by Penny Jordan
Jessica gave her a tight smile, wondering what it was that had given her away, until they were inside the house and a quick glance in a mirror showed her her white, strained face, and huge dark eyes. The skin beneath them was taut and discoloured as though bruised. She looked, she admitted to herself, haunted.
‘It’s a long drive,’ she said obliquely in response to Jane’s question.
‘Well, you’ve certainly made good time. I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of hours at least. Let’s have a cup of tea, shall we, and then I’ll take you up to the tapestries. We’ve moved them into the workroom in the stable block. The light’s much better in there. I’m afraid you’re going to be cold, though. We daren’t risk turning on the central heating. They’re so fragile and brittle in places.’
The tea she made was hot and strong, with an aromatic, almost bitter taste. It scalded Jessica’s throat, bringing her back to life. Watching her tremble suddenly, her face flooding with colour, Jane said quietly, ‘I don’t want to pry, but if you do want to talk…’ She pulled a wry face. ‘If it’s man trouble, I’ve been there myself…more than once.’
Jessica smiled bitterly. ‘Is it really so obvious?’
Jane grimaced apologetically.
‘Well, yes, I’m afraid it is.’
Much as she liked her, Jessica couldn’t talk to her. The hurt was still too raw, too new. All she really wanted to do was to crawl away somewhere and die, but she couldn’t do that. She had to get over it, to go on…
She looked out of the window at the darkening sky and said, ‘I think it might be a good idea for me to leave the tapestries until tomorrow. The light just isn’t good enough now.’
‘OK. I’ll take you up to your room.’ Jane hesitated and looked at her. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a date tonight, but I could cancel it if—’
Jessica shook her head. ‘No, please don’t—not on my account. I’m not very good company at the moment and, to be honest, I’d rather be alone.’
Jane gave her an understanding smile. ‘Well, there’s food in the fridge, and plenty of canned stuff in the cupboards. Just help yourself, and then tomorrow after breakfast I’ll take you across to the workrooms.’
In normal circumstances the room Jane showed her to would have enchanted and delighted her; as it was, she barely noticed the rich damask of the hangings enclosing the bed, only half listening to her as Jane described how the pattern had been copied from a faded, torn scrap of fabric found during the renovation work.
‘We had it copied in Lyons, using the traditional methods of weaving the fabric, and using modern dyes. Because the traditional dyes were so unreliable and faded so easily, we tend to forget how very rich and striking their original colours must have been—not to say garish,’ Jane added with a grin, reaching out and touching the bed hangings, admitting, ‘I love this shade of red, though. It’s so vibrant and warm.’
The room had a fireplace, but, as Jane explained to her, no fire could be lit in it. ‘Fire hazard,’ she added pulling a face. ‘We simply daren’t take the risk.’ She hovered for a moment, and then said awkwardly, ‘Look, if you want some company, I could always cancel my date.’
It was only pride that enabled Jessica to lift her head and force a smile to her own lips.
‘No. It’s all right. I might look suicidal,’ she said, striving to make her voice light and succeeding only in giving it a metallic brittleness, ‘but I promise you I’m not.’
Not suicidal maybe, she acknowledged after she had reassured Jane and closed the door after her, but desperately aware of an inner aloneness, a coldness of spirit that pierced her, reminding her too painfully of how only a short time ago she had known the deep inner warmth that comes from close intimacy with one special person.
She thought she had known all there was to know about pain and loneliness, but she was beginning to discover she had not. When she had turned her back on her parents and the life they had planned for her, she had suffered, missed them, but that pain was nothing like the pain that rent her now.
Her body ached for sleep, just as much as her mind ached for release into oblivion, but both were denied her as she moved restlessly in the huge tester bed, her mind racked by self-contempt and anguish, her body racked with its longing to have Daniel beside her. Holding her, touching her, loving her…
With a low moan she turned on to her stomach, burying her face in her pillow. This was sheer stupidity, idiocy. If she allowed her thoughts to continue unchecked they would surely drive her to madness.
Cravenly, she longed for some magic pill which would miraculously wipe her heart and body clear of any memory of Daniel, but no such cure existed.
CHAPTER NINE
WORKING on the tapestries might be keeping her hands busy, but it was doing nothing to control the waywardness of her thoughts, Jessica acknowledged, lifting her head from her work and gazing unseeingly through the large north-facing window of the workshop.
She had been in Northumberland for two days, trying to concentrate all her energies on the task confronting her, but it wasn’t working. Physically she might be here in Northumberland, but mentally, emotionally, she was still trapped in her bedroom at home, aching for Daniel, wanting him, loving him.
Her work was almost completed. Soon it would be time for her to return home. Jane had a busy social life and had invited her to join her this evening, when she was going out to dinner with friends.
Jessica had refused. She preferred to be on her own. There was no point in inflicting her misery on others.
Already it was mid-afternoon. Soon it would be dusk, and too dark for her to work. The evening stretched out in front of her emptily.
The house had a library full of books, and the small sitting-room Jane had invited her to use had a television set, but nothing held a strong enough appeal to wrench her mind away from its obsessive dwelling on Daniel.
She considered going to bed early, but the thought of going there, going compulsively over and over every second she had spent with Daniel, everything they had said and done, and then contrasting the rosy dream she had allowed herself to be drawn into then with the harsh reality of the truth, held no appeal either.
There had not been a moment from the time when she had last seen him when she had not been thinking about him. She had come up here to escape, to give herself a breathing space, but what if once she returned Daniel was not prepared to accept that she no longer wanted to see him? He was a determined man.
She was just watching the late evening news when she heard a car outside. She got up and went to the window, but it was too dark for her to see anything. It was still too early for Jane to be returning, and a tiny tendril of apprehension feathered down her spine. What if someone was about to break into the house? It contained many valuable pieces of furniture and paintings. And then the enormous, old-fashioned and very loud doorbell rang demandingly, and she dismissed her fears as idiotic and hurried downstairs.
It took her several minutes to deal with the complicated locks and bolts on the door, but foolishly, as she opened the door itself, she forgot to secure the safety-chain. She wasn’t used to living with such elaborate security precautions, and it was only when the door was pushed open abruptly from the other side and Daniel strode in that she realised her own folly.
Stunned by the unexpectedness of his arrival, here where she had believed he would never know where to find her, she could only stare at him in stupefaction.
‘Surprise, surprise!’ he mocked her as he pushed the door closed with a gentle, and yet somehow rather intimidating, movement of his hand. He smiled at her equally gently, and she shivered, hating herself for her weakness.
That feeling which had invaded the pit of her stomach when she opened the door and saw him had nothing to do with hatred or anger.
It had been instinctive, automatic, indelible. She still loved him.
Shaken by her own stupidity, she turned away from him, thinking in some way that she might be able to remain st
ronger if she wasn’t looking at him, if she was not being subjected to his effect on three of her five senses all at the same time; and the other two, touch and taste…She shuddered visibly, recalling all too clearly just how his body had felt beneath her touch, just how his skin had tasted…
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded abruptly. ‘How did you find me?’
She wasn’t going to look at him, but the hair on the nape of her neck lifted gently in warning as he moved towards her and she felt the air behind her stir.
She froze, willing her body to repudiate him if he touched her. But he didn’t, and only she knew just how much her recalcitrant body ached to feel the warmth of his hands on it.
‘If you want to vanish completely, you shouldn’t leave names and addresses on your answering machine,’ he told her calmly.
Of course—that message from Jane. How could she have been so idiotic? And then shamingly she picked up on the cynicism in his voice, and whirled round, denying hotly. ‘If you think I did that deliberately, so that you would come running after me…’ Pain and anger choked her. ‘You had no right to go into my house, to pry into my private things.’ He was looking at her grimly, like an adult waiting for a child to finish a temper tantrum; his very lack of response to her accusations lashed her into a greater fury. ‘You really are desperate, aren’t you? I suppose it was naïve of me to think that once you’d discovered that neither lying to me nor seducing me were going to work, you’d give up.’
He was still watching her silently, distantly. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of her handbag, and, picking it up with an impulsive, bitter movement, she fumbled inside it and extracted a handful of silver, throwing it at his feet and crying fiercely, ‘Thirty pieces of silver. That’s the usual payment for a Judas, isn’t—’
And then stood frozen with shock and horror at her own uncontrolled behaviour while he slowly picked up the money, and then said softly—too softly, her mind warned her—’You miscalculated. There are only twenty-nine pieces here, which means that I still haven’t had full payment.’
He took one step towards her, and then another, and too late she saw how deceptive his distant calm had been. In reality he was far from calm; the lack of light in the hallway had not allowed her to see the hard glitter of anger-spiked bitterness in his eyes, nor to guess at the tension of his body beneath his seemingly relaxed pose.
He was going to touch her, kiss her, and once he did—once he did, no matter that that kiss was given in punishment and rage, she would be lost, as lost as she had been when they’d made love, clinging to him, crying to him to do with her what he wished, to make of her what he willed.
‘What is it?’ she cried out frantically, betraying more of her terror than she knew. ‘What do you want?’
But she already knew what he wanted. He wanted her father’s wealth, and ultimately her father’s power. He wanted the bank, and to get it he was prepared to fulfil the conditions her father had set upon its acquisition. Marriage to her.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she begged wildly, her self-control shattering under the tension of his slow advance towards her. She had already backed as far away from him as she could, and her skin burned as she heard her own shaming plea and recognised the panic and fear in her voice.
‘Touch you?’ He stopped and frowned, his mouth curling as though in disgust at the very thought, his expression suddenly changing as the rage died out of his eyes, the hot red glitter replaced by cold hardness. ‘I haven’t come to play games, Jessica. I’m not here on my own behalf, but on your mother’s. Your father’s had a heart attack. He’s in Intensive Care. You mother needs you with her.’
She didn’t believe it. He was lying to her—using another ploy to weaken her.
‘You’re lying to me,’ she whispered, her face suddenly ashen. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘No, you wouldn’t, would you?’ He reached for her too quickly for her to avoid him, grasping her arm and dragging her towards the telephone on the table by the stairs.
Holding her arm in a grip so tight that she could already feel her flesh going numb, his eyes never leaving her face, he punched out a number into the telephone.
Jessica heard it ringing, and then when the ringing stopped he said tersely into the receiver, ‘Intensive Care, Sister Allen, please.’
Jessica’s head started to thud uncomfortably. What if he wasn’t lying? What if it was true? What if her father’s heart attack had in part been brought on by the discovery that she was refusing to fall in with his plans?
Anger, fear, pain…a conflicting mix of emotions gripped her as she stood there, her throat dry with apprehension, her eyes locked on Daniel’s.
Holding the receiver slightly away from his ear, so that she could hear the voice on the other end, he said tersely, ‘Sister Allen, I’m sorry to bother you. It’s Daniel Hayward. How is Mr Collingwood?’
There was a moment’s pause, and then Jessica heard a woman’s voice saying quietly, ‘Rather poorly at the moment, I’m afraid, Mr Haywood. As you know, he’s had a major heart attack, and I’m afraid it’s still far too early to give you any more information than that.’
Jessica stared at the receiver. She tried to speak, and found that her tongue had become thick and clumsy and that her head was buzzing. She saw Daniel put down the receiver and then turn to look at her, a frown replacing the grim hauteur with which he had been regarding her.
‘Oh, God, don’t look at me like that, Jess,’ she thought she heard him saying, but the words were indistinct and fuzzy, and the world was turning dark all around her. She was being sucked down into a dark, cold vacuum, which she fought desperately against letting claim her.
Sick and dizzy, she was conscious of Daniel picking her up and depositing her in one of the hard antique chairs that furnished the hallway.
She wanted to close her eyes to blot out his face, but she knew that if she did she would lose consciousness completely. She had to focus on something to will herself not to give way to the panic and fear inside her.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have broken it to you like that.’
Compassion. Concern. She stared blankly at Daniel, her body trembling as though she were frozen. He was holding her hands, she suddenly realised, crouching down on the floor beside her, his thumbs registering the too rapid race of the pulse in her wrists.
‘Let go of me, I’m all right.’
Her father in Intensive Care…Strange how she had never thought of her parents as vulnerable before. Strange how she suddenly felt as frightened and abandoned as a small child. She hadn’t lived with them for years—rarely saw them—and if asked would have said that she was an adult and no longer dependent on them in any kind of way, but now she realised that it wasn’t true.
She struggled to stand up, swaying uncertainly on her feet, her eyes blank.
‘I must go home. My mother. Why didn’t she ring me?’ she cried out in sharp anguish.
Daniel was still holding her hands, still refusing to let her go.
‘Perhaps she was afraid you’d refuse to come,’ he told her quietly.
‘Refuse?’ She looked at him, her eyes dark with shock. ‘but he’s my father.’
‘Yes, but you’ve made it very plain that you want to keep your life separate from theirs, haven’t you, Jessica?’
‘Because I couldn’t be what they wanted. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t love them, that I don’t care…’
* * *
She started to cry, her body shaking with emotion as she fought to control her feelings.
‘I must go home. My things…I need to pack.’
‘I’ll do that for you,’ Daniel told her. ‘You just tell me how to find your room, and then we’ll be on our way—at this time of night we should make good time.’
‘We?’ Jessica stared at him, and then said shakily, ‘I’m not going back with you.’
The look he gave her made her feel small and ashamed, as though somehow she was beha
ving more like a child than a woman.
‘I have my own car here,’ she pointed out in a calmer voice. Naturally I—’
‘Naturally nothing,’ Daniel overruled her. ‘You’re in no fit state to drive, and if you’re honest you’ll admit it.’ He saw her face and smiled unkindly.
‘Yes, I know how much against the grain it must go that I’m the one to have had to break the news and witness your…distress. You’ve had a severe shock, Jessica, and if you won’t consider the risk to your own life of driving several hundred miles while suffering from that shock, then at least think of the lives of the other people you might be putting at risk.’
She looked away from him, unable to deny the truth of what he was saying.
‘Besides,’ he added calmly, ‘my car will make much better time than yours.’
‘But you must be tired yourself,’ she pointed out. ‘You’ve only just arrived.’
Suddenly she realised how much he had taken on his shoulders, how very different his behaviour was from what she would have expected, but then she reminded herself of all that he stood to lose if anything should happen to her father, and of what a golden opportunity this must be to him to try to bring her round, to persuade her…
She ought to make a stand, to tell him that there was no way she was going to allow him to drive her back to London, but the thought of the long, tiring drive south, the knowledge that she was in no fit state to make that drive, silenced her.
‘Your room?’ Daniel demanded curtly.
Numbly Jessica told him, too drained to continue arguing. She watched with listless eyes as he went upstairs, and then, remembering his long drive and the equally long one ahead of them, she roused herself and went into the small kitchen which formed part of the caretaker’s suite of rooms.
Jane had told her to make herself completely at home in this part of the house, and she knew the other girl would not mind her raiding the fridge in order to make some sandwiches and a flask of coffee for the homeward journey once she knew what had happened.