had told her bluntly when she had asked why she was no longer included in invitations. ‘You’re just too much competition for the rest of us, Brooke.’
It had been shortly after that that her parents were killed in a freak car ferry accident—eight years ago now, and in those eight years she had learned to wear her unwanted mantle of ‘sexiness’ as best she could.
Grim humour etched a smile across her face. ‘Sexy’—if only they knew—her sexual experience was limited to the teenage fumblings she had indulged in until loneliness had driven her into her protective shell. Why was she feeling so sorry for herself, she derided herself mockingly. She was celibate by choice, not circumstance. There had been plenty of opportunities for her to indulge herself in sexual adventurings had she wanted to do so, but a certain fastidiousness made her hold back. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe in the myth of love and the perfect one and only—that was for adolescents; nor had she any moral reservations; men felt perfectly free to indulge in as many sexual encounters as they wished—she only needed to think of the many married men of her acquaintance who had approached her for dates if she needed proof of that—so why shouldn’t women? No, it was something other than that that held her aloof; something that had been born about the same time as she lost her friends and heard her mother saying almost reverently, ‘Brooke, you’re going to be the most stunningly beautiful woman….’
Physical beauty was all very well in its way, but it had its drawbacks. Unacknowledged, but lying at the back of her mind, was the knowledge that she wanted a man who would look beyond the façade of her beauty; a man who would want to know her … not just her face and figure.
She glanced down at her glass. Her wine had run out along with her patience with this party. She grimaced faintly again. Time she was making a move.
Sam, her solicitor, had been disapproving because she wanted to know so little about the people buying Abbot’s Meade, and she hadn’t had the energy to explain to him that the less she knew the more easy it was to shut herself off from the pain of losing the place. As always Brooke was half-amused by her own intensity of feeling, the logical, French side of her nature mocking her sentimentality about a few acres of land and a house that common sense said she could never hope to hold on to or preserve as it should be preserved. During the last few years of his life she had helped nurse her uncle and had lived here at Abbot’s Meade with him, giving up her secretarial job in London.
The late autumn afternoon was fast fading into dusk. She had every excuse to leave. It was a half-mile walk down to her cottage; she had no car, and the drive wasn’t illuminated. That would soon be changed, she reflected grimly. The new owners planned to put in lighting; perhaps they’d cut down the limes to make way for the lamp posts, was her sardonic thought as she started to make her way with lazy ease towards the door. With luck Sam wouldn’t notice she had gone until it was too late. Almost a head taller than the majority of the other women in the room, her tailored black suit a perfect foil for her red hair Brooke was unaware of how many pairs of eyes charted her progress, many of them with envy; some of them with sexual appraisal, and one pair in particular with sharp curiosity.
‘Adam, you aren’t listening to me….’
Dark eyebrows rose as Adam Henderson turned towards his companion, cold grey eyes masking his thoughts. ‘Sorry Bill,’ he apologised, ‘my mind was on other things.’ A cool glance in the direction of the tall redhead heading for the door made Bill Edwards frown. As head of Hart Industries, Adam had no equal; he had built up his empire from the most humble of beginnings; his father had died when he was a child and his mother had worked as a cleaner to support and educate him, and Bill, who was ex-Eton and the Guards, had nothing but admiration for him; but he knew that look in Adam’s eyes and his heart sank. When Adam embarked on the chase and inevitable capture of some hapless member of the female sex it always resulted in a sudden charge of energy that left the rest of his executive staff drained and exhausted.
The last time Bill had seen him look like that had been in New York. Adam had ended up adding a developing maintenance company to his building empire and yet another scalp to his belt.
‘Who is she?’ Adam asked him softly, not bothering to waste any time on pointless preliminaries. All his life he had seen a goal and worked punishingly towards it, once reaching it abandoning the pursuit in favour of something else, and at thirty-six he didn’t see why he should change now.
‘Brooke Beauclere, you bought this place from her.’ Bill told him dryly. He made it his business to always have these sort of facts at his finger-tips—that was how he kept his job as one of the highest paid executive directors in the country. If there was one thing Adam would not tolerate it was complacent, sloppy staff. That was why his companies won so many prestigious building contracts; why he could now pick and choose those contracts; because any architect who worked alongside a Henderson company knew that the specifications would be fulfilled right down to the last nail. And Adam believed in maintaining that same quality throughout every aspect of his business.
‘I did?’ The dark eyebrows lifted again. ‘She doesn’t look too pleased about it. How much did we pay?’
‘Just under half a million, but the place was heavily mortgaged, and I believe she’s donated most of the rest of the money to the local children’s hospital.’
‘Ah, one of the old brigade; an old name, a crumbling mansion and a set of values her ancestors would have laughed to scorn—this place was never acquired through genteel manners and do-goodiness. Still, with that face and body she can always raise another half a million—perhaps more.’
The cynical comment was too much in keeping with his boss’s nature for Bill to question it. One of that same ‘old brigade’, Adam had just derided, he knew when to keep his mouth closed. While it wouldn’t be entirely true to say that Adam had a chip on his shoulder, there was an awareness in him that in some circles he was accepted very much on sufferance because of his working-class origins, and Bill knew that it goaded him.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that his mother had worked as a cleaner in the Manor House of the small Yorkshire village where Adam had grown up. He certainly kept his feelings on the subject well hidden, but there were occasions, like now, when he allowed them to surface. Bill had a vivid memory of his own interview with Adam and the latter’s faintly derogatory remarks about ex-public schoolboys playing their way through life. When he had explained that an uncle had paid for his education, Adam had altered his attitude slightly.
‘What does she do?’ Adam asked without taking his eyes off her tall, fluid body.
‘Nothing, she nursed her uncle up until his death, and before that apparently worked in the city as a secretary.’
‘Umm … was she a good one?’
‘So it seems. She’s fluent in several foreign languages—especially French. Her father was French.’
On her way to the door Brooke had been stopped by her solicitor, who insisted on appropriating another glass of warm white wine for her.
‘Surely you’re not leaving already Brooke?’ he complained. ‘I wanted to talk to you about this donation to the hospital.’
‘Sam, I’m not going to change my mind,’ she told him positively. ‘They need that money far more than I do. I’ve got the Lodge,’ she persisted, when he would have interrupted, ‘and I have the ability to earn my own living. What more do I need?’
‘A job,’ he told her wryly. ‘My dear girl, have you thought yet? Where are you going to find a job round here? Abbot’s Meade is a small country town, there’s nothing here for a
