Stronger Than Yearning

It wasn’t unknown for some of her wealthy clients to try and wriggle out of paying for her work, and for that reason Jenna was insistent upon watertight contracts.

Harley leapt as eagerly at the bait as she had hoped. ‘I’ll get on to it the moment it arrives. How long do you think you’ll stay up here for?’

‘Just until after the auction.’

So she was still determined to go ahead. He sighed gustily. Privately, he thought she was mad even to contemplate buying such a vast, and undeniably crumbling pile. He shuddered to think what the bank would say, and of course, it would have to be bought in the company’s name, especially if she intended to use it as a showcase for their work. Who on earth would come all the way from London up here, though?

Almost as though she had read his mind, Jenna drawled laconically, ‘They aren’t all devoid of money and taste north of Watford, you know, Harley. There’s a vast untapped market up here and if we get in first, it could prove an extremely lucrative business.’

‘But our contacts, our craftsmen, they’re all in London.’

‘So we’ll pay them to travel — or find more.’

He knew her stubbornness of old, knew it and in many ways admired it. Not many women of her youth and with her commitments would have left a safe, well-paid position with an established firm to set up on her own, but she had. He had first heard of Jenna through a friend whose apartment she had decorated. He had gone to her initially to find out what she could do for a small Chelsea Mews flat he had bought and which he wanted modernising in order to sell at a profit. He had walked into her office to find it in chaos, paper everywhere, and her vivid, haunting beauty had almost robbed him of breath. He soon learned that under the chaos was a very keen business mind, but her untidiness had him itching to put things in order.

When she had let slip the fact that she was looking for a business administrator, he had leapt at the chance to join her, and even to this day wasn’t sure if he had actually angled for the job or if she had simply let him think he had.

Their partnership worked well. She was a generous employer, content to leave the administrative side of the business completely to him, and he took a pride in the neat lists of schedules and work plans he kept locked away in his desk, carefully monitoring the progress of each contract, checking that all flowed smoothly.

Initially he had been almost desperately in love with her, but he soon learned that it was pointless. She was the only woman he knew who seemed to be able to live her life without a man in it. In all the years he had worked with her he had never known whether she had a lover and, if so, who. On balance he rather doubted it, which seemed incredible, given her startlingly good looks and the fact that she had a fifteen-year-old daughter. Proof positive, surely, that once there must have been a man. And that she must have been extremely young …

He wasn’t sure of her exact age, she looked younger than she was. What had happened to Lucy’s father? Had he been married perhaps? Had they quarrelled? Had he perhaps been a boy as young as she must have been? Was it Lucy’s conception and birth that had soured her against men? None of them were questions he would have dared to ask her, and over the years his love had faded to admiration tinged with a wistful yearning that things might have been different.

Left by herself, Jenna walked towards the house. Sharp knives of tension speared her stomach. Those who knew her would have been stunned had they known how she was feeling. Jenna never betrayed any emotion, any weakness and yet here she was, dreading setting one foot inside the house she had come so far to see and yet knowing that she must.

The Hall was rectangular and dark. Someone had painted over the elegant Georgian plasterwork in a revolting shade of brown, so that even the light pouring in through the high windows did nothing to alleviate the gloom. Dust and the smell of damp permeated the air. A double staircase curved up to the first floor, the stairs elegant and shallow. All Jenna’s inborn sense of colour and fitness rebelled at what had been done to this once-gracious room.

Two sets of double doors led off the hall with another two single doors further towards the back of it. This main entrance was in the new wing of the house and, as she knew from the sketch plan she had, contained a large drawing-room, the library, a dining-room, and another room which was described as a ‘back parlour’.

Although badly scratched, the mahogany of the double doors into the drawing-room seemed firm and dry; the brass handles and locks decorating them were probably the originals, Jenna reflected, marvelling at the workmanship that meant they opened outwards easily despite their weight without so much as a squeak.

The drawing-room was at the far end of the new wing, and, from the smell of damp pervading it, had probably suffered the most neglect. A leaking downspout, or a hole in the roof, Jenna decided knowledgeably, studying the betraying mould-stains discolouring the faded silk wallpaper at the far end of the room.

Over the years, the original Adam design had been mutilated as only the Victorians and Edwardians had known how, but she could see how the room once must have looked and how it could look again. Against her will, Jenna found as she walked through the dusty neglected rooms that she was slowly falling in love with the house, the one thing she had made no calculation for at all. Against all reason, its neglect called out to her, making her ache to restore it to what it had once been. Moving from room to room she forgot why she had originally come here, and knew only a powerful feeling that the house had to be hers. It went against all logic and reason, but it was strong enough to blot out everything else, even Lucy, waiting for her at the Mathers’, even the fact that originally she had wanted the house simply because it had once belonged to the Deverils, everything. She had heard of love at first sight, but had never envisaged herself falling so deeply in love with a house that the thought of not owning it caused actual physical pain.

Not even the open evidence of damp and the knowledge that it would need a fortune spending on it could put her off. Already she could imagine how it would look; how it would come to life under her expert care and love.

On the first floor, a galleried landing overlooked the main hall with four doors leading off it. Jenna had already noticed several paintings hanging on the walls — the house was being sold complete with contents — but this was the first one that had caused her to spare it more than a passing glance. The portrait was of a man, dressed in clothes of the late Georgian era. His dark hair was worn unpowdered, curling close to his skull, and the painter had somehow managed to capture on canvas the sitter’s aura of intense masculinity. A cynical rakehell character, Jenna suspected moving closer to the portrait.

The words ‘James Deveril, aged 32, 1817’ were painted on the frame, and it seemed to Jenna as she studied him that the dark blue eyes watched her, coolly mocking her.

As far as she knew most of the Deverils had been fair-haired Saxon types whereas this man was dark, his hair as jet black as a gypsy’s, his skin tanned as though he had spent some time in hotter climates than Yorkshire’s.

Fascinated by him against her will, Jenna wondered who he was. It shouldn’t be difficult to find out — the Deveril history was well documented in the local library as she already knew.

What on earth was wrong with her? she chided herself, moving away. The moment she entered this house she had been acting in a manner totally foreign to her normal behaviour.

She walked from the Georgian wing into the old, Tudor part of the Hall. Here the rooms were small, oddly shaped, the windows mullioned and the ceilings beamed. The Georgian wing fronted the house and the original Tudor building ran at right angles to it, a good-sized courtyard was at the back of the building enclosed on two sides by the house itself and on the other two by stables and outbuildings. Now neglected and weed-covered, Jenna could already see how attractive this area could eventually be.

Beyond the house lay the grounds, which included a small park planted with specimen trees, collected by an adventuring Deveril who had had business interests in the West Indies, but the rich farmland that lay beyond the house’s immediate environs was being sold separately. Not that she would have wanted it, Jenna admitted, studying the plans at the back of her sale pamphlet, the land that went with the house afforded it plenty of privacy. She remembered as a child cycling past the lodge gates, intensely curious about what lay behind the protective ring of trees that hid the house from sight.

Today wasn’t the first time she had visited the house, though; there had been one other occasion on which she had been here. As she stepped out through the back door into the derelict yard her mouth twisted bitterly. On that occasion she had made the mistake of ringing the front doorbell, and had been sent round to the servants’ entrance for her pains. ‘Servants’ entrance’, dear God, how antiquated it all seemed now, ridiculously so; the hallmark of a family desperate to preserve the old ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘master’ and ‘servant’ image. Then she had been totally over-awed, embarrassed and humiliated. How naïve she had been! A true product of her remote village upbringing by a spinster great-aunt.

Having finished her inspection she walked back towards her car, lost in memories of the past.

‘Nice car!’ The unexpected intrusion of the deep male voice into her thoughts unbalanced her, and she swung round tensely, colour flushing up under her skin as she found herself being studied by a pair of openly appreciative male eyes. The visual impact of coming face to face with a man so similar to the portrait of James Deveril, which she had just been studying, made her usual cool poise desert her, and she could only glance from him to her scarlet Ferrari in disorientated bewilderment.

‘Sorry if I startled you!’ His eyes crinkled in warm amusement, laughter tingeing his voice as he added, ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost! Have you? They do say that one of the wives of one of the Deverils walks sometimes at full moon … though no one’s ever seen her during the day.’

He had a faint accent that she couldn’t place, and angry at herself for her bemused reaction, Jenna threw him a cold look. The laughter died from his eyes immediately, and he sketched her a briefly mocking bow, drawling lightly, ‘Sorry if I spoke out of place, ma’am …’

He was dressed in jeans and a checked cotton work-shirt, his hair tousled, the open neck of his shirt revealing a deep vee of tanned flesh and the beginnings of a tangle of dark hair. Who was he? He was so like James Deveril that he must have some Deveril blood somewhere … but why not? There had been several Deverils in the past who had taken what they considered their droit de seigneur over the village girls; this man could be the descendant of one of them. He couldn’t be a legitimate member of the family; there weren’t any alive.

‘Thinking of buying it, are you?’ He nodded towards the house as he spoke, his eyes lingering on the full thrust of her breasts as she turned to unlock her car.

Seething inwardly Jenna ignored him, hoping that he would take the hint and leave her alone, but when he kept on prowling appreciatively round her car, she began to suspect he was deliberately trying to infuriate her, and she snapped shortly, ‘Look, I can see that you consider yourself something of a local Don Juan, but I’m really not interested. If I were you I’d get back to work before your employers discover that you’re missing.’

She had expected him to be disconcerted by her put-down, but instead he merely laughed, stepping away from the car as she slid in to fire the engine. The car needed servicing and was being rather temperamental. It refused to start, despite several attempts to get it going, and all-too-conscious of his amused scrutiny, Jenna willed herself not to give way to temper.

‘Here, let me.’

His arrogance left her breathless, stupefaction giving way to fury as he opened her door, turned the key in the ignition and the car fired right away.

Closing the door for her he gave her a wide, taunting smile, and said, ‘Some cars are like women; they respond best to a man’s touch.’

Chauvinist! Much as she longed to throw the insult at him, Jenna restrained herself. Why get so het up about the sexual insolence of some village lout who obviously thought of the female sex as no more than male chattels.

She was still fuming when she reached her destination. Although deference wasn’t something she expected to receive from her peers — of either sex — there had been an air of insolent amusement about him, an easy, but none the less distinct, self-assurance that had jarred on her. Mere farm labourer he might be, but for all that he had made it plain that he considered himself superior to her simply by virtue of his sex, and that made her seethe. It had been a long time since she had come up against such blatantly arrogant maleness and it had unsettled her. Implicit in the look he had given her as she drove away had been the suggestion that had he so wished he could have mastered not only her car but her as well. No man could look at her like that and get away with it.

For goodness’ sake, Jenna chided herself as she parked her car in the drive of the old school-house and climbed out, why was she getting in such a state over some country Lothario?

Since she had left the area her old school had been shut down but Bill Mather, the headmaster, had been allowed to purchase the school-house. Built in the Victorian era, it had an air of solid respectability and stability. This was the first house she had ever truly called home, she thought, as she ignored the front door in favour of walking round to the kitchen. She had come here as a frightened, ignorant girl of barely fifteen, having been virtually thrown out by her great-aunt, her clothes in a battered suitcase and a two-week-old baby in her arms. She sighed faintly, anticipating the conflict now to come with that same ‘baby’. Lucy had objected strenuously to coming to Yorkshire, mainly because Jenna herself had been so eager to do so. What had happened to the easy friendship that had once existed between them? Sometimes these days she felt as though Lucy almost hated her. Was she being selfish in wanting to buy the house? Lucy still had several terms to do at school, even if she decided to leave after O levels; she had always complained about the smallness of their London flat. Here she could have as much space as she wanted. Perhaps even that horse she had nagged her mother for last year.

There was no sign of Lucy as Jenna walked into the Mathers’ kitchen. No doubt she would be sulking in her room. Lucy had made her dislike of the Mathers more than plain, because, Jenna suspected, she believed that like Jenna herself they knew the identity of her father and were conspiring with her mother to keep it from her.

Of course Jenna could understand why Lucy wanted to know her father’s identity, but it was something she just could not tell her … She bit her lip wondering how many people living in the village could remember that summer nearly sixteen years ago. She had changed of course. Then, she had been a painfully thin, milk-skinned child with red hair and enormous, frightened eyes. All that was still the same was the colour of her skin … even her hair had turned from carrot to rich Titian. No, she doubted if anyone would recognise her. She hadn’t had many friends. Her aunt had never really mingled with the other villagers, and besides, she had always been content with Rachel’s company.

Rachel … pain pierced through her. Fifteen years her sister had been dead and even now Jenna’s grief was as fresh and sharp as it had been then. Rachel had been everything Jenna had not: three years older, warm and extrovert, with a personality that drew people to her. There had not been an ounce of malice in her nature. Naturally warm-hearted she had naïvely believed that everyone else was the same; trusting and eager to please, she had paid a terrible price for her naïvety …

‘Jenna!’

She tore her thoughts abruptly from the past as Bill Mather walked into the kitchen. ‘I thought I heard your monster of a car arrive. How did it go?’

The grey eyes weren’t quite as keen now as they had been fifteen years ago, but they were still kind and wise.

‘I fell in love with the place, totally and for ever,’ Jenna told him honestly.

He and his wife were her only bridge between the present and her past; she loved them with an intensity that went so deep that it was something she could never talk about. Without them …