‘Did he say where he was going or when he would be back?’ Sylvie asked her stiffly.
The older woman shook her head.
‘He just said that he would telephone,’ she informed her.
Had Ran genuinely gone away on business or had he gone because of her? Sylvie wondered painfully. He had been kind towards her when he had talked about the pain of unrequited love, kinder than she had ever known him be before, but that didn’t alter the fact that he didn’t love her and that her presence here in his home must be creating problems for him. Well, she wouldn’t be creating those problems for very much longer, she decided, her determination to convince Lloyd to hand over their Haverton Hall project to someone else even stronger than it had already been.
Lloyd himself rang whilst she was upstairs updating her files, explaining that he had been delayed a little longer than he had expected and that it would be late evening before he arrived in Derbyshire.
Ran had instructed his housekeeper to prepare a room for Lloyd before he had left—the room next to her own, Sylvie discovered, when Mrs Elliott, the housekeeper, informed her of Ran’s instructions.
Her mobile rang and she answered it, expecting to hear Lloyd’s voice but hearing instead that of her stepsister-in-law.
‘Mollie, how are you?’ she asked, genuinely pleased to recognise her caller.
‘Queasy,’ Mollie responded, but Sylvie could tell from the happiness in the other woman’s voice just how pleased she was about her recently announced pregnancy.
‘Just you wait until it’s your turn,’ Mollie warned her. ‘It’s no joke. We had salmon for supper and it’s my favourite and I couldn’t touch a bite...’
Her turn! Sylvie gripped her mobile tightly. How would Mollie and Alex react when she told them that she was pregnant? They would want to know who the father of her child was, of course, although both of them were modern enough, loving enough, to accept her decision to keep the father’s identity to herself and to bring up her child alone.
‘How are things going up there?’ Mollie asked her. ‘How are you and Ran getting on...?’
To Mollie’s intuitive ears the silence that hummed down the wire between them before Sylvie answered her spoke volumes.
‘We aren’t,’ Sylvie told her shortly. ‘And in fact...’ She paused and then decided there was little point in keeping her decision from Mollie who was, in many ways, despite the distance which separated them, probably her closet friend; not just a stepsister-in-law.
‘I...I’ve decided to ask Lloyd to take me off this project, Mollie. I can’t...it isn’t... My being here just isn’t going to work... Ran and I...’ She stopped.
‘You still love him, don’t you?’ Mollie asked her gently.
For a moment Sylvie didn’t think she was going to be able to reply but almost against her will she felt compelled to respond honestly to Mollie’s gentle question.
‘Yes. Yes, I do,’ she admitted. ‘More than ever. He’s...he’s everything I’ve ever wanted, Mollie. The only man I’ve ever loved, the only man I ever will love...in every sense of the word,’ she admitted in a very low voice. ‘There hasn’t... I haven’t... Isn’t it incredible in this day and age,’ she continued, her voice full of angry despair, ‘that at my age the only man I’ve ever been intimate with, the only man who’s ever touched me...made love to me...is Ran? And both times... He doesn’t love me, Mollie. I know that. He never has, and that first time he was angry, and his reactions were... Both of us were angry and what we did...what we had... But this time it was so...so loving... so tender...so meaningful. But in reality he was just comforting me... He—’
‘Did he tell you that?’ Mollie interrupted her softly.
‘Not in so many words. He talked about how painful it is to love someone who can’t love you back, and...and about how there’s no need to...to feel ashamed of having that love; of needing that person.
‘I can’t stay here, Mollie,’ she burst out passionately. ‘I’m afraid of what might happen, of what I might say...do... Ran was so kind, so...gentle and tender... I want to keep that memory... I don’t want...’
‘He must feel something for you if...’
‘If he took me to bed?’ Sylvie supplied dryly for her. ‘He wanted me, yes, but... Lloyd was up here and he took Ran’s latest lady-friend back to London with him. Oh, I don’t think their relationship was particularly serious, but obviously Ran’s a man, and as such...’
‘He took you to bed because he wanted sex; is that what you’re saying?’ Mollie asked her shrewdly.
‘Well, I think that was a large part of it,’ Sylvie agreed.
‘But he must have felt something for you, Sylvie, to talk to you the way you say he did. If he really didn’t care, didn’t want
to get involved, then surely the last thing he would do would be to allow that kind of intimacy to take place between you.’
‘Yes... No... Oh, I don’t know. I just know... I just know that I’m afraid if I stay here I’ll... I can’t cope with it, Mollie; it’s safer for me to put as much distance as I can between us...’
‘Have you told him you’re leaving?’ Mollie asked her.
‘Not in so many words,’ Sylvie admitted. ‘He knows that I’ve asked... Lloyd’s coming up to Derbyshire to see me, but Ran isn’t here at the moment. His housekeeper says he told her that he’s had to go away for a few days, but he hasn’t told her where or when he’ll be back... I suspect that he’s trying to avoid me...’