Penny Jordan Collection(74)

                ‘No! She was the one who left me,’ Ran told her fiercely. ‘She told me herself that the only reason she’d given herself to me was because Wayne didn’t want a virgin...and...’

                ‘And you believed her?’ Mollie derided him quietly.

                Ran looked at her.

                ‘She was saying goodbye to him when I arrived and if you’d seen her with him...’

                ‘Looks can be deceptive,’ Mollie pointed out. ‘People can go to extraordinary lengths to conceal what they really feel if they believe that exposing those feelings could lead to them being rejected and hurt.

                ‘After all,’ she added quietly, ‘you’ve concealed the fact that you love Sylvie from her, haven’t you?’

                Immediately Ran tensed, his jaw tightening.

                ‘Alex told you?’ he demanded. ‘That was supposed to be—’

                ‘Alex hasn’t told me anything,’ Mollie assured him. ‘He didn’t need to tell me, Ran; I guessed.’

                ‘How?’

                ‘By knowing the kind of man you are and subtracting that from the way you behave towards Sylvie, and coming up with a figure that just doesn’t add up, not unless you add another ingredient to it,’ she told him with a small smile. ‘Why don’t you tell her how you feel...?’

                ‘She knows,’ Ran told her shortly. ‘Look, Mollie, I appreciate your concern,’ he said. ‘Maybe once, as a child, a young woman, Sylvie did love me, but that’s all changed now. She’s not a young girl any more, she’s an adult. There’ve been other men in her life, men who—’

                ‘What other men?’ Mollie challenged him, and then added boldly before he could answer, ‘You are the only lover Sylvie has ever had, Ran, the only one she’s ever wanted...’

                ‘No...that’s not true,’ Ran denied, but Mollie could see the way he changed colour, his face paling beneath his outdoor tan. ‘She and Wayne were lovers and now she has Lloyd.’

                ‘No,’ Mollie denied firmly, and then added more gently, ‘No, Ran. Wayne and Sylvie were never lovers. She told me that at the time and I know it was the truth. She’s said very much the same thing since, very recently.’

                ‘How recently?’ Ran pounced, and then shook his head. ‘This isn’t about other men, other loves. I would still feel the same way about her no matter how many other men there’d been in her life, but I can’t, won’t impose either myself or my love on her. She loves Lloyd.’

                ‘Yes, she does,’ Mollie agreed, ‘but she loves him as a friend, Ran, not as a man.’

                ‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d heard her talking to him on the phone as I did, pleading with him to see her...’

                Mollie took a deep breath. Before following Ran out here to talk with him there had been certain limits she had imposed on her revelations, certain boundaries she had told herself she must not and would not cross, certain confidences she would not share, but now she knew that she was going to have to break that self-imposed sanction.

                ‘Pleading with him to see her because she wants to be taken off the Haverton Hall project,’ Mollie told him quietly. ‘She’s desperately afraid, Ran, afraid of the way she feels about you and afraid of... She told me herself that she just doesn’t think she can take any more. She said it was impossible for her to do her work properly when all she could think about was you. She wants Lloyd to allow her to work on something else, something that doesn’t involve her in any kind of contact with you... It’s up to you, Ran,’ she told him simply, ‘If you love her...’