For a moment, staring at the invitation with its elegant black script, Sylvie felt as if she were suffocating. Her throat was constricted, her breathing labored, as she struggled against the painful memories. It was so unfair! This was the one thing that could force her to return to Penhallows, and Christine knew it. She was using the ultimate weapon.

Sylvie threw the invitation into a tarnished copper bowl on the table, where it lay amongst assorted clutter. The entire room was slowly drowning under layers of personal paraphernalia, all of it cherished and much too valuable to be discarded. Besides, neither Sylvie nor her flatmate, Helen, were known for being tidy. It was a part of the carefree life they had made for themselves in Paris.

"Hi," Helen said, emerging from the bathroom wearing her towel sarong-style over her lithe body. She was an attractive fair-haired girl dedicated to keeping fit, and it showed. "Anything interesting in the post?"

"A royal command," Sylvie sighed heavily. "Uncle Nick is getting married. I've been summoned to attend."

Helen looked thoughtful. She could see the shadows in Sylvie's eyes. Wide clear eyes with soft gray irises. It was her eyes that made Sylvie Penrith remarkable. She was, her friend thought, beautiful in her own way. Not that she did anything to enhance her looks, quite the opposite! Sylvie's long dark locks were at that moment dragged back off her face secured in a rubber band and her skin scrubbed clean of make up, but nothing could deny the perfect bone structure--or those eyes.

"Will you go?" Helen asked. She understood Sylvie's uncertainty, knew what it had cost her friend to rebuild her life--what it was still costing her.

"It's Uncle Nick," Sylvie said, her smile tinged with bitterness. "Christine must have persuaded him to have the wedding at Penhallows. She knew that nothing else would make me go back."

"Write and tell your grandmother you can't get time off," Helen suggested. "You could ring Nick, apologize, and fly over to London to meet him. Take him and his fiancée out for a meal."

"If it was anyone else, I would," Sylvie said. "But Uncle Nick is special. If he is getting married at last, Louise must mean a lot to him. He would be very hurt if I wasn't at the wedding. She knew that, of course."

Helen nodded. Christine Penrith was a force to be reckoned with, and she had tried every other means of getting Sylvie to visit her without success. It had been almost a year before Sylvie had even told her grandmother where she was living. She had done so then only because Uncle Nick had insisted.

"He's right, I know that," Sylvie had told Helen after a week of painful heart searching. She had been thinking constantly what to do for the best since the invitation arrived. "I suppose Christine didn't intend to hurt me. She just did what she thought was best for everyone."

"She still ought not to have interfered," Helen replied, her blue eyes narrowed. "You knew the affair wasn't going anywhere. Paul was never going to leave his wife. You would have made the break yourself when you were ready."

"Would I?" Sylvie's mouth dragged with the effort to control her emotions. "I'm not sure I would have had the courage. If Christine hadn't threatened to tell Mary Hutton..."

Once again, she remembered the terrible scene with her grandmother, Sylvie closed her eyes against the rush of grief. It was impossible to shut out the memories: Christine's anger, her own stubborn refusal to accept the truth. Then her desperate flight. It had been raining hard when she left Penhallows that night, the swipe of the wipers across the screen hardly able to cope with the force of the water. Sylvie wasn't entirely sure how she had managed to keep the car on the road.

She had driven the short distance to the next village where her uncle had his medical practice, ringing his front door bell furiously in her blinding pain. She had been drenched through when he opened it at last. Cold and desperate, she had demanded the truth from him, only to collapse into his arms as he confirmed her grandmother's story.

"It's true," Nick told her. "I can't tell you the details, because they are confidential as far as I am concerned, but Mary Hutton is ill. The diagnosis was confirmed a couple of weeks ago. Christine is right; Mary's husband should give her all his support. She is going to need it." Nick looked at Sylvie from eyes much like her own, except that they were framed by gold-rimmed glasses. "Paul is older than you, princess. He isn't a bad man, despite what he's done to you. Mary didn't want to tell him yet, but when he knows..."

Sylvie hadn't needed him to elaborate. She knew that Paul would never leave his wife once he learned of her illness. He had felt terribly guilty at snatching a few kisses from Sylvie, and it was his guilt that had prevented him from taking all she offered. If she were honest, Sylvie knew it was she who had pushed him into declaring his passion for her. And perhaps that was all it was on his side. Verging on nineteen, Sylvie was thirteen years younger than him, a fresh, lovely woman on the threshold of her sexuality--a woman in the making, and a very sensual one at that. Paul had been married for twelve years to a wife who seemed to have lost her appetite for lovemaking and was always tired. When he understood the cause of that tiredness, Paul's conscience would force him to end his tentative relationship with Sylvie.

It would have been too painful for them both. Sylvie had known she could not force Paul to make the decision. She had to leave, go away, and put as much distance between them as she could. In the end, she had taken up Helen's offer to share the tiny flat in Paris. She had not been back to her family's home since that night.

Sylvie had written to Paul, telling him their affair was over. She'd lied about her reasons for leaving, letting him believe she had been offered a wonderful new job in London. It had actually taken her nearly a month to find work, because her knowledge of the French language simply wasn't good enough to secure her a job as a secretary in Paris. She had almost decided to return to England and find work in London when Helen told her about Cornel Wilde.

"He's an American," Helen said. "He's writing a book about Paris. It's a history, I think--art and architecture--and he wants an English-speaking secretary. He asked my boss about me taking a sabbatical to work for him, but it's not my sort of work. Besides, I'm happy where I am, using my flair for translation. I rang Mr. Wilde and told him about you. He says you can go along this afternoon."

Sylvie had gone, and liked what she found. Cornel--as he asked her to call him--was in his fifties, graying hair, and a tall, spare man with eyes that twinkled at the world. He'd asked her to take dictation, and type a couple of pages on to his word processor.

"That's fine," he'd said as she kept up with his rather short, sharp sentences. "You're just what I want, Sylvie. I've tried employing English-speaking nationals, but I have to keep explaining myself all the time."

"That must be frustrating for you," Sylvie had said with a smile. "Well, I can start as soon as you like."

She had started that very day, and she had been working happily for Cornel ever since, but that was some months ago. Since then she had fought to put the pain of the past behind her, but the invitation to her uncle's wedding had brought it back into sharp focus.

However, that morning, after she left the flat and began to walk towards his apartment, which overlooked the Seine and was in a very beautiful area of the city, Sylvie knew that her job was coming to an end very soon. Cornel's manuscript was finished. He was only staying on so that she could help him file his notes. In another two weeks, he would be returning to New York, his research finished.

"It was my plan to finish the book back home," he had told her soon after they began working together. "But we get on so well, Sylvie, that I've decided to complete the manuscript here."

"I shall be sorry when you go," Sylvie replied. "I've enjoyed working with you."

"As I have with you," Cornel replied, his bright blue eyes narrowed and thoughtful. "I suppose there's no point in my asking you to come and work for me in the States?"

"I don't know..." Sylvie had been taken by surprise. She was settled into Helen's flat, but nothing lasted forever and she knew her friend had a serious relationship with a Member of the European Parliament, who had been trying to persuade Helen to marry him for a while now. "I would like a little time. May I think it over?"

"Of course." He smiled at her. "I'm too old to offer you anything but a job, Sylvie--but I've become fond of you, my dear. I should be happy if you decided you would like to come out to my home, if only for a few months."

As Sylvie let herself into Cornel's flat that morning, she could hear raised voices coming from the sitting room. It was the first time she had known her employer to have a visitor this early in the morning, and without mentioning it to her. That was unusual, because Cornel discussed everything with her so that they could plan their working time ahead.

She hesitated before knocking at the door, which was slightly open. The next moment, it was jerked wide and she found herself staring into a pair of angry blue eyes.

"Who the hell are you?" the man demanded. "We're having a private conversation here. How did you get in?"

Sylvie breathed deeply to steady herself. What on earth had she done to deserve such a greeting? He had caught her off balance and she felt oddly breathless. It wasn't just his angry attack that had her gasping; it was the man himself. He was dominantly male, the aggressive type--the type she instinctively avoided if she could.

Before she could answer his furious question, her employer intervened.

"Come in, Sylvie," Cornel said. He was sitting at his desk, several documents spread out in front of him, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. "Please ignore Rafe's rudeness. Despite appearances, he can be civilized when he chooses--but he appears to have forgotten his manners."

Seeing the angry glitter in those blue eyes, Sylvie sensed she was interrupting something important.

"I can go away and come back when you've finished," she offered tentatively. "I didn't realize you had company, Cornel."

"We have finished our business," he replied. "Rafe just doesn't want to admit it." He smiled at her affectionately, a hint of amusement in his eyes. "This very angry young man is my nephew, Sylvie. Rafe Wilde--Rafe, this is my personal assistant, Sylvie Penrith."

The angry young man glared at her, then his eyes narrowed in suspicion before widening. She thought he looked shocked, or perhaps stunned would be a better word, and she wondered what it was about her that could have knocked him back on his heels.

Now that Sylvie had had time to recover her breath, she was able to see that he was an extremely attractive man, in his late twenties perhaps, with black hair and chiseled features that made him look a little harsh, even arrogant. Or perhaps it was his furious expression that made him seem cold and unapproachable.

"Oh..." she faltered, at a loss to know how to handle the situation. "I didn't know you were expecting your nephew, Cornel. Family is special. You should have said. I needn't have come in today."

"Didn't know it myself," her employer returned with a wry look. "Rafe was in London on business and he decided to kill two birds with one stone--or try to. I was just going to make some coffee--but maybe you would do that for us, Sylvie?"

Sylvie nodded, skirting past the visitor and disappearing into the kitchen. She could hear them talking as she filled the filter machine and switched it on. Instead of returning immediately, she fiddled around with the large French china coffee bowls, the beautiful cups without handles they liked to use, trying not to listen to the heated conversation in the next room.

"There's no use you going over old ground," Cornel was saying. "I have no intention of selling my shares--to you or anyone else. And since I own thirty-three percent of the core business, I think that just about kills your deal, Rafe."

"But, don't you realize what you would be getting?" Rafe muttered, sounding frustrated. "The Wilde Corporation just isn't big enough to stand on its own, Cornel, not in the modern world. If you don't sell, there will be no merger and we'll get left behind..."

"Go ahead and sell your shares if you're determined," Cornel replied. "I can fight my own corner."

"You know I couldn't do that," his nephew replied. "If you're adamant you won't sell, I shall just have to carry on ... but don't blame me if your income drops like a stone once the world knows this take over isn't going to happen."

"We're a good company, and you're an efficient managing director," his uncle replied. "I have every faith in your ability to get the business through any bad publicity."

"But you could realize millions..." Rafe burst out just as Sylvie carried in the tray of coffee and a plate of large, crumbly cookies she had baked herself. "Don't you care that you're turning down a fortune? This chance may never come again."

"It's only money," Cornel grinned at him. "Sit down, Rafe. Relax and drink your coffee. If we merge with Brigson, they will sell off our assets and close down half the factories; that means hundreds of our people will be out of work. Some of our factories are in small towns, where we are the main employers. Bound to cause hardship. I don't want that on my conscience."

"Well, you may have to close factories yourself one of these days," Rafe said. He scooped the papers from the desk, tossing them into his briefcase. "Don't say I didn't give you the chance to get out while you could."

"No, I won't ever say that," Cornel promised, his manner as easy and relaxed as Rafe's was tense. "If it comes to it, we'll do what we have to do--but we'll do it our way, with as little pain for the people involved as possible."

"Have it your own way." Rafe turned and headed for the door. There, he paused and looked back, inclining his head to Sylvie. His eyes were narrowed, seeming to search her face--for what? Just what was he thinking? She wondered, but came up with nothing. "It was nice meeting you, Miss Penrith. I'm sorry the circumstances weren't more pleasant. Goodbye, Cornel."

Sylvie nodded but said nothing. She wasn't sure why, but she found Rafe Wilde disturbing.

Since leaving Penhallows nearly sixteen months earlier, she'd avoided becoming involved in an intimate relationship. She was still feeling bruised from the painful end to her one real love affair with Paul Hutton. She'd formed many friendships with men, mostly friends of Helen's, but none of them had made a lasting impression on her, and she certainly wasn't in the habit of hopping into bed with anyone who asked her. Quite a few had of course, but she had turned them down with a smile that made most of them her friends.

"Surely you can stay for coffee?" Cornel asked his nephew, giving him a persuasive smile. "I would have liked to talk to you longer ... about other things."

"I have a plane to catch," Rafe replied, his expression hard, un-giving. "Unlike you, I rely on the business for my living, and I'm going to have to work like crazy to prevent the shares from taking a nose dive."

The door closed with a snap behind him. For a moment there was silence, as if his going had left behind a kind of vacuum. Rafe Wilde was the kind of man who filled a room with his presence, Sylvie thought, a little sigh escaping her. He was certainly one very angry man.