Stronger than Yearning

by Penny Jordan

  ‘And of course because you don’t approve, she’ll be duly chastened,’ Jenna spat at him bitterly.

  It was childish to resent him because of what had happened, but she did. She was jealous of the fact that Lucy seemed to have transferred her affections from her to James, and even though she knew she was being ridiculous she couldn’t stop herself from flinging the angry accusation at him.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Something glinted in his eyes as he stopped her by his car, his hand on her arm. Jenna withdrew immediately, her face tight with rage and misery. ‘At the moment, as far as Lucy’s concerned, I’m a novelty—the realisation of her dreams of finding her father, but I can assure you that won’t last. I predict that by the time we’ve been married six months or so, she’ll be complaining to you that I’m too strict with her.’

  ‘I haven’t agreed that we will be married yet,’ Jenna reminded him sharply.

  ‘I hope you’re adult enough not to allow a temporary fit of jealousy to blind you to reason, Jenna,’ was his calm reply. ‘I can’t make you marry me, of course…’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ Jenna agreed, climbing into the car, and closing the door before he could help her.

  She sat in silence while he drove them to his apartment, butterflies storming the pit of her stomach. What if Lucy refused to see her…or speak to her…and what about James’s step-sister? What if she didn’t like her?

  ‘Lucy is having an extremely beneficial effect upon Sarah,’ James commented as they got into the lift. ‘I actually heard her laughing this morning.’ He grimaced faintly. ‘It hasn’t been easy for her, of course, losing her parents, and then being transported to a country where she knows virtually no one.’

  ‘She had you.’

  ‘Mmm. You’re not the only one who has generation-gap problems, you know. I’d only seen Sarah on a few brief occasions before the accident. I was already an adult when she arrived on the scene. My father remarried when I was fifteen, and I left home shortly afterwards.’

  He saw her expression. ‘No, I didn’t run away, but it was felt in the family that my father and his new wife would have an easier life without the presence of a teenage boy. I went to live with my grandfather on St Justine.’

  ‘Did you mind?’

  It was almost the first personal question she had asked him, and even now she half wished she had not done so. She didn’t want to know anything about him that would make him seem human and vulnerable: she wanted to keep him at a distance and preserve a wall of silence between them.

  ‘At first, but I got on very well with my grandfather, and on balance I think I was far better off as a much-wanted grandson than I would have been as a reluctantly accepted step-son.’

  Was he saying that his step-mother had not wanted him?

  As they had reached the door of his apartment Jenna could not ask. The tension inside her was appalling as she waited for him to open the door. To have to follow him into the empty drawing-room was a painful let-down.

  ‘Lucy’s probably with Sarah in her room. She’s in a wheelchair now, although the doctors are still convinced that the paralysis is hysterical and will eventually go. I’ll go and get Lucy. Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  Jenna nodded numbly. Her mouth felt dry, her head ready to burst with pain.

  She stood in front of the window overlooking the park, one remote corner of her mind admiring the delicacy of the wrought-iron balcony while the rest of it was seized by crippling tension.

  ‘Hello!’

  She turned round at the sound of Lucy’s voice. Her niece stood just inside the door, and there was no sign of James. Lucy looked tired and pale. There was an open anxiety in her eyes and all the resentment and bitterness Jenna had felt on learning that she had gone to James dissolved. Automatically she opened her arms, unsure which of them it was who sobbed first as Lucy ran into them.

  ‘I’m sorry…so sorry,’ Lucy whispered tearfully hugging her with fierce intensity. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt and upset you. It’s just that I’ve been so desperate to know about my father, it’s almost been like being ill. I can’t explain it to you, but…’

  ‘It’s all right, I do understand.’

  Of course she did, and it was almost worth all the pain and trauma of the last twenty-four hours to see Lucy transformed like this and once again the loving, affectionate girl she had previously been.

  ‘James was furious with me when he found out that I’d run away from school. He said I was the most thoughtless, selfish brat he’d ever met.’

  Tears glimmered in the brown eyes, but unbelievably Lucy was grinning. ‘I think that’s what convinced me more than anything else that he is my father…he sounded so much like a parent!’

  Jenna felt her throat constrict. The difference in Lucy was unbelievable. Did she have the right to destroy her very evident happiness by telling her the truth?

  ‘James?’ she questioned, raising her eyebrows a little.

  ‘Well, somehow it doesn’t seem right calling him “daddy”!’ Lucy pulled a wry face. ‘He’s far too macho to be a parent.’ She giggled. ‘I think if he wasn’t my father, I could almost fall for him myself! Sarah calls him James too.’

  ‘She is his sister,’ Jenna pointed out.

  ‘Umm. I wonder what that will make us when you and James are married? We’ll be step-sisters, but she’ll also be my aunt, won’t she?’

  Jenna was stunned. Shock followed by a swift burst of anger. James had had no right to tell Lucy they were getting married. He had out-manoeuvred her very neatly, knowing quite well that she could hardly turn round and tell Lucy they weren’t.

  ‘Wasn’t it a coincidence,’ Lucy was chattering on happily, ‘the two of you bumping into one another like that after all these years? James told me that you met when you first came to London, and that he had to go away when his grandfather became ill and that when he came back you’d disappeared.’ Lucy looked reproachful. ‘Why didn’t you let him know you were expecting me?’

  ‘Because, my dear daughter, your mother is far too proud to attempt what she no doubt saw as a form of moral blackmail,’ James drawled, coming into the room carrying a tray of coffee. ‘In fact it was a mix-up all round. When she didn’t reply to my letters, I naturally assumed that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with me. I had no idea that…’

  ‘She was expecting me,’ Lucy concluded for him, dancing over to him and relieving him of the tray. ‘I was just telling Ma that you’re so sexy that if you weren’t my father I could quite easily fall for you myself!’ she told James cheekily, putting the tray on the table and turning back to hug him.

  Watching his easy acceptance of her exuberant affection, Jenna saw that she had been wrong in thinking that he would make a poor parent. He seemed to know instinctively how to handle Lucy: he was firm with her yet understanding.

  ‘When’s the wedding going to be?’ Lucy was perched on the arm of a chair, nibbling biscuits and looking at Jenna.

  ‘Just as soon as we can arrange it,’ James answered for her. ‘In fact, I’m planning to take your mother out to dinner tonight so that we can discuss it.’

  He turned to Jenna. ‘Come and meet Sarah.’

  With Lucy trilling away happily at her side about the wedding and how exciting and thrilling it all was there was nothing Jenna could say. She followed James into an inner corridor with several doors off it.

  He opened one of them and stood back so that Lucy and Jenna could precede him.

  Jenna’s first feeling when she saw the slight blonde-haired girl in the wheelchair was one of intense compassion. Sarah lifted her head and smiled rather hesitantly at her, while James performed the introductions. Sarah was much shyer than Lucy and very withdrawn, not just with her, Jenna noted, but with James as well. She treated him like a distant acquaintance rather than a brother, and when he bent down to help her manoeuvre her wheelchair she snapped bitterly at him. ‘For God’s sake, leave me alone. I can do it myself.’

  It wasn’t
a completely unexpected reaction from a pretty teenage girl who must resent being tied to a chair however temporarily, but Jenna sensed there was more to Sarah’s hostility than mere frustration over her physical disabilities.

  ‘If we have an early lunch there should just be time this afternoon to run you back to school, young lady,’ James told Lucy, glancing at his watch.

  Although Lucy gave a brief pout, Jenna noticed that she didn’t argue with him and, once again, she was aware of an irrational feeling of jealousy, although this went quickly enough when Lucy turned to her and asked uncertainly, ‘What did they say, at school, I mean? What will happen when I go back?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jenna assured her gently. She wanted to have a long talk with Lucy about her dislike of the school, to try and find out what Lucy really wanted, but once again it seemed that James had beaten her to it.

  ‘James says I may not need to go to boarding school once we all move to the old Hall. He says Sarah and I could both attend day school.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to move to Yorkshire,’ Jenna reminded her.

  Lucy shrugged. ‘That was before…before I knew about you and James. I mean, it will be different now. We’ll be a proper family.’

  If only Lucy knew!

  ‘You’re going to invite Bill and Nancy to the wedding, aren’t you?’ Lucy asked. ‘Where will it be?’

  Jenna had not thought that far ahead yet. She was still trying to come to terms with the way James had forced her into a corner.

  ‘Since this is to be a first marriage for both of us, I think a church ceremony,’ James supplied.

  Over Lucy’s head, Jenna stared at James.

  ‘I hope you don’t expect me to appear in a veil and a long white dress?’ she questioned him sarcastically.

  His smile, a blend of tenderness and whimsicality, momentarily silenced her. He came towards her and took her hand in his, lifting it to his mouth. She could feel the warmth of his breath against her fingers, tiny shivers of sensation tingling over her skin. His eyes seemed to mesmerise her into standing quite still, even her breath suspended when he turned her hand palm upwards, and brushed a light kiss against the sensitive skin.

  ‘Whatever you wear, you’ll look radiant,’ he assured her.

  Jenna longed to rail and scream at him that she would not take part in the subterfuge he had thrust them both into, that she would not play the role of lovers that he seemed to have cast for them both, but before she could get the breath to do so the sound of a crash from Sarah’s bedroom riveted her attention.

  Both she and James moved at the same time, James’s longer legs ensuring that he covered the distance before her. Even so, Jenna was right behind him as he thrust open the bedroom door.

  The wheelchair lay on its side, wheels spinning, while its occupant lay sprawled on the floor, sobbing noisily. As James bent over her Sarah raised her head from the floor and screamed, ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! I hate you! Why couldn’t you be the one to die? Go away from me.’

  For the first time Jenna saw him look undecided about what to do, and instinctively she took charge.

  Crouching down on the floor beside the weeping girl she slid one arm beneath her to support her head, and stroked the blonde hair with her free hand.

  ‘I think you’d better go,’ she told James quietly. ‘Should she have a doctor to check that she’s all right?’

  ‘I’ll see to it.’

  As the door closed behind him Sarah sobbed bitterly, ‘I hate him! And I hate living here! I want to go home.’

  Smoothing Sarah’s hair back off her hot forehead, Jenna sighed. ‘Sarah, I understand how you feel and so does James, but he can’t bring back your parents for you, and you know he can’t let you live alone in America.’

  ‘My folks would never have wanted me to live with James. He and my mother never got along. He was horrible to her when she first met Daddy.’

  Without knowing why she should feel the need to defend him, Jenna found herself saying, ‘Sarah, wasn’t James very much the same age you are now when his father married your mother? Try to imagine how you would have felt if that had happened to you, if your mother had died and your father was going to marry someone else. It isn’t always easy to behave the way we know we should, is it?’

  ‘You mean James was jealous of my mother?’

  She had stopped crying now and the fever heat was beginning to leave her skin. Jenna was glad because she had been afraid that Sarah might work herself up to near hysteria.

  ‘It would only have been natural if he was, wouldn’t it? Perhaps he might even have felt that he was betraying his own mother by trying to like yours. And might your mother not have been a little bit jealous of him too? All of us feel insecure when we form a new and important relationship,’ she went on, before Sarah could leap to her mother’s defence. ‘I know if I was marrying someone who had a child or children from a previous marriage, I would be a little bit nervous about how they were going to react to me: would they be comparing me to their own mother? Would they make things awkward for me and my new husband? Just because we’re “grown-up” it doesn’t mean our feelings completely change, you know.

  ‘In fact, you should be able to understand exactly how James felt. Like you he had to go and live far away from his friends and his father…’

  ‘He went to live with his grandfather,’ Sarah told her, ‘but I always thought that was because he wanted to go.’

  ‘Maybe he did because he felt that he wasn’t welcome in his father’s new marriage,’ Jenna said as gently as she could. ‘Everyone has their pride, you know, Sarah, and we all try to hide it from others when we’re hurt, sometimes even to the extent of pretending we don’t care at all.’

  ‘I know, I pretend that I don’t mind about being in this chair but I do, and I hate it when the doctor says that there’s nothing wrong with me. If there wasn’t I’d be able to walk, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘And so you will,’ Jenna soothed her. ‘When the doctor says there’s nothing wrong, he means nothing wrong physically, but our minds exert a tremendous power over our bodies, you know. You were involved in a dreadful accident, and now your mind is telling your body not to move because when it moved it got hurt. But some day when your mind stops being frightened it won’t tell your body that any more.’

  ‘And then I’ll be able to walk again.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘I have to have physiotherapy twice a week and I hate it.’ She looked away from Jenna and started plaiting the fringed hem on her jumper.

  ‘What will happen to me when you and James get married and you move to Yorkshire?’

  ‘Oh, Sarah, you’ll come with us of course. Surely you didn’t think ..?’ She saw the tears glistening in the blue eyes and tugged Sarah’s hair gently. ‘James cares an awful lot about you, you know. One of the reasons he wants to get married is because he wants you to have a secure family background again.’

  It would do no harm to tell her the truth and might even help to break down her antipathy towards her step-brother, although quite why she should want to do anything to help James, Jenna could not understand. Because it sprang from her own innate sense of fair play. He had helped her with Lucy, so she should help him in turn.

  ‘I didn’t even know you and Lucy existed until yesterday,’ Sarah whispered, having digested her comment.

  ‘Well, it all happened a long time ago and I never thought that…’

  ‘That you would fall in love all over again. It’s just like a movie.’

  Jenna couldn’t help but laugh, even though she was thinking privately how shocked both Lucy and Sarah would be if they knew the truth.

  ‘Doctor’s here.’ Lucy pushed open the door and came in, her eyes anxious. ‘Are you okay, Sarah?’

  ‘I think so. I just get so impatient with myself when I can’t do things.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Lucy comforted her, ‘you’ll soon be out of that thing and until you are, I’ll chauffeur it around for you. We’ll
have to do plenty of shopping before we move to Yorkshire, Ma,’ she told Jenna. ‘Nearly everything Sarah’s got is too short for her now, and there are no decent shops in York. I’m dreading it,’ she groaned theatrically to Sarah. ‘No Top Shop, no Oxford Street…’

  ‘No eternal requests for advances on your allowance,’ Jenna chimed in, standing up as James and the doctor walked in.

  ‘I’ll go and wait outside,’ she offered, but Sarah clutched her arm. ‘Please stay with me,’ she begged.

  Across the small space that separated them Jenna’s eyes met James. The expression in his was wryly enigmatic and Jenna wondered what he read in her own. Compassion for Sarah.…but did he also know that some of that compassion was for him too? Talking to Sarah she had experienced a tiny surge of fellow-feeling for him, when she realised that he wasn’t as totally removed from the nagging problems of life as she had first imagined.

  ‘Well, now, young lady, let’s have a look at you.’

  Jenna waited while the doctor examined Sarah, relieved when he pronounced that no damage had been done.

  ‘Can’t run before we can walk, can we?’ he tut-tutted when he had finished his examination.

  Sarah grimaced. ‘Just walking would be enough for me right now.’

  ‘It will come in time, never fret.’

  ‘James tells me wedding bells are in the offing,’ he said to Jenna as she escorted him back to the drawing-room.

  Her mouth compressed a little. James was being remarkably talkative about their marriage, especially in view of the fact that she had not yet agreed to it.

  When they dropped Lucy off at her school later on that afternoon Jenna thought her niece looked happier than she had for a long time. During the long drive she had chattered to both Jenna and James impartially, bouncing about excitedly in the back seat whenever she talked about the wedding, plaguing James to tell her when it was going to be, but all he would say was that she would be the first to know once they had decided.

  ‘And this time, stay put. Is that understood?’ he demanded sternly as Lucy threw her arms round his neck to kiss him goodbye.