he swung the Land Rover over to the side of the road and parked it.
Mollie frowned as she heard the knock on her front door. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She had not had any time to make any friends in the town as yet, and virtually the only two people she knew were Bob Fleury and his wife.
Switching off the kettle, she went to answer the door. When she opened it her eyes widened in wary suspicion as she saw who was standing there.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded challengingly, before adding, ‘If you’ve come to apologise...’
‘I haven’t,’ Alex replied coolly. What was it about her, this five-foot-nothing bundle of aggressive womanhood with her tangle of curls and her amazingly coloured eyes, that somehow set his pulses racing and despite all his good intentions made him feel... made him react...?
‘Then what do you want?’ Mollie demanded.
Heavens, what was the matter with her? What was it about the man that made her behave so...so femininely...? She could actually feel her toes curling inside her shoes as she fought valiantly to control the dangerously awakening flood of awareness that swamped her as she stood there on her doorstep.
He represented everything she most disliked in a man, and yet here was her body telling her the opposite, luring her. Even more angry with herself than she was with him, Mollie took a step backwards, intending to close the door, but to her chagrin Alex had stepped inside before she could do so.
‘How dare you? This is my house—’ she began, only to have him cut her short.
‘No, it isn’t, it’s mine,’ he said cynically.
Mollie gaped at him.
‘You’re my landlord?’ she guessed, determined not to be caught out the same way again.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am,’ Alex agreed. ‘But...’
What on earth was going on? The whole situation was rapidly getting totally out of hand. He hadn’t come here to argue with her, dammit. He had come to...
To Mollie, his arrival so soon after she had finished writing her article only served to add fuel to her already turbulent emotions.
‘You might be able to browbeat and...and terrorise your other tenants, especially those unfortunate enough to owe their living to you, but I’m not—’ she began, but Alex had heard enough. He had never known a woman get under his skin so quickly or so thoroughly, and of all the wrong-headed and totally unjust accusations he had ever heard hers certainly took some beating.
‘Now just a minute—’ he began, but Mollie was in no mood to listen to him.
‘You’re trespassing,’ she told him dangerously. ‘And if you don’t leave immediately I shall...’
Alex, she realised, wasn’t listening to her. He was staring at the article she had so recently finished printing out and which she had left on the table in front of which he was now standing.
Attached to the front of it was a boldly handwritten note bearing his name, which she had underlined thickly, adding three heavily drawn exclamation marks. His earlier frown had become a black-browed scowl, and the very air around them in the small room seemed to have taken on a thunderous, sulphurous atmosphere.
‘Would you mind explaining to me what the hell this is supposed to be?’ she heard him demanding slowly as he spaced out each separate word with infinite care and ice-cold fury.
‘I should have thought it was obvious. It’s an article I’ve just written on the dreadful and iniquitous way farmworkers are treated at the end of their working lives...’ Mollie responded, determinedly tilting her chin as she met his furious glare head-on. She refused to give way either to his very obvious ire or her own quivering inner reaction of excitement and alarm at what she had caused.
‘Are you trying to imply that my farmworkers are badly treated?’ Alex asked her.
Mollie’s chin lifted even higher.
‘And if I am,’ she demanded. ‘Are you going to deny that you have turned people out of their homes to make room for new, younger employees?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Mollie blinked. She hadn’t been expecting such a categoric and totally barefaced misappropriation of the truth.
‘You’re lying,’ she told him positively.
Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Her accusations were so ludicrous and so far off the truth that if they hadn’t been such
