The Longest Pleasure Read online

  Mills & Boon is proud to present a fabulous

  collection of fantastic novels by

  bestselling, much loved author

  ANNE MATHER

  Anne has a stellar record of achievement within the

  publishing industry, having written over one hundred

  and sixty books, with worldwide sales of more than

  forty-eight MILLION copies in multiple languages.

  This amazing collection of classic stories offers a chance

  for readers to recapture the pleasure Anne’s powerful,

  passionate writing has given.

  We are sure you will love them all!

  I’ve always wanted to write—which is not to say I’ve always wanted to be a professional writer. On the contrary, for years I only wrote for my own pleasure and it wasn’t until my husband suggested sending one of my stories to a publisher that we put several publishers’ names into a hat and pulled one out. The rest, as they say, is history. And now, one hundred and sixty-two books later, I’m literally—excuse the pun—staggered by what’s happened.

  I had written all through my infant and junior years and on into my teens, the stories changing from children’s adventures to torrid gypsy passions. My mother used to gather these manuscripts up from time to time, when my bedroom became too untidy, and dispose of them! In those days, I used not to finish any of the stories and Caroline, my first published novel, was the first I’d ever completed. I was newly married then and my daughter was just a baby, and it was quite a job juggling my household chores and scribbling away in exercise books every chance I got. Not very professional, as you can imagine, but that’s the way it was.

  These days, I have a bit more time to devote to my work, but that first love of writing has never changed. I can’t imagine not having a current book on the typewriter—yes, it’s my husband who transcribes everything on to the computer. He’s my partner in both life and work and I depend on his good sense more than I care to admit.

  We have two grown-up children, a son and a daughter, and two almost grown-up grandchildren, Abi and Ben. My e-mail address is [email protected] and I’d be happy to hear from any of my wonderful readers.

  THE LONGEST PLEASURE

  Anne Mather

  www.millsandboon.com.au

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  IT had been the best summer Helen could ever remember. Walking across the stackyard, feeling the sun beating down on her bare shoulders, she thought how perfect it had been. Long, lazy days of sunshine, weather more reminiscent of the South of France than the West of England. Since she had come home from school six weeks ago, she had wakened every morning to blue skies and dewy air, and a shimmer of mist rising from the fields around Castle Howarth.

  Castle Howarth. Helen smiled. Her grandmother’s country home, and her home too since her parents had both been drowned on a sailing trip when she was little more than a baby. It wasn’t really a castle; just a rather rambling mansion much too large for one old lady and the few servants she still retained.

  When she was younger, Helen had thought it was the most marvellous place imaginable, a veritable rabbit-warren of rooms and passages, ideal for games of hide-and-seek, and sardines, and for letting off steam on rainy winter afternoons. She could even remember riding her bicycle along those winding corridors, losing herself in the maze of halls and galleries that surrounded the music room, and the drawing rooms, and the fantastic mirror-lined ballroom where Nan used to dance when she had first been presented.

  Of course, she had grown out of such things now, Helen reflected idly, picking up a straw and putting it between her teeth. These days, she was much too old for childish games, even though the temptation to slide down the banisters from time to time still existed. But, at fifteen, she had become aware of herself as a young woman, and other interests had claimed her attention.

  Rafe Fleming, for instance, she acknowledged dreamily, the corners of her generous mouth tilting in an unknowingly sensual smile. She would never have believed she would ever like him, let alone seek his company at every opportunity. Which just went to prove she had grown up at last, she decided. She could meet him now on equal terms. She was no longer the poor-little-rich-girl he loved to torment.

  She supposed she must have been about four years old when she first met Rafe Fleming. Her parents had been dead for almost a year, and gradually she had begun to adapt to her new life at Castle Howarth. Things had not been so different, except that now she lived in the country, instead of in London. Miss Paget still looked after her, and as her parents had always lived full social lives, she didn’t miss them as much as she might have done. She had probably been a rather precocious child, she reflected ruefully; spoilt, certainly, and inclined to expect her own way in all things, due no doubt to the fact that she had had no brothers or sisters.

  Her first encounter with Rafe took place in the gazebo. After spending a rather lonely winter couped up in the house, she had been granted permission by her grandmother to play in the gardens. Wrapped up warmly against the cool April air, she had been walking her dolls in the rose garden when she had espied the domed, ornamental roof of the summer-house. Set beyond a hedge of cypresses, it had looked exactly like an enchanted castle to the infant Helen, and it had been something of an anti-climax to find it was already occupied. A boy of perhaps ten or eleven was sprawled on the floor of the gazebo, reading, and Helen had regarded him without liking and with a definite air of superiority.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The boy started, evidently unused to being disturbed, but with the advantage of hindsight, Helen realised he had not immediately jumped to the offensive. ‘Rafe Fleming,’ he answered. ‘Who’re you?’

  ‘I’m Helen Michaels. Lady Elizabeth Sinclair’s granddaughter!’ Helen remembered the words now with a grimace of distaste. ‘This is my house, and my garden. And I want you to go.’

  ‘Do you?’ Rafe had made no attempt to obey her childish instructions, rolling on to his back and supporting himself on his elbows, regarding her with what she now knew had been a mixture of humour and insolence. ‘Well, well! And are you going to make me?’

  He had been good-looking even in those days, Helen reflected. Tall for his age, with lean features and ash-fair hair, and thin wrists jutting from the sleeves of his jerkin. But she had not realised it then. At that moment, she had wanted nothing so much as for her grandmother to appear and order him out of the summer-house. Little as she was, she knew she had no chance of displacing him herself, and the longer he lay regarding her with narrowed mocking eyes, the more frustrated she became.

  ‘You’re not s’posed to be here,’ she insisted, standing her ground, but Rafe was not impressed.

  ‘Get lost,’ he retorted, turning back to the magazine he had been reading, and it was all Helen could do not to stamp her foot in fury.

  Of course, she had been obliged to leave him then, with tears welling up in her eyes and threatening to disgrace her. But she had gone s
traight to her grandmother and reported the matter to her, secure in the knowledge that Nan would sort it out.

  However, her grandmother had proved to have a blind spot where Rafe Fleming was concerned. ‘I expect you startled him,’ she assured her indignant granddaughter, after drying Helen’s tears and consoling her with a stick of aniseed. ‘After all, Rafe has lived at Castle Howarth most of his life, and I suppose he feels he has a privileged position. His father works for me, you see, darling, and until you came, there were no other children on the estate.’

  Helen didn’t see how that gave him the right to order her about, but her grandmother would not be pressed, and in the weeks and months that followed, her resentment grew. He always seemed to be around when she didn’t want him, teasing her and mocking her, and making fun of her, particularly when she attempted to put him in his place. That first encounter had set the seal on their relationship, and nothing she could say or do could change the situation. Which was a pity because she liked Mr Fleming, her grandmother’s estate manager, and Rafe’s adopted father.

  She had learned Rafe was adopted quite by accident one afternoon, when she came upon her grandmother talking to him by the lily pond. Lady Elizabeth was asking how he was getting on at school, and Rafe was admitting, not without some aggression, that he wasn’t interested in education.

  ‘Why not?’ Lady Elizabeth wanted to know, and Helen, crouched behind the rhododendrons, listened with some amazement to his reply.

  ‘Why should I be?’ he had countered indifferently, plucking the head off one of the blooms hanging above his head, and shredding its delicate petals. ‘You don’t need any brains to plough a field or muck out the cowshed! What do I want with learning? I can pick up all I need to know right here.’

  Helen had been shocked that he should dare to speak to her grandmother so insolently. She had waited in anticipation for Lady Elizabeth to tell him to apologise, maybe even to box his ears—an expression Paget was prone to use, when referring to a more corporal form of punishment—but her grandmother did neither. Instead, she had laid a hand on Rafe’s shoulder, and said quietly:

  ‘You’re going to Kingsmead, and there’s an end of it. The Flemings may have adopted you, but you are not going to waste the brain God has given you. I’ve spoken to Tom. Term starts in September. Be ready.’

  After that, Helen had some peace, in term time at least. Kingsmead, she learned, was the local boys’ public school, and although Rafe did not board, he was too busy with homework and school activities to spend much time baiting her. For her part, she attended a kindergarten in the nearby town of Yelversley, and then, when she was old enough, she was sent to a girls’ school in Kent.’

  ‘Why do I have to board?’ she had objected, when she first learned of her grandmother’s plans. ‘Rafe Fleming doesn’t. Why can’t I go to Ladymead?’

  ‘Because you are my granddaughter, and your mother went to St Agnes,’ replied Lady Elizabeth firmly. ‘Now, run along and take Hector for a walk, there’s a good girl. He’s getting fat and lazy, and I don’t have the energy to take him out as often as I should.’

  Hector was her grandmother’s pekinese, a fluffy scrap of orange-coloured fur, who could still terrorise the postman when he chose. Curiously enough, the dog had never gone for Rafe’s ankles, even though he had called Hector a lot of unsavoury names. He preferred real dogs, he once told her, when she had run across him exercising his father’s golden retriever at the same time she was taking Hector for a walk. Not poor imitations, he had added, laughing at her flushed resentful face, and Helen had wished she had a Dobermann, with all the instincts of a killer.

  Then, three years ago, Rafe had gone to university in Warwick. To begin with, Helen had not noticed much difference. He was still home for the holidays when she was—at Christmas and Easter, at least—and although at Christmas they didn’t have much contact, she had been aware of him watching her with a distinctly jaundiced eye, when she helped her grandmother distribute the gifts at the party Lady Elizabeth gave for the estate workers. Helen knew he would not have been there at all had her grandmother not asked him to help with the tree. But she had, and afterwards he had been obliged to stay, unable to make his escape without offending the old lady.

  The Easter following, he was home again, but this time he was not alone. He had brought another young man with him; one of his friends from college, her grandmother informed her, after granting the boys permission to use the tennis court. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Helen?’ she ventured, as an afterthought. ‘I’m sure they’d give you a game, too, if you asked them.’

  Helen would have cut off her right arm before asking Rafe Fleming for anything, but her grandmother was not to know that. So far as the old lady was concerned, their initial antagonism towards one another had long since been forgotten, and Helen knew she would have been most disturbed if she had suspected the hatred her granddaughter still felt towards the young man she obviously favoured. Though why her grandmother should favour Rafe, when he treated her so offhandedly, Helen couldn’t imagine. She could only assume it was her friendship with Tom Fleming that gave his adopted son such licence.

  When she arrived home for the summer holidays, however, Helen discovered Rafe was not there. He had taken a job in France for three months, her grandmother told her, a faint trace of disapproval in her voice, and Helen guessed the old lady was disappointed because he had not chosen to work for her.

  For her part, Helen had mixed emotions. She was delighted Rafe was not to be around, of course, but she bitterly regretted the impulse she had had to invite one of her schoolfriends to spend the vacation with her. Tracy Grant’s mother was dead, and her father lived and worked in Central America. Because there was trouble there at the moment, Mr Grant had suggested Tracy should spend the holiday at school, and Helen had seized on Tracy’s dilemma as the solution to her problems.

  However, once she discovered Rafe was not to be around, Helen’s doubts took root. She discovered there was a world of difference between a friendship formed in school—compounded by school activities and school discipline—and one that relied on a genuine liking for one another and a shared enjoyment of mutual interests.

  Helen and Tracy, it transpired, had little in common. Having been brought up in the country, Helen enjoyed country pursuits. She rode well; she enjoyed taking long walks with the dogs; she had a natural love of nature. Tracy didn’t. Her interest in animals only stretched to the mink coat she intended to own one day, and horses frankly terrified her.

  Helen liked sports, too. She played hockey and tennis at school; she belonged to the local squash club; and she had even learned how to play golf, after accompanying her grandmother to the club for the past three years. Which was just as well, she had reflected on occasion. Having a weakness for stodgy foods, she found getting plenty of exercise helped to alleviate its effects, and she often put on leg-warmers and a leotard and worked-out until her body was soaked with sweat.

  Tracy, meanwhile, was unnaturally thin, and any kind of physical activity bored her. She liked nothing so much as to lie on the couch watching television all day, eating sweets, or surreptitiously puffing on the forbidden cigarettes she bought at the shop in town. She would have bought them in the village, except that Helen had objected. She knew if her grandmother discovered Tracy smoked there would be the devil to pay, and she seemed to spend her time that summer flapping her arms in rooms where Tracy had been, trying to get rid of the smoke.

  The worst moment had come when Rafe had arrived home the weekend before all of them were due to return to their studies. He had obviously turned up to spend a few days with his parents before going back to college, but apparently he felt obliged to come up to the house to see Lady Elizabeth.

  It was a wet day at the end of September, and for once Helen was confined to the house, too. Tracy had been watching television, as usual, but she had joined Helen on the window-seat only moments before Rafe came riding up the drive on his motorbike. Helen hadn’t e
ven known he had a motorbike, and she watched with almost as much interest as Tracy as he flicked down the metal rest and parked the bike on the gravelled forecourt before approaching the house.

  He was wearing leathers, and the slick black material suited his dark complexion. As he crossed the forecourt, he tipped his chin and removed the concealing helmet, and Tracy’s lips parted as his silky thatch of silvery pale hair was revealed.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she exclaimed, pressing her face against the windows, and as she did so, Rafe looked up and saw them. Helen wanted to die at the look of derision that marred his lean features as he recognised her. Then, he lifted his hand in a mocking salute before disappearing through the gate that led into the yard at the back of the building.

  She didn’t see him again, even though Tracy grew very impatient at her obstinacy. ‘Just because you’ve got some kind of grudge against him doesn’t mean I can’t find him attractive, does it?’ she argued angrily. ‘The first decent boy I’ve seen since I came to this dump, and you won’t even introduce me!’

  ‘Introduce yourself,’ retorted Helen tightly, holding on to her temper with difficulty. ‘And in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s not a boy; he’s a man! He’s nineteen, Tracy. Hardly likely to be interested in a kid of thirteen!’

  The Christmas after, Helen herself didn’t come home. She spent the holiday skiing in Switzerland, and then joined her grandmother at an hotel in London for a long weekend before returning to St Agnes. At Easter, she didn’t see Rafe at all, and the summer after that, Rafe again found employment on the continent.

  By the time this summer had come round, Helen had begun to believe there was to be no further contact between herself and Rafe Fleming. Oh, she had occasionally seen him when she was home, but only from a distance, and it was years since they had had any real conversation. He was twenty-one now, of course, and probably past the age when he could take a delight in making fun of her. In any case, she was older too, and she firmly believed that nothing he said could ever affect her again.