Ran challenged her, his expression suddenly hardening as he demanded, 'If it's the fact that you'll be living under my roof whilst Lloyd is in New York—'
'Your roof?' Sylvie interrupted him quickly, suddenly recognising a way of turning the tables on him and regaining control of the situation, of showing him who was boss. She gave him an acid-sweet smile.
'The Rectory may have been yours, Ran, but as part of the estate it is now owned by the Trust and—' 'Not so.'
Ran stopped her even faster than she had him. 'I have retained ownership of the Rectory and the land. I intend to farm it and to develop the fishing and shooting rights.'
Sylvie was momentarily caught off guard.
It was most unusual for Lloyd to allow something like that. He normally insisted on buying whatever land went with a property, if only to ensure that as much of its natural background and surroundings as possible were retained.
'If you'd like to follow me we can drive over to the Rectory now,' Ran offered coolly.
Immediately Sylvie shook her head. 'No... I want to see over the house first,' she told him crisply.
Ran stared at her and then looked at his watch before telling her softly, 'That will take at least two hours, possibly longer; it's now five o'clock in the afternoon.'
Sylvie raised her eyebrows. 'So...?' she challenged me. Ran shrugged.
'I should have thought after a transatlantic flight and the drive here from the airport that you'd have wanted a rest before touring the house, if only so that you can view it with a fresh eye and a clear head.'
'You're out of touch, Ran,' Sylvie told him with a small, superior smile. 'These are the nineties. Crossing the Atlantic for a power breakfast and then re- crossing it for another meeting is nothing,' she boasted.
Ran shrugged again and then waved one hand in the direction of the main doorway as he drawled laconically, 'Very well...after you...'
As he walked towards the door behind her, Ran paused. The sight of her had given him much more of a shock than he liked.
He had prepared himself for the fact that he would be meeting her as a woman, and not as the girl he had watched boarding the flight for America, but womanhood came in many different guises and took many different forms. However, none of them could possibly come anywhere near causing the kind of devastating effect on his senses that Sylvie's was creating.
Her hair, long and thick, hung down to her shoulders in an immaculately groomed swathe of molten honey-gold. Just looking at it, at her, made him ache to run his fingers through it, to watch its silken weight sliding through his hands… His stomach muscles tensed.
The brilliantly white T-shirt she was wearing hugged the soft shape of her breasts before disappearing into her jeans.
The T- shirts he remembered her wearing had been big and baggy and invariably slightly grubby as she happily trotted after him whilst he worked.
Even to his male uneducated eyes, this T-shirt was plainly not the kind one wore to work outdoors in.
And as for her jeans...!
Ran closed his eyes. What was it about the sight of a pair of plain blue jeans lovingly hugging the soft, shapely contours of a woman's behind that had such an evocative, such a provocative effect on a man's male instincts?
Unabashedly he acknowledged that had Sylvie been a complete stranger to him, and had he been walking down the street behind her, he would have instinctively increased his pace to walk past her so that he could see if she looked as good from the front as she did from the rear.
But she wasn't a stranger, she was Sylvie.
'I've told Alex that if you don't keep away from Sylvie he must make you,' Sylvie's mother had once warned him haughtily, shortly after her husband's death.
She had caught Ran at a bad moment and he had reacted instinctively and immediately regretted it as he'd thrown back at her bluntly, 'It's Sylvie you should be warning to keep away from me. She's the one doing the chasing.
Teenage girls are like that,' he had added unkindly, watching as Sylvie's mother pursed her lips in shock.
It had been then that he had seen Sylvie slipping past the open doorway of Alex's estate office.
Had she overheard them? He'd hoped not.
Difficult though her unwanted crush on him sometimes had been, the last thing he'd wanted to do was to hurt her.
But now, as he watched her, Ran acknowledged that these days if anyone was going to be hurt it was far more likely to be him!
Why had she taken as her lover and her intended partner for life a man more than old enough to be her father?
Ran couldn't begin to understand.
Unless it was because she had lost her father at such a young and vulnerable age.
Sylvie had pulled open the house's unlocked door and disappeared inside.
Sombrely Ran followed her.