by Penny Jordan
There was silence, until Luke said quietly, ‘Yes, I know.’ And then, as though following some train of thought of his own, he added easily, ‘You’ve done an excellent job with the twins, Jenneth. Your parents would be justifiably proud of you—and them.’
For some reason, when she had been able to hold out against all the other torments he had inflicted, this last one proved too much, and she lashed out fiercely at him.
‘Meaning what, exactly, Luke? That because you approve of the way I’ve brought up the twins you think I’m a suitable person to take charge of your daughter? Am I supposed to be flattered by that?’ she demanded bitterly. And then, before he could answer, she told him fiercely, ‘I don’t want you here, Luke. I don’t want you in my life and I don’t want you in my home…’
For a moment she almost thought she saw pain darken his eyes. He took a step towards her and she felt a fierce thrill of rebellion engulf her, but almost instantly he had himself under control, and, ignoring her comments as though they had never been uttered, he reached to unlock the small case he was carrying and said lightly, ‘Oh, before I forget… You left this behind you at the hotel last weekend.’
Jenneth wasn’t looking at him. Through the open door of her studio she saw to her dismay that the village’s most notorious gossip was just about to walk up to her studio, and she remembered with a stab of irritation that she had promised to look out some jumble for her for a local fund-raising event.
She had arrived just in time to catch Luke’s drawling statement, and Luke, with his back to the door, had no idea that she was there as he removed the grey silk nightdress from his case. Sliding it through his fingers, he said softly to Jenneth, ‘I found it on the bedroom floor after you’d gone.’ He threw it to her, and Jenneth saw the lightning calculation gleam in her unwanted visitor’s eyes and knew despairingly that within days the whole village would have heard about the incident, suitably embellished and interpreted.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, Jenneth… But you did say you’d have some jumble.’
In other circumstances she could almost have laughed at the inimical frown Luke turned on the older woman, who was already eyeing both Luke and the nightdress speculatively and with such obvious relish that Jenneth felt sick inside.
She suffered a moment’s savage temptation to pick up the nightdress and hand it over as jumble, but common sense stayed her, and instead, excusing herself to Luke, she escorted the other woman out of the studio and towards the garage, deflecting her unsubtle probing as best she could.
The day’s only relief was the announcement by Luke that he was spending the weekend with a medical colleague and his wife. As she listened to the twins and Angelica chorusing their mutual disappointment, she could only pray despairingly that fate would relinquish its torment of her and speedily provide Luke with his own house.
It was only her own ingrained good manners and an awareness that both the twins and Angelica were watching her that enabled her to walk with Luke to his car while he told her blandly that, since he had a few days in hand, it seemed a pity not to take advantage of the good weather and further Angelica’s education at the same time by joining the household part-way through the week, so that he would have time to spare to show Angelica the surrounding countryside before taking up his new post.
Jenneth gave him a tight smile, too engrossed in her own pain to see the sudden shadowing of his eyes as she forestalled his attempt to bridge the gap between them.
What had she intended to do? She wondered achingly. Kiss her goodbye? The same chaste salute on the cheek that she had seen him afford his aunt and Louise on countless occasions in the past?
‘We won’t keep you any longer,’ he told her, his voice suddenly and unaccountably hard and unkind. ‘It’s Saturday, and no doubt you’ve got plans for the evening. I must say you’ve surprised me, Jenneth,’ he added, and there was something in the way he looked at her that made her catch her breath and cringe inwardly beneath the subtle cruelty of his mocking voice. ‘When you told me you’d embraced the mores of the sexual revolution and that you preferred the variety of a succession of lovers to the vegetation of one single stable relationship, I thought you were simply taking defensive measures, but here you are, twenty-nine years old, still single, still unwilling to commit yourself to one among your many lovers.’
As she winced beneath the gentle but oh, so destructive words, he opened the car door for Angelica, and then turned back to Jenneth and said, with a smile that was as cold and cruel as an arctic winter, ‘Incredible—after so much and such varied sexual experience, you still manage to project that same air of virginal apprehension. If there’s one thing I regret about the past, it’s possibly that I wasn’t your first lover.’
No one other than she could hear what he was saying, and she fought hard to control the crawling burn of colour that betrayed what she was feeling.
Caution warned her against retaliating, already knowing that the price of such a retaliation would be too high, but she was in no mood to listen to any cautionary voices and, almost stuttering with fury and pride, she turned to him and hissed virulently, her eyes turning from cool grey to dark, anguished purple, ‘If there’s one thing I regret, it’s that I was ever stupid enough to believe you were anything other than a liar and a cheat…’ Then, unable to withstand the overpowering temptation to pierce his obnoxious conceit, she added acidly, ‘And as for being my lover—first, last or any other…I’d rather die…’
She was trembling as she stepped back from him, almost incoherent with rage and resentment, freed momentarily from the burden of her pain to the exhilaration of giving vent to emotions she had fought too long to control.
Giving him a final contemptuous glare, she turned her back on him, fierce quivers of sensation racing down her spine as she heard his soft laughter following her.
Naturally, for the rest of the weekend the twins were full of the convenience of the coincidences which had, so they believed, led to a more than satisfactory resolution of both their and Luke’s problems.
‘We were worried about leaving you here on your own,’ Kit told Jenneth for the umpteenth time over dinner on Sunday evening. ‘But now, with Luke here…’
Jenneth gritted her teeth and said nothing. She had stood in for their parents for so long that it was beyond her to destroy their illusions and tell them the truth… Watching her pick at her food, Kit and Nick exchanged guilty and conspiratorial looks above her downbent head and, as Kit confided to his twin later that evening when they were alone, if he wasn’t convinced that Luke was doing the right thing, he didn’t think he’d be able to endure Jenneth’s misery.
‘It has hit her pretty hard, hasn’t it?’ Nick agreed. ‘But Luke’s right. If he’d simply told her that he realised that he’d made a mistake, and that she was the one he’d wanted all along, she wouldn’t have believed him…’
‘No…I never realised he’d dumped her for someone else, did you?’
‘He didn’t have much choice, did he, not with the other girl pregnant? I suppose he had to do the decent thing…’
They exchanged wryly masculine looks, and Nick said uneasily, ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
There was silence, and then Kit reflected, ‘Just as well that Luke had time to tell us what the situation was before Jen got back. I was terrified she was going to tell him he couldn’t stay when he announced that we’d invited him to move in…’
‘Mmm, me too. Do you think she does still love him?’
Kit grinned at him and scoffed, ‘Are you totally blind?’
His twin, always the more soft-hearted of them, was looking a little uncomfortable, and Kit guessed that he was worrying about whether or not they had done the right thing in allowing Luke to persuade them to join his conspiracy to get Jenneth to admit him back into her life.
‘It’s not going to be easy,’ he had admitted bluntly. ‘She has every reason to loathe and resent me.’ And then he had told them coolly and very objectiv
ely what he had done.
‘If you ditched her then, why should we believe you want her back now?’ Kit had asked him equally bluntly, and he had given them a look that Kit later confessed to his twin had made him feel as though he had trespassed into very private territory indeed.
All he had said to them, though, was, ‘I loved your sister then and I still love her now. For that I’m afraid you will have to accept my word.’ And, oddly enough, for some reason that had been sufficient.
It was Nick who had thought to ask him just what he wanted from Jenneth, and he had replied promptly, ‘Marriage…’ Then he had added wryly, ‘And somehow I think that will be easier to achieve than regaining her trust, so that, I’m afraid, must come first.’
A statement at which both of them had boggled a little, since Luke had not minimised how much Jenneth was bound to resent and mistrust him.
Even now they weren’t quite sure just how Luke intended to persuade Jenneth to marry him, when by his own admission she neither liked nor trusted him.
‘There are ways,’ he had said mysteriously in response to their question, and then, before they could ask him any more, Angelica had come bursting in, demanding both their and her father’s attention, and wanting to know when Jenneth was coming back.
‘You don’t think he’ll hurt her, do you?’ Nick muttered uncertainly, earning himself a cynical look from his twin and the response,
‘Do you mean more than he has already?’
* * *
Jenneth was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to notice anything unusual in the twins’ behaviour. There were practical matters appertaining to Luke and Angelica’s arrival which kept her hands busy, as though she wasn’t busy enough already.
Nick, wandering into her studio one Tuesday afternoon, noticed the silk nightdress screwed up on the floor, and picked it up, studying first it and then his sister with raised eyebrows.
‘Louise gave it to me for being her unofficial bridesmaid,’ Jenneth told him, anticipating his question.
‘Mmm…not exactly your style, it it?’ he commented with a grin and a frankness that for some reason hurt. Even her brothers, or so it seemed, recognised that essential lack of sexual allure in her nature that had led to Luke discarding her in favour of someone else. ‘What’s it doing in here, anyway?’ he asked curiously.
‘I left it at the hotel and Luke brought it back for me,’ Jenneth told him, deliberately turning her back on him so that he wouldn’t see the telltale surge of colour running up her skin.
She had no way of knowing whether or not Laura Gosford had yet passed on details of the interesting scene she had witnessed, but if she had, and if either of the twins got to hear of it, it would be extremely awkward if she had fibbed to Nick about the reasons for the nightdress’s presence on her studio floor.
Damn Luke, and damn Louise as well, she thought inwardly, watching the way her brother’s eyebrows rose. If the nightdress weren’t so blatantly provocative, if it were one of her normal plain cotton nightshirts, she was quite sure it would never have provoked the very obviously erroneous thoughts its presence in Luke’s possession seemed to arouse.
Nick was grinning at her, and he came over to her and said teasingly, ‘Come on, Jen, there’s no need to be embarrassed. We’re all grown-up now; if you and Luke are having a bit of a thing…’
Jenneth glowered at him.
‘We aren’t,’ she told him flatly, then added anxiously, ‘Nick…please don’t suggest anything like that to Luke, would you—not even in fun? It would be…embarrassing for both of us,’ she explained.
‘You mean because you were once engaged? But that was over years ago,’ Nick protested cheerfully. Then, seeing her face, he agreed, ‘OK, I won’t say anything, although you’ve got to admit, it’s very suspicious. I mean, how did Luke know the nightdress was yours? How come you left it behind in the first place?’
Jenneth was thankful that the telephone rang, freeing her from her brother’s teasing questions. She picked up the receiver, firmly turning her back on him and listening to Eleanor’s wry complaint that she was finding life a little dull as her lover was away on business, and that she had decided to give a dinner party to enliven it a little.
‘Naturally I want you to come, but what I also want is your recipe for that delicious fruit sauce you make.’
The dinner party was on Saturday and, confirming that she would be able to attend, Jenneth reeled off the details of the required recipe.
Sooner or later she was going to have to tell Eleanor about Luke…or rather about the fact that he was going to be staying with her. She bit her lip, gnawing worriedly at it. Her friend was far too perceptive at times, and Jenneth could only hope she would manage to give a convincing performance of Luke being nothing other than an old family friend.
He and Angelica were due to arrive in the morning.
In any other circumstances she would have delighted in the anticipation of Angelica’s company, but the mere thought of Luke standing by and watching with coolly detached awareness of her vulnerability while she became enslaved by his child was enough to make her wish that Angelica was the kind of revoltingly spoiled and unappealing child she could easily and safely hold at a distance.
She was surprised that Luke, who very obviously loved his daughter, should not see the danger of Angelica forming an emotional attachment to her which must cause the little girl unhappiness when it eventually had to be broken.
Angelica was endearingly honest and open in her feelings, and in her desire for her father to remarry and provide her with a mother. Of course she had been very young, less than two and a half when her own mother had died, and she quite plainly adored her father and knew that he loved her in turn. Because of her own emotional make-up, it was plain that she felt no jealousy or resentment at the thought of sharing her father with someone else, possibly because she was too young as yet to be aware of adult emotions, and in her childish way she would see any second marriage that Luke contracted merely as her father’s wish to provide her with the mother she so desperately wanted.
Would Luke marry again? Another sophisticated, experienced woman able to match and arouse his sexuality in a way that she with her naïveté had not?
Savagely she gritted her teeth, remembering the full measure of her own ignorance…remembering how she had assumed, because she naïvely had found just the mere touch of Luke’s hand against her skin so intensely thrilling that she practically choked on the excitement of it, that Luke was similarly affected by the slightest intimacy with her, when in reality… She took a deep breath, and forced herself to confront the truth.
The reality was that Luke had never desired her enough to do more than make light-hearted imitation love to her, and when he felt real desire—real need—it had been for someone else.
And yet why, knowing that—and he must surely have known it well before he proposed to her—had he invited that sort of commitment? Male vanity…boredom?
Once she would have asserted that the Luke she knew could never behave so shallowly, but Luke himself had shown her how far she had mistaken his true nature.
So, knowing that, why did she still love him? Why did she still react to him as intensely and dangerously as she had done at twenty-one?
* * *
She had deliberately planned to be out when Luke arrived, firmly telling the twins that, since he was there at their invitation, they could be the ones to give up their time to welcome him.
Resolutely she filled her day with appointments, returning home well after the rush-hour traffic had emptied York, hoping against hope that something would have happened to prevent Luke’s arrival.
It hadn’t. The first thing she saw as she turned into the drive was his grey Jaguar. The second was Angelica, who was plainly waiting for her.
Despairingly she returned the little girl’s enthusiastic hug, knowing she simply did not have what it took to reject her. Because she knew what that kind of rejection felt like?
‘Daddy’s making supper,’ Angelica told her astonishingly. ‘I’m starving, aren’t you?’ And then, as she danced at Jenneth’s side, she added accusingly, ‘I’ve been waiting ages and ages for you. I wanted you to come with me to see my new school, but Daddy said you were very busy. I told the teacher about you, though…I told her that you were my pretend mummy and I told her about Kit and Nick…I’d like to have some brothers,’ she added wistfully. And Jenneth, too exhausted to say anything, followed her into the kitchen, startled to discover that she had spoken the truth and that Luke was preparing supper. An appetising smell of spices filled the kitchen, making her sharply aware that she hadn’t eaten all day.
‘Good, you’re back,’ announced Luke without looking at her. ‘We checked on your last appointment and guessed that you’d be back around now. Hope you still like lasagne…’
Disbelief rendered her speechless as she digested his throwaway remark, and she wondered wrathfully which one of the twins it had been who had given him access to her diary and her telephone book.
‘There was no need to wait for me,’ she told him curtly, causing him to turn round and say softly,
‘It wouldn’t have been the same without you.’
She could feel her face burning as much with rage as with self-consciousness, and on an impulse she didn’t want to name she told him savagely, ‘Well, I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. I’m eating out tonight.’
It was a lie, and for a moment, watching him, she actually thought he was going to say as much, but then Angelica tugged on her sleeve and implored, ‘Can’t you really have supper with us?’
Above his daughter’s head Luke’s eyes met hers.
If he had primed Angelica he couldn’t have done better, she acknowledged, torn between resentment that he should walk into her home and her life and calmly expect her to accept him as though all the years of anguish and misery had never been, and reluctance to hurt the little girl watching her so pleadingly.