CHAPTER ONE
RUE knew she had a visitor long before the old-fashioned bell-pull clanged in the small front porch. Horatio had started rumbling deep in his throat the moment the car pulled up outside. It would probably be Jane Roselle coming to collect the delphiniums she had promised to have ready for her. If so, she was going to have to wait for half an hour, because she was early, and Rue hadn’t quite finished tying up the bunches.
Five years ago, when she had first started growing and drying her own flowers and herbs, she had had no idea how quickly her small business would escalate, or the pleasure it would give her, but then, five years ago she had not thought it possible that life could hold pleasure for her ever again. She had been wrong, though. Perhaps her enjoyment was not the kind a young woman in her mid-twenties would normally expect, because it did not encompass any of the things that the rest of the world might consider necessary for happiness. There was no man in her life, for instance—no lover or husband to share her small pleasures and pains. She had no children, no family of any sort, barring Horatio.
But she was content in her aloneness, preferring it, even welcoming it for its security.
The bell clanged again, more impatiently, and Horatio’s growl deepened.
Rue deftly tied another bundle of the tall dried flowers and then hurried across the stone-flagged floor of the drying shed to wash her hands in the old-fashioned stone sink in the corner.
Her home, Vine Cottage, had once been part of a much larger estate. Vine Cottage itself had housed the estate gardener and, because of this, attached to it was a large assortment of outbuildings, including the comfortably sized drying shed with its old-fashioned heavy beams so ideal for hanging her flowers from. Next door to it was a small two-storey stable with a boarded loft and thick stone walls that kept dry in the wettest of weathers.
From the doorway in the upper storey, which had once been used, with the help of its small hoist, to store animal feed for the winter, it was possible to see as far as the big house itself and the hills beyond, as well as to look over her own ten-acre field, which was now, as they approached the end of summer, a glorious mass of rank upon rank of rich colour as her flowers bloomed.
She was just approaching the most critical period of her busy year. A dry late summer and early autumn meant that she could pick her flowers at their peak. Wet, windy weather destroyed the fragile blooms and could mean a whole season’s work going to waste.
Horatio whined at the door as she walked towards it. He was a dog of large size and indeterminate breed. She had found him abandoned half a mile outside the village three winters ago and, having been unable to trace his owners, had adopted him, or rather he had adopted her, she admitted ruefully as he followed her into the house.
Vine Cottage, with its small stone-mullioned windows, seemed dark and cool after the hot sunshine outside. The original cottage had grown over the centuries and the house was now in fact a good size, although the many interconnecting rooms made it awkward to traverse in a hurry, Rue acknowledged.
The small front hallway was little more than a tiny passage with no natural daylight. So when Rue opened the front door she was momentarily blinded by the sunlight, and had to blink rapidly as her eyes adjusted to its brightness, before she realised that her visitor wasn’t the customer she had been expecting, but a total stranger…a total male stranger.
Instinctively her fingers curled into Horatio’s collar, finding comfort in the soft fur and reassuring solid muscle beneath it, and as though he felt her tension Horatio uttered a deep-throated growl of warning.
‘Miss Livesey?’
He had a very deep voice, as one might expect for a man of his height and breadth, Rue acknowledged, at the same time as she acknowledged that he was obviously not a man who was used to being kept waiting, if that faint tinge of impatience, hardening his words to incisive irritation, was anything to go by.
As she nodded in acknowledgement, he stepped forward. ‘If I could have a word with you?’
And, although he phrased the words as a question, Rue was left in no doubt that he fully intended them as a statement of intent. She was forced to step back into the narrow darkness of the hall.
The man had to duck his head to step under the lintel. All the cottage doorways were low; that did not bother her, as she was barely five foot four herself, but it would be bound to cause her visitor a good deal of irritation were he forced to inhabit Vine Cottage, as by her estimate he was a good two inches above six feet tall.
Rue thought momentarily of the doorways at the big house, spacious, elegant doorways many of them, designed by Robert Adam to go with the spacious, elegant rooms they opened into. It would surely be difficult to find two more different environments than Vine Cottage and Parnham Court, but Rue knew which she preferred.
It seemed that she had no option but to invite her unexpected visitor into the pretty sitting-room to the right of the front door. The front of Vine Cottage faced south, warm sunlight spilling from the mullioned windows into the comfortably furnished room. Rue had decorated this room herself, lovingly waxing the beams and then painting their ancient plaster infills with a special lime wash stained palest ochre, which gave the plaster a soft, warm glow.
She had learned a good deal in the five years she had lived in Vine Cottage, she acknowledged, glancing slightly ruefully at her clean but very short fingernails. Five years ago she would not even have known the importance of painting traditional plaster infills with lime wash instead of modern paint—and five years ago she would certainly never have dreamed of doing such work herself.
As her visitor followed her into the sunny room, Rue saw him glancing appraisingly at her few good antiques: the chest of drawers which she lovingly polished with wax polish; the two chairs she had reupholstered herself; the small bureau.
While he was studying her home, Rue studied him, and now that she could see him properly she was tensely conscious of the air of vital masculinity that emanated from him.
Here was a man who was used to making his own rules in life…who was used to giving commands and having those commands obeyed. Here was a man who was used to the feminine sex paying full dues to his maleness, Rue suspected, even though there was nothing remotely sexual in the way his gaze flicked assessingly over her own slender body, registering the delicacy of her fine bone-structure and the fragility of her frame. Her blonde hair was pulled back off her face in a ponytail to make it easier for her to work, her skin free of make-up.
Six years ago she would never have dreamed of letting a man—any man—see her looking anything other than immaculately made-up and dressed. Odd to remember how much store she had once set by such things
. These days…these days she saw very few men, and when she did was always glad when she was free of their presence. They made her feel on edge, resurrected memories she would rather have suppressed…made her remember.
She realised that the man was looking expectantly at her and, for no reason that she could think of, she flushed vividly.
She saw the amusement darken the steel-grey of his eyes, and instantly her own flashed dark green with anger. So he found her amusing, did he? She didn’t offer him a seat, but asked crisply, ‘How can I help you, Mr…?’
‘Saxton, Neil Saxton,’ he supplied for her. ‘I understood that my solicitor had been in touch with you.’
The moment he said his name, Rue remembered it. Of course, this man hadn’t come here wanting to buy her dried flowers or herbs…one look at the expensively tailored pale grey suit he was wearing should have told her that much. The letter had arrived over two weeks ago, and she had stuffed it to the back of her desk, meaning to reply to it but somehow or other never taking time in the busy days that had followed.
‘You’re the new owner of Parnham Court,’ she said huskily, and, as though he found her statement of what he already knew to be both irritating and time-wasting, he said curtly, ‘Yes. You’ve obviously received my letter.’
‘You want to buy my land and this cottage?’
‘Yes. I need somewhere for a housekeeper to live. There’s room at the court, but I like my privacy. This place would be ideal for her. Your land, as you know, runs down one side of my drive. I’m prepared to offer you a good price.’
As she listened to him, Rue felt her anger growing. Did he really think he could simply walk into her home and bully her, with his masculinity and his wealth, into selling it to him? Five years ago she had virtually crawled into Vine Cottage like a wounded animal seeking sanctuary, and like an animal she had hibernated here all through one winter, barely aware of the damp and the draughts…the tiles missing from the roof, the lack of proper amenities…the state of disrepair the cottage had fallen into, having been unlived in for almost eight years. And then, with the spring, she had gradually started to reawaken to life itself. She had looked around her new surroundings and seen, in the sharp, strong sunlight of those early spring days, the dust and the dilapidation.
Having no money, she had had to do most of the work on the cottage herself. It had taken her two years to make it the comfortable home it was today. Two years of going to night school to learn a variety of crafts. Two years of working so hard that she practically fell asleep standing up at night. And now Vine Cottage wasn’t just a house…it was a part of her.
She looked at Neil Saxton with angry eyes. How dared he simply walk in here and assume that, because he was a wealthy man, he had the right to expect that she would be willing to sell her home to him, just because he wanted it? She opened her mouth to tell him that no money on earth could purchase Vine Cottage, and then she acknowledged that part of the blame was hers. She ought to have written to her solicitor and informed him that under no circumstances did she wish to sell either the cottage or the land.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said formally, turning her back on him so that he wouldn’t see her apology for the polite sham it was. ‘Vine Cottage isn’t for sale, and never will be.’
‘I see.’ Without looking at him, she could tell from the clipped tone of his voice that she had angered him. ‘Well, Miss Livesey…I think I ought to warn you that I’m a man who never takes no for an answer. Everything has its price,’ he told her cynically, and as she turned round to deny it Rue flinched beneath the look in his eyes.
It seemed to say ‘even you’, and her breath caught in her throat, locked there on a huge wave of pain and fear. Once his comment might have been all too pertinent…but over the last five years she had truly learned the value of her own self-respect, her own pride, her own independence and, most of all, her own peace of mind, and these were things that were so important to her that they were worth more than the most fabulous of king’s ransoms. And all of them were directly linked with Vine Cottage. It was her security blanket…her base…her own special private place; and too late she realised that in allowing this man to invade it she had allowed him to bring in with him values and emotions that made her tremble a little with fear.
Horatio felt it and growled again, his ears flattening to his head.
He had a good deal of Alsatian in him, and when he bared his teeth, as he was doing now, he could look extremely ferocious. Neil Saxton, though, seemed totally unafraid. He clicked his fingers to the dog and made a soft sound under his breath that changed Horatio’s growl to a whine, and from that to a fawning adoration that made Rue stand and stare in disbelief.
Over Horatio’s head, her eyes met Neil Saxton’s cool grey ones in shocked anger.