‘I expect the Annabelle is very dressy,’ Vicky murmured appreciatively.
‘Charming woman,’ Lloyd commented warmly after she had gone.
‘Yes, she is,’ Ran agreed.
‘About as charming as a piranha,’ Sylvie muttered between clenched teeth behind their backs before reminding Lloyd curtly, ‘I’ve got preliminary estimates for some of the work here if you want to see them. I have faxed copies off to New York, but...’
‘Sylvie, you’re so efficient,’ Lloyd told her, smiling benignly at her. ‘I keep telling her, Ran, that she needs to relax a bit more...have fun... When was the last time you spent a day shopping for yourself?’ he challenged her before she could say anything.
‘I shopped in Italy,’ she told him dismissively.
‘Yes, I know. I was there, remember...? I took her to Armani,’ he told Ran. ‘And what did she do? She told me that the clothes were far too expensive. What do you do with a woman like that?’
‘They were too expensive,’ Sylvie told him defensively. Too expensive for her at any rate, and although she knew that Lloyd would happily have offered to buy an outfit for her he was still her employer and she had no intention of taking advantage of his generosity. Even so, it hurt to know that he was comparing her to Vicky Edwards and perhaps finding her less feminine, less womanly, and in front of Ran. It was plain what both of them were thinking: that somehow she was less fun than the other woman—less of a woman. Well, let them think what they liked, she decided angrily. She was there to do a job, not to...to flirt and bat her eyelashes.
‘She’s a wonderful girl,’ she heard Lloyd telling Ran as she went to get the papers she wanted him to see. ‘But she works too hard, takes life too seriously.’
* * *
After she had dropped Lloyd and Vicky off at the airport, her head aching from listening to the other woman’s flirtatious comments, instead of heading back to Derbyshire, Sylvie drove on impulse to Manchester itself and parked the Discovery outside the Emporio Armani boutique that a kindly taxi driver had directed her to.
A pretty, dark-haired girl who could have been Italian but wasn’t brought her the trouser suit she had seen in the window.
The diffusion range might be cheaper than the designer originals but it was still expensive. Even so... As she turned and twisted in front of the mirror, studying her reflection in the flatteringly cut suit, Sylvie admitted that she couldn’t resist it. Neither could she resist the matching shirt that went with it.
So, she was dull and boring and unfeminine, was she? Well, she might not wear three-inch heels, and she certainly didn’t flutter her eyelashes, but she was still a woman...very much a woman...more than woman enough to ache with longing for Ran. Oh, yes, she was more than woman enough for that!
CHAPTER NINE
‘YOU’VE been a long time. What happened?’
Guiltily Sylvie spun round, dropping her Armani carrier bag as she did so. She had arrived back at the Rectory five minutes ago and had decided to go straight to her room, but she had just reached the top of the stairs when Ran emerged from his room, his curt comment coupled with her own guilt startling her.
‘You’ve been shopping,’ he said sharply in disbelief, answering his own question as he saw the bag she had just dropped and the contents spilled out from it onto the carpet.