The Only One

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

SHE hadn’t wanted to come to this party, and now that she was here, it was proving every bit as dreadful as she had envisaged, Brooke thought, almost instantly mocking herself for the immaturity of the thought. She was twenty-six for heaven’s sake, not sixteen. A wry grimace firmed the soft contours of her full mouth and across the width of the generously proportioned drawing room a man engaged in conversation with his companion caught the faint movement and watched her, slate grey eyes narrowing assessingly.

She had always known she wouldn’t be able to keep Abbot’s Meade, Brooke acknowledged, absently twirling her wine glass by its stem, her glance drifting over the view afforded by the drawing-room window. The view outside was as familiar to her as her own features; she knew exactly how many tall lime trees went to make up the lined drive that led from the front gates to the front of the house, just as she knew every inch of the grounds in which they stood. Abbot’s Meade had been in her family since the fifteenth century and her uncle had been the last male Meade left.

Ancestor worship was always something she had faintly despised, but there was something sad, almost painfully so, about having to come face to face with the fact that they had reached the end of an era.

Even during her uncle’s lifetime there had been insufficient funds to keep the estate going. Bits had gradually been sold off and eventually even the house itself had had to be mortgaged, and now that her uncle was gone, as her solicitor had said, there was nothing to be gained from hanging on any longer. And she had agreed with him. Even so … She was unaware of the faintly sardonic twist to her mouth as she glanced round the room, or that her contempt had been witnessed. The house had eventually been sold to a large corporation who intended to turn it into their headquarters. This party was being thrown to celebrate their new acquisition. Brooke hadn’t wanted to attend, even though she had been invited, but Sam Brockbank, her solicitor, had persuaded her. ‘Don’t forget, you’re going to be living practically on their doorstep,’ he had reminded her. ‘There’s no point in antagonising them, Brooke.’

That much was true. Although the house, the Dower House in which she had lived as a child with her parents, and the parkland had been sold, she had retained the rights to the small cottage just by the gates which had once been the lodgekeeper’s home. The cottage had its own garden and its own gate on to the main road which made her independent of the main house, but it would be difficult to remember that she no longer had the right to walk through that small garden into the main park, or to saddle up a horse from the stable and ride through it, as she had done in the past. Mentally mocking herself Brooke studied the occupants of the rooms. In the main, business-suited men with matching wives, they all exhibited the same glossy success-orientated sheen; all except one man. Frowning Brooke fought not to let her glance slide away as her own scrutiny was returned, a thousand times more assessingly. Whoever he was this man plainly wasn’t afraid of flouting conventions.

Tall, with carefully schooled black hair that looked as though it preferred to be unruly he had a face that suggested it might have been carved out of granite—or marble, Brooke corrected herself noting with a small shock of surprise, the almost too-perfect symmetry of bones and flesh as she caught a glimpse of his profile. Without the hard muscled strength his dinner suit did little to conceal he might almost have been too good looking she reflected, too engrossed in her own thoughts and conclusions to avoid the sudden trap of steely grey eyes as they meshed with hers and held her an unwilling prisoner.

Years ago Brooke had learned to be skilled in avoiding unwanted confrontations with the opposite sex. At five foot ten with a mane of dark red hair, long long legs and a well curved body she was used to dealing with a variety of unwanted come-ons from over-assertive males, including the accusation that by returning their scrutiny she was implicitly inviting their advances.

By some odd meshing of fate Brooke had inherited not her mother’s pretty, fair, Meade looks, nor her father’s darker French ones, but those of a long-ago Scots ancestor, which had resulted in a fine Celtic bone structure to match her red hair and golden-green eyes.

As a teenager she had been gawky and too thin; she had also been reasonably popular with her own sex, but in her late teens when she had flowered into womanhood she had discovered that her popularity decreased in direct ratio to her blossoming femininity.

‘You’re becoming too sexy,’ one girl had told her bluntly when she had asked why she was no longer included in invitations. ‘You’re just too much competition for the rest of us, Brooke.’