Her mouth still felt slightly swollen and sensitive from the way he had kissed her earlier. Her face started to burn as she recalled again the comment he had made to her about her being a vixen—and about Lloyd being her lover.
What would he say if he knew that she had only had one lover and that lover had been a man who hadn’t really wanted her, a man she had had to coax and beg to take her to bed, a man who had told her that he felt no love for her, that what had happened between them had been a mistake, an error of judgement best forgotten?
No. No. No. Angrily, Sylvie buried her face in her hands, but it was too late; there was no pushing back the memories now, they were here, surrounding her, flooding out any kind of denial or rational thought.
She had been at university by then; had, in fact, gone there unwillingly. So intense and all-consuming had been the ferocity of her teenage love for Ran, so burningly immediate and sharp-fanged her desire for him, that she had not been able to bear the thought of putting any kind of distance between them. Every spare minute she had, every excuse she could use, she had used—to be with Ran. As Alex’s stepsister it had been easy enough for her to spend her free time at the estate, joining the group of local teenagers who were helping Ran with some of his environmental projects had given her even more opportunity to be with him. Not that Ran himself had seemed to be aware of her feelings, even though she had done everything she could to show him how she felt.
There had been that afternoon she had fallen into the muddy lake they had been cleaning. Ran had pulled her out, grinning at her mud-covered clothes and hair.
‘I need a bath,’ she had complained, grimacing.
‘A bath?’ Ran had laughed. ‘There’s no way Alex’s housekeeper is going to let you into the house like that. I’d better take you back to the cottage with me and hose you down outside before I let you go back, otherwise we’ll both be in real trouble.’
His cottage... How she had trembled at the thought, imagining not the prosaic cleaning-up operation Ran had so teasingly referred to but something far more intimate, her body soaking in a tub of blissfully hot water whilst Ran lovingly soaped her clean...
‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her, frowning at her. ‘You’ve gone very red. Are you feeling ill?’
Ill... Sick with love, with longing for him, would have been the appropriate answer, but she had been too naive, too shy to make it. Instead she had shaken her head and dutifully climbed into his battered Land Rover for the drive back to his small estate cottage.
The sensual intimacy she had so dangerously imagined had proved to be just that—a fantasy.
Ran had made her remove her clothes in his small back porch, sternly admonishing her not to move off the old towel he had put down on the floor and to give him a shout once she was undressed and wrapped in the towel he had left her.
‘I’ll put your stuff in the washer—Alex’s housekeeper will kill me if she sees it—and then you can have a quick shower upstairs. You’ll have to go home in my stuff but at least it will be clean.’
‘These towels are awfully thin,’ she had remarked critically once she was standing wrapped in the protection of the largest of them, and Ran had returned to scoop up her filthy clothes.
‘Mmm... I use them to dry the dogs,’ Ran had told her unromantically, grinning at her when he saw her expression. ‘They’re the ones who should be pulling a face,’ he said. ‘When they come back covered in mud they get hosed down outside before they’re even allowed in.’
‘I’m not a dog, I’m a...’ A woman, she had been about to say, but then she had stopped as Ran had stooped to pick up her white briefs from the stone floor, her face turning an unsophisticated shade of pink when she saw how small they looked held in his strongly masculine hand.
The wet had seeped right through her jeans to her briefs, but Ran’s eyebrows had risen as he’d studied them and then her.
‘It’s all right... I can go home without them; it won’t matter under...my...your jeans,’ Sylvie had told him helpfully, far too innocent and young then to understand just how sensuously provocative it could be for a woman to go naked beneath her clothes—and even more so when the clothes, the jeans she was wearing, were his and not her own.
‘It’s okay; I think I’ve got something you can wear,’ Ran had told her laconically.
She had been young and naive but not so young nor so naive as not to be able to guess where the tiny pretty lacy briefs Ran had given her might have come from, and the knowledge that they must have belonged to another woman had cast a shadow not just over the whole day, but over everything.
She had once heard Alex joking with Ran about his taste for older women.
‘I’m not in the market for commitment or marriage,’ Ran had returned. ‘But I’m not about to turn myself into a monk either,’ he had admitted frankly. Neither of them had known that she was listening as she hesitated outside Alex’s library door on her way past.
‘So a woman who knows what life’s all about, who’s been married and decided that it isn’t for her, suits me fine.’
She hadn’t been able to hide her massive crush on Ran before she’d left for university, in fact had openly offered her love to him, but he had determinedly pushed it away—just as he had also determinedly pushed her away.
She had noticed it again at Alex’s annual Christmas party. Her mother had been there, turning her nose up at such little country pursuits, but Sylvie hadn’t cared. She’d been determined that Ran was going to dance with her and that she was going to claim a Christmas kiss from him.
She had been wearing a new dress and high heels. She had put her hair up and worn make-up. Alex had looked at her with tender amusement when she had come downstairs, but there had been no tenderness in Ran’s eyes later that evening when he had removed her arms from around his neck, refusing to give her the kiss she had begged him for. It had taken three glasses of wine before she had had the courage to approach him and, horrendously, she could feel her eyes starting to fill with tears as he’d unlocked her arms from around his neck and started to turn away from her.
‘Ran, please...’ she had pleaded, but he had ignored her, stony-faced and blank-eyed, as he’d walked away from her.
And, as though that hadn’t been bad enough, to compound the evening’s heartache and humiliation, she had seen him less than an hour later dancing with the newly divorced wife of one of Alex’s tenants, holding her tightly against his body as he caressed her under the dim lights, bending his head to kiss her with heart-shaking passion before leading her outside.
She had been so jealous, so burned up with pain that even her skin had felt raw and tender.
Later, naively, she’d told herself that Ran hadn’t meant to hurt her, that he probably still thought of her as a child and not a woman, and so she had gone on clinging to her self-created delusions.