Stranger From The Past. PENNY JORDAN

glare at her so disapprovingly, she really didn’t know.

      ‘Oh, do come on, Gareth.’

      The blonde was glowering at her now, making it plain how she regarded her, her hand reaching possessively for Gareth’s arm, scarlet nails gleaming dangerously against his suit-clad arm.

      ‘You know you’re mentioned in the will?’

      Sybilla had almost turned away from him, but his curt, almost acid words stopped her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed tonelessly, without looking at him. Henry Grieves, Thomas’s solicitor, had already been in touch with her about the collection of Dresden figures, which Thomas had directed were to be hers.

      She had been a little girl of no more than six or seven the first time she had seen the figures and fallen in love with them. Now she blinked away emotional tears, trying not to remember how at Christmas Thomas had told her that he had left them to her.

      He had always said that eventually the figures were to be hers, but she had treated his comments as a joke, knowing how valuable they were, and knowing also that Thomas knew that her love for them had been formed in the days when she had had no knowledge at all of their financial worth.

      In many ways she would have preferred that he had not left them to her, even though she appreciated that they had been a gift of love.

      Now though, sensitively suspecting that Gareth was somehow criticising her…perhaps even suggesting that she had pressurised Thomas into leaving her such a valuable gift, she tensed defensively.

      ‘I only mention it because you haven’t come to collect the figures.’

      His mildness confused her, coming so quickly after his earlier apparent coldness.

      She couldn’t tell him that the reason she hadn’t been up to the house was because she had known he was there.

      In the distance a church clock struck the hour, causing Gareth to frown. ‘I have to go now, but…we really ought…’

      ‘Gareth, for goodness’ sake…’

      Sybilla was already turning away from him, determinedly pushing her trolley in the direction of her own car. She was, she discovered, trembling slightly, her legs oddly weak.

      She told herself it was the shock of her trolley’s overturning, but in her heart of hearts she knew it was more than that. That the reason for her unfamiliar and unwanted weakness lay with the six-feet-odd of lean hardened maleness she had just walked away from.

      Shaking because of one inadvertent meeting with Gareth Seymour. Ridiculous. She had stopped being vulnerable to him or any other man when she was fifteen years old. Hadn’t she?

      CHAPTER TWO

      OF COURSE, Sybilla could not now go straight into the office as she had originally planned. She would have to go home and change her clothes, do something about her damp hair, and generally make herself look a bit more like the efficient and well-groomed businesswoman she purported to be, before she went through Belinda’s diary and dealt with her workload for the day.

      Fortunately, Belinda’s first appointment wasn’t until lunchtime, according to their shared secretary.

      Five years ago, when the two girls had decided to start up an agency providing temporary secretarial services, neither of them had envisaged how successful they were going to be. The town had been very small and parochial in those days, and it had only been with the opening up of a new motorway system and the consequent increase in small businesses establishing themselves in the newly developed business park just outside the town that the whole area had become more prosperous. Now, in addition to having on their books twenty very proficient secretaries, they could also provide clients with a wide range of other staff, including computer-operators and programmers.

      Sensibly so far they had concentrated on ploughing back the profits they’d made into the business and on expanding it slowly and carefully, and only the previous week they had been approached by their local newspaper, who were keen to include them in an article they planned to run on successful local enterprises.

      One of the drawbacks of running one’s own business, as Sybilla had discovered, was that it left little time for social and leisure activities.

      She had a good circle of friends, some from her schooldays, others she had made since through the business; at least twice a week she attempted to visit the town’s new leisure centre and spend an hour or more in the swimming pool there, but of late she had found that the demands of their growing business meant that she had less and less free time.

      Belinda had said ruefully just the other day that her husband and two teenage children were beginning to complain that they never saw her, and had told her friend, ‘It’s not so bad for me, but you don’t seem to have any social life at all these days, and you know what they say about all work and no play…’

      Sybilla had laughed, but too many of her friends were beginning to make the same comments to her, and only last week the next-door neighbours, for whom she had done this morning’s shopping, had warned her that she was never going to find herself a nice young man and settle down if she wasn’t careful.

      Because she liked and respected the Simmondses, Sybilla had refrained from telling them that she was quite happy as she was. Perhaps she had an over-jaundiced view of the male sex, but it seemed to her that, even in this day and age, once a woman was married and had children it became incumbent on her to juggle so many demanding roles that Sybilla felt it was small wonder that so many potentially very successful career women found themselves abandoning the unequal struggle of competing successfully with their male colleagues for promotion at the same time as they tried to meet the demands of their husbands and children.

      When she fell in love she would feel differently, Belinda had told her when she’d voiced this view to her, agreeing that, without that leavening magic, to an outsider it could seem that it was always the woman who seemed to have the responsibility for making relationships work, for keeping life harmonious and happy.

      Sybilla had contented herself with lifting a cynical eyebrow. She knew quite well that to those who thought they knew her she represented something of an enigma. With her close friends she was warm and affectionate; to those who needed her help—like her neighbours, like Thomas Seymour—she gave it generously and happily, but when it came to men, especially those who indicated that they found her attractive and wanted to get to know her better, she was cool and off-putting.

      She knew that her friends presumed that this was because she had dedicated herself to her career and that there was no room in her life for a man who might demand too much from her.

      But the truth was that she was afraid of allowing herself to become emotionally involved with anyone.

      She had seen too many marriages and relationships break up under the kind of strain that her own responsibility to the business would put on her to want to risk the same thing happening to her. The truth was that, for all her outward demeanour, at heart she was still the same idiotically romantic girl she had been at fifteen.

      When she loved she wanted it to be completely and without reserve; and she wanted it to be forever.

      Logic told her that she was being both naïve and foolish, and that in setting such impossibly high goals for herself she was almost deliberately making it impossible for her to form any kind of man-to-woman relationship. Instead of lowering her ideals a little and accepting reality she was deliberately withholding from herself the pleasure and happiness she might have found by doing so, and all because she was still punishing herself for being such a fool over Gareth.

      She had been fifteen, for heaven’s sake. Little more than a child. All right, so she had behaved embarrassingly and idiotically, but she wasn’t the only girl who had ever had a crush on someone. All right, so it was unfortunate that Gareth had realised how she’d felt, but that was no reason for her to feel that to allow any man to believe she cared for him was to open herself to humiliation and hurt.

      Mentally she might be twenty-five, she acknowledged