by Penny Jordan
And then, to her surprise, he put down the spoon he was holding and came over to them, taking hold of Angelica and telling her gently, ‘You heard Jenneth, Angie. She’s already made arrangements to go out tonight.’
He stood up with Angelica in his arms, his eyes boring into hers with flat, biting accusation, and she wondered helplessly why it was that she should be made to feel guilty, when he was the one who was culpable.
The very last thing she wanted to do was to go out again, but she had no alternative now, so she went upstairs, showered and changed into a cool silk dress…redid her hair and make-up and went back down again to find Nick and Kit waiting for her to demand where she was going and with whom.
‘I’m having dinner with a client…’ she told them vaguely, and then stiffened when she heard Luke saying laconically behind her,
‘There’s no need to spare our feelings, Jenneth…’ She swung round, glaring at him, and he added softly, ‘Wearing an outfit like that, there’s no way you’re going out on a business date…and besides—’ he added as Kit and Nick exchanged looks and quickly melted away. ‘And besides, the twins have already told me that you never agree to business dinners or meetings in the evening.’
It was true. A self-imposed rule begun when the boys had been younger, and which she had automatically stuck to.
As she bit her lip in vexation, Luke asked idly, ‘Will you be bringing him back here?’
She stared at him stupidly for a moment, and then said bewilderedly, ‘Who?’
‘Your date, of course…’ He shrugged powerful shoulders, and unwisely her gaze clung to the hard breadth of his torso, her memory conjuring up a disturbing vision of a hot Sunday afternoon when they had lain on the riverbank and Luke had removed his shirt. His skin had been tanned and unexpectedly tempting to touch. He had laughed at her shyness and taken her hands and spread them over his body, holding them there and then moving them as he kissed her…
Her mouth went dry at the disturbing image.
‘After all, we’re both adults,’ Luke was saying. ‘And if you want me to make myself scarce, you only have to say so. I expect you found it difficult at first, getting the twins to accept that you had a fully functioning sex life. I must admit I’m dreading the time coming when Angelica starts asking awkward questions, and I suspect boys are ten times worse, especially when they’re as protective as the twins are of you…’
Jenneth stared at him in disbelief, and without thinking said roundly, ‘If you’re intimating that I’d bring my dates back here…and go to bed with them…’
She stopped abruptly, realising what she was in danger of betraying, but to her relief Luke seemed unaware of her. He wasn’t looking at her, and the dark lashes lowered over his eyes concealed his expression from her.
‘Oh, you find it easier to go back to their place… Well, yes, I can see the sense in that.’ He gave a rich chuckle, and told her, ‘I can see I’m going to have to pick your brains while I’m staying here; I suspect you’ll be able to give me plenty of useful tips…’ A casual, easy smile was thrown her way, together with the breathtaking enquiry, ‘Will you be away all night, or…?’
Jenneth compressed her mouth and said furiously, ‘No, I shall not!’
‘Mmm… Personally, when I make love I must admit I enjoy the intimacy of spending the entire night with my partner, but then I must admit I’m a little old-fashioned about these things, and my experience probably falls very far short of yours.’
‘I doubt it,’ Jenneth told him through gritted teeth, wondering what on earth she was going to do with herself all evening, and where she was going to go.
In the end she went to the gallery, let herself in with her own set of keys, and then rang Eleanor, relieved to find that her friend was spending the evening alone and only too delighted with her offer of company.
‘This isn’t like you,’ she smiled, when she opened her front door to Jenneth an hour later. ‘Normally nothing can prise you away from home in the evening. Anything wrong?’ she added when she saw the high flush of colour of Jenneth’s otherwise pale face, and the grim set of her mouth.
‘I’m having a few problems at home,’ Jenneth admitted, knowing that it was impossible to pretend that nothing was wrong.
‘With the twins?’ Eleanor asked in some surprise.
Jenneth shook her head and sat down. Suddenly she needed desperately to unburden herself to someone, and Eleanor at least was someone she could trust…someone detached enough from the situation to be able to understand.
She explained briefly, in a tight, controlled voice, about her engagement to Luke and his subsequent marriage to someone else, and then told Eleanor about his totally astounding arrival in York, and the twins’ unintentional betrayal in inviting him to make a temporary home with them.
‘Good heavens!’ Eleanor said frankly. ‘In view of the fact that he rejected you for someone else, I should have thought you’d be the last person he’d want to stay with…’
Jenneth shrugged and said frustratedly, ‘It’s almost as though he’s trying to pretend that none of that ever happened. He behaves as though we’re old friends…as though…’ She gestured helplessly, trying to convey her despair and confusion.
‘Why don’t you just tell him firmly that you want him to leave?’ Eleanor suggested mildly.
Jenneth shook her head.
‘I can’t,’ she said huskily.
Eleanor gave a faint sigh and touched her arm lightly. ‘Ah…now I think I begin to understand. What to him appears to be very much a forgotten incident, to you is still a painful and wounding issue…’
‘Yes,’ admitted Jenneth unhappily. ‘And I’m afraid that if I try and tackle him I’ll do or say something that will betray to him how I feel…’
‘And how do you feel?’ Eleanor asked her calmly.
Jenneth grimaced. ‘Much as I did ten years ago when I first realised I loved him.’
‘And you’re frightened that he’ll guess that? Surely, if he’s treating the whole thing as though it never happened, he can’t be astute enough to make that kind of assumption?’
Jenneth shook her head.
‘No way,’ she told Eleanor grimly. ‘He’s very astute.’
She missed the sharp, thoughtful glance Eleanor gave her, lifting her head only when Eleanor said humorously, ‘Well, short of offering you sanctuary in the shape of one of my spare bedrooms, I don’t know what I can do to help.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Jenneth told her bitterly. ‘Luke already believes I’m spending the evening with my lover. If I stay here, he’ll probably tell the twins I’m spending the night with him.’ She gave a soft shiver and added wryly, ‘I’m supposed to be the guardian of their morals, and not the other way round, but…’
‘Yes, but…’ agreed Eleanor drily. ‘It never ceases to amaze me that men can become so outraged at the thought of one of their own kind daring to see their mother and sisters as sexually available, when that is exactly what they are doing themselves to someone else’s mother or sister…’
Jenneth laughed, and Eleanor said firmly, ‘That’s better…’ She got up and said quietly, ‘Jen, it’s none of my business, but I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you to simply ask Luke why he’s forcing himself back into your life like this? You say he’s an astute, intelligent man; he must know how much he hurt you. Most men would run a mile from a situation such as the one he’s deliberately got himself into… They’re all cowards at heart, and none of them likes being reminded of those occasions in their lives when they’ve behaved in a fashion that’s less than gentlemanly…’
Jenneth said tiredly, ‘I expect that as far as he’s concerned, he did the right thing. She was, after all, expecting his child…’
‘A child conceived when he was actually engaged to you,’ Eleanor reminded her. She looked worriedly at her friend and said consideringly, ‘It couldn’t be, I suppose, that he regrets what he did…that he’s looking for a second chance?’
J
enneth stared at her, hope flaring fiercely inside her, and then dying just as quickly.
‘No,’ she said firmly.
‘Well, there’s only one way you’re going to find out the truth,’ Eleanor told her gently, ‘and that’s by asking him…’
She was disturbed to see the bitterness glitter in Jenneth’s normally gentle eyes as she said tautly, ‘Luke lied to me in the past…why should he tell me the truth now? Anyway, I think it’s just that he sees me as a convenient “someone” to take care of Angelica for him until he can get himself organised.’
Eleanor raised her eyebrows and said, ‘I thought you told me he loved his daughter.’
‘He does,’ Jenneth confirmed. ‘Why?’
‘Because, my dear, if he’s astute as you seem to think, and if he loves his child as you say he does, then surely the very last person he’d want to entrust her to would be a woman who, by his own treatment of her, had the very best reason in the world for wanting to punish him and make him suffer as she’d suffered, and what better way to do that than through his child…’
‘Oh, but I couldn’t do anything like that,’ protested Jenneth.
Eleanor smile grimly. ‘No,’ she agreed, and then warned, ‘Be careful, Jenneth…I suspect he knows you better than you think.’
‘But not well enough to realise that my nights are not filled with a never-ending succession of different lovers,’ Jenneth told her, striving to sound light-hearted.
She glanced at her watch. It was only eleven o’clock. She dared not arrive home before one at the earliest.
‘How would you like it if I spent a couple of hours working on the accounts?’ she suggested to Eleanor.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS almost a quarter to two when Jenneth parked her car between the twins’ Metro and Luke’s Jaguar.
She was exhausted mentally and physically, her head pounding from two hours spent poring over columns of figures, her temper close to boiling point; her defence mechanism of distancing herself from anything approaching any kind of emotional reaction seemed to have completely deserted her.
She walked wearily into the kitchen, thinking only of crawling into bed and staying there, hopefully until Luke had ended his self-invited visit.
The kitchen light was on, and she grimaced a little. How often had she told the twins about wasting electricity? There had been times, especially as they grew fully into their teens, when it had often shocked her to hear the very strong echoes of their parents’ voices in her chiding of her brothers.
‘You’re back. Good, I was just beginning to wonder if you’d changed your mind and had decided after all to stay over…’
Jenneth stiffened, staring in disbelief into the shadowy corner of the kitchen, where Luke was lazily uncoiling himself from the comfortable, if shabby, chair beside the Aga.
There was a book on the table beside him. She couldn’t read its title upside-down, but it looked like some kind of text-book. She noticed this vaguely as the full force of all her resentment and frustration boiled up inside her and she snapped furiously, ‘You’re not my keeper, Luke. If I choose to stay out all night that’s no concern of yours, and as for you lurking here in the kitchen waiting for me as though…as though I was some kind of idiotic teenager, incapable of running my own life…’
‘I agree.’ The calm words silenced her, and she stared at him, her chest heaving, her eyes wild with anger that was dying to be replaced by an instinctive wariness.
‘As a matter of fact, the twins were concerned about you.’ He gave her an oblique, almost knowing look that made a fine chill of apprehension run over her skin.
‘They seemed to find it unusual and therefore worrying that you should be staying out so late, and so in order to ease their minds I offered to stay up and check that you got in safely…’
There was nothing Jenneth could say. She glowered at him in frustrated silence, all too aware of the thinly veiled challenge he had just given her. It hadn’t been by accident that he had mentioned the twins’ surprise. Did he guess that she had lied? That she had not spent the evening with a lover, but on her own?
As this humiliating thought struck her, he asked conversationally, ‘Did you have a pleasant evening?’
Jenneth looked suspiciously at him, but he had retreated into the shadows and his voice held nothing but polite, urbane enquiry.
‘Very pleasant, thank you,’ she said stiffly.
He moved then, and she saw the mocking, glittering smile that darkened his eyes as he taunted, ‘Ah, Jenneth…how ungenerous you are. Were I your lover, I should feel very deflated indeed to hear an evening spent in my company described with such lacklustre words… Will you be seeing him again?’
The dulcet, dangerous question slipped so easily beneath her guard, causing her to jump and react with instinctive self-defence, fibbing wildly.
‘Yes…on Saturday. We’re having dinner together…’
Thank goodness she had Eleanor’s dinner party to attend, and would not need to endure another long, exhausting evening in the gallery’s cramped office, she reflected miserably, as she turned away from her tormentor and headed for the door.
Only somehow or other Luke was there before her, barring her way, with the intimidating barrier of his lean, hard body.
‘I’d like to go to bed, Luke,’ she objected sharply, her nerve-endings quivering suddenly at the way he was looking at her, studying the shape of her body under the thin covering of her silk dress…almost as though she was a long-awaited gift he was anticipating unwrapping, she recognised.
‘Poor Jenneth,’ he mocked her. ‘Something tells me your evening wasn’t the success you’re trying to pretend. Perhaps this will make it better,’ he suggested softly. And before she could move, she was trapped against the wall by the intimacy of his body with its heat and maleness, with nowhere to go other than into the arms he stretched out to entrap her.
That he should be doing this to her was so out of context, so unexpected, that by the time she had marshalled her wits and was pushing frantically at his chest he was already feathering his mouth along the soft, vulnerable flesh of her exposed jawline, whispering unbelievably in her ear. ‘You used to like this… Do you remember?’ And then, ‘But of course, these days no doubt you prefer more sophisticated stimulation.’ And his hands slid smoothly down her back to pull her into the heat of his body, so that the hard maleness of his flesh was imprinted against her, the fierce thud of his heart beating into her.
The mouth he lowered to cover her own was unexpectedly gentle, its pressure and seduction so dangerously reminiscent of the past, that her own mouth had softened and opened almost before she knew what was happening.
Even when she heard the soft sound of satisfaction buried in his throat, it didn’t really register what was happening… It was all so totally unbelievable.
He kissed her slowly and tenderly, reducing her to a shivering, uninhibited responsiveness. The stunning incredulity of being in his arms, of being touched and kissed in that way, was so achingly familiar to her that her body was swept unthinkingly into response patterns so long ago set down that she had not even realised they were there.
She felt the hard arousal of Luke’s body, and instinctively pressed closer to him, blindly seeking the intimacy of flesh on flesh contact.
She felt Luke tense, mutter something against her lips as they clung moistly to his, and then he was kissing her again, more urgently this time, demanding from her a response that she was only too eager to give.
She felt his hands on her back and the coolness of the air on her exposed flesh as he eased her dress away from her body, and then he was touching her breasts, sending shock-waves of sensation shuddering through her body as though her skin had caught fire.
She tensed and moaned beneath the disruptive caress, wanting him to go on, wanting him to fulfil the unspoken promises he had made her so long ago, when his touch had whispered seductively to her body that he would show it pleasure beyond imagining�
� Only he had not done so. Instead he had been sharing that pleasure with someone else.
Instantly she went cold, remembering where she was and with whom, and Luke, sensing her withdrawal, lifted his mouth from hers and watched her.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing…’ she began unsteadily, but he stopped her with a cruel, taunting smile that locked her breath in her throat.
‘No?’ he queried softly, with almost insolent amusement. ‘I should have thought it was obvious.’ His voice had dropped to a dangerously malevolent purr. ‘Especially to a woman of your experience. I was attempting to give you the satisfaction your lover so obviously failed to supply.’
And the smile he gave her was at once so bland and so cruel that she felt she would freeze where she stood.
‘Not a wise decision on second thoughts,’ he added, monitoring every change in her expression, making her feel that she was exposed to him in the most dangerous and intimate way possible. ‘And as acts of charity go, not a particularly successful one, either…’
Acts of charity… Jenneth felt her legs almost buckle beneath her.
A hot, searing tide of misery and loathing flooded into her, and she ached for the detachment and the cynicism to match him with the kind of loaded, barbed response that would damage him as he had just damaged her. But she couldn’t think of a single thing to say, and so, turning on her heel, she wrenched open the kitchen door and made her way shakily to her bedroom.
Luke waited until the door had closed behind her, and then moved restlessly over to where he had left the medical text-book he had been reading.
His colleagues had been astounded when he had announced that he was putting in for this job, hiding himself away in an admittedly excellent but relatively unknown teaching hospital, when top hospitals the world over were clamouring for his skills as a surgeon. None of them had been able to understand his decision. They had thought he was mad and told him so. Now he wondered if they hadn’t been right.
That had been an idiotic move, challenging her sexually like that…and if her initial response had been the sweetest pleasure he had known in years, it had been a pleasure quickly lost and it had left him with an ache that reminded him savagely that, no matter how intelligent, how educated, how analytical a man might teach himself to be, there were still times when his physical responses would always overwhelm his intellect.