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Fantasy For Two
PENNY JORDAN
Opposites attract!Just what did impulsive Mollie Barnes and powerful landowner Alex Villiers, Earl of St. Otel, have in common? Mollie always championed the underdog, while Alex represented the privileged classes. He declared she was stubborn and willfully determined to believe the worst of him, while she thought he was simply amusing himself with her.So why had she confessed her secret fantasy to him? It soon became clear that they shared the same dream and Alex was perfectly happy to make it come true.
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Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon's most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women's fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Fantasy for Two
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
MOLLIE’S pretty heart-shaped face was screwed up into a despairing glower, her topaz-flecked sherry brown eyes minus their usual sparkle as she studied the contents of her office diary. ‘2.30 p.m. drive to Edgehill Farm to interview the farmer’s wife, Pat Lawson, re her special preserves recipe’. It wasn’t exactly adrenalin-pumping, heartbeat-raising stuff, and working on a small-town local newspaper deep in the heart of rural England certainly wasn’t what she had had in mind when she had been studying for her media degree, but realistically she knew that she was fortunate in having found a job at all. A good many of her peers had not done so and at least it was a start—a toe-hold on the career ladder which she hoped ultimately would lead to a much higher profile post, hopefully as either a newspaper or television journalist, covering all the important events of the day both at home and abroad.
It had been her parents, both of them careful and realistic in their outlook on life, and as different from Mollie with her vibrant and sometimes turbulent personality as it was possible to be, who had urged her to accept the job offer which had come up via one of her tutors at university.
‘Dad, writing up weddings and country fairs for the local rag in some old-fashioned country market town isn’t what I want,’ Mollie had protested to her father when they had originally discussed the job.
‘Maybe not,’ her father had returned equably, giving her a small smile before adding dryly, ‘You have to learn to walk before you can run, though, Mollie.’
‘At least it’s a job, darling,’ her mother had chimed in. ‘Although I wish you could have found something closer to home.’
Her parents lived in a comfortable London suburb and Mollie’s new job was going to take her deep into a remote part of the West Country, a small country town on the coast which looked as though it would be more at home featuring in some TV historical drama than being the kind of place which could produce anything remotely newsworthy.
And Mollie, if she was honest about herself, had the kind of personality that dearly loved, even needed some kind of challenge, some kind of cause or person to champion, something or someone into which she could pour all the strong energy of her femininely fiery nature.
And she very much doubted that she was going to get that kind of stimulation writing about Mrs Lawson’s family chutney recipes, even though she knew that it was the kind of thing that her mother, a very keen and skilled cook, would have fallen on with real pleasure.
She had only been in her new job—her first job—for just under a week, having spent her first weekend in Fordcaster settling into the small rented cottage which was to be her new home, and then her first three working days at the Fordcaster Gazette’s offices studying back copies of the paper and, as she had been instructed by the paper’s owner and chief executive-cum-editor, ‘absorbing the ethos’ of his paper.
‘You’ll find Bob Fleury interesting to work for,’ her tutor had told her when she had confirmed to him that she had accepted the job. ‘He’s a bit of an individualist, someone out of the common run—not entirely unlike yourself,’ he had added wryly, watching as Mollie had struggled to suppress the desire to defend herself hotly against his subtle dig.
They had had several run-ins during her time at university. She was too impulsive, too inclined to react with her emotions and not her brain, he had often told her.
‘Fleury—that’s an unusual name,’ she had managed to content herself with.
‘Mmm...’ he’d commented. ‘He’s got French blood. That part of the coast was heavily involved with smuggling during the years of the French Revolution, and the contraband they landed wasn’t always merely inanimate objects.
‘Bob’s a traditionalist who, alongside seeing life in a very individual manner, can also be very set in his ways,’ he had further told her. ‘He believes there’s a certain order to things and to people. Fordcaster is very much an archetypical English market town, and Bob represents its views and its determination to preserve the status quo.’
Mollie had listened ominously. The job was the absolute antithesis of everything she had hoped for when she had been studying for her degree, but she was realistic enough to know that it took more than a firstclass degree to land the kind of plum job she had yearned for. She simply didn’t have the kind of influence that would get her an entree into the world she wanted to inhabit—at least not at this early stage in her career—and she suspected that her mischievous tutor was deriving great satisfaction from having persuaded her to accept a job which they both knew would demand far more of her emotional self-control and patience than it ever would of her degree skills.
‘You can learn a lot from Bob, Mollie,’ her tutor had told her more seriously before she’d left. ‘Before he took over the paper—which, incidentally, has been in his family for several generations—he worked for a TV channel as one of their foremost foreign correspondents. What Bob doesn’t know about that kind of reporting isn’t worth knowing.
‘Furthermore, many of the people he worked with in the field have gone on to fill very high-ranking posts within the corporation and the media in general.’
The smile he had given her then had done much to restore Mollie’s faith, not just in him, but more importantly in herself. The job itself might not seem to offer much, he had subtly been telling her, but there were quite obviously potential opportunities that went with it that could promise a great deal.
Even so, she suspected that it was not going to be easy for her, working with Bob Fleury, and that she was going to have to do a good deal of biting on her tongue to keep her conflicting and often fiery independent views to herself.
They had already clashed once on the subject of hunting and Mollie suspected that there were going to be many other points of contention between them.
He must have some saving grace, though, because his wife, Eileen, to whom he had introduced Mollie, was a surprisingly modern-minded woman with a decided twinkle in her eye and a warm smile that belied her quite formal country woman appearance.
Both Bob and Eileen were in their late fifties, but Eileen had some very up-to-the-minute ideas and their home, with its elegant simplicity, like Eileen herself, had impressed Mollie considerably.
It wasn’t of Eileen, though, that she was thinking as she drove up a track which hopefully would lead to the farm.
She had already taken a couple of wrong turnings, the reason being that virtually all the land that surrounded the town was privately owned and subsequently its narrow lanes were bereft of any kind of sensible signposts.
Now, finally, she hoped she had found the right lane, but she was already running late for her appointment and Bob, as she knew, was a stickler for the old-fashioned kind of good manners which included being very strict about good timekeeping.
The sharp wind blowing across the Atlantic, up the English Channel and over the cliffs had tousled Mollie’s hair when she had got out of the car earlier to check on her bearings, and now she pushed it irritably out of her eyes—a dark rich red heavy mass of glossy curls which, together with her small-boned frame, gave her an air of feminine fragility which she privately thoroughly resented.
She was a modern woman, strong-minded and independent, and she wanted to be treated as such. Her spirit and her personality more than made up for what she lacked in terms of physical strength and size.
She put her foot down a little harder on the accelerator. The lane was single track only, and not tarmacked, and she winced as her small car bumped uncomfortably over the deeper ruts.
Her mind on the coming interview, she neglected to hear or see anything of the battered Land Rover coming round the bend towards her, but fortunately its driver saw her and he brought his vehicle to an immediate brake-protesting stop which caused Mollie to realise her own danger and likewise apply her own brakes.
Her car stopped just inches short of the mud-spattered nose of his. Cursing under her breath at the delay, she saw the Land Rover’s driver swinging open his door.
The last thing she needed now was to waste any more time. Angrily she pushed open her own door and got out. Whoever was driving the Land Rover wasn’t the farmer. Bob had described him to her as a man in his sixties, and this man was nowhere near that. Nowhere near, she acknowledged, sucking in a sharp breath as she took a good look at him.
Tall—taller even than her father, who was just exactly six feet—and broad, extremely broadshouldered, in the worn checked shirt he was wearing open at the throat to reveal a male vee of flesh disconcertingly shadowed by a soft sprinkling of very male-looking body hair.
His hair was black and very thick, his eyes an extraordinarily piercing shade of crystal-clear blue. They also possessed a certain steely look that for some obscure reason made her heart beat just a little bit faster and her chin go up as she fought down the odd mixture of nervousness and excitement that shot hotly through her veins.
She estimated that he was around thirty-two or three, almost a decade older than she was herself. But although his skin looked warmly tanned, suggesting that he spent a good deal of his time out of doors, and despite the fact that he was driving an extremely battered and shabby-looking Land Rover, and in defiance of the casual and well-worn clothes he was wearing, he had about him an air if not exactly of some dangerously good-looking predator, then certainly not one that fitted her mental image of a farmer.
He was far too sure of himself for one thing, far too arrogant and dominant in the way he approached her car and her, holding the door open for her in a gesture which, at face value, might seem courtly and polite but which Mollie assessed more darkly as a demeaning male act of aggression, an unspoken command to her to get out of her car.
If she hadn’t already been doing so she would have firmly refused and remained where she was, but as it was she was already halfway out, and had very little option other than to complete the manoeuvre.
She wasn’t going to allow him to think he had got the upper hand, though. No way.
Standing opposite him, she demanded aggressively, ‘You do realise, don’t you, that this is a private road?’
She could see from his expression that she had caught him off guard. He choked briefly and started to frown, his mouth hardening as he surveyed her grimly.
‘A private road along which you were travelling too fast,’ he retaliated smoothly.
He had a voice like rich, dark chocolate, Mollie recognised weakly. Very bitter rich, dark chocolate. She had always been susceptible to voices, and his was... She gulped and swallowed. His was.,.
Stop it, she warned herself severely. He isn’t your type of man at all. You don’t like dark-haired, darkbrowed, shockingly handsome and seriously sexy men. You never have, and besides...
His lordly assumption of control plus his arrogant attitude, coupled with her own quick-to-take-fire emotions and her uncomfortable awareness that she had been driving just a bit too fast, had a predictably explosive effect on Mollie’s temper.
‘I was not driving too fast,’ she contradicted him immediately—and untruthfully—and then added with what to her was perfectly reasonable logic, ‘And besides, you were driving a Land Rover, so you must have seen me coming...’
‘I did,’ he agreed grimly, adding as though to underline his point, ‘I stopped.”
‘So did I.’
The look he gave first the nose of her small car and then her made Mollie’s face burn pink with angry colour.
‘This is a private road over private land,’ she began again. ‘I have the permission of the owner to be driving along it—’
‘You do?’ She was interrupted softly.
‘Yes, I do. I work for the Fordcaster Gazette.’
‘Oh, you do, do you...?’ he said gently, but Mollie was far too incensed to pick up on the subtle undercurrent of danger held in the softly spoken but very inflexible words.
‘Yes, I do,’ she agreed, recklessly ignoring the small warning voice trying despairingly to make itself heard, its protest drowned out by the hot, angry turmoil of her need to get the better of her foe as, tossing her head, she lied bravely, ‘And anyway, the owner of this land happens to be a personal friend of mine.’
The dark eyebrows rose, the blue eyes suddenly looking coolly amused and holding an expression that was extremely cynical.
‘I think not,’ he corrected Mollie crisply, adding before she could say anything, ‘You see, I happen to be the owner of this land, and this private road happens to be my private road.’
Mollie’s mouth opened and then closed again. For sheer effrontery she had never met anyone like him.
‘You’re lying,’ she told him fiercely once she had got her breath back. ‘This road goes to Edgehill Farm, the Lawsons’ farm.’
‘To Edgehill Farm, yes, but it does not belong to the Lawsons; it belongs to me. The Lawsons are my tenants.’
‘I—I don’t believe you,’ Mollie managed to stutter defensively.
‘You mean you don’t want to believe me,’ he corrected her with a malign and very cold smile.
‘Who are you anyway?’ Mollie challenged him.
The cold smile became even colder, cold enough to make her shiver slightly, although she fought valiantly to conceal that fact from him.
‘I,’ he told her, pausing for effect and spacing each separate word carefully and precisely, ‘am Peregrine Alexander Kavanagh Stewart Villiers, Earl of St Otel.’
Mollie gaped at him.
She had heard Bob Fleury mention his name in terms of revolting awe and admiration—to her at least; she knew he owned vast tracts of land not only locally but elsewhere in Britain as well, and that he was the holder of several ancient hereditary titles—none of which had impressed her in the least when she had heard Bob Fleury talking about him. But now...
She gulped and swallowed hard on her chagrin and the impulse to deny what he was saying and accuse him of deceiving her—something, some hitherto slumbering instinct, told her that would not be very wise.
She couldn’t allow him to think he had totally routed her, though; it would not only go against the grain but would allow him to think that she was cowed, or even worse impressed, when the truth was that if anything the discovery of who he was had made her dislike him even more.
An earl. Well, she had no time for anything like that. She only accorded other people respect when she felt they merited it, and if he thought for one moment that just because he had flaunted his precious title...
‘Well, I don’t care who you are,’ she told him defiantly, well beyond listening to any inner voice of caution or restraint. ‘And if you think for one moment that I’m going to be intimidated by having you standing there like...like some Jane Austen character threatening to exercise some kind of...of droit du seigneur...’
The dark eyebrows shot up, the blue eyes gleaming with something that Mollie did not dare to try to analyse as he interrupted her suavely to say, ‘I somehow doubt that Jane Austen ever bestowed upon her male characters any kind of rights of that nature... In fact, I suspect she would have strongly disapproved of any such suggestion.’
‘Unlike you,’ Mollie retorted dangerously.
‘That depends... But since you seem so determined to cast me in the role of villain and rake...’
Before she could guess what was happening he had closed the distance between them and Mollie found she was locked firmly against his body—a body which felt far too robustly male for her feminine susceptibilities. He smelled of fresh air and the wind, and beneath the protesting defensive hand she had put out too late to ward him off she could feel the firm thud of his heartbeat and the crisp roughness of the body hair covering his skin.
He was all man. There was no doubt about that, she acknowledged weakly.
Whilst she was trying to control her unwanted and treacherous thoughts he was busily using one hand to keep her secured against his body as the other cupped her face and turned it to just the right angle for the downward descent of his mouth. He was so skilful that her last thought before his lips touched hers was that it was a manoeuvre at which he was extremely practised.
As though he had read her mind, she felt him whispering against her lips.
‘I once had to play the villain in the village pantomime...’
‘I doubt there was much playing necessary,’ Mollie managed to mouth back through gritted teeth, before the firm pressure of his lips on hers made further speech not just difficult but downright dangerous. To even try to open her mouth now, whilst it was being caressed so...so...by his, would be to invite...to...
‘Mmm...’ Giddily Mollie breathed a soft, appreciative sound of bliss as his lips stroked hers, and her own lips, her body, her ravished senses responded hedonistically to the delicious sensual mastery.
‘Mmm...’
‘Mmm...?’
To her chagrin Mollie recognised that he was repeating her soft sound of appreciation—not in confirmation of his own corresponding enjoyment of the kiss they were now sharing, but in fact as a question.
Immediately she stopped kissing him. Not that she had actually been kissing him, she tried to reassure herself as she primly filmed her kiss-softened lips against the provocation of the warmth of his breath and the tantalisingly gentle movement of his lips on hers... No, what she had been doing had quite simply and surely excusably been making an instinctive and automatic female response to the erotic mastery of a man who quite plainly knew far more about how to coax a woman into responding to him than was good for him—or for her.
Determinedly Mollie told herself that it wasn’t disappointment that was chilling her blood as he allowed her to put some distance between them.
‘How dare...?’ she began shakily.
‘How dare you, sir? Unhand me!’ he finished for her promptly.
Mollie glared at him. Now he was quite definitely making fun of her.
‘You had no right to do that,’ she told him angrily, now that she was safely out of range of the strange and highly dangerous effect he had on her senses when he was close up against her. Talk about close up and personal—but she was not the sort of woman to be misled or deceived by her hormones. Just because he was skilled at the kind of kissing that made her feel as soft and squishy inside as—
‘No? I thought you just said I had the right of droit du seigneur,’ he reminded her softly.
He was laughing at her, Mollie decided—enjoying a very male-orientated joke at her expense. Now she really was angry.
‘You do realise that what you’ve just done could be construed as sexual assault?’ she began heatedly, only to have the fire really taken out of her argument.
‘Is that why I’m going to have nail-marks on my arm from where you were holding onto me...?’ he returned blankly.
Nail-marks. Mollie’s eyes widened in a combination of embarrassment and fiery protest.
‘I did not...’ she began, only to stop as he started to roll up the sleeve of his shirt.
‘You’re in my way,’ she told him instead, ‘and I’m already late for my appointment with Mrs Lawson.’
‘Pat won’t mind,’ he assured her easily. ‘She’ll be busy looking after her grandchildren.’
Pat Lawson might not mind but Bob Fleury would if news of her tardiness ever got back to his ears, Mollie recognised.
‘If you won’t move that...that thing,’ she told him heatedly, tossing her curls in the direction of his Land Rover, ‘then I’m just going to have to walk.’
As she started to turn determinedly away from him she thought she heard him laughing, but the next moment he was striding back to his Land Rover and climbing into it, throwing the engine into reverse and allowing her to drive her own car further up the lane to where there was a convenient passing place.
Arrogant brute, Mollie mentally slated him when she actually drove past, assiduously avoiding looking at him, her nose firmly in the air. And if he thought for one moment that she had actually enjoyed his odious and unwanted kiss, then...then...! Hot colour flooded her face as she missed a gear and heard the harsh. grating sound her car engine made in protest.
Half an hour later, standing in his study in the library of Otel Place drinking a coffee he had just made himself, Peregrine Alexander Kavanagh Stewart Villiers, or Alex as he was known to his close friends and associates, reflected ruefully on his recent run-in with Mollie and mentally admitted that he hadn’t behaved very well.
His only excuse was that he had had a so-and-so of a morning, starting with a long-winded and petulantly plaintive telephone call from his stepmother complaining about the fact that her daughter—his stepsister—had announced that instead of completing her university course she had decided to take to the road with a band of travellers.
‘Alex, you’ll have to do something,’ his stepmother had insisted. ‘She’s always listened to you.’
‘Belinda, she’s twenty and an adult,’ Alex had wearily reminded her, forbearing to mention that the main cause of Sylvie’s rebellion was her own mother, and the clinging possessiveness with which she had always treated her, refusing to allow her to grow up and be properly independent.
Sylvie, in his opinion, was a very unfortunate young woman, and his stepmother would have been the first person to complain if Alex had tried to interfere in their relationship—as had been proved in the past.
And then there had been an equally lengthy telephone call from the charitable trust, to whom his father had handed over the family’s ancestral castle in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands. They had wanted to know the possible history of a tapestry which had just been discovered hidden behind a piece of Victorian panelling.
In the end Alex had had to refer them to the archivist of the family, a second cousin of his father’s who was currently living in a house on another of the family’s estates in Lincolnshire.
Like a good many other of the properties he owned, it was let out at a laughably nominal peppercorn rent. His financial advisors were constantly reminding him that by being so soft-hearted and housing not only several members of his family, including his stepmother, who lived in a very grand and expensive-tokeep apartment in London, but also various retired employees, and by paying for the upkeep of the properties they inhabited, he was depriving himself and, more importantly, the estate of income that was badly needed.
Very grimly Alex had had to remind them that so far as he was concerned there were more important things in life than money—and far more important duties and responsibilities.
The now retired employees living all but rent-free in his properties had, as he had explained to the accountants, served his family virtually all of their working lives and deserved some comfort and security in their retirement.
‘But, my lord, surely you can see how advantageous it would be if you were to revoke their tenancy agreements and either let out the properties on short-term leases at much higher rentals or simply sell them.
‘It isn’t just a matter of the revenue you are losing by allowing these people to live in them at such ridiculously low rents, there’s the additional fact that you are maintaining the properties for them. Only last year you paid for a full row of terraced farmworkers’ cottages on your Yorkshire estate to be completely modernised.’
‘I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to accept that I’ve made my decision so far as the tenancies are concerned and I don’t intend to change it,’ Alex had told them crisply.
The days when inheriting an earldom had meant inheriting a life of ease and indolence were long gone—if they had ever existed. Running large tracts of land, not to mention the properties and farms that stood on them, was, these days, sometimes a nightmare of complex legislation and red tape coupled with a never-ending battle to make financial ends meet.
Without the benefit of some very shrewd investments made by his great-grandfather, he doubted that he would have been able to afford the luxury of keeping the elegant Palladian mansion, Otel Place, which had been his father’s and was now his own principle dwelling. His great-grandfather’s money, though it might not make him wealthy, had certainly made the vital difference between his being able to keep most of his inheritance and potentially having to sell off a major part of it.
In fact, Alex now thought, the only bright spot in an otherwise extremely fraught day had been the run-in with his fiery, feisty redhead.
His? Momentarily he checked, and then frowned. She had certainly been furious with him, and perhaps with good reason, he acknowledged ruefully. He could have set her right earlier and explained who he was instead of helping her to dig the trap she had hurled herself into so recklessly.
Had her eyes been topaz or gold? He closed his own eyes—the smell of her perfume, light and tantalising, still clung to his shirt. She had felt good in his arms, against his body, beneath his mouth—warm and curvaceous, vibrant and alive.
He had known who she was, of course. Pat Lawson had told him that she was coming to interview her and he would probably have guessed anyway. Bob Fleury had informed him of her appointment when he had asked him if she could take up the tenancy of the empty cottage in the square he owned down by the river.
He had behaved rather badly, he acknowledged, even if she had invited him to do it, and there had certainly been no excuse for the way he had reacted to her idiotic charge of him using any kind of right to droit du seigneur. No, kissing her like that had been wholly out of order—and wholly enjoyable. More, in fact, than merely enjoyable.
She had had an effect on him that... Hastily he reassembled his thoughts. He was thirty-three, for heaven’s sake, and certainly a long way from allowing his hormones to dictate his behaviour to him.
No. He quite definitely owed her an apology and an explanation. He glanced at his watch. It was too late to call on her now, but he had to go into town later and he would call on her then to apologise.
CHAPTER TWO
‘GOOD.’
Feeling highly satisfied with herself, Mollie put down the pages she had just been reading of the piece she had written following her meeting with Pat Lawson, pausing to study the view from her sitting-room window. Beyond her tiny front garden lay a well-maintained and very pretty town square, complete with its own private garden for which only the occupants of the houses around the square had keys.
The neat early Georgian cottages had, so Mollie had learned from Bob Fleury, a certain cachet to them, and she should consider herself very fortunate to be able to rent one of them.
The cottage certainly had a lot to recommend itself, Mollie had to acknowledge. Its location, with its long back garden backing onto the river and its frontage onto the small square, gave it an almost country feel, and its interior decoration showed not only good taste and a respect for maintaining period detail but a thorough awareness of the needs of modern life as well.
Her mother had been extremely impressed with the kitchen and bathroom when she and Mollie’s father had driven down to Fordcaster with Mollie to help her get settled in.
‘It’s got a proper oven and not just a microwave,’ her mother had approved. ‘And everywhere’s so clean.’
‘Mmm... Apparently, according to Bob Fleury, the landlord is very particular about that sort of thing, and about who he takes on as tenants. Initially I’ve only been granted a lease for three months.’
‘Well, I can see his point,’ her mother had commented. ‘If this was my house I certainly wouldn’t want just anyone living here.’
Walking into the kitchen now, Mollie went to fill her kettle and make herself a hot drink.
Surprisingly Pat Lawson had proved to be extremely interesting to talk to, or rather to listen to, and in no time at all she had furnished Mollie not just with her great-grandmother’s much prized recipe for her famous chutney but in addition a good deal of crisply informative and very witty background information about the history of the town, including some interesting facts about its foremost family—the Villiers of St Otel—both past and present.
‘They go back right to the times of William the Conqueror,’ she had told Mollie. ‘The first earl came over from Normandy, although he wasn’t an earl then, just one of William’s knights. William gave him the earldom in return for his loyalty to him.
‘Things haven’t always been easy for them, of course. There was an earl beheaded in the time of Henry the Eighth, for supporting Anne Boleyn, and another during the Civil War; the most famous of them all, though, was probably the Black Earl—Rake-hell St Otel, they called him. He made a fortune gaming in the clubs in London and then lost it again and ended up abducting an heiress so that he could marry her for her money.
‘When, after six unsuccessful attempts to present him with an heir, his countess finally gave birth to a much wanted son there was a rumour abroad that her child had been another girl and that she had been exchanged at birth for a boy child fathered on one of the serving wenches by her husband...’
Pat Lawson shook her head at this point, but Mollie was more interested in learning about the vices of the current Earl rather than his long-dead ancestor.
‘What about the present Earl?’ she pressed her, eager to gather ammunition against her adversary.
‘Alex?’ Pat responded, with an affectionate warmth and an easy familiarity which both surprised and displeased Mollie somewhat, causing her to scowl horribly and Pat to break off from what she had been about to say and enquire, ‘Are you feeling quite well...?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine,’ Mollie assured her hastily. ‘Please go on. You were saying about Alex...about the Earl...’
Had Pat heard the angry note of censure and dislike in her voice as she’d said the word ‘Earl’? Mollie shot the older woman a quick look. There was no point in alienating her by allowing her own feelings about the man to show, not when it was obvious both from Pat’s doting tone of voice and the indulgent look on her face that she held a vastly different opinion of him.
‘Oh, yes, Alex... He’s had a hard time of it; there’s no doubt about that.’
She paused whilst Mollie attempted to look duly sympathetic, although inwardly she was silently raging. ‘A hard time of it’. Not from what she had seen, he hadn’t. Oh, yes, she could really buy into that one.
‘His father was killed hunting—which is one of the reasons that Alex has banned it on his land—and his unexpected death left Alex with huge death duties to pay. Luckily he’s managed to keep most of the land, even if he’s had to cut down on staff.’
‘I’ve read that more and more farmers and farmworkers are leaving the land,’ Mollie commented.
An idea was beginning to take shape in her mind, the seeds of what she knew in her bones would make a truly controversial piece starting to germinate in the warm, receptive atmosphere of her own instinctive sympathy for the underdog and her equally instinctive dislike of Alexander, Earl of St Otel, and all that he stood for.
‘Yes. Yes, some are.’ Pat was agreeing sombrely with her. ‘We’ve all had so many problems to face recently with there being so many food scares and new EC laws are coming into force.’
‘I was thinking more specifically of the problems that occur when farmers and farmworkers who have devoted the whole of their working lives to their farms discover, when they come to retire, that they are expected to vacate properties which have probably been their homes for most of their lives. Tenanted farms and tied cottages...’
‘Oh, yes, problems can and do occur,’ Pat agreed readily. ‘Often with tragic results.’
‘Like the woman in the north of England who was evicted from the home she had lived in all her life after her husband’s death, and expected to adapt to city life, living in a high-rise council block at eighty-two years of age,’ Mollie supplemented for her, really beginning to warm to her theme. This was an area she had researched extensively as a student, and such injustices were very close to her heart.
‘Yes, the law can be very unfair,’ Pat acknowledged.
‘Not the law, the landlords who implement it,’ Mollie corrected her firmly. ‘I know that the Earl is your landlord. I expect he owns a great deal of property, both locally and elsewhere.’
‘Yes. Yes, he does, but...’
Mollie could see the headline now, hear the plaudits ringing in her ears as she exposed Alexander, Earl of St Otel, for the selfish, greedy monster that he undoubtedly was. Heavens, such a story might even attract the interest of a television documentary team, and then...
Not that she would ever write a single word motivated by self-interest, she told herself sternly. That simply wasn’t her style. No, what she wanted to do was to draw people’s attention to social injustices, to right wrongs, to slay dragons, and if one of those dragons should just happen to be the Earl of St Otel, then...then that only went to prove how right she had been to...to... Well, anyway, he had had no right to kiss her like that.
Thanking Pat for her time, she hurried back to the Gazette’s offices, where she diligently produced an article including the recipe for Pat’s great-grandmother’s famous chutney. But once she left work and got home she looked out her earlier research and seated herself in front of her own computer, where she set to work producing a far more controversial and explosive piece.
It was an exposé of the way wealthy and uncaring land-owners treated their employees, and although she was scrupulously careful about not naming the Earl of St Otel—after all, she had nothing concrete in evidence against him yet—it was him Mollie had in mind as she worked on her article. He was, she had decided, the epitome of the greedy and uncaring land-owner, and a man too proud and arrogant, too selfish, to have a thought in his head for anyone other than himself.
Writing the article was one thing, she admitted, getting Bob Fleury to print it was quite another, but somehow she would find a way. She was determined. What she had to say, what she had to reveal and unmask about this nationwide issue was far too important not to be brought to people’s attention.
The country’s farmland was quickly becoming one vast mechanised food-production plant over which a small number of ever increasingly vastly wealthy individuals were acquiring total control—a business based merely on profits with no room in it for humanity nor for humans.
Sombrely Mollie watched now as a pair of geese flew over the river. Pat Lawson had mentioned during their conversation that there was a small nature reserve several miles away, the land and the small lake it included having been donated by a local philanthropist—some kindly elderly person, Mollie decided absently as she watched the geese disappear out of sight.
Alex grimaced as the Land Rover jolted out of a pothole in the road with a teeth-clenching rattle. He would dearly love to be able to replace it but he simply couldn’t afford to. For him to spend money on a new vehicle for himself would mean that he would have to take money from some other project, such as replacing an essential piece of farm equipment or ensuring that all his tenanted cottages were properly repaired.
He frowned briefly and then made a determined effort to switch off from thinking about the problems that came from trying to turn ancient privilege and everything that went with it into a modern, self-financing environment fit to go forward into the new millennium—something which hopefully his children would inherit with serenity and joy instead of the grim near despair which he had had to take on with his inheritance following his father’s unexpectedly early death. Death duties had been only the start of his problems, but hopefully they were now through the worst of things... Hopefully.
He looked ruefully at the small peace-offering on the passenger seat—a basket of peaches from the orangery that was the focal point of the house’s kitchen garden. Built at the time of the original mansion, and modernised early on in the Edwardian era, its heating was provided by a complicated labyrinth of pipes and hot water fuelled by an ancient and temperamental boiler.
He himself had been on the point of deciding that the place would have to be emptied and closed down when a retired local gardener had come forward with the proposal that a local group of amateur enthusiasts take over not just the orangery and the succession houses that lined the south wall of the kitchen garden, but also the kitchen garden itself.
This collective, of which he himself was now a part, in that he was an honorary member of their group, shared the produce which the garden gave. The peaches he had packed carefully in a basket surrounded by tissue paper were his share of this season’s.
For reasons which he had no intention of going into, their lush promise reminded him very much of the person for whom his gift was intended. Their fruit would be sweet and juicy but with an explosive and challenging sharpness. Deftly he swung the Land Rover over to the side of the road and parked it.
Mollie frowned as she heard the knock on her front door. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She had not had any time to make any friends in the town as yet, and virtually the only two people she knew were Bob Fleury and his wife.
Switching off the kettle, she went to answer the door. When she opened it her eyes widened in wary suspicion as she saw who was standing there.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded challengingly, before adding, ‘If you’ve come to apologise...’
‘I haven’t,’ Alex replied coolly. What was it about her, this five-foot-nothing bundle of aggressive womanhood with her tangle of curls and her amazingly coloured eyes, that somehow set his pulses racing and despite all his good intentions made him feel... made him react...?
‘Then what do you want?’ Mollie demanded.
Heavens, what was the matter with her? What was it about the man that made her behave so...so femininely...? She could actually feel her toes curling inside her shoes as she fought valiantly to control the dangerously awakening flood of awareness that swamped her as she stood there on her doorstep.
He represented everything she most disliked in a man, and yet here was her body telling her the opposite, luring her. Even more angry with herself than she was with him, Mollie took a step backwards, intending to close the door, but to her chagrin Alex had stepped inside before she could do so.
‘How dare you? This is my house—’ she began, only to have him cut her short.
‘No, it isn’t, it’s mine,’ he said cynically.
Mollie gaped at him.
‘You’re my landlord?’ she guessed, determined not to be caught out the same way again.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am,’ Alex agreed. ‘But...’
What on earth was going on? The whole situation was rapidly getting totally out of hand. He hadn’t come here to argue with her, dammit. He had come to...
To Mollie, his arrival so soon after she had finished writing her article only served to add fuel to her already turbulent emotions.
‘You might be able to browbeat and...and terrorise your other tenants, especially those unfortunate enough to owe their living to you, but I’m not—’ she began, but Alex had heard enough. He had never known a woman get under his skin so quickly or so thoroughly, and of all the wrong-headed and totally unjust accusations he had ever heard hers certainly took some beating.
‘Now just a minute—’ he began, but Mollie was in no mood to listen to him.
‘You’re trespassing,’ she told him dangerously. ‘And if you don’t leave immediately I shall...’
Alex, she realised, wasn’t listening to her. He was staring at the article she had so recently finished printing out and which she had left on the table in front of which he was now standing.
Attached to the front of it was a boldly handwritten note bearing his name, which she had underlined thickly, adding three heavily drawn exclamation marks. His earlier frown had become a black-browed scowl, and the very air around them in the small room seemed to have taken on a thunderous, sulphurous atmosphere.
‘Would you mind explaining to me what the hell this is supposed to be?’ she heard him demanding slowly as he spaced out each separate word with infinite care and ice-cold fury.
‘I should have thought it was obvious. It’s an article I’ve just written on the dreadful and iniquitous way farmworkers are treated at the end of their working lives...’ Mollie responded, determinedly tilting her chin as she met his furious glare head-on. She refused to give way either to his very obvious ire or her own quivering inner reaction of excitement and alarm at what she had caused.
‘Are you trying to imply that my farmworkers are badly treated?’ Alex asked her.
Mollie’s chin lifted even higher.
‘And if I am,’ she demanded. ‘Are you going to deny that you have turned people out of their homes to make room for new, younger employees?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Mollie blinked. She hadn’t been expecting such a categoric and totally barefaced misappropriation of the truth.
‘You’re lying,’ she told him positively.
Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Her accusations were so ludicrous and so far off the truth that if they hadn’t been such a damned insult, and if she hadn’t been so positive that she was right, then he would have been more inclined to laugh than get angry. However...! Clenching his jaw, he told her ominously quietly, ‘I do not lie.’
‘Liars always say that,’ Mollie replied sweetly.
‘This is impossible. You are impossible,’ Alex retorted. ‘And if you think for one moment that anyone with a shred of intelligence is going to publish this...this rubbish, then...’
As he spoke he was reaching for the article. Instinctively Mollie acted to protect it, to stop him reaching out. Alex got there first, crumpling up the sheets in his fist as Mollie tried to tear his fingers from around them.
Instinctively Alex started to turn away from her, but Mollie, who had reached up on her toes, stretching her body out precariously to try to retrieve the article, started to lose her balance, causing Alex to do the only possible thing he could do.
Mollie’s small, instinctive cry of alarm was smothered against the solid wall of his chest as he dropped the article and reached instead for her.
‘Let me go. Let me go,’ Mollie demanded, hammering hard against his chest with two small bunched fists, oblivious to the fact that but for his chivalrous gesture she would probably have been lying ignominiously in a heap at his feet instead of being held protectively and safely against the marginally less ungiving hardness of his body.
Both the floor and his muscles might be equally tough, but her body was certainly reacting very, very differently to the muscles than it would have done to the floor. The quivering, jelly-like shakiness which had invaded her limbs was certainly not the kind of reaction she could ever remember having after coming into contact with any kind of inanimate object. Come to think of it she couldn’t remember ever having experienced such a mind-boggling reaction to coming into contact with anything or anyone at any time in her whole life before. It really was too bad of her body to react to him in this wretchedly puerile fashion, she told herself sternly. He was, after all, only a man.
‘I hate you. Let me go at once,’ she told him furiously—just to make sure that he understood that the by now openly visible trembling of her body meant nothing whatsoever, and that if he was unwise enough to think that it did...
‘Likewise,’ she heard him telling her through gritted teeth.
So, given that both of them had expressed their dislike of one another so plainly, why was it that they were now locked in one another’s arms, kissing like a pair of starving lovers who had been apart for centuries?
Mollie had no idea. She only knew that the angry, passionate, devouring kisses their mouths were hungrily demanding from one another seemed to feed the need she could feel boiling up inside her rather than satiate it.
She had never dreamed that she could feel like this about anyone, that she could desire anyone so passionately, so intensely, so...so insanely...and so compulsively that she knew that if she didn’t somehow find a way to put a brake on what she was experiencing it wouldn’t be Alex who might be tearing off her clothes in order to make love to her, but she who was tearing off his.
That was what he did to her... That was how he made her feel. It wasn’t love; it wasn’t even lust... What exactly it was she couldn’t even begin to put a name to... She only knew it was something explosive. Something dangerous... Something over which she was totally without controt—a starving, famished, aching need that twisted tormentedly through her as she alternately pushed him away and then pulled him closer, her mouth biting hungrily at his, her lips closing around his hot, hard tongue, her hips grinding into his as he grasped them and held her, his body mirroring the fiercely sensual movements of hers.
She could feel his arousal and her own body ached and pulsed in response. A series of frantic mental images crowded her brain, sharply clear flashes...images of the two of them entwined together, their bodies naked, his skin glistening with sweat, sleek, tanned, roughened with soft dark hair, hers paler, softer but no less aroused.
She could feel her nipples hardening, thrusting against her clothes. Her teeth worried at his lower lip. She could hear him groan and felt his answering passion in the way his hands moved over her body, shaping her, moulding her, cupping her breasts, holding them in such a way that she literally shook with aching need.
She could feel herself starting to moan as the force of it possessed her body; a reciprocal shudder racked Alex’s body, and the sound he made, a low, raw groan, reverberated through her as their mouths fused hotly together. And then, abruptly and shockingly, Mollie felt Alex lift his mouth from hers and firmly push her away from him.
Instinctively she resisted, her senses so thoroughly aroused and aching for him that she couldn’t bear to let him go. And then, thankfully, before she could make a complete fool of herself, sanity and common sense came to her rescue, allowing her to shrug off the hands still clasping her forearms and to assume an expression of furious anger as she demanded huskily, ‘How dare you...? How dare you—?’
She broke off as she caught sight of the basket of peaches Alex had brought in with him, thankful to have something other than him on which to focus her attention and her chaotic emotions. ‘And just where did those come from?’ she asked aggressively.
‘I brought them with me,’ Alex told her curtly. ‘They’re home-grown—from the orangery.’
He was still trying to understand just what had prompted him to behave in such an uncharacteristic fashion. He was sexually experienced enough to recognise the potential destruction that could be caused by emotions, sensations as explosive as those he had just experienced, but there had been a feeling, a need within him when he had held Mollie in his arms which had gone far, far beyond any mere desire for sex.
He could tell, too, that even though she was trying valiantly to hide it from him she had been as caught off guard, as unable to control what had happened as he had been himself.
The last thing he needed right now was to get involved with a woman, a situation like this one. He had enough problems in his life already. More than enough.
‘The orangery,’ Mollie repeated bitingly. ‘And how many poor souls have you had to evict from their homes to pay for that kind of luxury, I should like to know?’
‘I’m sure you would,’ Alex agreed.
‘These peaches are rotten—rotten because they’ve been grown and fed on human misery,’ Mollie told him dramatically, tilting her head proudly as she added, ‘It’s all there in my article—the way that people, men like you—’
‘You can’t publish what you’ve written...’ Alex began to tell her, intending to warn her that she had got her facts totally wrong, but before he could finish Mollie immediately interrupted.
‘You can’t intimidate me,’ she told him passionately.
Alex opened his mouth to tell her that intimidating her or anyone else had never entered his mind, nor was it ever likely to do so, and that essentially at heart he was a pacifist, a man who applauded and worked for harmony, a man who respected the views and feelings of others. But instead, to his own bemusement, he heard himself saying in a passably threatening male growl, ‘Don’t be so sure.’
The tiny quiver of sensation that shivered through Mollie’s body as she heard him wasn’t entirely based on fear, but, wisely, she had no intention of investigating just why the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice should generate within her a feeling not unlike the delicious excitement she had experienced as a child when engaging in some activity which she had known to be forbidden.
‘Typical,’ she responded contemptuously to Alex instead, with a provocative toss of her head. ‘But you don’t frighten me.’
Grimacing to himself, Alex turned away from her and headed for the front door.
‘Maybe not,’ he muttered to himself under his breath as he angrily yanked the door open and strode through it. ‘But you sure as hell frighten me.’
No wonder he had stormed off like that, Mollie crowed in mental triumph as she firmly slammed the door after him. He had known she had him routed, that she couldn’t be bullied or pushed or cowed, as he had no doubt expected.
Walking back into her living room, she absentmindedly picked up one of the peaches and bit deeply into it. The fruit was luscious and sweet, with a taste that made her close her eyes in momentary sensual bliss.
‘Mmm...yummy...’
She had virtually finished the peach before she remembered what she had said to its donor. Well, never mind, she wasn’t one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, she told herself stoutly. How many peaches were there exactly in that basket? Three more... Well, it would be wasteful not to eat them, an insult to whoever had taken such care in growing and nurturing them...
The next day, standing in Bob’s office whilst she waited for him to finish reading her article, Mollie was still seething over her run-in with Alex. How dare he threaten her? He was typical of his type: rich, arrogant, completely oblivious to the thoughts and feelings of others.
But it was his threat to her article that concerned her the most and possessed her thoughts, not what had gone before it. In fact that kiss they had shared, and her own regrettably insane and inadmissibly intense response to it, was something she simply wasn’t prepared to dwell on or give any kind of credence to by thinking about it. Everyone was permitted the odd small aberration.
She had been under stress, caught off guard. He had no doubt expected her to reject him, and would have enjoyed having her behave in what to him would have been a predictably female and victimish way. By kissing him back, by showing no fear, she had shown him that she was not so predictable, so easily readable, that she was not the kind of woman who was going to be overawed or daunted by him.
She was no fool. Of course there would be members of her sex who would be silly enough to be taken in by his good looks and by the aura of success and maleness that clung to him, but she was most certainly not one of them.
Bob had reached the end of her article. He put it down and removed his spectacles, and then frowned as he told her baldly, ‘We can’t print this. You do realise that people locally will assume that this landlord you refer to is Alex, and—?’
‘And because he happens to own half the county no one is allowed to say or write anything that might show him up in his true colours? Is that it?’ Mollie interrupted him hotly.
Bob Fleury’s frown deepened as he looked at her.
His grandfather on his mother’s side had been a Scot, and Bob had inherited some of his dourness and his cautious carefulness, which balanced his more unpredictable French trait. Now, as he placed both his hands on his desk and studied Mollie, he chose his words very carefully.
She was such a fiery young thing, with so much still to learn, but he liked her. She had spirit and, just as important, she genuinely cared about her fellow human beings. He had no time for these cynical and worldly young people who seemed bored with their lives before they had really begun.
‘Is that what you think—that Alex is the kind of landlord you’ve written about in this article?’
‘Well, isn’t he?’ Mollie challenged him.
‘No,’ Bob told her promptly and firmly. ‘I’ve known Alex all his life and there is no way he would ever treat his tenants badly. In fact, one of the first things he did after his father’s death was set about raising enough money to ensure that those who had worked for his father and were close to retirement could be securely housed when they reached retirement age.
‘He had to fight like the devil to get his plans past the local planning committee as well. Simply allowing people to stay on in the often remote cottages they had occupied during their working lives wasn’t enough for Alex. No. What he did was bring in an architect and instruct him to design purpose-built units suitable for independent elderly people to live in.’
Now it was Mollie’s turn to frown.
‘Anyone can make plans...promises...’ she began, but Bob shook his head, forestalling her.
‘Alex did more than that,’ he told her firmly. ‘Wherever he owns an estate he has financed the building of a small development of these units, close to all the local amenities and complete with resident wardens and facilities for the disabled. He’s even financed a nursing home for those ex-employees who can no longer manage to live by themselves.’
‘But Pat said—’ Mollie began, only to have her boss cut across her objection a second time.
‘There’s no way Pat Lawson would ever criticise Alex,’ he told her. ‘She thinks the world of him.’
Mollie looked away. It was true that Pat Lawson had never actually mentioned Alex by name, she acknowledged unhappily, but she had assumed when the older woman had agreed with her own comments that she had known that Mollie was obliquely referring to him.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she heard Bob telling her, and he very firmly tore her prized article in two, and then two again, before depositing the pieces in his wastepaper basket.
Then he asked her, ‘Did you get Pat’s recipe?’
‘She’s young and enthusiastic,’ his wife reminded him gently later in the day, when they were having lunch together at the White Swan. The pub had originally been a coaching inn, and since it was owned by Alex it had escaped any kind of themed modernisation and was still very much a traditional English pub, with proper English food including Bob’s favourite steak and ale pie.
‘She needs something she can get her teeth into,’ Eileen added. ‘She doesn’t want to write about recipes and knitting patterns.’
‘Maybe so, but I can’t understand her—to write something like that about Alex of all people...’ Bob said, shaking his head. ‘I told her one of the first things any journalist worth their salt has to learn is to get their facts right. I mean Alex... I can’t think what’s got into the girl. She seems to have taken a real dislike to him.’
‘She needs a crusade...’ Eileen told him wisely, before adding firmly, ‘You know what the doctor said about your cholesterol level. Why don’t you have the chicken salad?’
Mollie could feel her ears burning hotly as she walked through the Gazette’s main office. No doubt everyone had heard Bob rubbishing her article this morning. Well, she didn’t care what Bob said; she knew, she just knew that there was no way that Alex was as white as he liked to be painted. After all, she had firsthand knowledge of just how badly he could behave when he wanted to, hadn’t she?
A brief touch on her arm made her jump. She turned her head to find Bob’s secretary smiling at her.
‘I was just going out for lunch,’ she told Mollie, ‘and I wondered if you’d like to come with me.’
‘I’d love to,’ Mollie accepted gratefully. With the exception of Lucy, the secretary, all the other members of the Gazette’s staff were of a similar age to its owner, and although she was a girl who had never found a problem in meeting and making new friends, and one who, moreover, enjoyed her own company, she had begun to feel slightly isolated and alone since moving to the town.
Bob had just kissed his wife goodbye and was about to walk out of the White Swan when he was hailed by an old friend—the chief inspector of the town’s police force—who, he saw, was frowning grimly.
‘Something wrong?’ he asked casually.
‘You could say that,’ he was told. ‘We’ve just been put on alert. It seems we’ve got a convoy of travellers heading out this way.’
‘Travellers?’ Bob questioned slightly bemused.
‘Yes. You know—hippies. New Agers...’ the chief inspector explained briefly. ‘They pitch up and make camp with their caravans and their lorries and cause the devil’s own kind of problems. If they do decide to make camp locally I’ll have every farmer for miles around on my back wanting me to get rid of them, not to mention the calls we’ll be getting from anxious parents worrying about the possibility of them selling drugs and generally causing problems.
‘I’ve been trying to track Alex down,’ he added.
‘It’s more than likely to be his land they settle on if they do settle locally, so it will be up to him to seek what legal remedies he can to move them on.’
‘What makes them do it, I wonder...?’ Bob mused. ‘I mean why...why decide to live outside society instead of within it?’
‘You’re the journalist, not me. Although most of them would tell you that they have chosen to create their own society...’
‘Mmm...’
Having refused his offer of a drink, Bob made his way back to the Gazette’s offices. If the travellers did decide to settle locally his readers would want to know exactly what was going on. Not, from what he had just heard about them, that any of these young people were likely to confide to him what their plans were. A thought suddenly struck him.
‘She needs something she can get her teeth into,’ his wife had told him about his new employee... ‘She needs a crusade...’
After a sandwich and an enjoyable chat with Lucy, which had included an invitation for Mollie to join Lucy and some of her friends on a ramble the following weekend, followed by a meal at a local pub, Mollie returned to the Gazette’s offices feeling much more cheerful. But her heart sank a little bit as, before she could reach her desk, Bob appeared and asked her to step into his office.
‘New Age travellers are coming here and you want me to interview them?’ Mollie asked him excitedly when he had explained what was going to happen. This was more like it. This was the kind of human interest story she could really get her teeth into.
‘The Gazette’s readers are going to want to know what these people are about, why they can’t stay in their own homes. Don’t they realise the havoc they cause, the damage they do to local crops and livestock?’ Bob was demanding critically, pursing his lips.
Mollie could tell exactly what kind of article he wanted her to write, but there were always two sides to every story.
‘We don’t know yet if these people do intend to pitch camp locally,’ Bob was reminding her. ‘With any luck they won’t, but—’
‘Where are they now? Does anyone know?’ Mollie interrupted him excitedly.
‘Well, they’re travelling this way, from the north. The police are keeping an eye on them, but apparently there’s not an awful lot they can do.’
Mollie quickly drew a brief mental map of the town’s infrastructure. That meant they must be travelling on what had once been the London road. Even if they decided not to pitch camp locally, it would still be worthwhile interviewing them, finding out how they lived, what had made them take to the road in the first place.
‘I could drive out to meet them and see if I can do some interviews,’ she suggested, holding her breath until Bob had given a brief grunt of assent.
Alex received the news of the travellers’ imminent arrival with far less enthusiasm.
He was not antagonistic towards their way of life, nor to them, and in many ways felt extremely sympathetic towards them, but... But he was also a land-owner and a landlord. He knew the havoc their arrival could cause, and the friction which could develop between them and their unwilling hosts. What he couldn’t quite understand, though, was why on earth they should have picked on Fordcaster. They were a small, quiet backwater of a town, well off any of the main arterial routes.
The police had already advised him to get in touch with his solicitor and set in motion what legal remedies he could to evict them, should they decide to settle. Unwillingly he reached for the phone. He didn’t like having to turn away anyone who was in need—it went against his whole ethos and nature—but he also owed a duty to his tenants.
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PENNY JORDAN
Opposites attract!Just what did impulsive Mollie Barnes and powerful landowner Alex Villiers, Earl of St. Otel, have in common? Mollie always championed the underdog, while Alex represented the privileged classes. He declared she was stubborn and willfully determined to believe the worst of him, while she thought he was simply amusing himself with her.So why had she confessed her secret fantasy to him? It soon became clear that they shared the same dream and Alex was perfectly happy to make it come true.
Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.
Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon's most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women's fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Fantasy for Two
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
MOLLIE’S pretty heart-shaped face was screwed up into a despairing glower, her topaz-flecked sherry brown eyes minus their usual sparkle as she studied the contents of her office diary. ‘2.30 p.m. drive to Edgehill Farm to interview the farmer’s wife, Pat Lawson, re her special preserves recipe’. It wasn’t exactly adrenalin-pumping, heartbeat-raising stuff, and working on a small-town local newspaper deep in the heart of rural England certainly wasn’t what she had had in mind when she had been studying for her media degree, but realistically she knew that she was fortunate in having found a job at all. A good many of her peers had not done so and at least it was a start—a toe-hold on the career ladder which she hoped ultimately would lead to a much higher profile post, hopefully as either a newspaper or television journalist, covering all the important events of the day both at home and abroad.
It had been her parents, both of them careful and realistic in their outlook on life, and as different from Mollie with her vibrant and sometimes turbulent personality as it was possible to be, who had urged her to accept the job offer which had come up via one of her tutors at university.
‘Dad, writing up weddings and country fairs for the local rag in some old-fashioned country market town isn’t what I want,’ Mollie had protested to her father when they had originally discussed the job.
‘Maybe not,’ her father had returned equably, giving her a small smile before adding dryly, ‘You have to learn to walk before you can run, though, Mollie.’
‘At least it’s a job, darling,’ her mother had chimed in. ‘Although I wish you could have found something closer to home.’
Her parents lived in a comfortable London suburb and Mollie’s new job was going to take her deep into a remote part of the West Country, a small country town on the coast which looked as though it would be more at home featuring in some TV historical drama than being the kind of place which could produce anything remotely newsworthy.
And Mollie, if she was honest about herself, had the kind of personality that dearly loved, even needed some kind of challenge, some kind of cause or person to champion, something or someone into which she could pour all the strong energy of her femininely fiery nature.
And she very much doubted that she was going to get that kind of stimulation writing about Mrs Lawson’s family chutney recipes, even though she knew that it was the kind of thing that her mother, a very keen and skilled cook, would have fallen on with real pleasure.
She had only been in her new job—her first job—for just under a week, having spent her first weekend in Fordcaster settling into the small rented cottage which was to be her new home, and then her first three working days at the Fordcaster Gazette’s offices studying back copies of the paper and, as she had been instructed by the paper’s owner and chief executive-cum-editor, ‘absorbing the ethos’ of his paper.
‘You’ll find Bob Fleury interesting to work for,’ her tutor had told her when she had confirmed to him that she had accepted the job. ‘He’s a bit of an individualist, someone out of the common run—not entirely unlike yourself,’ he had added wryly, watching as Mollie had struggled to suppress the desire to defend herself hotly against his subtle dig.
They had had several run-ins during her time at university. She was too impulsive, too inclined to react with her emotions and not her brain, he had often told her.
‘Fleury—that’s an unusual name,’ she had managed to content herself with.
‘Mmm...’ he’d commented. ‘He’s got French blood. That part of the coast was heavily involved with smuggling during the years of the French Revolution, and the contraband they landed wasn’t always merely inanimate objects.
‘Bob’s a traditionalist who, alongside seeing life in a very individual manner, can also be very set in his ways,’ he had further told her. ‘He believes there’s a certain order to things and to people. Fordcaster is very much an archetypical English market town, and Bob represents its views and its determination to preserve the status quo.’
Mollie had listened ominously. The job was the absolute antithesis of everything she had hoped for when she had been studying for her degree, but she was realistic enough to know that it took more than a firstclass degree to land the kind of plum job she had yearned for. She simply didn’t have the kind of influence that would get her an entree into the world she wanted to inhabit—at least not at this early stage in her career—and she suspected that her mischievous tutor was deriving great satisfaction from having persuaded her to accept a job which they both knew would demand far more of her emotional self-control and patience than it ever would of her degree skills.
‘You can learn a lot from Bob, Mollie,’ her tutor had told her more seriously before she’d left. ‘Before he took over the paper—which, incidentally, has been in his family for several generations—he worked for a TV channel as one of their foremost foreign correspondents. What Bob doesn’t know about that kind of reporting isn’t worth knowing.
‘Furthermore, many of the people he worked with in the field have gone on to fill very high-ranking posts within the corporation and the media in general.’
The smile he had given her then had done much to restore Mollie’s faith, not just in him, but more importantly in herself. The job itself might not seem to offer much, he had subtly been telling her, but there were quite obviously potential opportunities that went with it that could promise a great deal.
Even so, she suspected that it was not going to be easy for her, working with Bob Fleury, and that she was going to have to do a good deal of biting on her tongue to keep her conflicting and often fiery independent views to herself.
They had already clashed once on the subject of hunting and Mollie suspected that there were going to be many other points of contention between them.
He must have some saving grace, though, because his wife, Eileen, to whom he had introduced Mollie, was a surprisingly modern-minded woman with a decided twinkle in her eye and a warm smile that belied her quite formal country woman appearance.
Both Bob and Eileen were in their late fifties, but Eileen had some very up-to-the-minute ideas and their home, with its elegant simplicity, like Eileen herself, had impressed Mollie considerably.
It wasn’t of Eileen, though, that she was thinking as she drove up a track which hopefully would lead to the farm.
She had already taken a couple of wrong turnings, the reason being that virtually all the land that surrounded the town was privately owned and subsequently its narrow lanes were bereft of any kind of sensible signposts.
Now, finally, she hoped she had found the right lane, but she was already running late for her appointment and Bob, as she knew, was a stickler for the old-fashioned kind of good manners which included being very strict about good timekeeping.
The sharp wind blowing across the Atlantic, up the English Channel and over the cliffs had tousled Mollie’s hair when she had got out of the car earlier to check on her bearings, and now she pushed it irritably out of her eyes—a dark rich red heavy mass of glossy curls which, together with her small-boned frame, gave her an air of feminine fragility which she privately thoroughly resented.
She was a modern woman, strong-minded and independent, and she wanted to be treated as such. Her spirit and her personality more than made up for what she lacked in terms of physical strength and size.
She put her foot down a little harder on the accelerator. The lane was single track only, and not tarmacked, and she winced as her small car bumped uncomfortably over the deeper ruts.
Her mind on the coming interview, she neglected to hear or see anything of the battered Land Rover coming round the bend towards her, but fortunately its driver saw her and he brought his vehicle to an immediate brake-protesting stop which caused Mollie to realise her own danger and likewise apply her own brakes.
Her car stopped just inches short of the mud-spattered nose of his. Cursing under her breath at the delay, she saw the Land Rover’s driver swinging open his door.
The last thing she needed now was to waste any more time. Angrily she pushed open her own door and got out. Whoever was driving the Land Rover wasn’t the farmer. Bob had described him to her as a man in his sixties, and this man was nowhere near that. Nowhere near, she acknowledged, sucking in a sharp breath as she took a good look at him.
Tall—taller even than her father, who was just exactly six feet—and broad, extremely broadshouldered, in the worn checked shirt he was wearing open at the throat to reveal a male vee of flesh disconcertingly shadowed by a soft sprinkling of very male-looking body hair.
His hair was black and very thick, his eyes an extraordinarily piercing shade of crystal-clear blue. They also possessed a certain steely look that for some obscure reason made her heart beat just a little bit faster and her chin go up as she fought down the odd mixture of nervousness and excitement that shot hotly through her veins.
She estimated that he was around thirty-two or three, almost a decade older than she was herself. But although his skin looked warmly tanned, suggesting that he spent a good deal of his time out of doors, and despite the fact that he was driving an extremely battered and shabby-looking Land Rover, and in defiance of the casual and well-worn clothes he was wearing, he had about him an air if not exactly of some dangerously good-looking predator, then certainly not one that fitted her mental image of a farmer.
He was far too sure of himself for one thing, far too arrogant and dominant in the way he approached her car and her, holding the door open for her in a gesture which, at face value, might seem courtly and polite but which Mollie assessed more darkly as a demeaning male act of aggression, an unspoken command to her to get out of her car.
If she hadn’t already been doing so she would have firmly refused and remained where she was, but as it was she was already halfway out, and had very little option other than to complete the manoeuvre.
She wasn’t going to allow him to think he had got the upper hand, though. No way.
Standing opposite him, she demanded aggressively, ‘You do realise, don’t you, that this is a private road?’
She could see from his expression that she had caught him off guard. He choked briefly and started to frown, his mouth hardening as he surveyed her grimly.
‘A private road along which you were travelling too fast,’ he retaliated smoothly.
He had a voice like rich, dark chocolate, Mollie recognised weakly. Very bitter rich, dark chocolate. She had always been susceptible to voices, and his was... She gulped and swallowed. His was.,.
Stop it, she warned herself severely. He isn’t your type of man at all. You don’t like dark-haired, darkbrowed, shockingly handsome and seriously sexy men. You never have, and besides...
His lordly assumption of control plus his arrogant attitude, coupled with her own quick-to-take-fire emotions and her uncomfortable awareness that she had been driving just a bit too fast, had a predictably explosive effect on Mollie’s temper.
‘I was not driving too fast,’ she contradicted him immediately—and untruthfully—and then added with what to her was perfectly reasonable logic, ‘And besides, you were driving a Land Rover, so you must have seen me coming...’
‘I did,’ he agreed grimly, adding as though to underline his point, ‘I stopped.”
‘So did I.’
The look he gave first the nose of her small car and then her made Mollie’s face burn pink with angry colour.
‘This is a private road over private land,’ she began again. ‘I have the permission of the owner to be driving along it—’
‘You do?’ She was interrupted softly.
‘Yes, I do. I work for the Fordcaster Gazette.’
‘Oh, you do, do you...?’ he said gently, but Mollie was far too incensed to pick up on the subtle undercurrent of danger held in the softly spoken but very inflexible words.
‘Yes, I do,’ she agreed, recklessly ignoring the small warning voice trying despairingly to make itself heard, its protest drowned out by the hot, angry turmoil of her need to get the better of her foe as, tossing her head, she lied bravely, ‘And anyway, the owner of this land happens to be a personal friend of mine.’
The dark eyebrows rose, the blue eyes suddenly looking coolly amused and holding an expression that was extremely cynical.
‘I think not,’ he corrected Mollie crisply, adding before she could say anything, ‘You see, I happen to be the owner of this land, and this private road happens to be my private road.’
Mollie’s mouth opened and then closed again. For sheer effrontery she had never met anyone like him.
‘You’re lying,’ she told him fiercely once she had got her breath back. ‘This road goes to Edgehill Farm, the Lawsons’ farm.’
‘To Edgehill Farm, yes, but it does not belong to the Lawsons; it belongs to me. The Lawsons are my tenants.’
‘I—I don’t believe you,’ Mollie managed to stutter defensively.
‘You mean you don’t want to believe me,’ he corrected her with a malign and very cold smile.
‘Who are you anyway?’ Mollie challenged him.
The cold smile became even colder, cold enough to make her shiver slightly, although she fought valiantly to conceal that fact from him.
‘I,’ he told her, pausing for effect and spacing each separate word carefully and precisely, ‘am Peregrine Alexander Kavanagh Stewart Villiers, Earl of St Otel.’
Mollie gaped at him.
She had heard Bob Fleury mention his name in terms of revolting awe and admiration—to her at least; she knew he owned vast tracts of land not only locally but elsewhere in Britain as well, and that he was the holder of several ancient hereditary titles—none of which had impressed her in the least when she had heard Bob Fleury talking about him. But now...
She gulped and swallowed hard on her chagrin and the impulse to deny what he was saying and accuse him of deceiving her—something, some hitherto slumbering instinct, told her that would not be very wise.
She couldn’t allow him to think he had totally routed her, though; it would not only go against the grain but would allow him to think that she was cowed, or even worse impressed, when the truth was that if anything the discovery of who he was had made her dislike him even more.
An earl. Well, she had no time for anything like that. She only accorded other people respect when she felt they merited it, and if he thought for one moment that just because he had flaunted his precious title...
‘Well, I don’t care who you are,’ she told him defiantly, well beyond listening to any inner voice of caution or restraint. ‘And if you think for one moment that I’m going to be intimidated by having you standing there like...like some Jane Austen character threatening to exercise some kind of...of droit du seigneur...’
The dark eyebrows shot up, the blue eyes gleaming with something that Mollie did not dare to try to analyse as he interrupted her suavely to say, ‘I somehow doubt that Jane Austen ever bestowed upon her male characters any kind of rights of that nature... In fact, I suspect she would have strongly disapproved of any such suggestion.’
‘Unlike you,’ Mollie retorted dangerously.
‘That depends... But since you seem so determined to cast me in the role of villain and rake...’
Before she could guess what was happening he had closed the distance between them and Mollie found she was locked firmly against his body—a body which felt far too robustly male for her feminine susceptibilities. He smelled of fresh air and the wind, and beneath the protesting defensive hand she had put out too late to ward him off she could feel the firm thud of his heartbeat and the crisp roughness of the body hair covering his skin.
He was all man. There was no doubt about that, she acknowledged weakly.
Whilst she was trying to control her unwanted and treacherous thoughts he was busily using one hand to keep her secured against his body as the other cupped her face and turned it to just the right angle for the downward descent of his mouth. He was so skilful that her last thought before his lips touched hers was that it was a manoeuvre at which he was extremely practised.
As though he had read her mind, she felt him whispering against her lips.
‘I once had to play the villain in the village pantomime...’
‘I doubt there was much playing necessary,’ Mollie managed to mouth back through gritted teeth, before the firm pressure of his lips on hers made further speech not just difficult but downright dangerous. To even try to open her mouth now, whilst it was being caressed so...so...by his, would be to invite...to...
‘Mmm...’ Giddily Mollie breathed a soft, appreciative sound of bliss as his lips stroked hers, and her own lips, her body, her ravished senses responded hedonistically to the delicious sensual mastery.
‘Mmm...’
‘Mmm...?’
To her chagrin Mollie recognised that he was repeating her soft sound of appreciation—not in confirmation of his own corresponding enjoyment of the kiss they were now sharing, but in fact as a question.
Immediately she stopped kissing him. Not that she had actually been kissing him, she tried to reassure herself as she primly filmed her kiss-softened lips against the provocation of the warmth of his breath and the tantalisingly gentle movement of his lips on hers... No, what she had been doing had quite simply and surely excusably been making an instinctive and automatic female response to the erotic mastery of a man who quite plainly knew far more about how to coax a woman into responding to him than was good for him—or for her.
Determinedly Mollie told herself that it wasn’t disappointment that was chilling her blood as he allowed her to put some distance between them.
‘How dare...?’ she began shakily.
‘How dare you, sir? Unhand me!’ he finished for her promptly.
Mollie glared at him. Now he was quite definitely making fun of her.
‘You had no right to do that,’ she told him angrily, now that she was safely out of range of the strange and highly dangerous effect he had on her senses when he was close up against her. Talk about close up and personal—but she was not the sort of woman to be misled or deceived by her hormones. Just because he was skilled at the kind of kissing that made her feel as soft and squishy inside as—
‘No? I thought you just said I had the right of droit du seigneur,’ he reminded her softly.
He was laughing at her, Mollie decided—enjoying a very male-orientated joke at her expense. Now she really was angry.
‘You do realise that what you’ve just done could be construed as sexual assault?’ she began heatedly, only to have the fire really taken out of her argument.
‘Is that why I’m going to have nail-marks on my arm from where you were holding onto me...?’ he returned blankly.
Nail-marks. Mollie’s eyes widened in a combination of embarrassment and fiery protest.
‘I did not...’ she began, only to stop as he started to roll up the sleeve of his shirt.
‘You’re in my way,’ she told him instead, ‘and I’m already late for my appointment with Mrs Lawson.’
‘Pat won’t mind,’ he assured her easily. ‘She’ll be busy looking after her grandchildren.’
Pat Lawson might not mind but Bob Fleury would if news of her tardiness ever got back to his ears, Mollie recognised.
‘If you won’t move that...that thing,’ she told him heatedly, tossing her curls in the direction of his Land Rover, ‘then I’m just going to have to walk.’
As she started to turn determinedly away from him she thought she heard him laughing, but the next moment he was striding back to his Land Rover and climbing into it, throwing the engine into reverse and allowing her to drive her own car further up the lane to where there was a convenient passing place.
Arrogant brute, Mollie mentally slated him when she actually drove past, assiduously avoiding looking at him, her nose firmly in the air. And if he thought for one moment that she had actually enjoyed his odious and unwanted kiss, then...then...! Hot colour flooded her face as she missed a gear and heard the harsh. grating sound her car engine made in protest.
Half an hour later, standing in his study in the library of Otel Place drinking a coffee he had just made himself, Peregrine Alexander Kavanagh Stewart Villiers, or Alex as he was known to his close friends and associates, reflected ruefully on his recent run-in with Mollie and mentally admitted that he hadn’t behaved very well.
His only excuse was that he had had a so-and-so of a morning, starting with a long-winded and petulantly plaintive telephone call from his stepmother complaining about the fact that her daughter—his stepsister—had announced that instead of completing her university course she had decided to take to the road with a band of travellers.
‘Alex, you’ll have to do something,’ his stepmother had insisted. ‘She’s always listened to you.’
‘Belinda, she’s twenty and an adult,’ Alex had wearily reminded her, forbearing to mention that the main cause of Sylvie’s rebellion was her own mother, and the clinging possessiveness with which she had always treated her, refusing to allow her to grow up and be properly independent.
Sylvie, in his opinion, was a very unfortunate young woman, and his stepmother would have been the first person to complain if Alex had tried to interfere in their relationship—as had been proved in the past.
And then there had been an equally lengthy telephone call from the charitable trust, to whom his father had handed over the family’s ancestral castle in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands. They had wanted to know the possible history of a tapestry which had just been discovered hidden behind a piece of Victorian panelling.
In the end Alex had had to refer them to the archivist of the family, a second cousin of his father’s who was currently living in a house on another of the family’s estates in Lincolnshire.
Like a good many other of the properties he owned, it was let out at a laughably nominal peppercorn rent. His financial advisors were constantly reminding him that by being so soft-hearted and housing not only several members of his family, including his stepmother, who lived in a very grand and expensive-tokeep apartment in London, but also various retired employees, and by paying for the upkeep of the properties they inhabited, he was depriving himself and, more importantly, the estate of income that was badly needed.
Very grimly Alex had had to remind them that so far as he was concerned there were more important things in life than money—and far more important duties and responsibilities.
The now retired employees living all but rent-free in his properties had, as he had explained to the accountants, served his family virtually all of their working lives and deserved some comfort and security in their retirement.
‘But, my lord, surely you can see how advantageous it would be if you were to revoke their tenancy agreements and either let out the properties on short-term leases at much higher rentals or simply sell them.
‘It isn’t just a matter of the revenue you are losing by allowing these people to live in them at such ridiculously low rents, there’s the additional fact that you are maintaining the properties for them. Only last year you paid for a full row of terraced farmworkers’ cottages on your Yorkshire estate to be completely modernised.’
‘I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to accept that I’ve made my decision so far as the tenancies are concerned and I don’t intend to change it,’ Alex had told them crisply.
The days when inheriting an earldom had meant inheriting a life of ease and indolence were long gone—if they had ever existed. Running large tracts of land, not to mention the properties and farms that stood on them, was, these days, sometimes a nightmare of complex legislation and red tape coupled with a never-ending battle to make financial ends meet.
Without the benefit of some very shrewd investments made by his great-grandfather, he doubted that he would have been able to afford the luxury of keeping the elegant Palladian mansion, Otel Place, which had been his father’s and was now his own principle dwelling. His great-grandfather’s money, though it might not make him wealthy, had certainly made the vital difference between his being able to keep most of his inheritance and potentially having to sell off a major part of it.
In fact, Alex now thought, the only bright spot in an otherwise extremely fraught day had been the run-in with his fiery, feisty redhead.
His? Momentarily he checked, and then frowned. She had certainly been furious with him, and perhaps with good reason, he acknowledged ruefully. He could have set her right earlier and explained who he was instead of helping her to dig the trap she had hurled herself into so recklessly.
Had her eyes been topaz or gold? He closed his own eyes—the smell of her perfume, light and tantalising, still clung to his shirt. She had felt good in his arms, against his body, beneath his mouth—warm and curvaceous, vibrant and alive.
He had known who she was, of course. Pat Lawson had told him that she was coming to interview her and he would probably have guessed anyway. Bob Fleury had informed him of her appointment when he had asked him if she could take up the tenancy of the empty cottage in the square he owned down by the river.
He had behaved rather badly, he acknowledged, even if she had invited him to do it, and there had certainly been no excuse for the way he had reacted to her idiotic charge of him using any kind of right to droit du seigneur. No, kissing her like that had been wholly out of order—and wholly enjoyable. More, in fact, than merely enjoyable.
She had had an effect on him that... Hastily he reassembled his thoughts. He was thirty-three, for heaven’s sake, and certainly a long way from allowing his hormones to dictate his behaviour to him.
No. He quite definitely owed her an apology and an explanation. He glanced at his watch. It was too late to call on her now, but he had to go into town later and he would call on her then to apologise.
CHAPTER TWO
‘GOOD.’
Feeling highly satisfied with herself, Mollie put down the pages she had just been reading of the piece she had written following her meeting with Pat Lawson, pausing to study the view from her sitting-room window. Beyond her tiny front garden lay a well-maintained and very pretty town square, complete with its own private garden for which only the occupants of the houses around the square had keys.
The neat early Georgian cottages had, so Mollie had learned from Bob Fleury, a certain cachet to them, and she should consider herself very fortunate to be able to rent one of them.
The cottage certainly had a lot to recommend itself, Mollie had to acknowledge. Its location, with its long back garden backing onto the river and its frontage onto the small square, gave it an almost country feel, and its interior decoration showed not only good taste and a respect for maintaining period detail but a thorough awareness of the needs of modern life as well.
Her mother had been extremely impressed with the kitchen and bathroom when she and Mollie’s father had driven down to Fordcaster with Mollie to help her get settled in.
‘It’s got a proper oven and not just a microwave,’ her mother had approved. ‘And everywhere’s so clean.’
‘Mmm... Apparently, according to Bob Fleury, the landlord is very particular about that sort of thing, and about who he takes on as tenants. Initially I’ve only been granted a lease for three months.’
‘Well, I can see his point,’ her mother had commented. ‘If this was my house I certainly wouldn’t want just anyone living here.’
Walking into the kitchen now, Mollie went to fill her kettle and make herself a hot drink.
Surprisingly Pat Lawson had proved to be extremely interesting to talk to, or rather to listen to, and in no time at all she had furnished Mollie not just with her great-grandmother’s much prized recipe for her famous chutney but in addition a good deal of crisply informative and very witty background information about the history of the town, including some interesting facts about its foremost family—the Villiers of St Otel—both past and present.
‘They go back right to the times of William the Conqueror,’ she had told Mollie. ‘The first earl came over from Normandy, although he wasn’t an earl then, just one of William’s knights. William gave him the earldom in return for his loyalty to him.
‘Things haven’t always been easy for them, of course. There was an earl beheaded in the time of Henry the Eighth, for supporting Anne Boleyn, and another during the Civil War; the most famous of them all, though, was probably the Black Earl—Rake-hell St Otel, they called him. He made a fortune gaming in the clubs in London and then lost it again and ended up abducting an heiress so that he could marry her for her money.
‘When, after six unsuccessful attempts to present him with an heir, his countess finally gave birth to a much wanted son there was a rumour abroad that her child had been another girl and that she had been exchanged at birth for a boy child fathered on one of the serving wenches by her husband...’
Pat Lawson shook her head at this point, but Mollie was more interested in learning about the vices of the current Earl rather than his long-dead ancestor.
‘What about the present Earl?’ she pressed her, eager to gather ammunition against her adversary.
‘Alex?’ Pat responded, with an affectionate warmth and an easy familiarity which both surprised and displeased Mollie somewhat, causing her to scowl horribly and Pat to break off from what she had been about to say and enquire, ‘Are you feeling quite well...?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine,’ Mollie assured her hastily. ‘Please go on. You were saying about Alex...about the Earl...’
Had Pat heard the angry note of censure and dislike in her voice as she’d said the word ‘Earl’? Mollie shot the older woman a quick look. There was no point in alienating her by allowing her own feelings about the man to show, not when it was obvious both from Pat’s doting tone of voice and the indulgent look on her face that she held a vastly different opinion of him.
‘Oh, yes, Alex... He’s had a hard time of it; there’s no doubt about that.’
She paused whilst Mollie attempted to look duly sympathetic, although inwardly she was silently raging. ‘A hard time of it’. Not from what she had seen, he hadn’t. Oh, yes, she could really buy into that one.
‘His father was killed hunting—which is one of the reasons that Alex has banned it on his land—and his unexpected death left Alex with huge death duties to pay. Luckily he’s managed to keep most of the land, even if he’s had to cut down on staff.’
‘I’ve read that more and more farmers and farmworkers are leaving the land,’ Mollie commented.
An idea was beginning to take shape in her mind, the seeds of what she knew in her bones would make a truly controversial piece starting to germinate in the warm, receptive atmosphere of her own instinctive sympathy for the underdog and her equally instinctive dislike of Alexander, Earl of St Otel, and all that he stood for.
‘Yes. Yes, some are.’ Pat was agreeing sombrely with her. ‘We’ve all had so many problems to face recently with there being so many food scares and new EC laws are coming into force.’
‘I was thinking more specifically of the problems that occur when farmers and farmworkers who have devoted the whole of their working lives to their farms discover, when they come to retire, that they are expected to vacate properties which have probably been their homes for most of their lives. Tenanted farms and tied cottages...’
‘Oh, yes, problems can and do occur,’ Pat agreed readily. ‘Often with tragic results.’
‘Like the woman in the north of England who was evicted from the home she had lived in all her life after her husband’s death, and expected to adapt to city life, living in a high-rise council block at eighty-two years of age,’ Mollie supplemented for her, really beginning to warm to her theme. This was an area she had researched extensively as a student, and such injustices were very close to her heart.
‘Yes, the law can be very unfair,’ Pat acknowledged.
‘Not the law, the landlords who implement it,’ Mollie corrected her firmly. ‘I know that the Earl is your landlord. I expect he owns a great deal of property, both locally and elsewhere.’
‘Yes. Yes, he does, but...’
Mollie could see the headline now, hear the plaudits ringing in her ears as she exposed Alexander, Earl of St Otel, for the selfish, greedy monster that he undoubtedly was. Heavens, such a story might even attract the interest of a television documentary team, and then...
Not that she would ever write a single word motivated by self-interest, she told herself sternly. That simply wasn’t her style. No, what she wanted to do was to draw people’s attention to social injustices, to right wrongs, to slay dragons, and if one of those dragons should just happen to be the Earl of St Otel, then...then that only went to prove how right she had been to...to... Well, anyway, he had had no right to kiss her like that.
Thanking Pat for her time, she hurried back to the Gazette’s offices, where she diligently produced an article including the recipe for Pat’s great-grandmother’s famous chutney. But once she left work and got home she looked out her earlier research and seated herself in front of her own computer, where she set to work producing a far more controversial and explosive piece.
It was an exposé of the way wealthy and uncaring land-owners treated their employees, and although she was scrupulously careful about not naming the Earl of St Otel—after all, she had nothing concrete in evidence against him yet—it was him Mollie had in mind as she worked on her article. He was, she had decided, the epitome of the greedy and uncaring land-owner, and a man too proud and arrogant, too selfish, to have a thought in his head for anyone other than himself.
Writing the article was one thing, she admitted, getting Bob Fleury to print it was quite another, but somehow she would find a way. She was determined. What she had to say, what she had to reveal and unmask about this nationwide issue was far too important not to be brought to people’s attention.
The country’s farmland was quickly becoming one vast mechanised food-production plant over which a small number of ever increasingly vastly wealthy individuals were acquiring total control—a business based merely on profits with no room in it for humanity nor for humans.
Sombrely Mollie watched now as a pair of geese flew over the river. Pat Lawson had mentioned during their conversation that there was a small nature reserve several miles away, the land and the small lake it included having been donated by a local philanthropist—some kindly elderly person, Mollie decided absently as she watched the geese disappear out of sight.
Alex grimaced as the Land Rover jolted out of a pothole in the road with a teeth-clenching rattle. He would dearly love to be able to replace it but he simply couldn’t afford to. For him to spend money on a new vehicle for himself would mean that he would have to take money from some other project, such as replacing an essential piece of farm equipment or ensuring that all his tenanted cottages were properly repaired.
He frowned briefly and then made a determined effort to switch off from thinking about the problems that came from trying to turn ancient privilege and everything that went with it into a modern, self-financing environment fit to go forward into the new millennium—something which hopefully his children would inherit with serenity and joy instead of the grim near despair which he had had to take on with his inheritance following his father’s unexpectedly early death. Death duties had been only the start of his problems, but hopefully they were now through the worst of things... Hopefully.
He looked ruefully at the small peace-offering on the passenger seat—a basket of peaches from the orangery that was the focal point of the house’s kitchen garden. Built at the time of the original mansion, and modernised early on in the Edwardian era, its heating was provided by a complicated labyrinth of pipes and hot water fuelled by an ancient and temperamental boiler.
He himself had been on the point of deciding that the place would have to be emptied and closed down when a retired local gardener had come forward with the proposal that a local group of amateur enthusiasts take over not just the orangery and the succession houses that lined the south wall of the kitchen garden, but also the kitchen garden itself.
This collective, of which he himself was now a part, in that he was an honorary member of their group, shared the produce which the garden gave. The peaches he had packed carefully in a basket surrounded by tissue paper were his share of this season’s.
For reasons which he had no intention of going into, their lush promise reminded him very much of the person for whom his gift was intended. Their fruit would be sweet and juicy but with an explosive and challenging sharpness. Deftly he swung the Land Rover over to the side of the road and parked it.
Mollie frowned as she heard the knock on her front door. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She had not had any time to make any friends in the town as yet, and virtually the only two people she knew were Bob Fleury and his wife.
Switching off the kettle, she went to answer the door. When she opened it her eyes widened in wary suspicion as she saw who was standing there.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded challengingly, before adding, ‘If you’ve come to apologise...’
‘I haven’t,’ Alex replied coolly. What was it about her, this five-foot-nothing bundle of aggressive womanhood with her tangle of curls and her amazingly coloured eyes, that somehow set his pulses racing and despite all his good intentions made him feel... made him react...?
‘Then what do you want?’ Mollie demanded.
Heavens, what was the matter with her? What was it about the man that made her behave so...so femininely...? She could actually feel her toes curling inside her shoes as she fought valiantly to control the dangerously awakening flood of awareness that swamped her as she stood there on her doorstep.
He represented everything she most disliked in a man, and yet here was her body telling her the opposite, luring her. Even more angry with herself than she was with him, Mollie took a step backwards, intending to close the door, but to her chagrin Alex had stepped inside before she could do so.
‘How dare you? This is my house—’ she began, only to have him cut her short.
‘No, it isn’t, it’s mine,’ he said cynically.
Mollie gaped at him.
‘You’re my landlord?’ she guessed, determined not to be caught out the same way again.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am,’ Alex agreed. ‘But...’
What on earth was going on? The whole situation was rapidly getting totally out of hand. He hadn’t come here to argue with her, dammit. He had come to...
To Mollie, his arrival so soon after she had finished writing her article only served to add fuel to her already turbulent emotions.
‘You might be able to browbeat and...and terrorise your other tenants, especially those unfortunate enough to owe their living to you, but I’m not—’ she began, but Alex had heard enough. He had never known a woman get under his skin so quickly or so thoroughly, and of all the wrong-headed and totally unjust accusations he had ever heard hers certainly took some beating.
‘Now just a minute—’ he began, but Mollie was in no mood to listen to him.
‘You’re trespassing,’ she told him dangerously. ‘And if you don’t leave immediately I shall...’
Alex, she realised, wasn’t listening to her. He was staring at the article she had so recently finished printing out and which she had left on the table in front of which he was now standing.
Attached to the front of it was a boldly handwritten note bearing his name, which she had underlined thickly, adding three heavily drawn exclamation marks. His earlier frown had become a black-browed scowl, and the very air around them in the small room seemed to have taken on a thunderous, sulphurous atmosphere.
‘Would you mind explaining to me what the hell this is supposed to be?’ she heard him demanding slowly as he spaced out each separate word with infinite care and ice-cold fury.
‘I should have thought it was obvious. It’s an article I’ve just written on the dreadful and iniquitous way farmworkers are treated at the end of their working lives...’ Mollie responded, determinedly tilting her chin as she met his furious glare head-on. She refused to give way either to his very obvious ire or her own quivering inner reaction of excitement and alarm at what she had caused.
‘Are you trying to imply that my farmworkers are badly treated?’ Alex asked her.
Mollie’s chin lifted even higher.
‘And if I am,’ she demanded. ‘Are you going to deny that you have turned people out of their homes to make room for new, younger employees?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Mollie blinked. She hadn’t been expecting such a categoric and totally barefaced misappropriation of the truth.
‘You’re lying,’ she told him positively.
Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Her accusations were so ludicrous and so far off the truth that if they hadn’t been such a damned insult, and if she hadn’t been so positive that she was right, then he would have been more inclined to laugh than get angry. However...! Clenching his jaw, he told her ominously quietly, ‘I do not lie.’
‘Liars always say that,’ Mollie replied sweetly.
‘This is impossible. You are impossible,’ Alex retorted. ‘And if you think for one moment that anyone with a shred of intelligence is going to publish this...this rubbish, then...’
As he spoke he was reaching for the article. Instinctively Mollie acted to protect it, to stop him reaching out. Alex got there first, crumpling up the sheets in his fist as Mollie tried to tear his fingers from around them.
Instinctively Alex started to turn away from her, but Mollie, who had reached up on her toes, stretching her body out precariously to try to retrieve the article, started to lose her balance, causing Alex to do the only possible thing he could do.
Mollie’s small, instinctive cry of alarm was smothered against the solid wall of his chest as he dropped the article and reached instead for her.
‘Let me go. Let me go,’ Mollie demanded, hammering hard against his chest with two small bunched fists, oblivious to the fact that but for his chivalrous gesture she would probably have been lying ignominiously in a heap at his feet instead of being held protectively and safely against the marginally less ungiving hardness of his body.
Both the floor and his muscles might be equally tough, but her body was certainly reacting very, very differently to the muscles than it would have done to the floor. The quivering, jelly-like shakiness which had invaded her limbs was certainly not the kind of reaction she could ever remember having after coming into contact with any kind of inanimate object. Come to think of it she couldn’t remember ever having experienced such a mind-boggling reaction to coming into contact with anything or anyone at any time in her whole life before. It really was too bad of her body to react to him in this wretchedly puerile fashion, she told herself sternly. He was, after all, only a man.
‘I hate you. Let me go at once,’ she told him furiously—just to make sure that he understood that the by now openly visible trembling of her body meant nothing whatsoever, and that if he was unwise enough to think that it did...
‘Likewise,’ she heard him telling her through gritted teeth.
So, given that both of them had expressed their dislike of one another so plainly, why was it that they were now locked in one another’s arms, kissing like a pair of starving lovers who had been apart for centuries?
Mollie had no idea. She only knew that the angry, passionate, devouring kisses their mouths were hungrily demanding from one another seemed to feed the need she could feel boiling up inside her rather than satiate it.
She had never dreamed that she could feel like this about anyone, that she could desire anyone so passionately, so intensely, so...so insanely...and so compulsively that she knew that if she didn’t somehow find a way to put a brake on what she was experiencing it wouldn’t be Alex who might be tearing off her clothes in order to make love to her, but she who was tearing off his.
That was what he did to her... That was how he made her feel. It wasn’t love; it wasn’t even lust... What exactly it was she couldn’t even begin to put a name to... She only knew it was something explosive. Something dangerous... Something over which she was totally without controt—a starving, famished, aching need that twisted tormentedly through her as she alternately pushed him away and then pulled him closer, her mouth biting hungrily at his, her lips closing around his hot, hard tongue, her hips grinding into his as he grasped them and held her, his body mirroring the fiercely sensual movements of hers.
She could feel his arousal and her own body ached and pulsed in response. A series of frantic mental images crowded her brain, sharply clear flashes...images of the two of them entwined together, their bodies naked, his skin glistening with sweat, sleek, tanned, roughened with soft dark hair, hers paler, softer but no less aroused.
She could feel her nipples hardening, thrusting against her clothes. Her teeth worried at his lower lip. She could hear him groan and felt his answering passion in the way his hands moved over her body, shaping her, moulding her, cupping her breasts, holding them in such a way that she literally shook with aching need.
She could feel herself starting to moan as the force of it possessed her body; a reciprocal shudder racked Alex’s body, and the sound he made, a low, raw groan, reverberated through her as their mouths fused hotly together. And then, abruptly and shockingly, Mollie felt Alex lift his mouth from hers and firmly push her away from him.
Instinctively she resisted, her senses so thoroughly aroused and aching for him that she couldn’t bear to let him go. And then, thankfully, before she could make a complete fool of herself, sanity and common sense came to her rescue, allowing her to shrug off the hands still clasping her forearms and to assume an expression of furious anger as she demanded huskily, ‘How dare you...? How dare you—?’
She broke off as she caught sight of the basket of peaches Alex had brought in with him, thankful to have something other than him on which to focus her attention and her chaotic emotions. ‘And just where did those come from?’ she asked aggressively.
‘I brought them with me,’ Alex told her curtly. ‘They’re home-grown—from the orangery.’
He was still trying to understand just what had prompted him to behave in such an uncharacteristic fashion. He was sexually experienced enough to recognise the potential destruction that could be caused by emotions, sensations as explosive as those he had just experienced, but there had been a feeling, a need within him when he had held Mollie in his arms which had gone far, far beyond any mere desire for sex.
He could tell, too, that even though she was trying valiantly to hide it from him she had been as caught off guard, as unable to control what had happened as he had been himself.
The last thing he needed right now was to get involved with a woman, a situation like this one. He had enough problems in his life already. More than enough.
‘The orangery,’ Mollie repeated bitingly. ‘And how many poor souls have you had to evict from their homes to pay for that kind of luxury, I should like to know?’
‘I’m sure you would,’ Alex agreed.
‘These peaches are rotten—rotten because they’ve been grown and fed on human misery,’ Mollie told him dramatically, tilting her head proudly as she added, ‘It’s all there in my article—the way that people, men like you—’
‘You can’t publish what you’ve written...’ Alex began to tell her, intending to warn her that she had got her facts totally wrong, but before he could finish Mollie immediately interrupted.
‘You can’t intimidate me,’ she told him passionately.
Alex opened his mouth to tell her that intimidating her or anyone else had never entered his mind, nor was it ever likely to do so, and that essentially at heart he was a pacifist, a man who applauded and worked for harmony, a man who respected the views and feelings of others. But instead, to his own bemusement, he heard himself saying in a passably threatening male growl, ‘Don’t be so sure.’
The tiny quiver of sensation that shivered through Mollie’s body as she heard him wasn’t entirely based on fear, but, wisely, she had no intention of investigating just why the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice should generate within her a feeling not unlike the delicious excitement she had experienced as a child when engaging in some activity which she had known to be forbidden.
‘Typical,’ she responded contemptuously to Alex instead, with a provocative toss of her head. ‘But you don’t frighten me.’
Grimacing to himself, Alex turned away from her and headed for the front door.
‘Maybe not,’ he muttered to himself under his breath as he angrily yanked the door open and strode through it. ‘But you sure as hell frighten me.’
No wonder he had stormed off like that, Mollie crowed in mental triumph as she firmly slammed the door after him. He had known she had him routed, that she couldn’t be bullied or pushed or cowed, as he had no doubt expected.
Walking back into her living room, she absentmindedly picked up one of the peaches and bit deeply into it. The fruit was luscious and sweet, with a taste that made her close her eyes in momentary sensual bliss.
‘Mmm...yummy...’
She had virtually finished the peach before she remembered what she had said to its donor. Well, never mind, she wasn’t one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, she told herself stoutly. How many peaches were there exactly in that basket? Three more... Well, it would be wasteful not to eat them, an insult to whoever had taken such care in growing and nurturing them...
The next day, standing in Bob’s office whilst she waited for him to finish reading her article, Mollie was still seething over her run-in with Alex. How dare he threaten her? He was typical of his type: rich, arrogant, completely oblivious to the thoughts and feelings of others.
But it was his threat to her article that concerned her the most and possessed her thoughts, not what had gone before it. In fact that kiss they had shared, and her own regrettably insane and inadmissibly intense response to it, was something she simply wasn’t prepared to dwell on or give any kind of credence to by thinking about it. Everyone was permitted the odd small aberration.
She had been under stress, caught off guard. He had no doubt expected her to reject him, and would have enjoyed having her behave in what to him would have been a predictably female and victimish way. By kissing him back, by showing no fear, she had shown him that she was not so predictable, so easily readable, that she was not the kind of woman who was going to be overawed or daunted by him.
She was no fool. Of course there would be members of her sex who would be silly enough to be taken in by his good looks and by the aura of success and maleness that clung to him, but she was most certainly not one of them.
Bob had reached the end of her article. He put it down and removed his spectacles, and then frowned as he told her baldly, ‘We can’t print this. You do realise that people locally will assume that this landlord you refer to is Alex, and—?’
‘And because he happens to own half the county no one is allowed to say or write anything that might show him up in his true colours? Is that it?’ Mollie interrupted him hotly.
Bob Fleury’s frown deepened as he looked at her.
His grandfather on his mother’s side had been a Scot, and Bob had inherited some of his dourness and his cautious carefulness, which balanced his more unpredictable French trait. Now, as he placed both his hands on his desk and studied Mollie, he chose his words very carefully.
She was such a fiery young thing, with so much still to learn, but he liked her. She had spirit and, just as important, she genuinely cared about her fellow human beings. He had no time for these cynical and worldly young people who seemed bored with their lives before they had really begun.
‘Is that what you think—that Alex is the kind of landlord you’ve written about in this article?’
‘Well, isn’t he?’ Mollie challenged him.
‘No,’ Bob told her promptly and firmly. ‘I’ve known Alex all his life and there is no way he would ever treat his tenants badly. In fact, one of the first things he did after his father’s death was set about raising enough money to ensure that those who had worked for his father and were close to retirement could be securely housed when they reached retirement age.
‘He had to fight like the devil to get his plans past the local planning committee as well. Simply allowing people to stay on in the often remote cottages they had occupied during their working lives wasn’t enough for Alex. No. What he did was bring in an architect and instruct him to design purpose-built units suitable for independent elderly people to live in.’
Now it was Mollie’s turn to frown.
‘Anyone can make plans...promises...’ she began, but Bob shook his head, forestalling her.
‘Alex did more than that,’ he told her firmly. ‘Wherever he owns an estate he has financed the building of a small development of these units, close to all the local amenities and complete with resident wardens and facilities for the disabled. He’s even financed a nursing home for those ex-employees who can no longer manage to live by themselves.’
‘But Pat said—’ Mollie began, only to have her boss cut across her objection a second time.
‘There’s no way Pat Lawson would ever criticise Alex,’ he told her. ‘She thinks the world of him.’
Mollie looked away. It was true that Pat Lawson had never actually mentioned Alex by name, she acknowledged unhappily, but she had assumed when the older woman had agreed with her own comments that she had known that Mollie was obliquely referring to him.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she heard Bob telling her, and he very firmly tore her prized article in two, and then two again, before depositing the pieces in his wastepaper basket.
Then he asked her, ‘Did you get Pat’s recipe?’
‘She’s young and enthusiastic,’ his wife reminded him gently later in the day, when they were having lunch together at the White Swan. The pub had originally been a coaching inn, and since it was owned by Alex it had escaped any kind of themed modernisation and was still very much a traditional English pub, with proper English food including Bob’s favourite steak and ale pie.
‘She needs something she can get her teeth into,’ Eileen added. ‘She doesn’t want to write about recipes and knitting patterns.’
‘Maybe so, but I can’t understand her—to write something like that about Alex of all people...’ Bob said, shaking his head. ‘I told her one of the first things any journalist worth their salt has to learn is to get their facts right. I mean Alex... I can’t think what’s got into the girl. She seems to have taken a real dislike to him.’
‘She needs a crusade...’ Eileen told him wisely, before adding firmly, ‘You know what the doctor said about your cholesterol level. Why don’t you have the chicken salad?’
Mollie could feel her ears burning hotly as she walked through the Gazette’s main office. No doubt everyone had heard Bob rubbishing her article this morning. Well, she didn’t care what Bob said; she knew, she just knew that there was no way that Alex was as white as he liked to be painted. After all, she had firsthand knowledge of just how badly he could behave when he wanted to, hadn’t she?
A brief touch on her arm made her jump. She turned her head to find Bob’s secretary smiling at her.
‘I was just going out for lunch,’ she told Mollie, ‘and I wondered if you’d like to come with me.’
‘I’d love to,’ Mollie accepted gratefully. With the exception of Lucy, the secretary, all the other members of the Gazette’s staff were of a similar age to its owner, and although she was a girl who had never found a problem in meeting and making new friends, and one who, moreover, enjoyed her own company, she had begun to feel slightly isolated and alone since moving to the town.
Bob had just kissed his wife goodbye and was about to walk out of the White Swan when he was hailed by an old friend—the chief inspector of the town’s police force—who, he saw, was frowning grimly.
‘Something wrong?’ he asked casually.
‘You could say that,’ he was told. ‘We’ve just been put on alert. It seems we’ve got a convoy of travellers heading out this way.’
‘Travellers?’ Bob questioned slightly bemused.
‘Yes. You know—hippies. New Agers...’ the chief inspector explained briefly. ‘They pitch up and make camp with their caravans and their lorries and cause the devil’s own kind of problems. If they do decide to make camp locally I’ll have every farmer for miles around on my back wanting me to get rid of them, not to mention the calls we’ll be getting from anxious parents worrying about the possibility of them selling drugs and generally causing problems.
‘I’ve been trying to track Alex down,’ he added.
‘It’s more than likely to be his land they settle on if they do settle locally, so it will be up to him to seek what legal remedies he can to move them on.’
‘What makes them do it, I wonder...?’ Bob mused. ‘I mean why...why decide to live outside society instead of within it?’
‘You’re the journalist, not me. Although most of them would tell you that they have chosen to create their own society...’
‘Mmm...’
Having refused his offer of a drink, Bob made his way back to the Gazette’s offices. If the travellers did decide to settle locally his readers would want to know exactly what was going on. Not, from what he had just heard about them, that any of these young people were likely to confide to him what their plans were. A thought suddenly struck him.
‘She needs something she can get her teeth into,’ his wife had told him about his new employee... ‘She needs a crusade...’
After a sandwich and an enjoyable chat with Lucy, which had included an invitation for Mollie to join Lucy and some of her friends on a ramble the following weekend, followed by a meal at a local pub, Mollie returned to the Gazette’s offices feeling much more cheerful. But her heart sank a little bit as, before she could reach her desk, Bob appeared and asked her to step into his office.
‘New Age travellers are coming here and you want me to interview them?’ Mollie asked him excitedly when he had explained what was going to happen. This was more like it. This was the kind of human interest story she could really get her teeth into.
‘The Gazette’s readers are going to want to know what these people are about, why they can’t stay in their own homes. Don’t they realise the havoc they cause, the damage they do to local crops and livestock?’ Bob was demanding critically, pursing his lips.
Mollie could tell exactly what kind of article he wanted her to write, but there were always two sides to every story.
‘We don’t know yet if these people do intend to pitch camp locally,’ Bob was reminding her. ‘With any luck they won’t, but—’
‘Where are they now? Does anyone know?’ Mollie interrupted him excitedly.
‘Well, they’re travelling this way, from the north. The police are keeping an eye on them, but apparently there’s not an awful lot they can do.’
Mollie quickly drew a brief mental map of the town’s infrastructure. That meant they must be travelling on what had once been the London road. Even if they decided not to pitch camp locally, it would still be worthwhile interviewing them, finding out how they lived, what had made them take to the road in the first place.
‘I could drive out to meet them and see if I can do some interviews,’ she suggested, holding her breath until Bob had given a brief grunt of assent.
Alex received the news of the travellers’ imminent arrival with far less enthusiasm.
He was not antagonistic towards their way of life, nor to them, and in many ways felt extremely sympathetic towards them, but... But he was also a land-owner and a landlord. He knew the havoc their arrival could cause, and the friction which could develop between them and their unwilling hosts. What he couldn’t quite understand, though, was why on earth they should have picked on Fordcaster. They were a small, quiet backwater of a town, well off any of the main arterial routes.
The police had already advised him to get in touch with his solicitor and set in motion what legal remedies he could to evict them, should they decide to settle. Unwillingly he reached for the phone. He didn’t like having to turn away anyone who was in need—it went against his whole ethos and nature—but he also owed a duty to his tenants.
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