Penny Jordan Collection(2)

                An unscheduled and unfortunately brief visit from Alex and his                     wife Mollie to vet Lloyd and talk over the situation with Sylvie had resulted in                     her deciding to take the job, a decision which, twelve months down the line, she                     regularly paused to congratulate herself on making, or at least she had done                     until now.

                Her work was varied and fascinating, and barely left her with                     any time to draw breath, never mind for any personal relationships with members                     of the opposite sex, but that didn’t worry Sylvie. So far, what she had learned                     from her experiences with men was that she was a particularly poor judge of the                     breed. First there had been her revoltingly humiliating teenage crush on Ran and                     his rejection of her, then there had been the appalling danger she had put                     herself and her family in with her foolish involvement with Wayne.

                She and Wayne might never have been lovers but she had known,                     from the first, of his involvement in the drug scene and, as foolishly as she                     had tried to convince herself that Ran would fall in love with her, she had also                     tried to convince herself that Wayne was simply a lost soul in need of                     protecting and saving.

                She had been wrong on both counts. Love was the last emotion                     Ran had ever felt for her. And as for Wayne... Well, thankfully he was now                     safely out of her life.

                Her new job took every minute of her time and every ounce of                     her energy. Each new property the Trust decided to ‘adopt’ had to be inspected,                     vetted and then painstakingly brought up to the same standard as all the other                     properties the Trust financed and opened to the general public.

                Sylvie knew that her employer’s highly individualistic and                     personalised way of deciding which of the multitude of properties he was offered                     as potential new additions to the Trust’s portfolio were worth acquiring caused                     other organisations to eye him slightly askance. For Lloyd to accept a house it                     had to have what he described as the ‘right feel’, but his eccentricities tended                     to make Sylvie feel almost maternally protective of him.

                Or at least they had until now.

                To return from a six-week trip to Prague, where she had been                     supervising the takeover of a particularly beautiful if horrendously run-down                     eighteenth-century palace they had recently added to their acquisitions, to                     discover that in her absence Lloyd had made yet another acquisition in the form                     of Haverton Hall, a huge neoclassical building set in its own parkland in                     Derbyshire, had caused her heart to sink into her shoes.