‘I can’t discuss it over the phone,’ Sylvie told him. ‘I need to see you... Oh, Lloyd, I’m so sorry...’ She gulped as she heard her voice thickening with tears.
‘Don’t be,’ she heard Lloyd telling her gently, and then, to her relief, he said, ‘I’ll be there with you just as soon as I can fix up everything down here and then we can talk.’
‘Oh, Lloyd,’ Sylvie wept.
How typical it was of Lloyd that he should put everything else on hold to come and see her, Sylvie acknowledged after their call had ended. He would understand, she knew he would, but she still felt guilty about letting him down.
The door to Ran’s study was open and Ran himself entered the hallway just as she was about to cross it. As he glanced at the mobile she was still holding in her hand, Sylvie realised that he must have overheard her talking to Lloyd.
‘Lloyd’s coming back,’ she told him huskily.
‘Yes, so I gathered,’ she heard him responding flatly, with something that almost sounded like anger hardening his voice. Sylvie couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Already the tenderness they had shared last night felt as though it was all something she herself had imagined, created out of her own need; it had gone.
‘I...I have to go to Haverton,’ she told him shakily as she made to walk past him.
Ran watched her go. It tore him apart to see the pain she was in. Last night she had turned to him in need, in simple human need, driven by her longing, her love for another man, a man who had left her to be with another woman.
Did Lloyd have any conception of what he had done, of what he was doing, or did he simply think that his wealth gave him the right to ignore other people’s feelings? Did he think that the damage he had done to Sylvie, the hurt he had caused her, simply didn’t matter?
Yesterday he had left her to be with someone else and now, today, he was coming back.
‘I need to see you,’ he had heard Sylvie whisper emotionally to him, and as he had heard the betraying tremble in her voice he had closed his eyes. He knew all about that need, had known about it from long before the night he had taken Sylvie in his arms in a mixture of fury and longing, breaking every promise he had ever made himself as he made love to her, with her, and discovered, with a mixture of joy, pain and shame, that he was her first lover.
‘Wayne’s been telling me for ages to find someone to lose my virginity with,’ she had thrown tauntingly at him, and she had gone from him to Wayne, abandoning everything and everyone to be with him—her family, her education, even, it had seemed to Ran at times, her principles.
But then she had changed her mind, begged Alex for his help and support, to help her get her life back on track.
He had seen her off at the airport with Alex and his new wife, an impulse decision, giving in to a need for which he had berated and despised himself.
He had ended up going home afterwards and slowly getting drunk—not something he was in any way proud to remember, but it had been the only way he could find to anaesthetise himself against his pain.
Not even to Alex, his closest friend, had he been able to talk about how he felt, about how much he loved her. Alex was, after all, her stepbrother.
He had thought that he was prepared for the reality of knowing that she would spend her life with someone else, but that had been when that reality was at a safe distance. Knowing she loved Lloyd was one thing; having to witness that love, having to hold her whilst she cried for him, having to listen to her pleading with him for his return—no amount of preparation could protect him from that kind of pain.
And now Lloyd was on his way back to see her. Would she tell him about last night, about the intimacy they had shared? Morally there was no reason why she should do so but...
Last night, when he had held her, touched her, loved her, when he had felt her body’s response to him, answered not just its sensuality but its deeper and far more intensely urgent demand for something that went far beyond even the physical, sexual satisfaction he had felt...known... He opened his eyes and walked across to the window of his study to look out into the garden. Long-ago ancestors of his had designed and planned this garden, lived in this building; his title, his land, the great house which was now too big and too expensive for any one family to run—all that tradition now rested on him and with him.
Once, long ago, it would have been considered his duty as the last male of his line to produce a child, a son, a legitimate heir. But that was something he could never do. He could not marry another woman when it was Sylvie he loved, not for his own sake and not for any wife’s either, so there would be no legitimate heir. The only child he would ever have was the one he knew already that he and Sylvie had created between them last night. Their child. But he could not compel Sylvie to allow him to be a part of that child’s life. Not when he knew that she didn’t love him. Twice now she had turned to him for comfort when, in reality, she had loved another man. There could not, must not ever be a third occasion.