Mark said, falling in beside him.
‘That sounds promising. What about the barn?’
‘There are any number of options open to you there. It’s very adaptable. In fact, I did wonder if you’d like to convert it into your own country retreat. There’s a small private road and, with a walled garden, it would be very private.’
If it had been anywhere else, he might have been tempted. But Longbourne Court was now a place he just wanted to develop for maximum profit so that he could eradicate it from his memory, along with Sylvie Smith.
The last thing Sylvie had done before she’d left Longbourne Court was to pack the wedding dress away where it belonged, in a chest in the attic containing the rest of her great-grandmother’s clothes.
Not wanted in this life.
It was going to be painful to see it again. To touch it. Feel the connection with that part of her which had been packed away with the dress.
Always supposing the chests and trunks were still there.
There was only one way to find out, but Longbourne Court was no longer her home; she couldn’t just take the back stairs that led up to the storage space under the roof and start rootling around without as much as a by-your- leave.
But as soon as she’d talked to Josie, reassured herself that everything was running smoothly in her real life, she went in search of Pam Baxter, planning to clear it with her. Get it over with while Tom McFarlane was still safely occupied with the architect.
She’d seen him from the window. Had watched him walking down to the old coach house with Mark Hilliard.
He’d shaved since their last encounter. Changed. The sweater was still cashmere, but it was black.
Like his mood.
And yet he’d had a smile for Geena. The real thing. No wonder the woman had been swept away.
It had been that kind of smile.
The dangerous kind that stirred the blood, heated the skin, brought all kinds of deep buried longings bubbling to the surface.
Not that he’d needed a smile to get that response from her. He’d done it with no more than a look.
But then there had been that look, that momentary connection across Geena’s head when, for a fleeting moment, she’d felt as if it were just the two of them against the world. When, for a precious instant, she’d been sure that everything was going to be all right.
No more than wishful thinking, she knew, as she watched a waft of breeze coming up from the river catch at his hair. He dragged his fingers through it, pushing it back off his face before glancing back at the house, at the window of the morning room, as if he felt her watching him.
Frowning briefly before he turned and walked away, leaving Mark to trail in his wake.
She slumped back in the chair, as if unexpectedly released from some crushing grip, and it took all her strength to stand up, to go and find Pam.
The library door was open and when she tapped on it, went in, she discovered the room was empty.
She glanced at her watch, deciding to give it a couple of minutes, crossing without thinking to the shelves, running her hand over the spines of worn, familiar volumes. Everything was exactly as she’d left it. Even the family bible was on its stand and she opened it to the pages that recorded their family history. Each birth, marriage, death.
The blank space beneath her own name for her marriage, her children-that would always remain empty.
The last entry, her mother’s death, written in her own hand. After all her mother had been through, that had been so cruel. So unfair. But when had life ever been fair? she thought, looking at the framed photograph standing by itself on a small shelf above the bible.
It was nothing special. Just a group of young men in tennis flannels, lounging on the lawn in front of a tea table on some long ago summer afternoon.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there, hearing the distant echo of her great-grandfather’s voice as he’d repeated their names, a roll-call of heroes, when some shift in the air, a prickle at the base of her neck, warned her that she was no longer alone.
Not Pam. Pam would have spoken as soon as she’d seen her.
‘Checking up on me, Mr McFarlane?’ she asked, not looking round, even when he joined her. ‘Making sure I’m not getting too comfortable?’
‘Who are these people?’ he asked, his voice grating as, ignoring the question, he picked up the photograph and made a gesture with it which-small though it was-managed to include the portraits that lined the stairs, the upper gallery, that hung over fireplaces.
She waited, anticipating some further sarcasm, but when she didn’t answer he looked up and for a moment she saw genuine curiosity.
‘Just family,’ she said simply.
‘Family?’ He looked as if he would say something more and she held her breath.
‘Yes?’ she prompted, but his eyes snapped back to the photograph.
‘Didn’t they have anything better to do than play games?’ he demanded. ‘Laze about at tea parties?’
Her turn to frown. Something about the photograph disturbed him, she could see, but she couldn’t let him get away with that dismissive remark.
Laying a finger on the figure of a young man who was smiling, obviously saying something to whoever was taking the photograph, she said, ‘This is my great-uncle Henry. He was twenty-one when this was taken. Just down from Oxford.’ She moved to the next figure. ‘This is my great-uncle George. He was nineteen. Great-uncle Arthur was fifteen.’ She leaned closer so that her shoulder touched his arm, but she ignored the
‘And the boy in the front? The joker pulling the face?’
‘That’s my great-grandfather, James Duchamp. He wasn’t quite twelve when this was taken. He was just short of his seventeenth birthday four years later when the carnage that they call The Great War ended. The only one of them to survive, marry, raise a family.’
‘It was the same for every family,’ he said abruptly.
‘I know, Mr McFarlane. Rich and poor of all nations died together by the million in the trenches.’ She looked up. ‘There were precious few tennis parties for anyone after this was taken.’
Tom McFarlane stared at the picture, doing his best to ignore the warmth of her shoulder against his chest, the silky touch of a strand of hair that had escaped her scarf as it brushed against his cheek.
‘For most people there never were any tennis parties,’ he said as, incapable of moving, physically distancing himself from her, he did his best to put up mental barriers. Then, in the same breath, ‘Since we appear to be stuck under the same roof for the next week, it might be easier if you called me Tom. It’s not as if we’re exactly strangers.’ Tearing them down.
‘I believe that’s exactly what we are, Mr McFarlane,’ she replied, cool as the proverbial cucumber. ‘Strangers.’
He nodded, acknowledging the truth of that. The lie of it. ‘Nevertheless,’ he persisted and she glanced up, her look giving the lie to her words as she met his gaze, as if searching for something…‘Just to save time,’ he added.
‘To save time?’
She didn’t quite shrug, didn’t quite smile-or only in self-mockery, as if she’d hoped for something more. What, for heaven’s sake? Hadn’t she got enough?
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Tom it is. On the strict understanding that it’s just to save time. But you are going to have to call me Sylvie. My time may not be as valuable as yours, but it’s in equally short supply.’
‘I think I can manage that. Sylvie.’
Divorced from ‘Duchamp’ and ‘Smith’, the name slipped over his tongue like silk and he wanted to say it again.
