‘You’re joking.’ His amused cynicism irritated her.
‘No, I’m not joking at all,’ she told him sharply. ‘After all, herbal medicine existed long before our so-called modern drugs.’
‘Well, yes, but they were hardly as powerful.’
His self-assurance annoyed he
r, and she had a sudden longing to destroy it.
‘Some of them are,’ she argued firmly. ‘Take ergot, for instance…’
‘Ergot… What’s that?’ She had his attention now, he was looking at her in a direct, uncompromising way that she knew that she ought to find intimidating, but which instead for some odd reason she found challenging.
‘Ergot is the fungus on the rye,’ she told him knowledgeably. ‘It used to be used, among other things, for aborting unwanted foetuses. Unfortunately, its side-effects can be devastating. Used unwisely, it can give rise to a whole range of things from gangrene to madness.’ She saw the look on his face and laughed harshly. ‘It’s still used today as a base for migraine drugs. Doctors prefer only to prescribe it for men,’ she added drily.
‘You obviously know a lot about it.’
Without thinking, she shrugged and said, ‘It was my father’s hobby. I grew up with it, so to speak.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed grandly. ‘I think I can see why a man who’s fortune was founded on modern drugs could be interested in herbal medicine.’
Instantly Rue tensed. He had ticked her—and she had let him, fool that she was, carried away by her enthusiasm for one of her favourite subjects—into betraying herself and giving him exactly the kind of lever he wanted to pry into her most private affairs. He wouldn’t hesitate to use it, she could see that in his eyes as he looked at her.
‘Your solicitor was telling me this morning about your father,’ he added, still watching her. ‘What happened?’ he demanded abruptly when she refused to either look away or make any comment.
The abruptness of his question caught her off guard. ‘To what?’ she asked him uncertainly, not sure of the meaning behind his question.
‘To the fortune your father left you?’ he answered harshly. ‘He died six years ago, apparently a millionaire, and yet you, his only child, are now living here in this cottage, instead of Parnham Court which he left to you, and apparently earning your own living—a rather curious state of affairs, I’m sure you’ll agree.’
‘To you, perhaps,’ Rue answered him in a suffocated voice, almost totally unable to believe that she had heard him correctly. His rudeness was really insufferable. She opened her mouth to tell him as much and then, to her own shock, heard herself saying instead, ‘If you really must know, my husband gambled it away and I let him.’
She faced him proudly, waiting to see the pity and contempt form in his eyes. But, whatever feelings her words had evoked inside him, he betrayed nothing of them as he said coolly, ‘You must hate him for that.’
‘No, not really. Odd though you might find it to believe, I’m far happier now than I ever was when I was my father’s heiress. I was a spoiled, arrogant child. You could even say that I deserved everything that happened to me. There’s no way today, for instance, that I would ever be remotely attracted to a man like Julian, and certainly I’d never be stupid enough now to believe him capable of loving me.’
‘Him, or any man?’ Neil Saxton asked her quietly.
The shock of it was reflected in her expression as her eyes darkened and widened. How had he known that? How had he known of the iron that had entered her heart when she’d found out the truth about Julian? How had he known that she had sworn that never again would she allow any man to deceive her into believing he cared about her?
She fought to regain her self-control, shrugging her shoulders and saying as coolly as she could, ‘It’s true. I’m afraid I don’t have a very high opinion of your sex.’
‘Or of yourself,’ Neil Saxton told her, softly and unforgivably.
She turned her back on him then, gripping hold of her trug tightly in order to stop her hand from trembling.
‘You’re on my land, Mr Saxton,’ she told him emotionlessly, ‘and I would be very grateful if you would remove yourself from it immediately.’
‘You know, you interest me,’ he told her conversationally, totally ignoring her command. ‘It must have taken guts to establish all this—’ he waved his hand over the flowing river of colour surrounding them ‘—out of nothing. To turn yourself from a dependent child into an independent business-woman.’
Rue smiled mirthlessly at him. ‘And men don’t like women with guts, especially successful women with guts—is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
To her astonishment he laughed, throwing back his head to reveal the hard, masculine line of his throat. ‘Is that what you think?’ he marvelled, looking at her. ‘Is that the reason for this?’ He reached out and touched her tightly drawn back hair and then her make-up-less face. It was only the briefest of touches, no more than a mere brushing of hard muscles against the softness of her smooth skin, but it was still enough to make her jump back from him as though she had been burned, rage and panic warring for supremacy in her eyes.
‘You’re out of date,’ he told her mockingly. ‘At least where I’m concerned. I admire a woman with guts. She’s so much more of a challenge, both in bed and out of it.’
‘Your personal views of my sex are of no interest to me whatsoever,’ Rue ground out at him from between clenched teeth when she had recovered from the shock of his unashamedly taunting comments.
‘No, I can see that,’ he agreed, and for some reason the cool, insolent way his glance roved over her body, from the crown of her head right down to her bare toes with their unvarnished nails, made her want to turn and run and hide herself away from him. Stupidly, she had a vivid mental image of herself as she had been at eighteen, pretty and silly, her blonde hair a flowing mane, her nails long and painted, her clothes the very best that Knightsbridge could provide and her head empty of a single thought that did not concern having fun and enjoying herself.