FREE SPIRIT.

Penny Jordan.

Hannah Maitland congratulated herself.

"There's no man in my life...no love to whom I'm committed. Not now, not in the past and not in the future."

A bleak picture for most women - but for career-minded Hannah it was satisfying. She thought she knew exactly what she wanted out of life, and men, even attractive ones like Silas Jeffreys, didn't rate very high on her list.

It was a situation that Silas was determined to remedy as fast as he could!.

CHAPTER ONE.

'OH, YOU'RE off then, are you, darling?' Hannah's mother mourned, as Hannah came rushing into the kitchen, her weekend bag swinging from her shoulder.

It was a secret sorrow of Mrs Maitland's that, having produced four sons in succession before the arrival of a. much-longed for daughter, that daughter should turn out to be a determined career girl. She was proud of Hannah, of course she was, but she couldn't help feeling a little envious when her husband's parishioners mentioned family marriages and grandchildren.

With four sons scattered to the four corners of the earth, pursuing their chosen careers, surely it was only natural for her to wish that Hannah, her only daughter, had chosen to stay at home and settle down? Tom, her husband, laughed at her whenever she voiced this complaint, reminding her gently that Hannah had every right to choose her own way of living her life.

As she watched her crossing the kitchen, Rosemary Maitland studied her covertly. Even now, after twenty-six years, it still amazed her that she and Tom had produced this ravishingly beautiful creature, with her tall, slender body, and delicately oval-shaped face. Her tawny eyes had been inherited from Rosemary's own grandfather but, widely s.p.a.ced and set between thick, dark lashes, Hannah's possessed an allure Rosemary could not remember her grandfather's having. Hair as tawny as her eyes, every conceivable shade of brown streaked with red and blonde, which nowadays was confined to a neat, elegant bob, had once curled half-way down her back until Hannah had announced that it was too untidy and not the image she wanted to project as a financial accountant.

Her daughter's choice of career was something that constantly amazed Rosemary. Where on earth had she got it from, this flair with figures? Certainly not from her, nor from Tom. Rosemary suppressed a small chuckle, remembering the many hours she and her husband had toiled over their household accounts.

A vicar's wife learned young how to manage on slender means, but they had been lucky; a generous bequest from a great-aunt had enabled them to educate all five children privately and to finance them through university.

'I'm sorry I've got to rush, Ma,' Hannah apologised, 'but I promised Linda that I'd call round. She's having problems with the Inland Revenue. She's got an appointment to see them this afternoon and I've promised I'll go with her. You know what she's like about figures. The mere sight of a column of them turns her into a dithering idiot, which is a shame because she's a marvellous businesswoman in every other sense.'

'Yes, I've heard that the shop's doing very well,' her mother agreed.

'I called in a few weeks ago and was dangerously tempted to buy the most beautiful tapestry cushion, Kaffe Fa.s.sett, I believe it was.'

Making a mental note to check with her friend on what exactly it was her mother had seen, Hannah went over to her and gave her a fond hug and a quick kiss. Her mother's birthday was coming up soon and the tapestry cushion would make a surprise present for her.

Hannah had already bought her main present, a beautiful tweed suit from Jaeger, which she knew her mother would love.

'Give Linda my love, won't you?' her mother told her as she followed her out of the kitchen.

The vicarage was old and rambling and without the benefit of central heating, other than a very primitive handful of radiators that ran off the temperamental back boiler in the kitchen. Since this boiler required a fearsome amount of stoking to keep the radiators even moderately warm, it was the expressed opinion of the Maitland family that it was easier to do without the heating than to try to make it work. Her parents' life hadn't been an easy one, Hannah acknowledged, as she walked swiftly over to her car, and yet they were happy, far happier than the majority of her contemporaries'

parents.

Her car had been a twenty-sixth birthday present to herself, a steel-grey Volvo, practical and st.u.r.dy.

'I'm sorry your father isn't here to see you off,' her mother apologised, as Hannah got into the driver's seat.

Hannah grinned, and for a moment it was possible for Rosemary Maitland to believe she was looking at Hannah as she had been as a teenager, all coltish legs and long, untidy hair. Now all that seemed to be left of that girl was that teasing grin, and even that was seldom in evidence these days. Hannah looked exactly what she was, a very successful businesswoman, dressed and groomed in a way that mirrored her lifestyle and her ambition, and looking at her, observing the elegant charcoal-grey pinstripe suit and the cream silk blouse designed like a shirt, without any feminine frills or flounces to it, Rosemary couldn't help feeling a little sad. She was proud of Hannah, of course she was, but she just wished that she would relax a little more; for instance, what had happened to that infamous temper Hannah had had as a child, a temper which her brothers had so often unkindly sparked off by tormenting her?

These days Hannah was everything that was reasoned and controlled. Too controlled, perhaps. Hannah started the engine and, with a final wave to her mother, set off down the overgrown drive.

The Dorset village which was home to her parents, and which had been home to her until she'd left for university, was small and picturesque, but that didn't mean that life for its inhabitants was without its problems. Parents mourned as their sons and daughters, unable to get jobs, moved away from home. Work on the land, which had once been labour-intensive, was now mechanised to such an extent that farm workers' cottages fell into disrepair as they became vacant, and farmers neither had the inclination nor the need to replace their workforce.

Now many of those cottages were being snapped up by people from London, up and coming career men and women, much like herself, with a keen eye for a 'bargain, and the knowledge that money invested in property was a wise investment. The village had changed even in her short lifetime.

Her father was close to retirement, and even though neither her father nor her mother had said anything Hannah knew they were both worrying about how they would manage and where they would live once her father had to give up the vicarage.

She and her brothers had discussed this problem the last time they were all together the previous Christmas. None of her brothers was married, preferring like her to be footloose and fancy free, and between the five of them they had agreed that they would all start saving towards being able to buy their parents a comfortable home.

After all, it was only right that they should do so Mark had commented earnestly. Had their father invested his inheritance in bricks and mortar, instead of in their education, he would not be worrying about his retirement now.

Who else but a vicar would call his sons Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Hannah wondered as she turned into the traffic. The boys took it well, even though there had been a period in their teens when all of them had opted to use their second and less conspicuous names. Once, their mother had confessed that it had been she who had called them after the Apostles, and Luke had teased her that the only reason she had chosen such names for them was because, in her disappointment at not producing the daughter she longed for so much, she had simply thought of the most convenient names.

Hannah had grown up surrounded by love and laughter. Her father was a gentle, intelligent man, who cared deeply about the human race and who suffered with it. Her mother was everything a vicar's wife should be: supportive, understanding, generous both with her time and her patience, cheerfully tolerant of the demands others made on her husband's time and of the financial hardship their life together had involved.

Even now, her mother still made her own jams and chutneys, still used every sc.r.a.p of produce the huge, rambling vicarage garden gave, not so much these days because they needed it-after all, there were now only two mouths to feed, three if one counted Simon, a cat who had adopted them-but simply because for so many years she had not been able to afford to waste anything that now the habit had become ingrained with her. Hannah thought wryly of the half-opened cartons of this and that, discarded from her own fridge without a second thought. She rarely cooked for herself, preferring to eat out.

Most lunchtimes she ate with clients of the company for whom she worked. Most evenings she ate either snacks while working at home or went out with friends. How different her life-style was now from her mother's!

This visit home, as always, her mother had probed gently into her personal life. What she wanted to know was if Hannah had fallen in love. Hannah had gently evaded her questions, not because she resented them but simply because she didn't know how to explain to her mother that falling in love for her was something that just wasn't going to happen. She had seen what the pressures of modern living did to too many of her friends' relationships to risk such intimacy herself, and vicars' daughters weren't like the rest of the female population, they either revolted and went completely wild or, like Hannah herself, they lived by a set of rules and regulations, so totally out of step with modern mores as to be archaic.

Not that either parent had ever put any pressure on Hannah to conform to special standards different from those of her peers, but she and the boys, most especially Hannah herself, had grown up desperately aware of how very vulnerable their father was to public opinion. While it might be all very well for the daughter of the local entrepreneur to be out discoing at fourteen years old, while the local landlord's daughter might have her name splashed all over the gossip press with impunity, and while other stalwarts of the Women's Guild might discreetly let slip that their daughters were involved in intimate relationships which did not include a wedding ring, Hannah was in no doubt at all that the local community as a whole would not only strongly disapprove of any such behaviour on her part, but would also carry that disapproval to the ears of her father, and, quite simply, Hannah had never felt able to put that burden on him.

Now, of course, she was living away from home and in London, where she had her own airy apartment in the refurbished docklands area, and she had grown into the habit of evading intimacy, preferring solitude to 'coupledom', so that she automatically fended off those men who did approach her s.e.xually. Fair-mindedly, she had to admit that her single state wasn't entirely because of her parents.

There had also been her career. She had worked single-mindedly to achieve the high position she now held: consultant to one of the managers of a very small but well-established firm of financial experts. The genteel poverty of her childhood wasn't something she had enjoyed, she felt ashamed to admit now.

There had been times when she had envied other children their possessions, their toys, their spending money, even though with wisdom and security she could appreciate that the gifts she had received from her parents had been of far more value than mere material possessions. Even so, she had been left with a desire, almost a craving, for financial security, not the kind of security that came from marriage to a wealthy man, but the kind of security she could earn for herself.

The village wasn't busy. It was half-day closing. Hannah's mother had been surprised when she had telephoned early in the week to say that she was taking a couple of days off, and to ask if it was convenient for her to come home. She hadn't said anything then about Linda's desperate telephone call to her the previous day, begging her to advise her.

Linda Askew was the daughter of a local businessman. She and Hannah had been at school together, and their friendship had been established then. The only child of wealthy parents, Linda had chosen not to go on to university as Hannah had, but her parents'

death in a car crash two years ago had revealed the shocking fact that the business was virtually bankrupt. In order to pay off her father's outstanding debts, Linda had sold virtually everything.

Forced to confront the necessity of earning her own living, she had bought a small property in the village and decided to use her interest and expertise in various forms of needlework to establish a small shop. The business had done well. Linda was a sympathetic and caring person. She had a flair for designing, and her tapestries had become much sought after.

An approach from a glossy magazine had resulted in them marketing one of her tapestries as a special offer to their readers.

The offer had been wildly successful, and it was because of the funds she had received via this offer that Linda found that she had now run into problems with the Inland Revenue. They had confronted her with a demand for tax which, she had told Hannah tearfully, she simply could not pay.

Having previously dealt with her own accounting system, she had not known whom to turn to, and so Hannah had offered to come down to the village and go with her on her appointment to see the tax inspector. Because it was half-day closing, it was relatively easy for her to park in the main street of the village.

Checking that the burglar alarm was in place and firmly locking her door, Hannah walked briskly towards Linda's shop, not going to the front door but going the full length of the row of stone-built houses and then round the back, past the long, narrow gardens, where the richness of the autumn-hued flowers was just beginning to take over from the brilliant blaze of summer.

Linda was waiting for her by her back door. She ushered Hannah inside quickly and said breathlessly, 'I've got the coffee on. I didn't know whether you'd want a cup or ...'

'I'd love one,' Hannah told her. 'I can drink it while I go through your papers. What time exactly is the appointment?'

Linda told her and Hannah checked her watch. That left her a good hour to run through the figures, which should be ample time. She found the error quickly enough, a simple mistake in adding up, which had resulted in Linda paying less than the amount of tax that she ought to have paid the previous year.

'Oh, no,' Linda said, sitting down, her face going pale. 'Oh, Hannah, what on earth am I going to do?'

'It's not as bad as it looks,' Hannah a.s.sured her. 'I've just checked back into your previous year's figures, and you seem to have made a trading loss, but from what I can see, you actually paid tax.'

'Well, yes,' Linda agreed, frowning slightly as she scanned the figures Hannah was indicating. 'You see, I got the demand and I . . .

well, I just paid it.'

Hannah hid a tiny grimace. 'Well, at the end of the day, I suspect you will probably find that you only owe the Inland Revenue a very small sum of money indeed,' she said soothingly. 'What we need to do now is to put all these figures in front of the inspector.'

'Oh, Hannah, you must think me an absolute idiot,' Linda said ruefully, as they finished their coffee and Hannah collected all the papers, folding them neatly and inserting them into a spare file she was carrying in her black leather briefcase. 'I don't know why it is, but the sight of a column of figures always throws me into an absolute panic. I always used to envy you. You were always top of the cla.s.s in maths.'

'And you were always top in domestic science,' Hannah reminded her, 'whereas I was still sewing the same grubby sc.r.a.p of fabric in the fifth form as I was in the third.'

Her comment lightened Linda's tension, as she had intended it to do, and the other girl laughed.

'Yes, I suppose we all have our weaknesses and our strong points,'

she agreed.

The tax office was in the local bounty town, and when Hannah suggested that they both went in her car Linda agreed willingly.

'I'm still driving Dad's old Jag,' she told her. 'It's on its last legs now, really, but I can't afford to replace it, even though it guzzles petrol at an appalling rate. Mack at the garage somehow or other manages to keep it going for me, I don't know how.'

Without taking her eyes off the road, Hannah said sotto voce, 'A labour of love, perhaps.'

Linda flushed, and Hannah reflected on her mother's comments that the village grapevine was reporting that Linda and Ian Macdonald were 'getting involved'.

'He's been marvellous since Dad died,' Linda said quietly. 'I don't really know what I'd have done without him. It was he who suggested that I bought the shop, and he gave me trade references when I first set up in business. He even offered to guarantee my loan with the bank, but I couldn't let him do that. He's away at the moment,' she gave a slight sigh.

'a family funeral in Edinburgh.'

Hence the frantic call to her, Hannah recognised. The county town wasn't busy. Hannah knew where the local Inland Revenue offices were and parked her car deftly in the nearest car park. Several people eyed her businesslike suit and crisp, authoritative manner as she and Linda waited to cross the road.

She looked out of place here in the quiet mellowness of the old stone town. Young mothers in jeans and sweatshirts pushed prams or held the hands of toddlers. Older women in tweeds and sensible shoes, carrying shopping baskets, eyed her curiously. A group of youths stopped and stared, one of them whistling at her. Hannah ignored them. She was used to attracting attention.

Long ago she had learned the necessity of playing down her looks.

In the career she had chosen, to look feminine in the way she herself looked feminine was not an a.s.set. The full' softness of her mouth made men think thoughts that were not at all businesslike. The high curves of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s concealed by her silk shirt and the businesslike cut of her suit jacket caused male concentration to wander, and in the early days of her career she had encountered more than her fair share of s.e.xual hara.s.sment, before a kindly and far more worldly colleague had taken her on one side and pointed out that in their line of business, a lushly feminine figure such as hers was definitely not an a.s.set-not if she wished to be taken seriously, that was. And so Hannah had learned to disguise the narrowness of her waist and the fullness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

She had learned to adopt a severe, almost cold expression. She had learned to modulate her voice so that it never betrayed any emotion.

She had had her hair cut and kept it straight and sleek in a businesslike bob, and most of all she had learned to control her terrible betraying temper, to distance herself from the slights and snubs she had endured in the early days of working her way up the career ladder.

She had come a long way from the girl she had been when she had first left university, but there was still a long, long way to go. She thought about the new job she had applied for. She had heard about it on the. grapevine, a prestige appointment as vice- president of a small but extremely highly geared financial services group. The post would involve working very closely with the chairman of the group, someone whom Hannah had never met, but whom she had heard much about. His name featured frequently in the pages of the Financial Times. It was spoken with awe over the lunch tables of their small, elite world.

Silas Jeffreys was a man who guarded his privacy with the utmost stringency. She had never even seen a photograph of him, never read a word of gossip about his private life, never even met the man, but what she had heard of his reputation? what she knew of the way he ran his business, told her how much she wanted to work with him. It would be like sitting at the feet of a master.

She had applied for the job a week ago. She had an interview on Monday, a good sign. She could feel cautiously hopeful. Her qualifications and work experience were good, but there were still intelligent and otherwise sane men who did not believe that women could work in finance, and she had no way of knowing if he was one of that number.

No amount of discreet probing could elicit enough information for her to draw a composite picture of the man, which was aggravating to someone like Hannah who had trained herself to have a neat, orderly mind and to keep her mind empty of clutter but full of information.

As they walked into the building, she and Linda were moving at the same pace, but by the time they had entered the reception area Hannah noticed that Linda was lagging slightly behind her. She hid a small smile. After all, her friend wasn't the only person to be intimidated by the vast anonymity of the Revenue offices.

The girl on reception was young and smiled warmly at them.

Obviously she hadn't been in her job very long yet, Hannah reflected cynically, as she turned enquiringly to Linda, asking her for the name of the tax officer they were due to see.

Linda had it written down, and she handed the piece of paper over to the girl nervously.

'Oh, yes, he's on the fifth floor,' the girl told her, giving them another warm smile.

The lift was old and creaked as it moved slowly upwards. A symbol of the tax system itself, or simply symbolic of a careful husbanding of national resources? Hannah wondered, as she and Linda stood silently side by side. Her friend was very nervous. Hannah wanted to tell her not to be, but she knew that it wouldn't do the slightest good. She wanted to tell her that tax officials were only human, after all, capable of standards that were good, bad and indifferent, just like anyone else, and merely trained to appear distant and sharply suspicious of the motives of the public. However, Linda was very vulnerable and emotional where her weakness over figures was concerned, and Hannah suspected that, like somebody with a phobia about visiting the dentist, no amount of rea.s.surance from someone else would tend to lessen her apprehension.

They found the office down a long corridor, a small boxlike room furnished with a basic desk, a chair behind it and then two other chairs in front of it. Behind the desk was a set of filing cabinets and some open shelves full of bulging files, books and other papers.

Hannah could see all this through the gla.s.s part.i.tion of the door as she knocked briefly on it and waited for the young man working behind the desk to lift his head and invite them in.

He did so very politely, and Hannah read in the grimness behind the polite words and the tiredness she could see in his eyes the kind of strain that comes from long, long hours of work, when the worker knows that no matter how many hours that he or she puts in the work itself will never diminish. Hannah introduced herself, firmly shaking his hand and advising him that she would be representing Linda.

She sat down and explained calmly and concisely that an error had occurred, but that it was merely an error and not an attempt to defraud the Revenue. The inspector looked unconvinced, which was no more than Hannah had expected. Linda, however, shot her a nervous, agitated glance, quickly bursting into a muddled explanation of how the error had first occurred.

The interview lasted far longer than the young inspector could have antic.i.p.ated. Hannah was tireless and relentless in putting forward Linda's case, checking every move that the young man made, calmly and coolly putting forward a very strong defence of Linda's errors.

Hannah saw him glance surrept.i.tiously at his watch. A date? she wondered, seeing the tiny frown touch his forehead.

His telephone rang and he excused himself tq answer it. He listened for a few seconds, and then said tersely, 'Yes, thank you. Can you ask him to wait down there for me, please?'

Whoever was at the other end of the line said something else, and then the tax inspector said, 'Oh, well, if he's already on his way up ...'.

As soon as he had replaced the receiver, Hannah said smoothly, 'I'm sorry we're taking so much of your time, but you can understand Linda's concern over the whole matter.'

'We, too, have been concerned,' the tax inspector responded tersely, but he wasn't looking at her, Hannah realised. His attention wasn't focused on them the way it had been before. Instead he was looking at the door.

They heard the footsteps on the uncarpeted corridor, long before the door opened. Male footsteps, firm and very, very sure of themselves. The door opened, but Hannah didn't turn round to look to see who had come in. Whoever the visitor was, she suspected from the look of strain on the tax inspector's face that he wasn't entirely welcome.

She wondered if it was a more senior inspector come to check on the young man's progress, and decided that she was right in her a.s.sumption when she heard him saying awkwardly, 'I'm sorry, I'm not quite finished here.'

Seeing an opportunity to put Linda's case before a more senior authority, Hannah turned toward the newcomer, only just managing to suppress her shock as she saw him for the first time.

Her first impression was that he made the small room seem even smaller. He was leaning on the back wall of the office, his arms crossed negligently in front of him, his tall, broad-shouldered frame encased in a suit that Hannah's practised business eye recognised immediately as coming from Savile Row. The fabric alone must have cost a fortune- that kind of wool and silk mixture was unbelievably expensive, as she knew to her cost.