was laughing at her, Mollie decided—enjoying a very male-orientated joke at her expense. Now she really was angry.
‘You do realise that what you’ve just done could be construed as sexual assault?’ she began heatedly, only to have the fire really taken out of her argument.
‘Is that why I’m going to have nail-marks on my arm from where you were holding onto me...?’ he returned blankly.
Nail-marks. Mollie’s eyes widened in a combination of embarrassment and fiery protest.
‘I did not...’ she began, only to stop as he started to roll up the sleeve of his shirt.
‘You’re in my way,’ she told him instead, ‘and I’m already late for my appointment with Mrs Lawson.’
‘Pat won’t mind,’ he assured her easily. ‘She’ll be busy looking after her grandchildren.’
Pat Lawson might not mind but Bob Fleury would if news of her tardiness ever got back to his ears, Mollie recognised.
‘If you won’t move that...that thing,’ she told him heatedly, tossing her curls in the direction of his Land Rover, ‘then I’m just going to have to walk.’
As she started to turn determinedly away from him she thought she heard him laughing, but the next moment he was striding back to his Land Rover and climbing into it, throwing the engine into reverse and allowing her to drive her own car further up the lane to where there was a convenient passing place.
Arrogant brute, Mollie mentally slated him when she actually drove past, assiduously avoiding looking at him, her nose firmly in the air. And if he thought for one moment that she had actually enjoyed his odious and unwanted kiss, then...then...! Hot colour flooded her face as she missed a gear and heard the harsh. grating sound her car engine made in protest.
Half an hour later, standing in his study in the library of Otel Place drinking a coffee he had just made himself, Peregrine Alexander Kavanagh Stewart Villiers, or Alex as he was known to his close friends and associates, reflected ruefully on his recent run-in with Mollie and mentally admitted that he hadn’t behaved very well.
His only excuse was that he had had a so-and-so of a morning, starting with a long-winded and petulantly plaintive telephone call from his stepmother complaining about the fact that her daughter—his stepsister—had announced that instead of completing her university course she had decided to take to the road with a band of travellers.
‘Alex, you’ll have to do something,’ his stepmother had insisted. ‘She’s always listened to you.’
‘Belinda, she’s twenty and an adult,’ Alex had wearily reminded her, forbearing to mention that the main cause of Sylvie’s rebellion was her own mother, and the clinging possessiveness with which she had always treated her, refusing to allow her to grow up and be properly independent.
Sylvie, in his opinion, was a very unfortunate young woman, and his stepmother would have been the first person to complain if Alex had tried to interfere in their relationship—as had been proved in the past.
And then there had been an equally lengthy telephone call from the charitable trust, to whom his father had handed over the family’s ancestral castle in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands. They had wanted to know the possible history of a tapestry which had just been discovered hidden behind a piece of Victorian panelling.
In the end Alex had had to refer them to the archivist of the family, a second cousin of his father’s who was currently living in a house on another of the family’s estates in Lincolnshire.
Like a good many other of the properties he owned, it was let out at a laughably nominal peppercorn rent. His financial advisors were constantly reminding him that by being so soft-hearted and housing not only several members of his family, including his stepmother, who lived in a very grand and expensive-tokeep apartment in London, but also various retired employees, and by paying for the upkeep of the properties they inhabited, he was depriving himself and, more importantly, the estate of income that was badly needed.
Very grimly Alex had had to remind them that so far as he was concerned there were more important things in life than money—and far more important duties and responsibilities.
The now retired employees living all but rent-free in his properties had, as he had explained to the accountants, served his family virtually all of their working lives and deserved some comfort and security in their retirement.
‘But, my lord, surely you can see how advantageous it would be if you were to revoke their tenancy agreements and either let out the properties on short-term leases at much higher rentals or simply sell them.
‘It isn’t just a matter of the revenue you are losing by allowing these people to live in them at such ridiculously low rents, there’s the additional fact that you are maintaining the properties for them. Only last year you paid for a full row of terraced farmworkers’ cottages on your Yorkshire estate to be completely modernised.’
‘I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to accept that I’ve made my decision so far as the tenancies are concerned and I don’t intend to change it,’ Alex had told them crisply.
The days when inheriting an earldom had meant inheriting a life of ease and indolence were long gone—if they had ever existed. Running large tracts of land, not to mention the properties and farms that stood on them, was, these days, sometimes a nightmare of complex legislation and red tape coupled with a never-ending battle to make financial ends meet.
Without the benefit of some very shrewd investments made by his great-grandfather, he doubted that he would have been able to afford the luxury of keeping the elegant Palladian mansion, Otel Place, which had been his father’s and was now his own principle dwelling. His great-grandfather’s money, though it might not make him wealthy, had certainly made the vital difference between his being able to keep most of his inheritance and potentially having to sell off a major part of it.
In fact, Alex now thought, the only bright spot in an otherwise extremely fraught day had been the run-in with his fiery, feisty redhead.
His? Momentarily he checked, and then frowned. She had certainly been furious with him, and perhaps with good reason, he acknowledged ruefully. He could have set her right earlier and explained who he was instead of helping her to dig the trap she had hurled herself into so recklessly.
Had her eyes been topaz or gold? He closed his own eyes—the smell of her perfume, light and tantalising, still clung to his shirt. She had felt good in his arms, against his body, beneath his mouth—warm and curvaceous, vibrant and alive.
He had known who she was, of course. Pat Lawson had told him that she was coming to interview her and he would probably have guessed anyway. Bob Fleury had informed him of her appointment when he had asked him if she could take up the tenancy of the empty cottage in the square he owned down by the river.
He had behaved rather badly, he acknowledged, even if she had invited him to do it, and there had certainly been no excuse for the way he had reacted to her idiotic charge of him using any kind of right to droit du seigneur. No, kissing her like that had been wholly out of order—and wholly enjoyable. More, in fact, than merely enjoyable.
She had had an effect on him that... Hastily he reassembled his thoughts. He was thirty-three, for heaven’s sake, and certainly a long way from allowing his hormones to dictate his behaviour to him.
No.
