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  Tears stung her eyes as she waited for Cherry to fetch her father. She didn’t bother to check them, letting them fall because there was no need to hide how she felt now. And then she heard a sound behind her.

  Silas was standing in the doorway, his face hard and bitter.

  When had he come back, and why? Horribly conscious of her tears and the disadvantage of her position, Kate dashed the drops away with impatient fingers.

  ‘I’d forgotten that there’s no spare bedding. I’ve arranged for some to be brought down for you,’ Silas told her harshly.

  He was looking at her as though he wanted to kill her, Kate recognised shiveringly. What had she done to merit such a look, or was it simply that seeing her had brought home to him all that he had lost…all that his brief affair with her must have cost him?

  In another man she might have pitied him, but how could she pity someone who had deceived her as he had, who had allowed her to believe he loved her, that he was to free to love her?

  She turned back to the phone and her father, explaining the situation to him, and asking him if he could bring her clothes and other necessities to the main entrance of the estate.

  When she replaced the receiver, Silas had gone.

  * * *

  ’Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong there.’

  Graham Crew was a large cheerful man in his early forties, who had examined Kate’s arm and her bruises with a gentleness belied by his physical appearance.

  ‘I expect Silas has already told you why we have to take the precaution of keeping you here, but there’s really nothing to worry about,’ he told her comfortingly. ‘You’ll be perfectly safe.’

  ‘Silas seemed concerned that I might have picked up some kind of contamination from the soil.’

  ‘Was he? It’s possible, but highly unlikely. To tell the truth, we need to keep you here not so much for your own safety, but for the protection of the animals and livestock in the dale.

  ‘We have beasts here undergoing treatment. Someone broke in the other night and managed to free one of them. Luckily we found him and he was still on the estate, but we can’t risk either you or your goat carrying infection outside.’

  He frowned as he got up.

  ‘I can’t understand why Silas doesn’t do something with this place. It’s all right for the rest of us, most of us are creatures of passage, so to speak, but he’s been here right from the start. Perhaps you can do something about it while you’re here. It needs…’

  ‘A woman’s touch?’ Kate supplied wryly.

  He grinned at her. ‘All right, so I’m an old-fashioned chauvinist. It’s quite permissible at my age, or at least that’s what I tell my wife and daughter. So far, I haven’t managed to convince them.’

  He got up. ‘Will we be having the pleasure of your company at dinner tonight, or is Silas going to be selfish and keep you to himself? I know what would be my choice,’ he added with another grin.

  Kate couldn’t help liking him, and they were laughing together five minutes later when Silas came in. He scowled at both of them and disappeared in the direction of his study.

  Cherry had been banned from accompanying her father to the estate gates, which was just as well, Kate reflected as she battled with foolish tears when she saw her father.

  ‘All this fuss for an idiotic goat,’ he growled, but Kate could see that he was relieved to see that she was all right, and for his sake she put on a cheerful smile and made a couple of joking remarks.

  ’A week will soon pass for me. I’m not so sure how you and Mum are going to feel after a week of Cherry.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about the lass,’ he told Kate, his face softening. ‘We’ll see she’s all right. It’s a rare treat to watch her with the dogs. Got a flair for it, she has.’

  ‘She’s determined she’s going to have that pup ready for next year’s junior trials,’ Kate warned him.

  ‘Aye.’ His face softened again. ‘I reckon she’ll do it, an’ all.’

  After he had gone, one of the men, dressed from head to foot in protective clothing, went outside to collect her things.

  In the privacy of her room she unpacked them. Right on the top of her suitcase was Cherry’s photograph. She hugged it to her and then studied her daughter’s smiling face. Whatever else it had cost her, her relationship with Silas had given her this. She propped the frame up on the bedside table and then started to unpack her clothes. She would have to find out about proper washing facilities. There was no machine in Silas’s kitchen, but presumably there must be something up at the main building.

  Her mother had packed her schoolwork, and a huge box of fresh food, including some of her own home-made bread, Kate recognised.

  The house was quiet, and she knew that she had it to herself. Silas would not want her company, of course; that went without saying. Was that why she could sense so much anger in him? Because he resented the way fate had tossed her back into his life? If so, his resentment could hardly equal hers.

  Did he also share her fear? she wondered wryly. But then, why should he? He stood in no danger of their enforced proximity rekindling feelings he could never have experienced.

  Was she really afraid of loving him again? She was older and surely wiser, no longer a young girl eager to believe that when a man said ‘I love you’, he meant it.

  And yet the grim-faced man who had shown her up to this room and then stood back from her, his face shadowed and taut, a man who betrayed with every word he spoke about his work how strong his code of ethics was, was no careless philanderer.

  But with her own eyes she had seen him take another woman into his arms, had heard her talk about their children.

  ‘I have no wife,’ he had told her bleakly, and yet she had felt no satisfaction, no pleasure in his very obvious pain. How unreliable human emotions were. How vulnerable human beings.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  KATE had dinner with those members of the establishment’s work-force who were not on duty. A twenty-four-hour guard was being mounted on the premises; some of the experiments called for constant monitoring and the people who worked in the isolation unit ate alone, she was told by Silas’s deputy, Sam Carter. Inevitably the talk turned to Silas himself.

  ‘He lives for his work,’ one of the men commented.

  ‘Not entirely,’ someone else pointed out. ‘He’s just bought that place, and I’ve heard a rumour that he’s thinking of leaving here and turning himself into a farmer.’

  As she listened, Kate discovered that Silas had bought a nearby farm, and she remembered him once telling her of his love of the land. It was something they had shared; only yesterday evening she had slipped away from the farmyard to take the familiar track that led upwards to the moorland…

  Despite her active life, she was not as limber as she had been at eighteen, she reflected wryly, and her calf muscles had protested as she started to climb the steep incline. The chill evening breeze whipping off the fells had stung colour into her cheeks, her unconfined hair blowing out behind her like a dark red banner; her profile, as she turned just for a moment to look back the way she had come, outlined against the backdrop of fells and sky, pure and mediaeval.

  How many times as a child she had walked that path, and in how many different moods.

  As a teenager she had gone up there to gloat over the Seton kingdom spread out beneath her, and to dream daydreams of the times when Abbeydale still had its abbey and the road through the dale was busy with travellers. Elizabethan messengers had ridden through here carrying despatches from Scottish Mary to her cousin in England; Elizabeth’s father’s commissioners had sweated up this very incline on their fat donkeys as they went about the business of assessing the wealth of the churches. And way back before that, Richard III had sent urgent messages to his followers to rally them to his cause.

  Later Kate’s daydreams had taken a more practical turn as she bacame infected by the urgency of her need to break free of the confines of the dale.
And she had broken free, but to what?

  There had been those heady, delirious days of pleasure with Silas, a handful of weeks which had arely stretched into months. They had met in May.

  Kate moved restlessly, not wanting to remember, but unable to stop herself thinking of how she had roamed the moorland in the long summer evenings, one of John Seton’s dogs by her side. The ground was usually dry at the beginning of summer and she would sit there and think of him, the dog pressing into her side.

  How much more conscious one was here of the vastness of the universe, its millions upon millions of stars shining overhead. Was there life out there…another world…another race?

  She had met Silas at a debate on just that very subject. He, like her, had been in the audience; mesmerised by the power of the argument she had just heard, Kate had bumped into him as she got up to leave.

  He had reached out to steady her, and even then, in her innocence of sex, she had been aware of the chemistry between them.

  A mature student, he was completing a PhD course, having returned to take his degree after spending several years working his way around the world. He was twenty-six then, to her eighteen, an adult to her child; but it had been as a woman that she had reacted to him, on fire with the need that pulsed through her the moment he touched her.

  He had smiled at her, as though he knew just what she was feeling; a warm, teasing smile that made her gaze in fascination at the full curve of his bottom lip and wonder with a sudden, hot rush of sensation what it would be like to have that very male mouth caressing her own.

  In a daze she had heard him ask her something, realising almost too late that he was asking her if she would like to go for a drink.

  Such was the casual way dates were made on campus, and she had had no hesitation at all in accepting.

  And so it had begun. A shared drink at a pub in Lancaster favoured by students, a discussion which had seemed to embrace every subject under the sun, and yet of which later she could remember only him saying, ‘Your eyes are the most remarkable colour. Like the sea at its very deepest point, dangerous and very, very alluring. A man could drown so easily in those green depths.’

  And, with all the instincts of the woman emerging from the chrysalis of the girl-child, Kate had known and recognised the sexual power that emanated from him.

  His eyes were tawny-gold, echoing the warmth of his skin, which was not Celtic pale like hers, but brushed with warm bronze as though he carried Latin blood in his veins.

  He could well do so, he had told her. His family came from Cornwall, where sailors from the Spanish Armada had come ashore to mix their blood with those of the local population.

  He had rarely talked to her about his family, a shutter coming down whenever the subject was mentioned. And no wonder, Kate thought tiredly.

  Why had she never guessed that he might be married? She had accepted his sexual experience, his worldliness, without question, never even thinking that at twenty-six and already a man he might have a wife and family.

  They had known one another six weeks before they made love. A long time in those permissive days, when her peers went quite happily to bed with boys they had known for less than six hours.

  She had been nervous, timid and fearful, despite the fact that Silas knew she was still a virgin; frightened of not being able to match his sexual expertise, of disappointing him in some way.

  He was living in a cottage some way out of Lancaster, and travelled to and from the university by car, a luxury outside the means of the majority of the students, and the rented cottage was a far cry from Kate’s own shabby room on campus.

  It was late June and the weather had still been hot. They had spent the previous two weekends together, and on each occasion she had been half expecting Silas to make love to her, half wanting him to and half dreading it.

  She had been quite deliberately provocative with him in the way that only a naive teenage girl could be, she remembered grimly, teasing him with come-on smiles and brief, daring touches of her hand against his skin, quickly withdrawing in fright whenever she saw the fierce burn of desire darken his eyes.

  The day had been hot and still, the fields around the cottage parched brown by the sun; the farmers had been delighted by their early hay crop, and the air was full of dust motes and the scents of summer.

  He had been working in the garden. He had taken his reponsibilities towards the owner of the cottage seriously, and she, growing bored and petulant at not receiving his full attention, had mischievously turned the hosepipe full on him, soaking him to the skin.

  Even without closing her eyes, she could remember now how the jetting spray of water had plastered the thin cotton of his shirt to his body, darkening his jeans to dense navy. He had stood up slowly and turned towards her. She hadn’t been able to remove her gaze from his face. His eyes had burnt as fiercely as a golden hawk’s, and she had felt the familiar frisson of sexually generated tension curl through her stomach.

  He had advanced on her slowly, stalking her like a soft, padded mountain cat, and she had stood where she was, shaking with excitement and fear. She knew quite well what she had unleashed and she couldn’t run from it. When he reached her he would take her in his arms and kiss her until she could hardly breathe for the suffocating sensation of need building inside her…

  But instead, when he was within feet of her, he picked up the hosepipe and quite deliberately played it over her body, ignoring her shriek of outraged protest.

  She was wearing a brief top and shorts. The top was loose and she had seen no need to wear a bra to support the brief uplift of her small breasts, but with the soaking top plastered against her skin and her nipples hardening under the combined shock of the cold water and her own arousal, she suddenly felt as vulnerable as though she were actually naked.

  As she crossed her arms protectively over her chest, she heard Silas saying drily, ‘Serves you right. You needed cooling off.’ But then, when her teeth started to chatter with a mixture of cold and the withdrawal of the momentary high she had been experiencing, his manner changed. He dropped the hosepipe and came towards her, frowning as he observed her stricken face and the tears that were already shimmering in her eyes.

  She had still been so much the child…so governed by moods that alternated from high to low, Kate recognised wryly. So much a victim of her own emergent sexuality, and so very, very immature…

  ‘Hey, come on. It’s all right,’ he told her softly, prising her arms away from her body, and wrapping her in his own. As an embrace it had been purely comforting, but she was still inclined to sulk, not liking being treated like a child, and she tried to pull away.

  The friction caused by the wet cloth against her breasts caused her nipples to harden again, and her angry movements to break free dragged the hardened points against Silas’s chest. She had not realised what she was doing until she felt the swelling arousal of his body.

  There was a moment when she could have pulled away, when he obviously recognised their danger and momentarily eased back from her, but she pressed wantonly against him, wanting to make him acknowledge the power of her womanhood, and the moment was lost beneath the roaring swell of their mutual desire.

  He said her name, thickly, rawly, and she had looked up to see the topaz eyes glittering fires of gold.

  He kissed her then, and not just on the mouth, but all over her body, lying her down on the grass and sucking on her tender, virginal nipples until she writhed in ecstasy, crying out incoherent pleas to have him against her, around her, within her.

  He made love to her there under the hot June sun, so that the scent of the garden mingled with the scent of his body, and he loved her in such a way that she found only delight and pride in her body, offering herself up to his most intimate caress without qualm.

  They spent the evening lazily loving one another and drinking wine, lying in the huge double bed with its linen sheets and old-fashioned eiderdown.

  She spilled some of hers, and i
t ran down over her breasts and on to her belly.

  Her stomach quivered protestingly as she had a vivid memory of Silas’s dark head bent over her body. If she closed her eyes, she suspected she might actually feel again the rough sensuality of his tongue as it had lapped at the spilt wine.

  And after that…She shook as she tried not to remember how the touch of his tongue had aroused her, and how she in turn had stroked and tasted every inch of him.

  In the morning she had felt an unfamiliar soreness, and she had been as lazy as a cream-fed cat: too sated to want to move. They had made love again in the hot stillness of the afternoon, Silas deliberately arousing her to a pitch where she had cried out her need and pleasure, and he had responded fiercely to the eroticism of the sounds she had made.

  They had been lovers from June to September, and Silas had told her that they would get married at Christmas. He wanted her to be a winter bride, he had told her, because it would so suit her colouring, and afterwards he would make love to her in the light from an open fire and watch the flames play red-gold against her pale skin while he fulfilled their marital vows. But he had been lying to her…

  It was the sound of voices around her that brought Kate back to the present. She reached up to make sure that the warmth of her skin was not her own hot tears, that she need not brush them away. She had done all her crying for Silas years ago, and when Cherry was born she had told herself that she was going to put him out of her mind completely.

  And she had succeeded.

  Until she came back to Abbeydale.

  Had he fallen in love with her birthplace? she wondered. Perhaps he planned to breed a flock of the sheep he had shown her; if so, her father would be envious.

  But how would she feel with Silas living close at hand? And what about Cherry? So far her daughter had evinced only the most basic curiosity about her father, but as she matured…

  So many problems. None of which Kate could solve, so to take her mind off them she asked curiously, ‘You don’t seem to have any females on the staff.’