Five miles or so before her ultimate destination, Veronica pulled the car she had hired at the airport over to the side of the road and switched off the engine. She did it not because she was unsure of where she was going, not even because she wanted to absorb the beauty of the Derbyshire countryside around her, magnificent though it was as it basked warmly in the mid-afternoon sunshine, devoid of any sign of human occupation apart from her own.
No… Unfortunately, the reason Veronica had stopped was that she had been significantly aware for the last few miles, not just of the slight dampness of her hands on the steering wheel but, even more betrayingly, of the increasing turmoil of her thoughts and the nervous butterflies churning her stomach.
When she finally met... confronted... Sasha, she wanted to be calm and in control of both herself and the situation. She wasn’t, Veronica reminded herself sternly, meeting him as an idealistic teenager who had fallen so disastrously and desperately in love with him, but as a woman, a woman who had a job to do.
She would not... must not allow her own personal feelings to affect her judgment or her professionalism. In the eyes of other people, her job might appear to be just a piece of cake, traveling the world, living and breathing the air of some of its most beautiful buildings, able to afford to commission its very best workmen.
Well, it was far more to it than that. As J.J. had remarked admiringly to her the previous year, when he had viewed the finished work on the Venetian palazzo, Veronica didn’t just possess the most marvelous and accurate eye for correct period detail, for harmony and color, for the intricacy that meant she could hold in her mind’s eye the entire finished concept of how an original period room must have looked.
No, she also had an extremely shrewd and practical side to her nature which ensured that with every project she had worked on so far, she had managed to bring the work to completion on time and under budget.
This was something that didn’t just ‘happen’. It involved hours and hours spent poring over costings and budgets, more hours and hours tramping around warehouses, inspecting fabrics and furniture, and in many cases, because of the age of the houses, it also meant actually finding and commissioning workmen to make new ‘aged’ copies of the pieces she required.
Italy, as she had quickly discovered, was a treasure house for such craftsmen and so, oddly, was London, but always at a price, and Veronica had surprised herself a little at her ability to bargain for days, if necessary until she had got what she wanted and at a price she considered to be fair.
This had, of course, led to her often having to take an extremely firm line, not just with the craftspeople she dealt with but very often with the original owners of their properties as well, who very often retained life tenancy in the houses and quite naturally wanted to have their say in how they were restored and furnished.
Oh, yes, she was used to dealing with sometimes difficult ex-owners, and situations where she had to use both patience and tact to ensure that no one’s pride was hurt.
It was a very definite skill to be able to walk the tightrope between avoiding hurting a prior owner’s often sensitive pride and ensuring that the house was restored as she knew J.J. would want it to be.
But this time… Well, this time, it wasn’t just the sensitive feelings of a property’s ex-owner she was going to need to consider. No, this time the person whose feelings, whose emotions were going to need careful handling was herself.
“Damn it!” she exclaimed and tried to stop her hands from shaking. “I need to calm down! I have to do this! I need to do it!”
Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply and calmly several times and then opened them again, wiping her hands on a tissue and then re-starting the Discovery’s engine. Hiring this four-wheel-drive was such a great choice…
From the plans and other papers J.J. had given her to study, Veronica knew the Discover is going to be useful for traveling over the rugged terrain and the overgrown driveways that surrounded Elsinore Hall.
Veronica also chose this car because, as she had discovered in the past, a large sturdy off-road vehicle often provided a boon for transporting the odd ‘find’ she came across when scouting around looking for materials for the restoration work to a property.
The statue she had found for the secluded enclosed garden of the Italian palazzo had been one such find, bought and paid for on the spot before the vendor could change his mind, and loaded immediately into her car.
Ten minutes later, Veronica was driving through the open gates to Elsinore Hall. The twin lodges at either side of the gate, joined by a pretty spanning ‘archway’, had both looked run-down and in need of repair.
Veronica knew from her homework that they had been constructed at the same time as the main house, and the house, like them, had been designed by one of the country’s foremost architects in the Palladian manner favored by the likes of Inigo Jones.
Theatrically, the drive to the house curved through flanking trees, several of which were missing, spoiling its original symmetry, although those which remained were so heavily in leaf that they still obscured all her attempts to glimpse the house until she had driven past the final curve in the drive.
She caught her breath. Used as she was to beautiful properties - after all, Henry’s ancestral home was renowned for its elegant grace - this one, despite the shabbiness of its fading elegance, was something very special and she could see instantly why J.J. had fallen so immediately and completely in love with it.
Set on a small incline, so that it could overlook its surrounding gardens and parklands, it was everything that the neoclassicist architects had decreed their houses should be and then some more, Veronica acknowledged as she drove slowly towards the graveled parking area in front of the massive columned portico to the house.
“This is it, Ronnie!” she said slowly. “Whatever happens… Whomever you’re about to see, stay strong! Keep you cool! Do your job and walk away.”
Stopping the Discovery, Veronica opened the door and started to get out. Let the games begin! Don’t back down now!
They met on the paved portico. Sasha opened the massive front door just as Veronica mounted the last step. She stopped the minute she saw him and gave him a quick glimpse. Her stomach did some flip-flops but she managed to keep her composure.
He hadn’t changed, but then why should he have? Sasha still looked exactly the same. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the smooth warm skin of a countryman, his jeans were clinging softly to the taut muscles of his long legs.
His forearms were bare and bronzed, the soft checked shirt he was wearing was exactly the same kind of shirt Veronica could remember seeing him wearing all the years she had been growing up. His hair was still as thick and darkly rich as ever, his jaw just as chiseled.
No signs of soft, rich living there, despite the odd snippets of gossip she had picked up from her mother and from Mollie about the discreet parade of elegant, wealthy women who had passed through his life.
Well, Sasha had always had a penchant for that type, women in the main who were slightly older than him, dressed to kill, knowing... all the things that an adoring, unknowing seventeen-year-old was not.
Only his eyes had changed, Veronica noticed, with a sudden sharp flicker of sensation which she immediately suppressed. Oh, they were still the same incredible color, somewhere between onyx and gold, still flecked with those heart-dizzying little specks of lighter color and still surrounded by those unfairly long, thick dark lashes.
‘Get a hold on yourself, girl!’ Veronica thought when she felt his gaze on her.
Yes, all that was still familiar to her, but the lazily sensual way they were studying her, the subtle but very male message she could read in them as Sasha’s gaze flicked over her T-shirt-covered breasts and her slim waist in the plain blue jeans...
That was most certainly not familiar to her, at least not from Sasha Neville-Talbot, the man who scared her soul for life. The man that crushed her heart into million pieces. The man that made fun of her and her youthful passion.
And it was only then, when she countered that look with an instinctive and automatically female one of cool reproval, that Veronica realized that one of them had closed the distance between them from its original safe several meters to a much, much less secure three or four feet. One of them...
To her chagrin, Veronica recognized that it wasn’t only Sasha who had moved so much closer and that she was halfway towards the front door now instead of on the perimeter of the portico... When had she moved...? And how? Without knowing what she was doing...? Sasha had always had that kind of effect on her... Had... All that was in the past now, she reminded herself fiercely. And just to ensure that Sasha knew it too, Veronica held out her hand to him and, raising her voice slightly, smiled with cool authority as she greeted him.“Sasha, good! I’m glad you’re here. We can get straight down to work. I’ve studied the plans of the house, but I always find that it makes an enormous difference to actually walk over a property, so...” 
“Mmm... You won’t have seen it as you drove in. It’s on the other side of the estate. I’m living there at the moment and I’ve arranged with Mrs. Elliott, who used to be my cousin’s housekeeper when he lived there, for a room to be prepared for you. J.J. mentioned that you’d probably be working here for a number of months and he and I agreed that in view of Elsinore’s distance from the nearest town, and the fact that he has warned me that you like to keep a very keen eye on the budgets, it makes sense for you to stay at the Rectory rather than waste time and money hunting around for alternative accommodation.” “Wow! Did you now? Still deciding on my behalf…” she whispered this last part more for herself than him. “Yes. Especially since it seems that there could be occasions when you might have to travel abroad to check on work you’ve set in progress at other Trust properties.” Well, what he said made sense
They had covered the ground floor of the house, walked the length of the elegant gallery, with its windows overlooking the parkland and the distant vista of the Derbyshire hills, and were just inspecting the enormous ballroom which opened off it, when Veronica acknowledged inwardly that Sasha might have been right to advise her to wait until after she had rested to inspect the house. Elsinore Hall’s rooms might not possess quite the vastness of the palazzo’s marble-floored rooms, nor the fading grandeur of the Prague palace, but Veronica had already lost count of the number of salons and ante-chambers they had walked through on the lower floor. The gallery felt as though it stretched for miles, and as she studied the dusty wooden floor of the ballroom her heart sank at the thought of inspecting
Veronica was sitting upright now, ignoring the pounding pain in her head as she glared belligerently at Sasha.“You don’t know what you’re talking about! J.J. doesn’t... he isn’t...” She stopped, shaking her head. How could she explain to Sasha of all people, about the thing that drove her, the memories and the fears? As a teenager, she had done so many foolish things and even let down the people who had loved and supported her. Her involvement with Wayne was something she knew she would always regret. She hadn’t known at the time, of course, just what he was. In her innocent naiveté, Veronica had never guessed that he was anything other than someone who had bought a handful of recreational drugs to pass on to people at rave parties. 
Hard on the heels of the acute envy, Veronica had felt when she had first seen the exterior of the house came to a pang of sadness for its inner neglect. Oh, it was clean enough, if you discounted the air possessing a sharp, almost chemical smell that made Veronica wrinkle her nose a little, but it was a long, long way from the home she had so lovingly mentally created. She heard Sasha moving around in the hall behind her.“Let’s go… I’ll take you up to your room,” he told her. “Have you got something for your headache?”“Yes, I have, but they’re in my luggage… which is in my hire car… That you left behind…” Veronica told him grimly. In the excitement of seeing the house, her headache had abated slightly, but now the strong smell in the hallway had made it return and… with interest. She
Sasha grimaced as he studied the very obviously cut-through pieces of fencing wire. This was no accident… Someone had quite definitely used wire cutters on them, which meant... The lambs which had been born early in the spring had all gone now, his breeding stock the only flock that remained. And the deer roaming the home park was a tempting target for poachers. The last time he had seen Henry, the two of them had discussed the pros and cons of tagging their deer. Like him, Henry had a small herd on his estate, but since their marriage, Mollie, his wife, had added a new strain to them in the shape of the same miniature deer that she had bred so successfully. As Sasha glanced towards the line of bushes that separated the parkland from the main gardens to the H
Instinctively her free hand went to her body to check just how far up her T-shirt had ridden.“What is it?” Sasha asked her, his attention caught by the movement of her hand.“Uh… You’re heavy, Sasha. You’re still on top of me and you’re hurting me,” Veronica told him, not entirely truthfully. She tried to bury herself in the night’s cloaking shadows, but it was too late and she could see from the sudden narrowing of his gaze as it followed the action of her hand that he realized, as she had just done herself, that her wretched T-shirt had ridden up far enough to expose the lower curve of her breasts. The last thing, the very last thing Veronica wanted was for Sasha to study her body in any way at all. So why, in God’s name?... Why,
Veronica frowned as she started to double-check what she had just been reading. In a detailed account for the work involved in treating both the wet and dry rot to Elsinore Hall, she had only just noticed something strange. Just slipped in at the back of the file, was an additional sheet reporting on some dry rot infestation in the Rectory, Sasha’s private property, and with it was a brief note confirming that the work on the Rectory would be put in hand before the contractors started working on Elsinore Hall itself. She could feel her heart starting to thump heavily with a mixture of anger and pain as she read the sheet again. It wasn’t unknown for the owners of the properties the Trust took over to try to drive as hard a bargain as they possibly could.&nbs