HER ONE AND ONLY VALENTINE - Read Free Page B

acid in the pit of her stomach as she searched frantically for a quick fix solution to the problem he had presented her with.
    Maybe if she'd managed more sleep she might have found an option or two. To have what sleep she had managed uninterrupted by fitful dreams of the past would certainly have helped too...
    Tugging angrily on the steering wheel, she made the final turn through the huge wrought iron gates that heralded the entrance to Brookfield.
    Having Brookfield and its hundred and something acres to work on was supposed to help both her and Lizzie to focus their intense emotions from Mattie's passing, elsewhere. It was supposed to be a chance to look forwards, not back, and at the same time to allow them to never forget the one person who had helped them when they had needed it most.
    They finally had a chance at a real future—the two of them together against the world.
    Once through the gates, the Jeep was immediately surrounded by an avenue of tall skeletal trees that wouldn't see leaves for months yet, while Rhiannon thought about the bitterness in Kane's voice when he had asked her why it would matter to him whether or not Lizzie knew who he was.
    He had to be out of the house before Lizzie came home; there was no question about that!
    Even if a small, resentful part of Rhiannon thought for a brief moment that it might do him good to see how amazing and beautiful and bright and funny and audacious her child had turned out to be.
    Low branches reached out to scrape against the high roof of the Jeep as she got closer to the one part of her past she had tried hardest to leave behind.
    Designed for the coaches that would have driven to the large house when it was first built in the late nineteenth century, the original owners could never have envisaged the need for anything wider than a large coach to use the driveway, so they had simply built it to enter on one side of the lake and leave on the other in one large scenic circle that only ever widened in front of the house itself. It made for a beautiful drive, one that normally acted as a soothing balm for Rhiannon's soul.
    The trees thinned and allowed a glimpse of the lake and the impressive house beyond. Brookfield.
    All of her young life, growing up in a block of flats in a poorer part of Dublin, Rhiannon could only have dreamt that a place like Brookfield existed outside a fairy tale. And she still remembered the first weekend Mattie had brought her to his 'little country cottage'. That first turn on to the wide gravel in front of the three-storey country house, when the sun had come out from behind a cloud and glistened in every one of the dozens of small panes of leaded glass, had been like coming home. And it still did that to her, even if the place was now laced with loneliness, without her best friend to greet her at the door. And a rising resentment that Kane Healey was there when Mattie wasn't.
    She wouldn't let him take it from her. She'd find a way to make it work without the estate.
    With a sigh of resignation, she set the handbrake and undipped her seat belt, but when she walked into the entrance hall there wasn't a sound except the echo of her footsteps on the smooth slate floor. Nothing. Not even a whisper.
    And yet she could still sense Kane's presence.
    She moved down the hallway and peeked through doors. Into the lounge, the dining room, the sitting room, the games room and lastly the gigantic kitchen—where she smoothed the palm of her hand over the well worn surface of the gigantic wooden table as she walked to the other end of the room.
    Where in hell was he? She shouldn't have to go looking for him!
    She raised a hand and kneaded the muscles on the back of her neck where her skin prickled with an awareness of his presence behind her before his deep voice sounded, close enough to make her jump a little, and softer than she remembered it being in a very long time.
    'Still tired from the long drive yesterday?'
    She lowered her hand.