‘I need to see you,’ he had heard Sylvie whisper emotionally to him, and as he had heard the betraying tremble in her voice he had closed his eyes. He knew all about that need, had known about it from long before the night he had taken Sylvie in his arms in a mixture of fury and longing, breaking every promise he had ever made himself as he made love to her, with her, and discovered, with a mixture of joy, pain and shame, that he was her first lover.
‘Wayne’s been telling me for ages to find someone to lose my virginity with,’ she had thrown tauntingly at him, and she had gone from him to Wayne, abandoning everything and everyone to be with him—her family, her education, even, it had seemed to Ran at times, her principles.
But then she had changed her mind, begged Alex for his help and support, to help her get her life back on track.
He had seen her off at the airport with Alex and his new wife, an impulse decision, giving in to a need for which he had berated and despised himself.
He had ended up going home afterwards and slowly getting drunk—not something he was in any way proud to remember, but it had been the only way he could find to anaesthetise himself against his pain.
Not even to Alex, his closest friend, had he been able to talk about how he felt, about how much he loved her. Alex was, after all, her stepbrother.
He had thought that he was prepared for the reality of knowing that she would spend her life with someone else, but that had been when that reality was at a safe distance. Knowing she loved Lloyd was one thing; having to witness that love, having to hold her whilst she cried for him, having to listen to her pleading with him for his return—no amount of preparation could protect him from that kind of pain.
And now Lloyd was on his way back to see her. Would she tell him about last night, about the intimacy they had shared? Morally there was no reason why she should do so but...
Last night, when he had held her, touched her, loved her, when he had felt her body’s response to him, answered not just its sensuality but its deeper and far more intensely urgent demand for something that went far beyond even the physical, sexual satisfaction he had felt...known... He opened his eyes and walked across to the window of his study to look out into the garden. Long-ago ancestors of his had designed and planned this garden, lived in this building; his title, his land, the great house which was now too big and too expensive for any one family to run?
?all that tradition now rested on him and with him.
Once, long ago, it would have been considered his duty as the last male of his line to produce a child, a son, a legitimate heir. But that was something he could never do. He could not marry another woman when it was Sylvie he loved, not for his own sake and not for any wife’s either, so there would be no legitimate heir. The only child he would ever have was the one he knew already that he and Sylvie had created between them last night. Their child. But he could not compel Sylvie to allow him to be a part of that child’s life. Not when he knew that she didn’t love him. Twice now she had turned to him for comfort when, in reality, she had loved another man. There could not, must not ever be a third occasion.
Lloyd was more than likely to arrive before evening and Ran knew that he simply could not endure being there to see him reunited with Sylvie.
He walked back to his desk and reached for the telephone.
In the pretty sitting room which his wife had made so much her own, Alex grinned in appreciation as their son headed eagerly towards him, swinging him up into his arms as Mollie looked on placidly. Alex looked lovingly at her. She was in the early stages of pregnancy with their second child and suffering from morning sickness.
‘I’ve just had a phone call from Ran,’ he told her.
‘Mmm... How is he—and Sylvie...?’
‘He wants to come down for a few days. Apparently he wants to pick my brains for ideas on making the estate more self-sufficient.’
‘Do you think he and Sylvie will ever work things out?’ Mollie asked him anxiously.
Alex raised his eyebrows.
‘Why ask me? You’re the one who thinks that they are madly in love with one another.’
‘I don’t think, I know,’ Mollie corrected him sternly. ‘But the pair of them are just so...so stubbornly determined not to admit to one another how they feel.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might just be wrong?’ Alex asked her tenderly.
‘No, because I’m not. You’re Sylvie’s brother, Alex, and Ran’s best friend; you have a duty to do something to help them.’
‘Oh, no! No! No way...’ Alex denied, shaking his head and looking alarmed. ‘They are both adults.’
‘Maybe. But they’re both behaving like children. We have to do something, Alex; you saw the way Sylvie was breaking her heart over Ran when we went to see her in New York just after she went there... It was pitiful to see the look in her eyes when she finally managed to ask after him... And Ran’s just as bad.’
‘Look, they’re at Haverton Hall together...alone,’ Alex stressed. ‘If that doesn’t give them both the opportunity to sort themselves out...’
‘Maybe being alone isn’t what they need, maybe they need someone to talk to, to show them...’ Mollie suggested meaningfully, giving him a coaxing smile.
‘No way,’ Alex told her firmly, but Mollie had made up her mind. One way or another, something would have to be done, and if Alex couldn’t be persuaded to do that something, well, then—
Determinedly she started to think.
It was later in the afternoon when Sylvie returned from Haverton Hall to learn from Mrs Elliott that Ran had announced that he had to go away for several days.