Stranger From The Past. PENNY JORDAN

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      His manner towards her held a mixture of contempt, disdain, and a quality which was almost a controlled anger, and none of that added up to the kind of response to her which might have led to his making a sexually provocative remark.

      She looked past him at the closed front door, reflecting grimly that ten years ago she would have given her very soul for this degree of intimacy with him, whereas now…whereas now all she wanted him to do was to go and leave her alone. His presence here in her hallway was too overpowering…too…too emotionally dangerous, so much so that she could almost feel the air between them crackling with hostility and anger.

      And yet why on earth should he be hostile towards her? Surely not because Thomas had left her the Dresden?

      Gareth had never been avaricious. Thomas had been a wealthy man, but she knew that Gareth had always insisted on making his own way through life. When he was at university he had taken holiday jobs, refusing to allow Thomas to increase his allowance, determined to stand on his own two feet.

      So why should Gareth be hostile towards her? From the moment she had overheard that conversation, had realised that he knew of her feelings for him and deplored them, she had avoided him, refusing to return to the Cedars until she’d known he wouldn’t be there. A year’s sabbatical after he had finished university and then the fact that he had opted to work in America meant that in the two years before he had left university and taken up his post in Boston she had barely seen him at all, so surely he could hardly still be angry with her because at fifteen she had dared to fall in love with him? Nor, logically, could his anger come from a misplaced belief that just because he was spending a few days back in town she was going to start mooning over him the way she had done as a teenager. She had surely already proved to him that she knew quite well that her feelings were not reciprocated, and that the last thing she wanted was to open herself up to any further humiliation and pain.