Stronger than Yearning

by Penny Jordan

  She needed no encouragement to accept his body within her own, eagerly asking for it, openly demanding it, sighing in obvious pleasure at the first tormentingly slow thrust of it, and then matching the powerful surge of his body all the way; loving each demanding thrusting masculine movement until the pleasure built to such a pitch that there was no room even to experience the sensations convulsing her, only to live them.

  The climax was explosively shattering, James’s mouth on her own absorbing her cries of pleasure, and then sobbing against her throat his own delirious release.

  They both lay still, too exhausted to move. Gradually, reality swung back into focus. Jenna was aware of her skin prickling with sweat, her body aching with a delicious lethargy, her mind vacant and empty, or at least it was until James propped his head up on one hand and said lazily.

  ‘Can I look forward to being greeted like that every morning?’

  All her earlier ambivalent feelings came sweeping back, bringing with them a return of her earlier self-disgust, this time heightened by the knowledge that at no point in their love-making just now had James forced a single thing on her. She had wanted him to make love to her. Acute nausea gripped her. Pushing herself away from James she spat harshly, ‘Keep away from me, I hate you.’

  For a moment he looked angry and then he mocked, ‘I see you hate me, but you love my body…my love-making, is that it?’

  Jenna went scarlet, unable to hide her humiliation from him.

  ‘I’ll never forgive you for that,’ she told him furiously as she slid off the bed and grabbed his discarded robe. ‘I never, ever, want you to touch me again.’

  All at once his expression hardened. He reached for her and grabbed her wrist before she could move.

  ‘Now, just a minute, Jenna,’ he told her softly. ‘Last night, this morning, okay I could have understood your being annoyed with me…but what we did just now was completely mutual…I don’t know what it is in that head of yours that makes you so ashamed of enjoying sex, and unless you tell me I won’t know. But what I do know is that whether you’re prepared to admit it or not, you enjoyed what we just did together. Now you’re telling me that you don’t want me to touch you again. Lady, I’ve got news for you,’ he told her on a deepening voice, ‘you’ve just picked up a mighty sharp two-edged sword, and you’d better be careful you aren’t the one that gets cut up on it. And I’ll tell you one other thing. No man likes being put down the way you’ve just put me down, Jenna. It’s just as humiliating for a man to be treated as a sex object instead of a human being—maybe even more so. So far from me pressing my unwanted attentions on you, my dear wife, you’re going to have to be the one to do the asking in future, and my bet is that whatever you think right now, you will. You’re a very passionate woman, Jenna. Too passionate to live your life as a celibate.’

  ‘Maybe so.’ The truth of what he was saying stung, scouring her pride, hurting her so painfully that she just had to hurt back. ‘But I’ll see you in hell before I ever ask you to be my lover, James.’

  He laughed mirthlessly. ‘You think so? After what we just experienced?’

  It came to her then…blindingly…powerfully…just how she could get her own back and silence him.

  ‘Ah, but you see,’ she smiled sweetly. ‘That wasn’t you I was making love with…’

  ‘No…’ His mouth curled derisively. ‘My body tells me a different story. Who in hell was it then?’

  ‘Your ancestor,’ Jenna told him with sweet complacency. She stared dreamily into space and said softly, ‘I dreamed he was my lover the first night I saw his portrait. If I close my eyes and wish hard enough, James, it’s easy to think that you’re him.’

  She heard the sound he made in his throat and saw the sick whiteness of his face with a savage sense of satisfaction. Let him see how he liked being humiliated and mocked. Firmly she pushed away the sense of guilt filling her. What she had said wasn’t entirely true. She had dreamed of the man in the portrait, of course…but that dream had contained James too…and if she was truthful with herself she wasn’t quite sure which one of them it was she had desired as her lover. Certainly, the man in her dreams had possessed many of James’s characteristics. James deserved to be hurt she told herself, ruthlessly, silencing her thoughts…He deserved it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘I’M leaving now, Jenna, I’ll be back late Thursday.’

  Without a word, Jenna nodded coolly, refusing to so much as lift her head from the accounts she was working on as James lingered for a moment by the study door.

  Only when she was sure he had gone did she release a shaky pent-up breath. How much longer could she continue with her present way of life and keep up the rigid self-control she was imposing on herself?

  It was two months now since they had returned from their honeymoon. Their honeymoon! Even now she shuddered at the travesty of what their stay in the Caribbean had been. Even now the knowledge of how insultingly easy James had found it to make good his boast that she would beg him to make love to her, scorched her with humiliation, burning a self-contempt so deep into her soul that she felt she would never be free of it.

  When she thought about those weeks in the Caribbean—which she did as seldom as possible—she could still recall them in such vivid detail that they seemed more real than the life she was at present living.

  For four days she had avoided James, glad of the work that kept him away from her side, and then on the fifth he had found her when she was sunbathing by the privacy of their pool. He had touched her skin briefly as he sat down beside her, and that had been all it took to bring to life within her a clamouring need that refused to be contained.

  That night she had deliberately drunk more wine than usual with her evening meal, hoping it would douse the fires of desire burning through her body, but all it had done had been to relax her inhibitions and pride to such an extent that later…but no…she wasn’t going to think about that now…about how she had gone to James and…Jenna could feel the deep tide of colour washing over her skin, her fingers curling tensely into her palms as she tried not to think about that and all the other nights since when James had reduced her to a wanton, eager creature she barely recognised as herself, as his love-making raised her to the heights.

  Heights from which she swiftly tumbled back to reality each morning, Jenna reminded herself bitterly. God, how she hated and loathed herself!

  Possibly more even than she hated James. While she could accept that it was perfectly feasible for a man to experience desire without love or respect, she found it almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that she could experience such an intensity of desire for a man she knew she hated.

  James seemed to derive a good deal of amusement from the situation. How many times since that first night had he tormented her with her own words, demanding to know who she thought she was making love to—himself or his ancestor, and if she refused to give him the right answer…She put down her pen, shuddering with the memory of the punishment he could invoke.

  Sexually he could exercise a control over her that both terrified and fascinated her. She continually fought against him, loathing the fact that it was possible for him to generate such an intense reaction within her, and yet helpless against the fiercely swift tides of desire that ran within her at his lightest touch.

  This week he was spending a few days in London—something he had done on several occasions in the two months they had been living at the Hall. On each occasion, she told herself, she was glad to see him go, and on each occasion the very first night of his absence she lay wakeful and aching for the warm reality of him in bed beside her. They no longer even had separate rooms. James would not allow it.

  Sighing faintly she closed her heart against the desolation creeping over her. Sometimes it seemed that the harder she fought against the sexual chemistry that existed between them the stronger it became. Unlike her, James seemed to suffer no shame or self-contempt in desiring her. And he did desire he
r—he had told her so with his tongue as well as with his body, in ways that it still made her shudder delicately to recall.

  ‘Jenna…can I come in?’

  She had been so engrossed in her own painful thoughts that she hadn’t heard the tap of Sarah’s crutches over the parquet floor. Her step-sister-in-law had progressed to them only the previous week, and Jenna had organised a special meal to celebrate the occasion.

  ‘I’m only working on the accounts,’ Jenna told her, pulling a wry face. ‘I’m only too glad to be interrupted.’

  ‘Has James gone?’ Sarah carefully avoided looking at her as she manoeuvered herself down into a chair.

  Jenna sighed faintly. Although he never betrayed it to anyone she knew that James was hurt by Sarah’s continual avoidance of him. Against her will she felt slightly sorry for him, and as always when she suffered these ambivalent feelings towards him Jenna tried to push them aside. Why should she feel sorry for him? Perhaps because she knew that in this instance he was being condemned unfairly, her conscience suggested mildly.

  That much was true. Jenna knew that Sarah still resented what she considered to be James’s rejection of her own mother, and even though she was now well on the way to full recovery from the trauma of the accident, Jenna knew that she still retained a slight residue of irrational conviction that somehow James was to blame for what had happened to her parents.

  ‘I’ve just come from the other wing,’ Sarah told her. ‘The ceiling in the hall is almost finished.’ Her eyes glowed vividly in her small pale face. ‘Jenna, it is just so beautiful.’

  Jenna smiled. The same artist who was doing the ceiling in the ballroom had been commissioned to do a similar trompe l’oeil allegorical work on the vaulted hall ceiling, and Sarah spent part of every day in there watching him work, fascinated by the scene growing in front of her eyes.

  She was a gifted artist herself, and Jenna had not missed the long and earnest conversations Sarah had with the young Royal Art College graduate whom Geoffrey Rust employed as his assistant.

  She watched as Sarah looked down at her hands for several seconds. ‘Jenna, I’d like to go to art school,’ she burst out at last. ‘Watching what’s been done here has been so fascinating.’

  ‘Well, you certainly do have the talent,’ Jenna agreed, frowning slightly before choosing her next words, and then adding quietly, ‘but, Sarah, have you thought about how arduous it will be?’

  ‘Too arduous for me because I’m virtually a cripple?’ Sarah queried bitterly.

  ‘Now that just isn’t true. You are making an excellent recovery. The doctor said as much last month when we went to see him. By the time you’re ready to go to art school you should be fully recovered…but it won’t be easy, Sarah,’ she added gently.

  ‘No, and if it hadn’t been for——’ She broke off, her face flushing slightly.

  ‘Go on,’ Jenna urged her. ‘If it hadn’t been for what, Sarah? For your accident? For your parents’ deaths? For James?’

  She watched the younger girl colour darkly as she mentioned James’s name.

  ‘I can’t help it, Jenna,’ Sarah admitted, twisting her fingers together anxiously. ‘I know that logically he wasn’t to blame. How could he be? But deep down inside I still feel that he’s glad about what happened, that my mother is dead. I know he never liked her.’

  Jenna sighed faintly and glanced at her watch. In half an hour the retired schoolteacher they were employing to give Sarah private lessons until she was fit enough to go back to school would be arriving. She had every logical reason to avoid dealing with the issue that Sarah had just raised. She could quite reasonably simply pass the problem on to James to deal with, after all Sarah was his half-sister. She knew that she ought to feel pleased that Sarah felt this resentment against him, but oddly enough she could not, because she realised what damage it was doing to Sarah to carry such a heavy burden of guilt mixed with anger and resentment. Jenna turned her chair away from her desk, so that she could look at her step-sister-in-law.

  ‘Sarah, I’m going to tell you something now about James that is extremely private.’ Quickly she outlined the story of James’s mother as Lady Carmichael had told it to her, finishing by saying, ‘So you see that as the boy James was when your mother and his father married he must naturally have felt resentful on his own mother’s behalf.’

  ‘You’ve said as much to me before,’ Sarah admitted, ‘but then, I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t want to believe that James could possibly have felt as I do. I even resented the fact that he might have shared my feelings. I wanted them to be my own.’

  ‘We all feel like that at some time in our lives,’ Jenna comforted her. ‘But I honestly believe, Sarah, that as he grew older James ceased to resent your mother’s marriage to his father. He learned to get over the feelings he had as a teenager, because he realised how damaging they could be. Just as you must realise the same thing and try to get over it. I know it won’t be easy. It never is easy to rid ourselves of our deepest convictions. They’re part of us, and really, deep down, we don’t want to part with them…’

  As she said the words, it suddenly struck Jenna that they had a particular relevance to herself. She had always told herself that sex was something she could never enjoy, and now because she did she resented the man who had made her realise the truth. Ridiculous, she told herself angrily. There were other reasons why she resented James, reasons that had nothing to do with the wild hunger he knew how to build up inside her.

  ‘Jenna, come back!’ Sarah commanded teasingly, her smile fading as she added slowly, ‘I think I understand what you’re trying to say. I know you’re probably right, but like you say, it isn’t always that easy. Whenever I feel myself liking James I get angry with myself,’ she admitted wryly. ‘I don’t suppose you can understand that…’

  All too well, Jenna thought inwardly, far better than Sarah could ever know.

  ‘I think so,’ was all she said. ‘You feel torn between a very natural feeling of being drawn towards your step-brother, and an equally natural feeling of guilt because part of you feels that by liking him you are in some way betraying your mother. If you genuinely want to go to art school, you’re going to have to spend so much time studying and getting well that there won’t be time for you to worry so much about your other problems.’

  She paused as the phone rang and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Jenna, it’s me, Graham, are you free for lunch by any chance?’

  She could feel the warm colour moving swiftly up under her skin as she held the receiver. Graham Wilde had rung her several times since her return from honeymoon. On the first occasion he had found the bookcase she had wanted, and she had gone with him to see it, and then on to a celebratory lunch afterwards, from which she had returned, slightly light-headed, to be greeted by a coolly disapproving James.

  Some reckless instinct she hadn’t known she possessed had led her into agreeing to go out to dinner with Graham two nights later, when he had called to invite her out. Graham knew that she was married, she argued with herself. Therefore, he was hardly likely to mean anything other than a social pleasantry by the invitation. James hadn’t been pleased, but he hadn’t argued either. She liked Graham. She found his company soothing, and his obvious admiration of her flattering. She also knew that their friendship irritated James, and for some reason that made her all the keener to pursue it. She might be married to James, she told herself, but he wasn’t going to lay the law down as far as her personal friends were concerned.

  ‘Yes…yes I am…’ she confirmed. They made arrangements to meet at a local pub which had a deservedly good reputation for its food and then Jenna replaced the receiver. As she did so she saw that Sarah was frowning slightly, but the younger girl made no comment, merely picking up her crutches and saying that it was almost time for Mrs Holder to arrive.

  ‘With a bit of luck by Christmas I should be fit enough to go to school with Lucy.’

  ‘Well, we certainly
hope so,’ Jenna agreed.

  Lucy’s school had closed for the summer holidays the previous month. She had spent three weeks at the Hall with them, and Jenna had been thrilled by the new warmth in her relationship with her niece.

  One thing that had surprised her though had been Lucy’s relationship with James. She had expected her niece to cling a little to him; and in fact rather to revel in her new relationship with him, but although it was undeniable that they got on well together, Lucy did not call James dad preferring, as Sarah did, to use his Christian name, and although it was obvious that she enjoyed his company her relationship with him was more that of niece and favourite uncle, or even sister and much older brother rather than daughter and father. This had surprised Jenna a little in view of Lucy’s determination to claim him as her father.

  This week Lucy was in London, staying with her friend, and James would be bringing her back with him when he returned on Thursday.

  It had already been arranged that at the start of the autumn term Lucy would attend a local private school with an excellent scholastic record.

  Indeed, everything had worked out very well, Jenna reflected wryly, if she discounted her own feelings about her relationship with James. Sarah was slowly recovering, and, she hoped, coming to terms with her feelings about her step-brother. Lucy was far more settled and far, far happier. The work on the house was progressing well. James had been delighted with what she had done on their own temporary apartments and Jenna had even been approached by one or two of their neighbours with a view to doing some work for them. However, she had decided not to take on any work until the old Hall was finished. In fact, it surprised her how much she was enjoying this break from her career.