to completion on time and under budget.
This was something that didn’t just ‘happen’. It involved hours and hours spent poring over costings and budgets, more hours and hours tramping around warehouses, inspecting fabrics and furniture, and in many cases, because of the age of the houses, it also meant actually finding and commissioning workmen to make new ‘aged’ copies of the pieces she required. Italy, as she had quickly discovered, was a treasure house for such craftsmen and so, oddly, was London, but always at a price, and Sylvie had surprised herself a little at her ability to haggle and bargain for days if necessary, until she had got what she wanted and at a price she considered to be fair.
This had, of course, led to her often having to take an extremely firm line, not just with the craftspeople she dealt with but very often with the original owners of their properties as well, who very often retained life tenancy in the houses and quite naturally wanted to have their say in how they were restored and furnished.
Oh, yes, Sylvie was used to dealing with sometimes difficult ex-owners, and situations where she had to use both patience and tact to ensure that no one’s pride was hurt.
It was a very definite skill to be able to walk the tightrope between avoiding hurting a prior owner’s often sensitive pride and ensuring that the house was restored as she knew Lloyd would want it to be.
But this time it wasn’t just the sensitive feelings of a property’s ex-owner she was going to need to consider. No, this time the person whose feelings, whose emotions were going to need careful handling was herself.
Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply and calmly several times and then opened them again, wiping her hands on a tissue and then re-starting the Discovery’s engine.
She had hired a four-wheel drive, not just because she suspected from the plans and other papers Lloyd had given her to study that it would be useful for travelling over the rugged terrain and the no doubt overgrown driveways that surrounded Haverton Hall, but also because, as she had discovered in the past, a large sturdy off-road vehicle often provided a boon for transporting the odd ‘find’ she came across when scouting around looking for materials for the restoration work to a property.
The statue she had found for the secluded enclosed garden of the Italian palazzo had been one such find, bought and paid for on the spot before the vendor could change his mind, and loaded immediately into her car.
Ten minutes later she was driving through the open gates to Haverton Hall. The twin lodges at either side of the gate, joined by a pretty spanning ‘archway’, had both looked run-down and in need of repair.
Sylvie knew from her homework that they had been constructed at the same time as the main house—and the house, like them, had been designed by one of the country’s foremost architects in the Palladian manner favoured by the likes of Inigo Jones.
Theatrically, the drive to the house curved through flanking trees, several of which were missing, spoiling its original symmetry, although those which remained were so heavily in leaf that they still obscured all her attempts to glimpse the house until she had driven past the final curve in the drive.
Sylvie caught her breath. Used as she was to beautiful properties—after all, Alex’s ancestral home was renowned for its elegant grace—this one, despite the shabbiness of its fading elegance, was something very special and she could see instantly why Lloyd had fallen so immediately and completely in love with it.
Set on a small incline, so that it could overlook its surrounding gardens and parklands, it was everything that the neoclassicist architects had decreed their houses should be and then some more, Sylvie acknowledged as she drove slowly towards the gravelled parking area in front of the massive columned portico to the house. Stopping the Discovery, she opened the door and started to get out.
Ran had seen her drive up from an upstairs window. She was just a few seconds short of five minutes early. Remembering a younger Sylvie, and her apparent total inability to arrive anywhere on time, he grimaced ruefully to himself before making his way downstairs.
They met on the paved portico. Ran opened the massive front door just as Sylvie mounted the last step. She stopped the minute she saw him, freezing instinctively like a gazelle scenting the presence of a leopard.
He hadn’t changed, but then why should he have? He still looked exactly the same. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the smooth warm skin of a countryman, his jeans clinging softly to the taut muscles of his long legs, his forearms bare and bronzed, the soft checked shirt he was wearing exactly the same kind of shirt she could remember seeing him wearing all the years she had been growing up. His hair was still as thick and darkly rich as ever, his jaw just as chiselled—no signs of soft, rich living there, despite the odd snippets of gossip she had picked up from her mother and from Mollie about the discreet parade of elegant, wealthy women who had passed through his life—Ran had always had a penchant for that type, women in the main who were slightly older than himself, soignée, knowing … all the things that an adoring, unknowing seventeen-year-old was not.
Only his eyes had changed, Sylvie noticed, with a sudden sharp flicker of sensation which she immediately suppressed. Oh, they were still the same incredible colour, somewhere between onyx and gold, still flecked with those heart-dizzying little specks of lighter colour and still surrounded by those unfairly long, thick dark lashes.
Yes, all that was still familiar to her, but the lazily sensual way they were studying her, the subtle but very male message she could read in them as Ran’s gaze flicked over her T-shirt-covered breasts and her slim waist in the plain blue jeans … that was most certainly not familiar to her, at least not from Ran.
And it was only then, when she countered that look with an instinctive and automatically female one of cool reproval, that Sylvie realised that one of them had closed the distance between them from its original safe several metres to a much, much less secure three or four feet.
One of them … To her chagrin Sylvie recognised that it was not only Ran who had moved so much closer and that she herself was halfway towards the front door now instead of on the perimeter of the portico … When had she moved … and how, without knowing what she was doing …? Ran had always had that kind of effect on her … Had had … All that was in the past now, she reminded herself fiercely. And just to ensure that Ran knew it too she held out her hand to him and, raising her voice slightly, smiled with cool authority as she greeted him.
‘Ran, good, I’m glad you’re here. We can get straight down to work. I’ve studied the plans of the house, but I always find that it makes an enormous difference to actually walk over a property, so …’
God, but she was so incredibly sexy, Ran acknowledged. He could feel the heat, the reaction, the response surging through his veins. He had been prepared to find her beautiful. She had always been that. But in the past it had been almost a sexless, childish kind of beauty … Now her sensuality, and his own reaction to it, hit him in the solar plexus like a blow.
As for that cool little voice of authoritative superiority, that distancing little outstretched hand … Later Ran was to ask himself what on earth he had thought he was doing and if he had gone completely mad, but at the time …
Ignoring her outstretched hand, he covered the distance between them and before Sylvie could even begin to guess what he intended doing his hands were resting either side of her waist, his scent, his heat filling her nostrils, his body and his mouth less than inches away from her own.
‘Ran!’
Was that really her own voice, that soft, husky, and, yes, somehow
