Read Online Penny Jordan Collection: Just One Night by Penny Jordan - Free Book Online

of style with a capital S, had been discreetly impressed with her working ‘uniform’, she had noticed. Now it was second nature to her always to wear immaculate white T-shirts and equally immaculate jeans, and the act of putting on clothes she had already been wearing all day was not one she enjoyed.
    She had a spare set of car keys in her purse—another trick she had learned from her work. Spare keys to anything and everything were a necessity, as she had quickly discovered the first time she had allowed one of the workmen to accidentally lock her out of a building and then go home with the keys—it would be a simple enough matter for her to walk back to Haverton Hall and pick up her Discovery. The last thing she wanted was to be dependent on Ran for a lift to the place in the morning, and besides—a small triumphant smile curved her full mouth—it would be good to be able to point out haughtily to him that whilst he had been out enjoying himself with his girlfriend she had been working.
    She had a well-developed sense of direction and the walk to the Hall, which someone else might have found a daunting prospect, was nothing to her.
    Humming happily to herself, Sylvie set out.
    It was a warm summer’s evening, with just enough remaining light for her to avoid the occasional cloud of midges hovering on the still air.
    Being on foot gave her the opportunity to assess the land far better than she had been able to do from inside Ran’s Land Rover. She had spent enough time on Alex’s estate to appreciate that it was going to take a considerable amount of good husbandry on Ran’s part to bring this land into the same productive state as her stepbrother’s. Oddly, she envied him the challenge, but not so much as she envied his wife the pleasure she would have in lovingly restoring the Rectory; in making it the home that Sylvie knew it could be. Oh, yes, she envied her that.
    Only that? Sylvie paused, shaking her thick hair back from her head. Of course only that. She couldn’t possibly envy her Ran, could she—Ran and the children he would give her? No, of course she couldn’t.
    It was almost dark when Sylvie eventually reached the Hall, its bulk throwing long shadows across the gravel, cloaking both her and the Discovery as she walked towards it.
    The sound of other feet on the gravel momentarily made her freeze until she recognised the familiar shapes of half a dozen inquisitive peacocks and peahens. The cocks were sending their shrill cries of warning up into the still night air.
    Sylvie laughed as she heard them, relieved, and shook her head at them as she told them cheerfully, ‘Yes, I may be an intruder now, but you’re going to have to get used to me. You and I shall be seeing an awful lot of one another, you know.’
    She stayed with them for several minutes, watching them and talking to them. Soon, no doubt, when it became fully dark, they would be roosting somewhere out of the way of any predatory hunting foxes.
    Turning her back on them, Sylvie stared thoughtfully at the house, trying to visualise how it would look once the stone had been cleaned. That alone would cost a small fortune and would, no doubt, take almost as long as it would take for the interior to be renovated. She must ask Ran to give her any formal records from when the hall had originally been built and the work done on it since then. She wasn’t sure, but she suspected that the stairway she had seen had been, if not the work of Grinling Gibbons, then certainly the work of one of his more innovative apprentices.
    The tiny sprays of coral, the seashells and unbelievably realistic fish carved into the wood related, no doubt, to the fact that the money for the original house had come from the very profitable overseas trading its owner had been involved in. As a prominent member of King Charles II’s court, and one of his favourites, he undoubtedly had had access to many money-making activities.
    Idly Sylvie wondered what it would have