Past Loving. PENNY JORDAN

know you’ve bought this place, wild horses wouldn’t drag me within a mile of it.’

      Ten minutes later, when she finally pulled out on to the main road, she was still shaking, still cursing herself for her folly in giving in to her need to make that childish verbal defiance. Why on earth hadn’t she simply remained cool and uncaring, shrugging aside his comment and just driving off without giving in to the need to react to it?

      Well, at least she had made her position plain. As far as she was concerned, his presence in the village wasn’t welcome, and she wished he had not chosen to come back. She was glad that it was extremely unlikely that she would have to have any kind of contact with him, although, womanlike, she couldn’t help wondering what on earth a single man could possibly want with such a huge barn of a house.

      She was of course late for her board meeting, apologising to the other members when she hurried in.

      As they discussed the new packaging, she remembered Patsy’s hint about Gerald not even being on the board. For some time she had been contemplating inviting him to join them as a non-executive director. He was a well-balanced, cautious man who would help to offset Paul’s ebullience, and he was their accountant.

      ‘I hear Robert Graham has just moved into the area,’ Lawrence Starling commented to her after the board meeting.

      Lawrence was their newly appointed sales manager. Paul had head-hunted him from one of the multinationals. Single and two years older than her, he was beginning to develop a semi-proprietorial attitude towards her that Holly was trying to discourage.

      ‘Yes, I believe so,’ she agreed dismissively.

      ‘Strange sort of thing for him to do—I mean to move out here…’

      ‘He grew up here,’ Holly informed him.

      ‘Oh, I see. Look, Holly, I was wondering: there are one or two aspects of the new packaging I wanted to bring up at the board meeting, but with your being late there really wasn’t time. I know Bob Holmes wanted to get off to play golf, and I didn’t want to delay him. Could we discuss them over dinner tonight?’

      ‘No, I’m sorry, I already have an engagement,’ Holly told him truthfully. She hadn’t missed the none-too-subtle way Lawrence had let her know that Bob was playing golf, and, while she was forced to agree with Paul that Lawrence’s aggressive marketing tactics were beginning to pay off, she found his incessant need to put others down and his uncurbed ambitious desire both distasteful and wearying. And besides, in a sense what she had said was true, even if her engagement was merely with her garden and her desire to make sure that the new forget-me-not plants were tucked up in their beds just as soon as possible.

      ‘Tomorrow, then?’ Lawrence pressed her.

      Firmly Holly shook her head, telling him, ‘I think you’d better wait and discuss it with Paul when he gets back. You know that he has overall charge of marketing.’

      The sullen look Lawrence gave her irritated her, but she didn’t let it show. Why was it that men had this annoying propensity to change from ‘I know best’ father figures to sulky little boys whenever the former bullying manner did not work? Why could so few men accept a woman as their equal and rejoice in her success and her skills? Why must they always feel so threatened and be so antagonistic? Perhaps it was time that someone discovered a way of reprogramming the entire male species.

      If they did, one thing was for sure; it would be a woman who would make the discovery and implement it…no man would ever admit that his psyche needed any kind of change.

      Reminding herself that she was perhaps being a little unfair and that there were many, many men who were comfortable with and supportive of their female partners’ success in life, she headed for her office.

      IT WAS SIX o’clock before she was able to lift her head from her paperwork and think about preparing to go home.

      An hour later, as she drove past the entrance to the lane past the Hall, she noticed that two men were working there, putting in the supports for a rough-hewn farm-style gate.

      Well, Robert certainly hadn’t wasted much time there, she reflected as she put her foot down on the accelerator and sped past.

      She was half a mile further down the road when she heard the all too unwanted sound of a police car siren. When she looked in the mirror and saw the driver flashing his lights at her, she cursed under her breath and pulled in to the side of the road.

      She had been speeding, if only marginally, and she of all people ought to have known better. The number of times she had complained to Paul that he drove too fast—And now she was the one to get booked.

      The police officer was polite but unrelenting; she wondered what he would have said if she had pleaded in mitigation that it had been the soreness in her heart caused by the memory of an old love-affair that had caused her to put her foot down and break the speed limit. Since he was a man, it was all too probable that he just would not have understood, she told herself as she listened gravely to his caution. Her first driving offence in over ten years of blemishless driving. And it was all Robert’s fault.

      She was still glowering and mentally blaming him when she eventually drove off, this time keeping a much stricter eye on her speed.

      Rory had gone but the newly turned earth of the flower-beds showed how hard he had been working. The forget-me-nots were small dots of soft grey-green against the darkness of the earth. She lingered in the garden, studying them, telling them not to be overawed by their well-established perennial bedmates, and then paused to console and reassure those same larger plants, coaxingly promising them that the new arrivals were no threat to them, and that the summer extravagance of their pinks, silvers, whites and blues would be all the more spectacular after the sharp colour contrast of the bright spring yellows and blue of the bulbs and forget-me-nots.

      It was almost an hour before she had finished her tour of the garden, and although it was still light she could smell the crisp early autumn scent infusing the air.

      Yesterday morning she had spotted a heron investigating the fish pond, which meant that this weekend she would have to string wires from the vine eyes in the brick surrounding the pond to stop him from helping himself to her fish.

      The irritation and anxiety produced by her run-in with Robert was slowly fading as her senses responded to the peace of her garden.

      If, ten years ago, someone had told her that she would become so devoted to such a homely pursuit, that she would find so much solace and pleasure in it, she would have bitterly denied what they were saying. A small smile touched her mouth. It was time she went in. She was going out this evening.

      Their local market town’s seventeenth-century assembly rooms had recently been renovated and reopened, providing an elegant setting for a number of events. Tonight’s event was a small charity affair; a well-known cellist who supported the charity would be playing for them, and there was to be a light supper afterwards, provided by the local WI.

      As a prominent business figure locally, Holly had been approached to support the charity and in addition to buying tickets she had also given a generous donation. The bowls of potpourri scenting the rooms had been provided by her company, their perfume a distillation of natural products and one which she personally thought was evocative of the period in which the assembly rooms had been built.

      The evening was to be a formal affair—black tie for the men and gowns for the women, preferably with some sort of Regency look about them to complement the setting. When she had originally bought the tickets, Holly had assumed that Paul would be escorting her, but then this trip to South America had intervened.

      Instead she was now being partnered by a relative newcomer to the area.

      The building of a new private hospital just outside the market town had resulted in an influx of medical personnel. John Lloyd was the new hospital’s chief administrator. A Scot in his late thirties, divorced with two children, he had made no secret of the fact that he found her very attractive.

      However, he was old enough