by Penny Jordan
‘I’ve got some leave due over Christmas and the New Year. A month.’ And then he was going back to South America, but didn’t tell him that.
‘Mrs Pilling wants all the legal formalities tied up as quickly as possible,’ the solicitor informed him. ‘She’s anxious to start work on the house as soon as she can.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Jake told him equably, watching the older man fumble with his papers as he wondered just how intimate a relationship had built up between his client and Gloria Pilling.
The answer was none at all. Gloria Pilling had recognised in Jake that quality that made him impervious to her particular brand of allure. She hated him for that imperviousness, and she also resented the fact that her only means left of proving to herself her superiority was to flaunt her wealth at him on every possible occasion.
Jake had learned to control his feelings too long ago to allow her to see when her sharp, raking goads met their target. He knew quite well how she felt about him.
Soon Fitton Park would be hers and he would have discharged his responsibility to his heritage to the best of his ability.
He wondered how the local gentry would react to Gloria. She was determined to have her pound of flesh from him, and he had dutifully introduced her to Louise Davenport-Legh, watching with detached amusement as Gloria subtly played up to the other woman’s vanity.
Two days before the final completion of the sale took place, he gave in to a quixotic impulse and moved into Fitton Park.
His working life had inured him to discomfort and, although the damp, musty smell of the bedroom he had once shared with Justin made him grimace a little, by the time he had unearthed some clean dry bedding from one of the ancient linen chests his nose had become accustomed to the vague smell and he found himself slipping back into the familiarity of the house’s odd creaks and sighs.
It had been a wet summer, with the sun only shining from the end of August, so that now, in September, the grass in the park was virtually knee-high.
As he ran through it, pacing himself, he exercised his imagination trying to imagine what Gloria Pilling would make of it. As though to make up for the wet summer, the September sun shone hot, covering his body with the slickness of sweat. The electricity had been reconnected to the house after its long period unoccupied, but Jake had forgotten to switch on the immersion heater and the prospect of a cold shower reminded him of school and his childhood. He ran to the boundary wall and then along it. The specimen trees planted by his ancestors were just beginning to show signs of the approaching autumn in the faint discoloration of their leaves.
Birds called out warning cries to one another as he ran past them, and he heard the familiar small sounds of wildlife rustling through the undergrowth.
When he had completed his run, instead of going inside, he headed for the stableyard.
The enclosed space had trapped the heat of the sun, the cobbles striking warm through the soles of his trainers. There was an old-fashioned pump in the middle of the yard. He stripped off his shorts and shoes and stepped into the stone trough, his mind full of memories of how his grandfather used to insist on both his and Justin’s undergoing the pump’s freezing spout of water. Then he had often felt as though they were being encased in ice, but today the cool, silky feel of the water against his hot sticky skin was almost a sensual pleasure. He stepped out of the trough, shaking himself dry, welcoming the heat of the sun.
A door banged and he turned his head, frowning at the familiar sound. There was no one here other than himself, and yet the kitchen door only banged like that when it was opened from inside.
His frowning glare swept the emptiness of the courtyard, and then fastened abruptly on the shadowy figure standing inside the kitchen door.
He reacted immediately and instinctively, dropping the shorts he had just picked up and springing across the yard, far too fast for the intruder to do more than turn around and race across the kitchen.
He caught her easily before she was halfway across the room, spinning her round, his mouth hard and grim until he realised who it was.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised wildly, as she had done before. ‘I didn’t realise you were here…’ She shivered suddenly. He released her, still frowning, and stepped back from her, and instantly her face burned with hot, shocked colour as her glance fell to his body and was immediately averted.
He swore under his breath, realising that he had embarrassed her… had forgotten, in the sudden instinctive reaction to the knowledge that there was an intruder, that he was completely nude.
Her embarrassment touched him with compassion and amusement. She couldn’t be more than sixteen, if that, and, remembering his own vulnerability at that age, he said easily, ‘I’m sorry, too. I suppose you came to see the house, did you?’
The downbent brown head nodded; one sandalled foot scuffed at a broken tile on the kitchen floor.
‘I didn’t think anyone would be here…’ Her head lifted, her eyes suddenly wild and nervous. ‘You won’t tell my mother, will you… about my being here?’
‘Not if you don’t want me to.’
She smiled at him. A tentative, curling mouth at once so feminine and innocently provocative that he drew in his breath on a sudden sharp surge of arousal which fortunately he managed to control… just.
Her head was down again so that all he could see were two dark wings of hair. God, how in hell had that happened? She was a child!
‘I suppose you’re playing truant from school,’ he said sharply.
‘School!’ The dark head came up again, the brown eyes wide and stunned. ‘I’m eighteen years old,’ she told him curtly. ‘Mother likes to pretend I’m much younger, of course.’ Her mouth twisted in bitterness, and then she challenged, ‘Are you sleeping with her?’
‘No.’
He knew that his answer was harsh, and he softened its antagonism saying quietly, ‘No, I’m not.’ And as he said it he wondered why he wasn’t telling her, as he should, that it wasn’t really any concern of hers anyway.
Instead he heard himself saying, ‘Have you seen the house?’
She shook her head.
‘Want me to show you round it?’ he suggested.
She made an inarticulate sound in her throat and then lifted her head and said breathlessly, her face furiously flushed, ‘Yes, please… but hadn’t you better get dressed first?’
He had forgotten about that, and almost laughed, until he realised that if he did he would probably hurt her. She looked such a child.
But she wasn’t.
Eighteen. It gave him an unpleasant jolt. He had felt safer when he had thought she was just a child. Safer… he groaned over his own thoughts and heard her say timidly, ‘If you’ve changed your mind… about showing me the house…’
He shook his head, trying to dispel the odd sensation of awareness that was threatening him.
‘Not at all,’ he heard himself saying in an over-hearty, avuncular fashion. ‘Just give me five minutes to go upstairs and make myself respectable.’
As he turned towards the door he had the odd feeling that if he left her there she would somehow disappear, and, dangerously, that was something he didn’t want, even though common sense warned him that it might be best if she did leave.
‘My bedroom’s at the top of the house. Come up with me and wait for me, then we’ll start at the top and work our way down.’
To spare her any further embarrassment he retrieved his shorts and pulled them on before telling her to follow him upstairs.
He used the familiar route of the servants’ back stairs, taking them two at a time and then pausing to wait for her, realising that she was probably trailing miles behind him. Only she wasn’t. She was standing right behind him and not even breathing fast. He frowned. Beneath that sloppy sweatshirt she was wearing, those jeans that looked as though she still had to grow into them, she must be supple and fit. He wondered briefly what her body was like, trying to visualise what lay beneath her bulky
clothes and failing.
Instinct warned him that he was flirting with danger, but for some reason he didn’t heed it, directing her up the next flight of stairs.
‘This was once the nursery floor,’ he told her when they reached the landing. ‘The attics above were used for the servants.’
‘The nursery floor. I suppose that’s why the windows are barred.’ She walked over to one and gazed out. The sun struck brilliant prisms of rich red light in the darkness of her hair. She turned round to look at him and he found himself gazing at the warm lushness of her mouth.
It was an effort to wrench away his gaze. This girl… this child had an effect on him that her mother, with all her skill and experience, could never match.
Only she wasn’t a child… Not at eighteen.
‘Which is your bedroom?’ she asked him.
‘This one,’ he replied absently, pushing open the door.
She walked through it ahead of him, studying the two narrow beds and the room’s starkness.
‘It looks a bit like a school dormitory.’
‘My grandfather believed in an austere upbringing,’ he told her drily.
He hadn’t bothered unpacking, and his clean clothes were still in his unopened case.
He opened it now, extracting clean briefs, a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt not dissimilar to her own.
When he turned round she was sitting on one of the beds. His bed, he recognised with a small stir of sensation he didn’t want to feel.
‘I know you’ve already seen all of me that there is to see,’ he commented drily, ‘but I think it might be as well if you waited outside while I get dressed.’
He opened the door and waited, but she stayed where she was, sitting on the bed, her body tensed with a sudden open, urgent determination.
‘Are you really not my mother’s lover?’ she asked him fiercely.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JAKE looked across at Beth, already aware of what underlay the question, and why her whole body was tensed with urgency and dread.
There were a dozen or more retorts he could have made, from the light-hearted to the dismissive, all of them safe and innocuous.
He knew why he didn’t choose to make any of them, just as he knew why he hadn’t chosen to make her wait for him downstairs.
She was a heart-catching mixture of maturity and ingenuousness; of fierce independence and vulnerability. His own throat ached for her as she asked the question, and at the same time he knew that if he reached out to touch her it wouldn’t be only compassion that motivated him.
It astounded him, how much she had the power to move him; this small, dark-haired girl-woman, who was nothing like the conventional ideal of feminine allure.
And yet, dressed in bulky jeans and an equally bulky sweatshirt, her face free of make-up and her hair tangled, she still had more sensuality, more power to arouse him simply by the way she smiled than her mother had with all her wiles and experience.
He knew he had hesitated too long to use a conventional, safe response. He knew also from the expression darkening her eyes that she thought he had lied to her the first time she’d asked the question.
‘I’m not your mother’s lover,’ he told her quietly. ‘And neither do I intend to be.’ He wondered how much he could say… how far he could go. He had already witnessed the alienation between mother and daughter, but how truthful could he be about the revulsion and dislike he felt towards Gloria Pilling?
‘You don’t find her… attractive… or desirable?’
‘No,’ he told her shortly.
Her mouth quivered as though she was about to cry and, totally unable to stop himself, he said thickly, ‘Don’t…’
She got off the bed and said tightly, ‘I’d better go… I’m in your way… I shouldn’t be here.’
It was all there in her voice, in the way she looked at him; her sense of rejection, of pain, of humiliation.
‘No.’ His fingers curled round her wrists, holding her. ‘I’d like you to stay. Just turn round for a moment while I get dressed.’
Without realising it, his thumb was stroking the pressure-point of her wrist, trying to soothe its frantic beat. He ought to make her wait outside, but he was frightened that if he did she would leave, and he could hardly show her round the house dressed in damp shorts and trainers.
For one thing… for one thing, the physical effect she was having on his body was not something he was going to be able to conceal for much longer, especially not dressed the way he was.
He released her wrists and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her round. She was tiny, her bones as frail as a bird’s.
‘Are you sure you’re eighteen?’ he asked her gravely.
She grimaced. ‘Yes… I don’t look it, I know. Of course, Mother prefers it that way. She’d like me out of her life altogether, but that isn’t possible…’
‘Not possible? Why?’
‘Harold—my stepfather—made it a condition of his will that my mother was to be responsible for me until I marry. He was very kind to me…’ She turned round, ducking her head to avoid looking at him. ‘I think he felt guilty about taking me away from my father. My father committed suicide after the court case and Harold soon came to realise that my mother resented having me around. He made it a condition of his will that if I didn’t make my home with her until I marry, she would forfeit half his estate.’
‘He did that knowing the two of you don’t get on?’
She heard the criticism in his voice and smiled wryly. ‘He meant it for the best… He was very old-fashioned… very protective. When I marry, I’m to get a lump sum from his estate.
‘I’d prefer to live on my own… to find a job and support myself, but I haven’t had any training. A year at a fashionable French finishing school doesn’t really equip one for earning one’s own living.’
‘So you’re forced to live with Gloria…’
‘Until I get married… I think that’s half the reason she wants to live here,’ she joked weakly. ‘She probably thinks it will be easier to marry me off here than it was in London.’
Jake frowned at the bitterness in her voice.
‘Of course, it might have been easier if she’d managed to resist the temptation to try out my potential husbands for their skills in bed.’
Her face flamed as she saw the way he was looking at her.
‘I suppose you think I’m a bitch for saying that.’
‘I would have thought that Gloria was the one who was being the bitch,’ Jake corrected her.
She was so vulnerable… so desperately in need of protection. She touched some inner core of him that Justin’s weakness had once touched, and it was all he could do to stop himself taking hold of her.
He shivered suddenly, a small presentiment of some unwanted emotion freezing his spine, and instantly she was concerned.
‘You’re cold, and that’s my fault. I’ll wait outside while you get changed.’
‘No, you won’t, you’ll stay here. That way I’ll know you’re not going to disappear,’ Jake told her wryly.
A pale flush of pleasure stained her skin and made her eyes shine. It was so obvious that she wasn’t used to receiving compliments or praise. And yet when she smiled she was lovely.
As he firmly took hold of her and gently turned her round again before turning his own back and stripping off his wet shorts, he couldn’t help wondering what she was really like beneath her clumsy, over-large clothes.
He was glad when her breathless, hesitant voice asked softly, ‘Can I turn round yet?’
‘You can now,’ he told her, zipping up his jeans and pulling on his sweatshirt.
‘Did you really sleep in here?’ she asked him.
Her face was still flushed, and he noticed with protective amusement that she was wary of looking at him.
He wondered how much experience of his sex she had had, and then caught himself up, sternly repressing his self-inflammatory thoughts. She was like a burr st
icking to his skin; a pleasurable itch he ached to scratch; and yet why? He barely knew her… had seen her only twice. It wasn’t like him to be overcome by this instant, overwhelming mingling of compassion and desire.
‘Yes. Yes, we really did,’ he told her absently.
‘We?’ she queried, turning from her contemplation of the peeling whitewashed walls and barred windows.
‘I shared this room with my brother. He’s dead now,’ he told her briefly, and wondered how much she knew about the history of his family.
What she didn’t know now she probably soon would, and for some reason he found he wanted to tell her himself.
He did so as he led her from the bedroom to the room he and Justin had once used as their playroom and then their study.
‘He killed himself?’ she responded, shocked.
‘Yes,’ Jake confirmed briefly. ‘He was a homosexual… My grandfather found him with his lover and there was a quarrel… Justin shot my grandfather and then turned the gun on himself…’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘Do you think it would put your mother off the house if she knew?’
She shook her head decisively.
‘Nothing could put her off. She’s determined to live here and play the grand lady… At least that’s one field in which I can make use of my finishing-school training. They sent us on a four-month antiques appreciation course. Mother hates decorating and furnishing. She says I can earn my keep by taking charge of the renovations here.’
Jake was startled, but he soon discovered as they toured the house that Beth possessed both the knowledge and the instinctive feel for old property to give her a loving insight into how the house could and should be.
His private dread that Gloria Pilling would turn Fitton Park into a parody of all that it should be vanished as he listened to Beth talking about replacing the worn silk brocade with an identical fabric woven in France.
‘It will cost the earth,’ she said mischievously, her smile warming her small face, and then she reached out and touched him, saying seriously, ‘You needn’t be afraid. I shan’t spoil it…’
