by Penny Jordan
She was breathing hard, sobbing almost, unaware of the fact that she was beating her fists on James’s chest until he took her wrists in a gentle grip.
‘Jenna, Jenna…Stop now…’
She took a deep, painfully racking breath and glared at him with angry, bitter eyes. ‘Oh, no. You wanted to know…well, I’ll tell you…I’ll tell you what I haven’t told anyone else…anyone…I wanted to see Rachel, but they wouldn’t let me. I pushed my way past the nurses and into the ward. She was lying there. There was blood everywhere, on the sheets, on the floor…’
‘Jenna…’
‘No!’ She said it savagely, her eyes wild with her tormenting memories. ‘You wanted to know. Well, now you do. No, I did not give birth to Lucy, but my sister did; she’s part of her, all I have left of her, and——’
‘You must have been so young…’
She heard the words dimly, and forced herself to respond. ‘Fifteen. I was fifteen.’ Her voice seemed to come from a long distance. ‘They wanted her to be adopted, but I wouldn’t let them. Bill and Nancy helped me. I had to keep her.’ She said it urgently, as though James was someone she had to convince of the rightness of her actions. ‘She was Rachel’s child…Rachel would have wanted…Rachel…’
Tears spurted from her eyes and poured unceasingly down her face. Jenna tried to stem their flow and discovered it was impossible. Something unfamiliar had happened to her. She felt curiously weak and empty somehow as though something she had carried within her for years had gone. And then she realised what it was—it was her pain, the pain of losing Rachel, the guilt and fear she had known because of her sister’s death, because she had not been able to do anything to help her. She swayed giddily, suddenly glad of the protective bulk of James’s body against her own. She wanted to stay here with him for ever, she thought dreamily, safe…But she was not safe with James and she never would be. All the life seemed to have drained out of her. It was more than she could cope with right now to move away from him. Like a limp doll Jenna allowed herself to be lifted in his arms and carried from the room.
With a curious sense of being apart from herself she felt James place her on her bed. No, not her bed, but his own, she realised, raising her head to glance incuriously round his room.
She couldn’t remember their coming upstairs, and as though he knew what she was thinking, James said tightly, ‘You fainted. I think you need a drink,’ he added in that same strangely tight voice. ‘I think we both do.’
Jenna wanted to protest that she didn’t want anything but she was too weak to do so. Telling him about Rachel’s death had been like a dam breaking, sweeping away the hurt and the pain that had built up over the years, and now she just felt empty somehow, lifeless and unable to so much as co-ordinate a single thought. All she wanted to do was simply to lie here.
‘Jenna.’
James was back, carrying two brandy glasses. He saw the face she pulled and his own expression relaxed slightly from its hard remoteness. ‘Come on, let me help you.’ He put the glasses down and leaned over her, lifting her shoulders from the bed and supporting her with the soft pillows.
‘I don’t want anything to drink, James.’ She turned her face away from him. ‘I’m all right.’
Her ears just caught the sound he made, something between derision and…anguish? But she wouldn’t let herself believe that. Why should James feel anguish on her behalf, or Rachel’s? It had all been a long time ago.
Despite her denial, Jenna found herself taking a small sip of the reviving brandy when James held the glass to her lips. It burned fiercely down to her stomach, making her shudder in faint distaste.
‘Was that why you wanted the old Hall so much?’ James asked her quietly.
‘At first,’ Jenna admitted, ‘at least that was my intention. Bill and Nancy were horrified. Neither of them wanted to see me making decisions based on a desire for revenge.’ Amazingly she could talk quite calmly now: the storm of emotion and pain that had threatened to destroy her earlier had cleansed her of the past, removing all the dark bitterness that had tormented her for so long. She would never forget what had happened to Rachel, but now at last she was no longer haunted by the bitter hatred that had tainted her life since her sister’s death.
‘But, ridiculously in some ways, the moment I saw the old Hall properly, I fell in love with it. I told myself I was doing it for Lucy’s sake, that it was rightfully hers. I told myself it would make good sense from a business point of view, but in reality, I wanted the house for myself. It called out to me, satisfying some need inside me.’
‘You talk as though those feelings are now all in the past,’ James told her, watching her.
Jenna shrugged, suddenly aware that she was treading on ground as delicate as eggshells. If she wasn’t careful, James would lure her into betraying the real reason the Hall no longer held her heart—namely, the fact that it now belonged to him. She fought to revive her earlier resentment and anger against him, but they had both gone. She could feel nothing…just a vast emptiness.
‘I don’t know what I feel at the moment,’ she told him at last. She gave a wry smile, and then raised her eyes to his face. ‘Your godmother told me all about your mother.’ She saw his expression change, become shuttered and dark, and instinctively she reached out to touch him…hurt because he so obviously did not welcome her knowing. ‘I’m sorry if you’d rather she hadn’t told me,’ she whispered tensely, ‘but please don’t be angry with her, she was acting with the best of motives. She wanted me to understand why you wanted the old Hall so desperately.’
‘Yes,’ his mouth curled wryly, ‘she would, she and my mother were very close.’
They sat in silence for a moment and then he added huskily, almost as though the words were dragged out of him, ‘I couldn’t believe it when she died…I loved her so much, and yet in a way I hated her for…’
‘Dying and leaving you alone with a burden you were too young to handle?’ Jenna supplied for him, recognising in his admission a trace of her own feelings on Rachel’s death. She too had experienced that mingling of pain and anger, and with it both guilt and resentment.
He looked at her and for a moment Jenna felt as though for the first time they were really seeing one another. Hope fluttered tentatively inside her and then James ruined it all by saying curtly, ‘You realise that Lucy will have to be told the truth.’
‘No!’ The denial was wrenched from her already aching throat in a husky cry of pain.
‘Yes, Jenna,’ James replied firmly. ‘She has to know.’
‘But she thinks that you are her father.’
‘Does she?’
The wry doubt in his voice reinforced Jenna’s own private belief that Lucy did not behave towards him as she would have expected her to react to her father.
‘I think she finds me a convenient substitute, but as to whether or not she genuinely thinks I am her father…’
‘But it was because you believed she did that you married me,’ Jenna pointed out in bewilderment.
‘That was one of the reasons, but since then I’ve had more opportunity to observe her.’
Cold icicles of dread formed down Jenna’s spine. Was this James’s way of telling her that he wanted their marriage to end? Was he using the truth about Lucy’s parenthood as a means of escape? Pride kept her from asking him.
‘She’ll have to be told, Jenna,’ he softened the words with a brief smile, and added huskily, ‘but not tonight…’ He was looking at her mouth and a tingling reaction of delight heated Jenna’s skin. Unwittingly provocative, her lips parted.
James’s fingers touched her throat, and slid upwards to cup her jaw. Against her mouth he murmured hypnotically, ‘Tell me to stop if you don’t want this.’
Dizzy with emotional exhaustion, she had no energy left to fight against her need and love. Her mouth clung welcomingly to his, her body shivering in delight beneath the light touch of his hands.
When they had made love before, it had al
ways been with an element of raw savagery and Jenna had never totally overcome her own inner rage and confusion that James should be able to make her respond in such a way, until passion had blotted those feelings from her mind, but this time that elemental anger wasn’t there.
James’s touch was gentle, tender, reverent almost, the slow spiralling dance of desire building up between them so achingly beautiful that it brought a tight lump of pain to her throat.
This time when she caressed and kissed James’s body he seemed somehow less invulnerable, less hard and unyielding, his voice a soft, husky litany of pleasure against her skin as he muttered hoarse words of praise and delight at her touch.
They seemed almost to be making love in slow motion, as though there was all the time in the world to enjoy and relish each simple caress, with no urgent rush to satisfy their mutual craving for satisfaction.
Long before she felt the hard warmth of James’s body sliding over her own Jenna had abandoned reason and reality in favour of emotion and fantasy. She was here in James’s arms where she had longed to be for so many empty weeks, and he was touching her, making love to her as though he did indeed cherish and adore her. It was a precious dream she did not want to relinquish, and her body opened willingly to the first thrust of his, moving in perfect time to his demands, sharing with him the sweetly piercing pleasure of escalating desire.
Her hands moved over his back, clinging lovingly to the hard muscles as she wrapped her arms around him, kissing the salt skin of his throat, loving the moist heat of his shoulder as her mouth moved slowly over it. His tongue touched her ear, investigating each delicate convolution and she shuddered in fierce pleasure, muffling the small sounds of delight she couldn’t subdue against the heat of his skin.
‘Don’t do that!’ His voice was hoarse and strained, sending shivers of reaction racing over her skin as he pressed his lips to her ear. ‘Don’t try to hide from me how you feel, Jenna. I want to hear it,’ he told her thickly, cupping her face with hands that trembled slightly, momentarily stilling the arousing movements of his body within her own. ‘I want to hear your pleasure…I want to see it…taste it…’ He groaned suddenly and then kissed her with a suppressed violence that shattered her languorous spiral of desire and turned it instead into a white-hot, aching need that twisted and coiled inside her, making her arch pleadingly against his body and respond feverishly to his kiss.
Her blood sang through her veins, her breathing constricted. Huskily she cried out his name, lost to everything but the intensity of the feeling inside her. A terrifying heat burned her skin, turning it slick with sweat so that it clung to James’s. He groaned something unintelligible against her mouth and moved fiercely within her, demanding and getting her response to his urgency. She was racing towards the outer limits of the universe with no means of controlling her pace, with nothing to hold on to except James…She clung desperately to him, her body convulsing in the first primitive spasms of pleasure.
‘Jenna!’ He cried out her name and it seemed to echo hollowly round the room as his body released a fierce heat within her and shuddered to a climax that matched her own.
Tears ran freely down her face, but they were not tears of pain or anguish, simply tears of joy and release. There would never be anything else in her life to equal this pleasure, this giving of herself wholly and completely to the man she loved. But who did not love her, she told herself on the edge of exhausted sleep. James did not love her.
She woke up once towards dawn, and knew immediately that James was also awake. His mouth touched her throat, his hand gently cupping her breast, slowly caressing the warm fullness of it. She made a lazy sound of pleasure deep in her throat and turned into his arms.
‘Tell me something…’ His voice reverberated against her ear and she curled in sleepy appreciation of his reaction to her.
‘What?’
‘Tonight when we made love, was I the one you took into your body, Jenna, or was it still your fantasy lover?’
Still her fantasy lover? Jenna frowned in the darkness. Did James still really believe that lie she had told him when they were first married? Surely he must have guessed that she had used it merely as a means of defence, as a protection against the desire he had aroused within her? She frowned a little more, remembering how on previous occasions he had also demanded to know who had been in her mind while he made love to her body. A curious tension gripped her. Could it be possible that he could…but no…It was just male sexual jealousy, nothing more.
She wanted to tell him the truth, but she sensed that to do so would be to leave herself too vulnerable to him. It would be safer and wiser to let him go on doubting. All at once their earlier quarrel came back to her. James wanted her to tell Lucy the truth. He wanted to end their marriage, she was sure of it. Last night had simply been an expression of a man’s physical need, nothing more.
She thought for a moment before answering his question, and then glad of the darkness to conceal her expression from him she said lightly, ‘Does it matter? Lots of women have fantasies about men other than their husbands.’
She wanted to cry out in protest as he withdrew from her turning over on to his side, unbearably hurt by his mocking, ‘No, I suppose not, especially when it has such an extremely erotic effect on you.’
She only realised how angry he was when he added bitingly, ‘Perhaps the next time we make love you’d like me to be my ancestor physically as well mentally. Maybe I could hire the appropriate costume…It would be quite interesting to see what effect that has on you, if simply imagining that I’m him can…’ He broke off as Jenna burst out, ‘Stop it…stop it!’ and laughed savagely before saying finally, ‘There are those who do say that there’s a remarkable family resemblance between us, but I can’t say that I find your response to me exactly flattering. Not when I know that in reality you’re making love to a man who’s been dead for over a hundred years.’
Jenna felt as though she had been physically and mentally mauled. James had hurt her before, but it had been nothing like this. She crept out of his bed and went into her own room, gathering up her discarded clothes as she did so. They could not continue to live like this. The thought struck her that perhaps James was making life as impossible for her as he could in the hope that she might be the one to leave, to leave him with the Hall.
Strangely enough, the thought of losing the house did not affect her at all.
* * *
‘Where’s Lucy?’
They were having breakfast, James was reading his paper, Sarah had a book open in front of her, but now both of them looked up as Jenna came in with some fresh coffee. Munching a piece of toast, Sarah said in surprise, ‘Oh, didn’t you know? She’s gone out. She left just after she spoke to you, James,’ Sarah added, turning to her step-brother. ‘I saw you both coming in from outside. It isn’t like Lucy to be such an early bird, normally I have to drag her out of bed.’
A cold fist closed round Jenna’s heart. She looked into James’s face but could discern nothing from it. He had threatened last night that if she did not tell Lucy the truth herself, he would do it for her.
Had he carried out that threat? Had he told Lucy the truth about her parenthood?
Jenna ached to demand the truth from him, and couldn’t repress a small sigh of relief when Sarah finished her coffee and said lightly, ‘I’m going to see how they’re getting on with the work on the hall ceiling. See you both later.’
When she had gone, before Jenna could say a word, James frowned and said thoughtfully, ‘Has it struck you that Sarah could have a crush on young Bob? She seems to spend an awful lot of her time watching him work.’
‘Never mind Sarah,’ Jenna exploded. ‘What about Lucy? You told her, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’ she demanded, standing up and pacing anxiously, coming to an abrupt halt in front of the window which she stared out of blindly. ‘You can’t wait to get rid of me, can you? You don’t give a damn about Lucy, you never did. All you wanted was this place. Well
, you can have it and welcome. I couldn’t live here with you now, even if you begged me, not after what you’ve done. How could you?’ she whispered in a choked voice turning to look at him, her face white with strain. ‘How could you? Didn’t you think of the effect it might have on her of——’
She gasped in shock as he got up from the table and came towards her, grasping her shoulders and shaking her almost violently.
‘Just what in hell are you talking about?’ he demanded thickly. ‘Just what sort of man do you think I am, Jenna?’ He released her, his face contorting in a brief expression of disgust. ‘I don’t need to ask that really, do I? You’ve already told me. Well, for your information I didn’t tell Lucy the truth—you did. She overheard part of our conversation last night, it seems. I found her wandering round the garden early this morning. Like her, although for different reasons, I hadn’t been able to sleep. I guessed at once that she knew.’
Jenna said nothing. She couldn’t have spoken to save her life. She sank down on to the cushioned window-seat, her body trembling with aching despair. ‘What did she say to you?’ she asked in a husky voice. ‘What…’
‘She asked me if what she had heard was true—apparently she didn’t hear all of it, only the first bit. She was so shocked that she didn’t stop to listen to any more. I told her as much as I could.’
‘Oh, my God, she must hate me,’ Jenna said quietly, pressing her hands to her face. ‘For her to find out like that.’
‘She took it surprisingly well…’
‘Then, where is she?’ Jenna cried desperately. ‘Where has she gone? James, she’s missing!’
‘She’s gone to see Bill and Nancy. I drove her there. She wanted to talk to someone who knew what had happened. I suggested Nancy and Bill and she agreed. She’ll be quite safe with them, Jenna.’