Stronger than Yearning

by Penny Jordan

  ‘You look more like Lucy’s sister than her mother in that get up,’ James told her softly. ‘Did you know you sleep with your mouth open?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Jenna returned shortly. His voice was seductively teasing, deepening the enclosed intimacy of the car. She could smell the faint tang of his cologne, elegant and masculine. Like her he was wearing jeans, old and faded, the soft fabric clinging to the muscles of his thighs. The leather blouson jacket he had been wearing was lying on the back seat. He had taken it off before getting in the car and the fine wool checked shirt he had on underneath it was open at the throat.

  A curious constriction seemed to grip her own throat muscles as he leaned over her. A panicky desire to push him away from her tensed her muscles as she fought against it. To react to his proximity in such an adolescent way would be totally humiliating. She knew quite well that he was deliberately taunting her with his sexuality, knowing that she was unnerved by it, but she also knew there was no real reason for her fear; he was not going to attack her as Charles had attacked Rachel.

  That kiss he had forced upon her in Margery’s study had been an act of retaliation, not one of undeserved aggression, but even so his closeness ignited all her repressed feelings of anger for and fear of his sex.

  ‘You have the most lovely hair.’ He raised his hand to touch her head and instantly Jenna jerked away, fear suddenly far stronger than logic, panic flaring briefly in her eyes as she froze.

  His hand dropped, his eyes narrowing disbelievingly. ‘What are you so afraid of?’

  Her mouth had gone dry, her heart thudding erratically. It was worse than all her most terrifying nightmares: she was always so careful about hiding her inner fears, and yet here she was betraying them to the one man she would most hate to recognise them.

  ‘Nothing.’ Even to her own ears her voice sounded husky and unfamiliar.

  ‘Liar.’ His hand lifted to her face and then dropped away again as she was unable to stop herself from cringing. His mouth compressed and Jenna could see the anger in his eyes. She felt sick with inner disgust.

  ‘Come on,’ he said abruptly, ‘let’s go and get that coffee. It seems that we both need it.’

  He had stopped off the motorway at a small country hotel. They had the comfortable coffee lounge completely to themselves. A smiling waitress brought them a pot of coffee, and even though Jenna had not particularly wanted a drink its aromatic fragrance tempted her tastebuds.

  ‘Black for me,’ James told her, as she picked up the pot.

  Lounging opposite her in a deep armchair he was completely at ease. Conversely, she was perched tensely on the edge of hers. Biting her lip Jenna tried to relax. She hadn’t wanted to share the journey north with him and now it seemed as though she had had good reason not to.

  ‘Lucy safely back at school?’ he asked, picking up his coffee.

  In anyone else the question would merely have been a civil attempt to make conversation, but remembering his criticisms of her as a mother Jenna flushed angrily.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ she told him curtly. She kept her attention on her coffee-cup until good manners prompted her to say hesitantly, ‘It must have been a dreadful shock to you to lose your father and step-mother…I hope your step-sister is soon better.’

  He shrugged before replacing his coffee-cup. ‘I was always closer to my mother than my father, but yes, it’s always painful to come to terms with the loss of a parent. Sarah—my step-sister—is finding it particularly hard. She was in the car with them when it happened and was trapped there for several hours before they could free her. Since then she hasn’t moved—the doctors tell me that physically there’s nothing wrong with her, that the paralysis is psychosomatic, probably a result of shock and fear. She had to lie completely still while they cut her free, in case she injured herself. At the moment I feel she’s too cut off from other people to make a speedy recovery, but she refuses to see anyone other than myself and her nurse. She’s convinced the scratches she received on her face will make her hideous for life. At the moment the scars do look bad, but the doctors assure me that they will fade and eventually disappear completely. She’s always been rather shy and withdrawn.

  ‘As soon as she’s free of hospital tests I intend to buy a house away from London——’ He frowned suddenly, checking himself. ‘However, I’m sure you don’t really want to hear any of this.’

  His sardonic comment increased her feeling of guilt. It was plain from what he said that he cared deeply about his step-sister, and that he was prepared to make changes in his own life, sacrifices, in fact, for her benefit. Was she being selfish in insisting on moving to the old Hall?

  ‘How is Lucy?’

  His question startled her, and she looked directly at him for the first time that day. The startling blue of his eyes shocked her, bringing back memories she had thought successfully submerged. Her skin grew hot as she fought them down again. James might bear some resemblance to the ancestor she had dreamed about, but they were not one and the same person.

  ‘Not too happy, I’m afraid,’ she admitted unwillingly. ‘Her headmistress is concerned about her too. She’s worried that Lucy might ruin her life by rushing into marriage—looking for a father-figure.’

  ‘So…why not provide her with one yourself? Either tell her about her real father, or marry and provide her with a substitute one.’

  ‘It isn’t as easy as that.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Or are you just telling yourself that to ease your own conscience.’

  ‘Of course I’m not.’ He had goaded her into real anger now. ‘Would you marry just to provide your step-sister with a substitute mother?’

  ‘I might…if I thought I had sufficient grounds for doing so.’

  His answer stunned her and he shrugged briefly, his eyes thoughtful as he registered her surprise.

  ‘I don’t entirely support the modern view that marriage should be a relationship founded on true love—for one thing love is an extremely difficult emotion to define. Most of us make the mistake of confusing it with sexual desire—a pretty potent force to resist, I admit, but no basis for a lifelong relationship. Marriage demands mutual respect and a lot of hard work, a willingness to compromise on both sides and an understanding of what makes the other person tick. It demands acceptance of them too…compassion and a lack of desire to completely transform their character.

  ‘It’s my view that no marriage is far, far better than a bad marriage, and good ones are very hard to find. We’re all taught these days to expect perfection in a relationship and it doesn’t exist, so the moment things don’t work out, we get disappointed and angry and fall out of love. If people took a more realistic view of marriage and what they can expect of it, it would last a lot longer.’

  ‘And yet believing all that, you can still advocate that I marry purely to provide Lucy with a substitute father?’

  He shrugged again. ‘It’s all a matter of priorities—a question of what you put first: Lucy’s happiness or…’

  ‘My own?’ Jenna enquired sweetly.

  Instead of replying James glanced at his watch. ‘Time we were on our way,’ he told her calmly.

  They made good time, but even so Jenna was stiff and tired when he eventually stopped the car outside the Hall just before midday.

  Jenna had arranged for the architect to meet her at two, and when James suggested lunch, she said coolly that she would only require a snack and, moreover, that she had an appointment.

  ‘Suits me fine,’ was James’s laconic response. ‘I’ll have a wander round and meet you outside at one. We can get a quick snack in the hotel in the village.’

  Jenna forbore to comment. She had intended to tell him that she was lunching with Bill and Nancy, but he hadn’t given her time to make the excuse.

  They went inside the house together, James wandering off into the older wing, leaving Jenna alone to make a careful tour of the Georgian rooms.

  Without the initial excitement of her purcha
se to buoy her up she could see that she was going to have a far harder job on her hands than she had at first visualised. In her imagination she clothed the rooms as she wanted to see them, but she could not deny that it would take a long time to get them like that. Using her camera to record details of the plasterwork that needed repairing and the motif on the mahogany doors, she made detailed notes. Tattered brocade curtains hung at the library windows, the once elegant room dingy and drab. She knew a firm that specialised in traditional fabric patterns; they were expensive, but very good. She itched to see James’s sketches, but he had not mentioned them to her as yet and she was not going to ask.

  Her tour of the downstairs completed, she retraced her steps into the hall. The staircase curved elegantly upwards, or at least it would be elegant once it was repaired. Sighing faintly, she stepped over a pile of rubbish on the floor and mounted the stairs. Immediately in front of her was the portrait. She tensed as she looked up at it, licking her lips, her muscles suddenly locking. To look into those mocking blue eyes was to remember in vivid detail the acutely sexual nature of her dream. The portrait at once fascinated and revolted her. She stepped backwards, stifling a shocked scream as she felt hands grasp her shoulders.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s only me,’ James said easily from behind her. ‘Sorry if I startled you.’ He released her immediately, moving away from her but as she turned to face him Jenna was struck by his likeness to the portrait. It shuddered through her flooding her mind with confused mental pictures.

  ‘My scapegrace ancestor,’ James commented wryly. ‘I’m surprised Sir Alan kept the portrait hanging there.’

  ‘People get so used to what’s around them that they cease to notice it in the end,’ Jenna said huskily. She felt curiously weak and faint, and told herself it was because she was hungry.

  ‘It’s getting on for one,’ James informed her. ‘If you’ve finished down here, how about going for lunch now?’

  There was no reason for her to refuse. She knew the hotel in the village quite well, and although the owner was justifiably proud of his carvery lunch, Jenna found she was barely able to touch her plateful of food, despite her earlier conviction that she was hungry.

  James on the other hand cleaned his plate.

  He was a very complex man, she reflected, eyeing him briefly as she drank her coffee. Despite his assertion to her that he meant to gain possession of the Hall, he had not betrayed that intention today by so much as a word or gesture. What really went on inside that hard masculine skull, she wondered, watching him. He glanced up and smiled mockingly. ‘Normally when a woman looks at a man like that she’s wondering what he’s like in bed,’ he drawled tormentingly.

  ‘Well, I’m not!’ Anger made the colour leave her face, her eyes glittering furiously into his.

  ‘Pity! I would have enjoyed showing you.’

  His blatant masculine arrogance took her breath away. It stunned her to realise that he meant it too; that despite the fact that he didn’t particularly like her, and he certainly knew how much she loathed him, he could still talk about making love to her and see it as a viable proposition. But, then, men did not have to be emotionally involved to enjoy sex…quite the contrary, she thought grimly, draining her coffee-cup and standing up.

  ‘I’ll walk back to the old Hall,’ she told him coolly, picking up her large shoulder-bag.

  For a moment she thought he meant to protest, but apart from a warning gleam in his eyes he seemed indifferent to her decision.

  It didn’t take her long, and the June day was warm enough to make the walk a pleasant one. She got to the end of the drive at the same time as a small estate car turned into it. The driver stopped and she walked over to him.

  ‘Peter Clifford,’ he introduced himself. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance be my prospective client?’

  When Jenna agreed that she was, he offered her a lift up to the house.

  ‘It’s a real architectural hotch-potch,’ he commented to Jenna when they got out of the car. ‘What exactly do you have in mind for it?’

  Briefly she told him.

  ‘The restoration work might prove difficult, especially if you’re after authentic reproduction, but let’s go in and see what it’s like inside.’

  His comment depressed Jenna slightly. She had been hoping that he might be able to give her introductions to firms of the same standard as those she used in London. She had no doubt that they did exist, but finding them would take time; in the meantime she would have to use those she knew in London, which would mean extra expense.

  They had just reached the Tudor part of the building when she heard James’s car drive up. She heard him walking over the bare floorboards as he came in search of them, and she also saw the speculation in the architect’s eyes when James finally appeared.

  Almost immediately, instead of addressing his comments to Jenna he addressed them to James. His automatic assumption that James was the one he would be working for infuriated her, but she refused to allow her anger to appear.

  ‘Of course, when it comes to the décor, no doubt you’ll have your own ideas,’ he commented, turning to Jenna at last, his expression slightly condescending. ‘Women have their own views on these things,’ he added to James.

  ‘They do indeed, don’t they, darling?’ The endearment and the casual arm James placed round her shoulders stunned Jenna into complete silence. When the architect’s back was turned she glared at him, and tried to pull away, but his arm simply tightened round her. While she tried to struggle, the architect kept talking to James. It was plain that he thought them a couple and Jenna gritted her teeth, thinking of the biting remarks she would be making to him when she told him the truth.

  And James. For what possible reason could he be reinforcing the architect’s error? Sheer devilment, she suspected, giving up trying to move away from him, and instead, simply turning her head away and refusing to acknowledge his presence in any way.

  It took the better part of the afternoon to go through the house, at the end of which Jenna’s temper had reached exploding point.

  As she watched the architect drive away she turned to James and demanded bitterly, ‘Just what the hell do you think you were doing? Giving him the idea that——’

  ‘That we were lovers?’ His eyebrows rose and he shrugged. ‘It was obvious that he thought it anyway, it would only have embarrassed him to discover the truth.’

  ‘So you decided to embarrass me instead, is that it?’ Jenna seethed. ‘As a mere woman my embarrassment doesn’t matter?’

  James blinked and said laconically, ‘As the unmarried mother of a teenage child, I find it hard to understand why the thought of having a lover should embarrass you.’

  Goaded beyond her endurance but unable to retaliate Jenna snapped her teeth shut, gritting them together.

  ‘You have some sketches to show me,’ she reminded him curtly.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t have them with me. Some of them are very fragile, and I didn’t want to risk getting them damaged. I’ll show them to you when we get back.’

  Grimly, Jenna said nothing. She had no desire to go back to James’s apartment with him, but it seemed she had little choice. She only hoped that his precious sketches, once she got to see them, would prove to be worth the trouble.

  They stopped once on the way back for a brief snack and a cup of tea, but James seemed disinclined to make idle conversation for which she was grateful. It was gone ten when they reached the outskirts of London and in the dimness of the car Jenna studied him covertly. The resemblance to the portrait on the stairs was less obvious now; it was only when one looked at him full face that he could have passed for the double of his ancestor.

  Heredity was a funny thing…One of the reasons she had been so reluctant to tell Lucy about her father was her fear that Lucy might grow up always looking for the Deveril strain in herself. If anything, however, Jenna felt that Lucy shared her own temperament rather than that of either of her parents, although her features we
re Rachel’s. Once again her eyes were drawn to James’s profile: he was an exceedingly physically attractive male, there was no doubt about that, but unlike most of her sex she found his masculine perfection repellent rather than attractive.

  ‘Taking an inventory?’

  He had turned to smile mockingly at her. Furiously determined to prove to him that her scrutiny of him had no personal basis, Jenna retorted tightly, ‘No one could ever question that Deveril blood runs in your veins.’

  Incredibly his face went white, his fingers tensing on the steering-wheel. ‘Just what in hell do you mean by that?’ he demanded harshly, stunning her with the intensity of his anger. She had thought him a man without an Achilles’ heel and yet, incredibly, it seemed she was wrong. She had no idea why he should be so bitterly resentful of his Deveril blood, but it excited her to know that he was not as invulnerable as she had supposed.

  She managed a light shrug, longing to probe into the reason for his furious response but knowing that this was not the time.

  ‘The portrait on the stairs,’ she told him simply. ‘Surely you must have seen the resemblance?’

  Amazingly, his anger was gone, leaving in its place a lazy amusement. ‘Ah yes…the family black sheep. My revered ancestor…Yes, there is a similarity. Apparently it crops up in every so many generations,’ he added carelessly, ‘but I’m afraid I have to tell you that he was no Deveril.’

  Jenna stared at him. ‘But of course he was…you said yourself…’

  ‘I know what I said, but what I didn’t tell you was that it was rumoured at the time and later confirmed by his mother on her deathbed that he was not her husband’s child, but her lover’s. Hence the reason his supposed “father” was so eager to get rid of him. Hence also the reason why he had no compunction about taking his wife’s family name, I suspect,’ James added musingly. ‘I have in my possession his granddaughter’s diary; the whole story is written down there. It wasn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence, in those days!’