Penny Jordan Collection(52)

                ‘You’re right, she’s a child still, and the sooner she grows up and forgets all about me the better,’ Ran had told him hardily. ‘And as for taking her to bed,’ he had thrown at Alex as he turned to leave, ‘well, there’s always a cure for that.’

                And so there had been, for a while at least, until he had grown sickened and shamed by the emptiness of the sexual encounters he was sharing with women who meant as little to him emotionally as he did to them. And, even with that form of release, keeping the promise he had made to Alex and himself hadn’t been easy. There had been times, far too many of them, when he had nearly weakened, like when he had fished her out of the muddy lake and taken her back to his cottage. Oh, God, the temptation then to take what she was so innocently offering him, to take on the role not so much of seducer as sorcerer, transmuting the frail strength of her youthful crush on him into the enduring bond of real adult love.

                But, despite the temptation which kissing her had presented, somehow he had always managed to tell himself of the differences that lay between them in age, experience and in prospects. He loved his job and wouldn’t have wanted to change it for anything or anyone, but there was no denying that to expect a girl, brought up as Sylvie had been with every conceivable luxury, to move into the kind of accommodation estate managers normally occupied, to live the often lonely lifestyle that would be hers when he was working... He just couldn’t do it. Had she been older, wiser...poorer...it might have been different. And so he had resisted the temptation to give in to her desire and his own love, and he had praised himself for his selflessness, until the fateful day he had taken her Alex’s cheque.

                To see her there, outside her flat, dressed only in a man’s shirt—a shirt through which, with the hot summer sunshine slanting down on her, he could see quite plainly the shape and fullness of her breasts and even the dark aureoles of her nipples—to watch her with another man, a man who he had immediately assumed was her lover, had created within him an anger, a bitterness, a jealousy that had rent wide apart his self-control.

                To discover later, too late, that there had been no other lover, to realise what he had done and why, had filled him with such self-loathing that he could hardly endure the weight of his own guilt.

                ‘I love you,’ Sylvie had told him innocently. ‘I want us to be together...’

                He had spent the previous week with Alex, discussing ways and means in which they could reduce the cost of running the estate. Amongst them had been his own suggestion that they rent out his cottage and that he move into rooms in the main house. He knew that if Alex accepted his suggestion he wouldn’t even have a proper home to offer her. He could just imagine how her mother would react to that, to the idea of her daughter living in rooms above the stables of the house where she had been brought up. And Sylvie was still so young, still so naive...still at university with the whole of her life in front of her. What right had he to use what had happened between them to tie her to him? No, better to let her think that he didn’t want her than to have her turn to him five or even ten years down the line to tell him that she had made a mistake; to accuse him of putting his own emotions before her needs, of taking advantage of her youth and inexperience.

                And he’d been glad he had done so when she had dropped the bombshell about her relationship with Wayne.

                Somehow that was something he had just not expected, but he had seen from the expression in her eyes and the vehemence in her voice that she meant every word she was saying. And so he had walked away, telling himself that it was for the best for her, best that somehow, some time, some way he should learn how to forget her.

                But, of course, he had never done so.

                And now here she was, back in his life, a woman now and not a girl, and what a woman, how much of a woman, the woman whom he loved—and who hated him.