by Penny Jordan
Nell couldn’t stand any more. She cried out sharply, ‘Stop it! Stop it, Joss. You were the one who wanted this marriage.’
‘And you were the one who needed it,’ he reminded her brutally, pouring himself a glass of champagne and drinking it quickly.
He held out the bottle to her, but she shook her head.
‘No? Want to get the ordeal over with as quickly as possible, do you? Well, you’d better pray that if you aren’t carrying my child already, by the end of tonight you are.’
He poured another glass of champagne and drank half of it, and then with a grimace he put the glass down.
‘I’ve only ever had to do this once before—drink before I could make love to a woman. And she was my first. Take off your nightdress, Nell.’
He saw her shock and laughed unkindly. ‘I thought you wanted to get this over as quickly as possible. If you keep that on that’s not going to be possible. When I bought it for you it was with the intention of tasting every millimetre of flesh it exposed before I took it off you. Pathetic what traps our imaginations lay for us, isn’t it …?’
He was, if not drunk, then at least tipsy, Nell recognised with shock, but then, like her, he had eaten nothing all day, and he was normally a very abstemious man. It made her skin crawl with self-disgust to realise that he had to get drunk before he could touch her. She had read about such things, but never anticipated she herself would experience them.
But Joss seemed unaware of her self-contempt. He was still looking at her, his eyes glittering hotly as he slowly studied her body.
He reached out and traced the delicate silk of one shoulder-strap with his thumb and, although he had not touched her there at all, Nell was uncomfortably conscious of the aroused tension in her breasts, her nipples pushing against the tiny shells of lace.
Even her breathing betrayed her agitation, she recognised frantically as she fought to control her response to him, trying to step back, but finding that doing so only brought him closer as he closed the gap between them.
‘I knew you would look like this. Feel like this,’ he said thickly, and, as though he knew exactly what she was feeling, he slowly traced the outer petals of the flower that covered her breast teasingly, narrowing the tormenting circles until the pad of his thumb touched the tiny ring of almost bare flesh that swelled against the lace stamens.
She wasn’t cold, but she was shivering, Nell recognised, and so was Joss. That shocked her and she looked up at him. His eyes burned hot gold.
‘Nell,’ he muttered thickly, and she cried out as she felt his mouth close over her tormented flesh. Her whole body seemed to contract, her eyes unwittingly registering her shock and confusion that he could so easily arouse her. She forgot all the promises she had made to herself and clung desperately to him, making incoherent sounds of need and pleasure.
A long time later—or was it only minutes?—they lay together on the vast bed in a tangle of pleasure-sated limbs, the last tiny reverberations of sensation still pulsing through her body …
In the morning it was different. In the morning she remembered all that she should have remembered before letting Joss make love to her, and she was deliberately cool and distant with him, lashing herself with painful reminders of how much champagne he had had to drink before he could make love to her, and how the fierceness of his possession was a tribute to whoever he had been thinking about when he did make love to her, and not her herself.
The day was overcast, and dragged, both of them treating one another with the cool politeness of two strangers forced to endure one another’s company.
After lunch Joss announced that he had some work to do and Nell, taking the hint, announced that she would explore the gardens.
It was too cold to stay out for very long, and when she got back Joss was on the phone, frowning as he asked several brief questions.
When he replaced the receiver he was still frowning, but Nell didn’t ask him if anything was wrong and when, later in the day after several more telephone calls, he announced that he was going to have to cut their honeymoon short and fly to New York, she made no demur.
CHAPTER TEN
‘YOU’RE not pregnant, then?’
Nell looked at her stepsister and fought against betraying the painful kick of pain twisting her stomach.
She and Joss had been married for eight weeks, and, as Grania had so rightly announced, she was not carrying his child. But then, it was hardly likely that she would be, not when he had not made love to her since their return from France.
In fact, he was hardly ever at home, spending long days in London, interspersed with increasingly frequent trips to New York. He looked tired and tense, and Nell suspected that he was bitterly regretting their marriage.
‘Not yet,’ she responded with false calm.
‘Where is Joss, anyway? I thought he’d be here.’
‘He’s in New York.’
‘Again? Perhaps he’s got someone else there,’ Grania suggested spitefully, adding when she saw Nell’s colour change, ‘Oh, come on, Nell, surely you don’t expect him to be faithful to you?’ She yawned. ‘Well, I wish I’d known that before I came down here. I was hoping to coax him into giving me a sub. I’ve seen this darling fur coat—sable … and it is almost Christmas. I wonder if Joss will spend Christmas here or in New York,’ she added maliciously.
‘I really have no idea,’ Nell retorted, her patience snapping.
She felt both relieved and guilty when Grania had gone, but her patience had been worn thin by the pressures within her marriage, and sometimes she didn’t know which was worse, having Joss at home, or having him away. When he was at home he was distant with her, and, although they shared the same bedroom, since their honeymoon he had made no attempt to touch her. When he was away she ached for him to come home, hoping each time that somehow a miracle would occur and that he would come back wanting her, but of course it never did.
She was in the sitting-room making a list of Christmas cards when she heard the car. Thinking it might be Joss, she rushed to open the door, but it was Fiona who stood there, her appearance for once less than immaculate.
She came in, bringing with her the coldness of the November night.
‘I know Joss isn’t here … I just want to leave this for him. My resignation,’ she added with a wintry smile. She saw Nell’s surprise and laughed harshly. ‘You do know that he’s going to be declared bankrupt, don’t you?’ And then she said softly, ‘So, he hasn’t told you. I did wonder. Of course, he’s been hoping to stave off complete disaster, but he’s made several serious losses recently on the futures market. The banks are calling in all his loans, and he won’t have the collateral to cover them.
‘Poor Joss … now he’ll just be another ex-millionaire …’
And as she said it Nell knew that the thought pleased her. She felt sick, and impotent, wanting desperately to refute what she was saying and yet knowing that she couldn’t. Why hadn’t Joss said something to her … shared his problems with her …?
‘I must go—I’ve got a flight out to San Francisco at eleven. I’ve been offered a job there. Oh, by the way, Joss’s solicitor says that there shouldn’t be any problem getting the divorce through … not in the circumstances …’
With a final malicious smile she was gone, leaving Nell standing sickly against the door.
What divorce? Her own, of course. Joss was divorcing her … Well, she had been expecting it, but she had expected him to discuss it with her first … to tell her himself that it had been a mistake and not just simply let her find out from his secretary … his ex-secretary. And then she remembered what else Fiona had said to her. Joss was going to be declared bankrupt. She knew all too well what that would mean to him. It would destroy him. There must be a way it could be stopped. She knew less than nothing about Joss’s financial affairs. All right, so he may have made several wrong decisions, but surely if he could just weather this crisis, he could recover … His bank would surely stand by him�
�and then Nell remembered Fiona saying that his banks were calling in his loans, because he didn’t have enough collateral. Nell knew all too well what that meant, and then she remembered something else.
This house … this house could be used as security. She must find Joss and tell him … or better still tell the bank. It was almost ten o’clock at night … hours before she could contact the bank, she acknowledged fretfully. If only she knew where Joss was. If only he would get in touch with her, but he never contacted her when he was away and she had been too proud to ask him for an address or a telephone number.
Fiona might have known, but she was somewhere on her way to Heathrow.
Nell couldn’t sleep. She was awake at dawn, and long before nine o’clock she was parked outside Joss’s bankers’ offices in Chester.
The girl on the enquiries counter didn’t turn a hair when she asked to speak to the manager, even when Nell told her she didn’t have an appointment.
‘It is very urgent that I see him, though,’ she stressed, praying that she would be able to do so.
Her prayers were answered. The manager came out of his office and smiled warmly at her. Far more warmly, surely, then a bank manager would smile at the wife of a potential bankrupt?
The moment she was in his office, Nell told him breathlessly why she had come.
He heard her out in silence, and then said non-committally, ‘I see.’
‘Is it … is the house worth enough to … to cover my husband’s liabilities?’
‘Er … yes. More than enough, I believe. But are you sure you want to do this, Lady Eleanor? The house is in your sole name, you know. It is your property,’ he stressed.
‘And Joss is my husband,’ Nell responded fiercely.
Something almost approaching a smile touched his mouth.
‘Very well. There’ll be certain arrangements we’ll need to make. I suggest you go home now, and we’ll be in touch.’
‘And Joss won’t be declared bankrupt,’ Nell pressed.
‘I think I can safely assure you of that …’ He paused and smiled again, and said gently, ‘You must love your husband a great deal, Lady Eleanor.’
Nell averted her head. ‘Yes,’ she agreed huskily. ‘I do.’
She refused a cup of coffee and thanked him for his time. He escorted her off the bank’s premises and then went back to his office and picked up his intercom.
‘Get me Joss Wycliffe at that New York number he left for us, will you, Jane?’
‘Ah, Joss,’ he said genially some ten mintues later when his secretary put the call through. ‘I’ve just had a most extraordinary interview with your wife.’
Joss arrived home without warning, just after Nell had finished toying with a meal she didn’t really want. She was in the library reading the Financial Times, trying to look for some clue as to what had actually happened, but there was no mention of Joss’s name.
She stood up uncertainly as he opened the door, and then gasped out his name in surprise as he covered the distance between them and picked her up in his arms, kissing her fiercely.
It was a dream ̣. a mirage … it had to be, but that didn’t stop her from responding ardently to the urgent pressure of his mouth, or from pressing herself eagerly against the aroused hardness of his body.
‘Just one question, Nell,’ he told her, releasing her mouth. ‘Despite everything I’ve said and done … depsite what’s happened between us … Could you … do you love me?’
Her face gave her away.
‘Oh, God, Nell,’ he swore thickly. ‘Why haven’t you said so? Why did you let me think you didn’t care?’
‘Because I thought that was what you wanted,’ she told him, raising bemused eyes to his face.
He had lost weight and looked far more vulnerably human than she had ever seen him look before. She touched his jaw with fingers that shook a little, gasping softly when he caught hold of her wrist and lifted her palm to his mouth, placing a kiss in its cupped hollow.
‘What I wanted … what I still want is you. Not the public Lady Eleanor, Nell, but the real you. I’ve glimpsed her once or twice. I’ve even managed to warm the coldness of my life in the heat of her compassion. I used to watch you with your grandfather and envy him.’
He felt her start and smiled grimly.
‘Didn’t you guess how I felt? He did, and in his last months he took pity on me and told me that when he was gone, he hoped I would marry you and take care of you and Easterhay.’
‘But you told me you were marrying me for the title.’
‘It was the best excuse I could find. I was desperately afraid I was going to lose you to Williams.’
‘David? But, Joss, how could you have thought that?’
‘Very easily. Men as deeply and hopelessly in love as I was then are possessive and jealous. Besides, Grania told me she thought you would marry him. Do you remember? She came home the weekend before I proposed to you. She mentioned it then, when she was asking for an advance on her allowance.’
‘But Grania knew how I felt about you. She guessed from something I said. She warned me that you’d never look twice at someone like me, and I thought she was right. Oh, Joss, how can you love me? I’m not beautiful, or sophisticated. I …’
‘You are beautiful,’ he corrected her huskily, ‘and not just physically. How many girls of your age would have given up their independence, as you did, to nurse a bad-tempered old man?
‘I fell in love with Cheshire when I spent a few days here on business. Up until then I’d lived in London. So I bought myself a house here, never dreaming that it was going to lead to the most painful and self-destructive period of my life. When I first moved up here, I considered myself impervious to dangers like falling in love. The way I’d grown up had toughened me, Nell, and clawing my way up the ladder via commodity-dealing finished off the process.
‘If I ever thought about marriage … about sharing my life with one person, it was with a sense of contempt for those people I knew who were idiotic enough to commit themselves in such a way.
‘And then I met you, and you turned every belief I had upside-down. At first I couldn’t believe what I was feeling. How could I have fallen in love with a woman who would barely bring herself to say my name, who turned her head and refused to look at me every time we met, who disappeared like woodsmoke in the sunlight whenever I tried to pin her down?’
‘I thought you came here to see Gramps,’ Nell told him painfully. ‘I thought that if I was always hanging around you would guess how I felt about you and … and be amused by it …’
‘Oh, Nell … what idiots we’ve both been.’
The words were muffled against her hair as he held her.
‘When you made love to me that first time … I wanted to tell you then. I thought you’d probably guessed … and then when Fiona came round and told me that you’d told her what had happened and that you’d had to force yourself to make love to me …’
He felt the shudder that convulsed her, and tightened his hold of her slender body.
‘She was lying to you,’ he told her gruffly. ‘She must have guessed what had happened. I think I rather gave the game away that morning by acting like a lovesick eighteen-year-old. I telephoned you …’
Nell shook her head, silencing him, and said quietly, ‘No—you asked Fiona to telephone me.’
She saw comprehension dawn in the gold eyes. ’That bitch! he swore bitterly. ‘It’s just as well she’s already left the country.’
‘She loved you, Joss,’ Nell told him, prepared to make allowances for the other woman now that she herself was so gloriously secure in Joss’s love.
‘Not me,’ he told her, correcting her. ‘It was my money she loved. Do you know that you’re the first person in my entire life who’s ever wanted to do something for me … who’s ever been prepared to make a sacrifice for me —and such a sacrifice, Nell.’
He looked down at her and she could have sworn it was tears that made his eyes glitter.<
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‘Would you really have done that? Mortgaged this place as security?’
‘Ten times over,’ she assured him truthfully. ‘Tell me the truth, Joss. How bad are things for you financially? It doesn’t matter,’ she added quickly as he tensed. ‘Whatever happens …’
‘Oh, Nell, Nell. Fiona lied to you. I’m nowhere near the edge of bankruptcy. It’s true that I could have lost a great deal of money on a recent deal, but I didn’t, I made a lot instead. That’s what being a successful commodity-broker is all about. But do you know something—I’m getting rather tired of the cut and thrust of dealing. They do say that you begin to lose your edge once you’re over thirty, and I’m five years beyond that. What would you say if I told you I was considering retiring and concentrating on building up the estate … on becoming something of a “gentleman farmer” …?’
‘Oh Joss …’
The delight in her face showed him exactly what she felt, the parted warmth of her mouth too much temptation for him to even try to resist.
It was a long time before he stopped kissing her, and then Nell asked breathlessly, ‘But Fiona … why on earth did she lie to me like that? She must have known I’d find out.’
‘I don’t think she thought that far ahead. She wanted to lash out and hurt us. … hurt me. While I was in New York she turned up totally unexpectedly at my hotel suite and announced that she thought it was time she and I became lovers. I told her then that there was only one woman I wanted to make love to and that was my wife. I should have have guessed then that she’d want to retaliate, but she caught me off guard, at a time when I couldn’t get away from the deal I was doing, and when all I wanted to do … when all I ached to do was to be with you, so consequently I was far less tactful then perhaps I should have been …’