Lloyd was more than likely to arrive before evening and Ran knew that he simply could not endure being there to see him reunited with Sylvie.
He walked back to his desk and reached for the telephone.
* * *
In the pretty sitting room which his wife had made so much her own, Alex grinned in appreciation as their son headed eagerly towards him, swinging him up into his arms as Mollie looked on placidly. Alex looked lovingly at her. She was in the early stages of pregnancy with their second child and suffering from morning sickness.
‘I’ve just had a phone call from Ran,’ he told her.
‘Mmm... How is he—and Sylvie...?’
‘He wants to come down for a few days. Apparently he wants to pick my brains for ideas on making the estate more self-sufficient.’
‘Do you think he and Sylvie will ever work things out?’ Mollie asked him anxiously.
Alex raised his eyebrows.
‘Why ask me? You’re the one who thinks that they are madly in love with one another.’
‘I don’t think, I know,’ Mollie corrected him sternly. ‘But the pair of them are just so...so stubbornly determined not to admit to one another how they feel.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might just be wrong?’ Alex asked her tenderly.
‘No, because I’m not. You’re Sylvie’s brother, Alex, and Ran’s best friend; you have a duty to do something to help them.’
‘Oh, no! No! No way...’ Alex denied, shaking his head and looking alarmed. ‘They are both adults.’
‘Maybe. But they’re both behaving like children. We have to do something, Alex; you saw the way Sylvie was breaking her heart over Ran when we went to see her in New York just after she went there... It was pitiful to see the look in her eyes when she finally managed to ask after him... And Ran’s just as bad.’
‘Look, they’re at Haverton Hall together...alone,’ Alex stressed. ‘If that doesn’t give them both the opportunity to sort themselves out...’
‘Maybe being alone isn’t what they need, maybe they need someone to talk to, to show them...’ Mollie suggested meaningfully, giving him a coaxing smile.
‘No way,’ Alex told her firmly, but Mollie had made up her mind. One way or another, something would have to be done, and if Alex couldn’t be persuaded to do that something, well, then—Determinedly she started to think.
* * *
It was later in the afternoon when Sylvie returned from Haverton Hall to learn from Mrs Elliott that Ran had announced that he had to go away for several days.
‘Did he say where he was going or when he would be back?’ Sylvie asked her stiffly.
The older woman shook her head.
‘He just said that he would telephone,’ she informed her.
Had Ran genuinely gone away on business or had he gone because of her? Sylvie wondered painfully. He had been kind towards her when he had talked about the pain of unrequited love, kinder than she had ever known him be before, but that didn’t alter the fact that he didn’t love her and that her presence here in his home must be creating problems for him. Well, she wouldn’t be creating those problems for very much longer, she decided, her determination to convince Lloyd to hand over their Haverton Hall project to someone else even stronger than it had already been.
Lloyd himself rang whilst she was upstairs updating her files, explaining that he had been delayed a little longer than he had expected and that it would be late evening before he arrived in Derbyshire.
Ran had instructed his housekeeper to prepare a room for Lloyd before he had left—the room next to her own, Sylvie discovered, when Mrs Elliott, the housekeeper, informed her of Ran’s instructions.
Her mobile rang and she answered it, expecting to hear Lloyd’s voice but hearing instead that of her stepsister-in-law.
‘Mollie, how are you?’ she asked, genuinely pleased to recognise her caller.
‘Queasy,’ Mollie responded, but Sylvie could tell from the happiness in the other woman’s voice just how pleased she was about her recently announced pregnancy.
‘Just you wait until it’s your turn,’ Mollie warned her. ‘It’s no joke. We had salmon for supper and it’s my favourite and I couldn’t touch a bite...’
Her turn! Sylvie gripped her mobile tightly. How would Mollie and Alex react when she told them that she was pregnant? They would want to know who the father of her child was, of course, although both of them were modern enough, loving enough, to accept her decision to keep the father’s identity to herself and to bring up her child alone.
‘How are things going up there?’ Mollie asked her. ‘How are you and Ran getting on...?’