Stronger than Yearning

by Penny Jordan

  ‘James…’ She wanted to tell him the ring was far too valuable for her to wear, but he had moved closer to her than she realised and when she turned her head her face brushed the cool silk of his shirt. The warm male smell of his body engulfed her, promoting an aura of intimacy between them that provoked the strangest reaction in the pit of her stomach. She started to move away, but James’s hand against her throat stopped her. His thumb lifted her chin so that she was forced to meet his eyes. He bent his head towards her; wicked lights dancing blatantly in his eyes. ‘I’m glad you like it.’ He whispered the words against her mouth, the sensation of his breath stroking her lips, making the sensitive skin quiver faintly.

  His thumb left her chin and pressed lightly on her bottom lip. Instinctively she opened her mouth slightly and was stunned by the heart-jerking swiftness with which the warmth of James’s mouth covered her own.

  It was only the lightest of kisses, brief and quickly over, but long after he had stepped back from her, her lips tingled in memory of the heat of his against them. Even without closing her eyes she could far too easily sense the firm pressure of his thumb against her lower lip. He had not kissed her with any force or passion but the memory of the feeling of his mouth against her own stirred feelings inside her she found it hard to dismiss or even rationalise. All she did know was that they caused her alarm and apprehension, a feathering sensation of panic coiling along her nerves more frightening because for the first time she was experiencing the fear without the adrenalin-surging boost of anger.

  The main topic of conversation over dinner was the wedding. James had arranged for them both to see the vicar in the morning and Jenna had an irrational impulse to tell him that things were moving too fast, that she wasn’t ready yet to commit herself so totally. What did she want? An old-fashioned courtship? Hardly! After all, there was nothing personal between them. Their marriage was to be a business arrangement and one from which she had already gained in the material sense. Her bank manager was highly delighted about it; the suppliers she had ordered from since the news of the engagement had broken had offered her very generous credit terms without her even having to ask. Jenna was no fool; she was fully aware that being James’s wife would bring an added lustre to her reputation, and that any number of rich and thrusting social climbers would be only too pleased to pay for the privilege of boasting that James Allingham’s wife had done their décor—and they would be prompt payers. With a little hard-headed shrewdness she could use James’s reputation and her own standing as his wife to treble her business at least, but she had little desire to do so. The business world had lost its savour for her some time ago, she admitted to herself as she listened to James and his godmother talking. The impetus had been gone for some time.

  ‘So that’s settled then! Lovely.’

  Jenna came out of her reverie at the tail end of the conversation, not quite sure what had been said until Lady Carmichael said to her, ‘James is leaving you behind when he goes to collect Lucy tomorrow, Jenna. We’ll be able to have a long chat.’

  ‘I thought another long car ride might be too much for Sarah,’ he explained to Jenna. ‘When she and Lucy come down here to stay I’ll make arrangements for a private nurse to attend her daily, but for this weekend…’

  ‘I’m quite happy to look after her, James,’ Jenna told him quietly. She remembered Sarah’s complaints about her back and a gleam of excitement illuminated her eyes. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ without realising what she was doing Jenna curled her fingers into the fine wool of his suit jacket, ‘Sarah was complaining of some discomfort in her back this evening. Surely that must mean she has some feeling there?’

  For a moment he didn’t respond. Beneath her fingers his arm felt curiously tense and as she looked up at him Jenna realised he wasn’t looking at her, but at her hand on his arm. The curious rigidity she could sense in his body increased, and then as he looked up and found her watching him, subsided. He looked different, but she could not have said why exactly.

  ‘James?’

  He caught the uncertainty in her voice and said levelly, ‘Yes, I think you could well be right.’

  ‘I thought you might mention it at the hospital on her next visit.’

  ‘Yes, yes I shall.’ He spoke with his usual cool decisiveness, but Jenna had the strangest feeling that his mind was on something else. Lady Carmichael asked a question about the accident—James replied, and the strange moment was gone.

  After dinner they had coffee and at ten-thirty Lady Carmichael announced that she was going to bed. ‘I think I’ll go up too.’ Jenna stood up to follow her from the room. James opened the door for them, and as she walked past him she thought for a moment that he looked almost…lonely. But she dismissed the notion as being ridiculous. Men like James were never lonely—they might be solitary upon occasion by choice, but lonely? Never!

  * * *

  ‘Ah, there you are, my dear. Do you mind if I join you?’ asked Lady Carmichael. Jenna was lazing beneath a shady tree in the lodge garden, the book she was supposed to be reading open across her lap. James had left just after lunch to collect Lucy, and Sarah had gone upstairs for her afternoon rest. A bee hummed soothingly among the tall hollyhocks and the beneficent warmth of the June sun lulled her into a pleasant state of drowsiness.

  ‘Not at all. After all, it is your garden. It’s lovely,’ Jenna praised. ‘You must spend an awful lot of time on it.’

  ‘I did, but now I find my rheumatism puts anything more arduous than a little gentle weeding out of my scope. We’re lucky enough to have a devoted gardener who comes round three times a week. James was telling me that the gardens at the old Hall need a good deal of attention.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ Jenna agreed. ‘The whole place does.’

  ‘Has James told you anything about why the old Hall is so important to him?’

  ‘He did say that an ancestor of his had originally lived there.’ Briefly, Jenna thought of the face in the portrait and a tiny shiver raised goosebumps on her skin. In her mind’s eye that dark face bent towards her, the indolent, aristocratic hand lifting to her face, touching her mouth as James had done last night. Stop it, stop it, she cautioned herself, trying instead to concentrate on what her hostess was telling her.

  ‘Well, that is part of it,’ Lady Carmichael conceded, ‘although to be competely accurate James’s ancestor was never really a member of the Deveril family. His mother was married to one of them, but his father was not her husband. There was a suggestion at the time that his father had Stuart blood in his veins and certainly, there is a degree of resemblance, but that, of course, is all mere speculation. However, that is not what really motivates James in his desire to acquire the old Hall.

  ‘Has he told you anything about his mother?’

  Jenna shook her head. ‘Very little. I know that she committed suicide.’

  ‘Yes, it was tragic. She was my cousin, you know, much younger than me, of course, the youngest in the family, in fact, and I’m afraid quite spoiled in the way that pretty little girls are. Her parents were comfortably off, but nothing like as wealthy as James’s father’s family. David fell madly in love with her the moment he saw her. It was during the war and he was posted over here. Christine liked him and was flattered by his obvious love for her, but I’m afraid she never really loved him in that same intense, devouring way.

  It was really her parents who persuaded her to marry him. They were concerned about her safety if she stayed in England—during those early days of the war, the outcome wasn’t certain and they thought she’d be far safer in America. She was only nineteen when they married—and a very young nineteen at that. James was born in 1949. I remember how thrilled her parents were when they heard the news. They went over to the States to see them. They were killed in an aircrash on the way back.’ She paused and Jenna waited, understanding, knowing that her hostess was back among old ghosts, reluctant to let them go.

  She sighed faintly. ‘Where was I? Oh, yes. I heard fr
om Christine rather sporadically after that. Christmas and birthday cards, that sort of thing, the odd letter, and then David had to come to England on business. Christine and James came with him. We saw quite a lot of them that first summer. James was an enchanting child. Very sturdy and male, very sweet-natured too. He adored his mother—in fact, most men did. She was that sort of woman,’ Lady Carmichael told Jenna wryly.

  ‘David had to go from London to Paris for some business discussions and it was during that time that Christine must have met Alan Deveril.’

  For the first time Jenna tensed. Her eyes widened fractionally, and as though sensing her concentrated interest her hostess asked, ‘Did you ever meet him? You came from his part of the world originally, of course.’

  ‘I knew him,’ Jenna said in a clipped voice, ‘but not socially if that’s what you mean. My great-aunt was not from the sort of social background that made her welcome in Sir Alan Deveril’s drawing-room.’

  ‘Yes, he was the most unmitigated snob,’ Lady Carmichael agreed. ‘I met him once with Christine. I bumped into them in the Ritz and she introduced him to me. I didn’t like him.

  ‘Of course, it didn’t take long for the gossip to start—David was busy in Paris, and Christine always had been headstrong. Alan seemed to exercise a kind of fascination for her that I’ve never been able to understand. After all, she had everything a woman could possibly want: an adoring husband, a delightful son, a very comfortable lifestyle…’

  ‘Everything but excitement,’ Jenna suggested.

  Lady Carmichael’s glance acknowledged her shrewdness. ‘There was that, of course. Deveril did possess a certain reptilian brand of charm, I suppose. He certainly had an extremely bad reputation. He was married, of course. No one ever saw his wife. He kept her away from society at the Hall. It was commonly rumoured that he married her for her money, but that wasn’t all that uncommon. However, Christine wasn’t his first affair during his marriage. There had been talk of a young daughter of an acquaintance, hurriedly packed off abroad, hints of other relationships, but never anything as flamboyant as this affair with Christine.

  ‘She, poor fool, was besotted with him. God knows why, she was convinced that he intended to divorce his wife and marry her. She told me as much and the gossip press was full of hints and speculation. Of course, in those days divorce was much more shocking than it is today. I had my doubts even then. Lovely though she was, Christine had no money of her own, and he was a man notorious for his expensive tastes: gambling, drink, and the old Hall. God, how he loved that house. He could bore on for hours about it. It was almost an obsession with him, how it had been in the family for centuries.

  ‘Of course, when David came back from Paris the scandal finally broke. He confronted Christine about her affair—she told me this herself—and she told him she wanted a divorce and that Deveril and she intended to marry. David begged her to reconsider, but she refused.

  ‘She went to Deveril that night—to his London flat. When she told him what she had done—that she had left David—he went crazy with her, told her he had never had any intention of marrying her, that for one thing if he did he would probably lose the Hall because he would not have access to his wife’s money if they were divorced. Poor Christine could not believe him. She asked him if he honestly expected her to believe that a mere house was more important than their love. Their love…He laughed at her, she said…told her that like all women she was a fool, that nothing mattered more to him than keeping the Hall, that it was the only reason he had married his wife in the first place. He would kill to keep it if he had to, he told her.

  ‘She couldn’t go back to David—not then. So she came to me and was too distraught to conceal anything from me. She told me everything.

  ‘Eventually, I persuaded her to go back to her husband. He still wanted her and was prepared to make a fresh start.’ She sighed again. ‘I sometimes wish I had not done that. It didn’t work, it couldn’t. She wasn’t the same person. She was like a broken mechanical toy, completely unable to function. She and David had only been back in the States a matter of weeks when she committed suicide. James found her.’ For a long time there was silence and then Lady Carmichael said emotionally, ‘Now, perhaps, you can understand why this obsessive desire of his to possess the old Hall so distresses me.’

  ‘Perhaps now that he does possess it, he will be able to put the past behind him,’ Jenna suggested quietly.

  ‘Maybe. Certainly he’s strong enough to do so if he wishes…but does he wish? I sometimes think it’s just as well there are no Deverils left alive, because if there were.…’

  There was a roaring noise in Jenna’s ears, a feeling of weakness sapping her strength but she fought it back. Lucy, Lucy, she thought achingly, as wronged by the Deverils as James himself and yet at the same time part of them.

  Knowing this should make her feel closer to him, but it merely increased her fear of him. He had an unnerving talent for burying his deepest feelings very thoroughly, but they were there and they were strong enough to motivate him to pursue a course relentlessly until it got him what he wanted. But thankfully he did not want her, she reminded herself. She had nothing to fear. The Hall was what he wanted. The Hall, that was all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘WITH my body I thee worship…’

  Tiny frissons of sensation ran down Jenna’s spine. It was cool in the small Norman church and the scent of the roses decorating it almost overpowered her. She still could not believe that this was her, actually marrying James. But it was. And now the vicar was turning to her, telling her that she and James were man and wife.

  There was a tense expectant pause, a waiting silence from the others in the church with them that stirred fingers of apprehension along her spine. Instinctively, she started to move away from her new husband, tensing in shock as James’s fingers curled round her wrist and he drew her towards him.

  His head bent and before she could define his intentions, his breath, cool and fresh stroked her skin, his mouth unexpectedly warm as it touched hers. A curious tension gripped her, pain coiling achingly through her stomach. It was nerves, just nerves, she told herself as she jerked tensely away, and James released her. Only the wedding breakfast to get through now. She mustn’t let herself think about that unanticipated and unwanted kiss. All it had been was a gesture, a sop to convention, something she mustn’t even think about now. James surely wouldn’t be.

  The wedding breakfast was being held at the hotel that had once been Lucille Carmichael’s home. Bill and Nancy were staying there courtesy of James. They had a room with a four-poster bed, Nancy had told Jenna only that morning, as she helped her to dress.

  Her dress! Jenna stared down at it, closing her mind to the excited babble of their guests. She had found the dress in a small shop in South Molton Street, after an exhausting search. She had not wanted to wear white, in fact she had not known what to wear. A church ceremony seemed to call for something more than a simple suit, however expensive. In the end she had settled on a cream lace blouse with a high neck, delicately tucked and flounced, very Edwardian in appearance with long sleeves and deep cuffs also tucked and frilled. The matching skirt was full length and faintly A line in design, again with an unmistakable Edwardian flavour about it. It had a deep waistband which had had to be taken in—Jenna had lost weight in the weeks before the wedding from all the work she had had to do, not to mention the endless succession of sleepless nights. The skirt was plain apart from the decorative waistband and the deep, pin-tucked and lace-trimmed flounce at the hem.

  Maggie who had gone with her to buy it had raved over it. Jenna herself had felt a little uncertain about wearing something so different from her normal style.

  Instead of the traditional veil she had opted for a frivolous cream hat that perched precariously on her hair and had a tiny spotted net veil which covered the upper part of her face.

  James made no attempt to remove it when he kissed her for which she was sincerely grateful
for she was terrified that it might fall off at the lightest touch.

  For Jenna, the wedding breakfast passed in a blur of voices and faces. James had invited several business colleagues and their wives, plus some of his own staff—executives whom she had already met at a dinner party, held by James’s accountant’s wife two weeks before the wedding. They all seemed pleasant enough, although Jenna had the sense to know that at the moment she was being treated with the reserve naturally accorded to the chairman’s wife.

  As well as Bill and Nancy, she had invited Harley, who once he got over his petulance about not being informed ahead of anyone else of her plans had been pleased about the match, Gordon Burns and his wife, Maggie and her boyfriend, and one or two others.

  Now she was aching with tiredness and reaction, and the thought of the long flight out to the Caribbean the following morning appalled her.

  They were each staying in their respective apartments tonight, James having made the suggestion that it would make their departure easier. Jenna had been a little surprised, but his suggestion made sense. It was pointless moving all her clothes into James’s apartment only to have to move them out again the moment they came back from St Justine.

  They would be away for two weekends in all, and Lucy was going to spend them here with Lady Carmichael and Sarah. James had organised everything meticulously, Jenna acknowledged, wondering why that fact should irritate her so much. It had struck her only the previous day that everything was running on oiled wheels and almost too perfectly. Sarah’s consultant had confirmed that a degree of sensation was returning to her paralysed body. Lucy seemed much happier and more settled. Everything was ready for them at the Hall. Jenna had supervised the final hanging of the curtains and other drapes only that week. James had not seen their quarters yet. Would he like them? Did it really matter? she asked herself wryly. She was surprised to find that it did, but then, of course, as an interior designer she was used to hoping that her clients approved of her work, and this was only a carry-through from that feeling.