Bitter Betrayal

That should have made her feel glad, but it didn’t. She had an appalling, impossible impulse to reach out and touch him. To smooth those lines away…to make him smile, the old, familiar, teasing smile that had once made her stomach curl with pleasure and her body ache with desire.

‘My car’s just round the corner. We’ll give you a lift…’

‘No!’The panic-stricken denial was out before she could stop it, leaving them both to look at one another in a silence that was impregnated with an emotional hostility Jenneth could almost taste.

In the distance the photographer was busily at work, and she could hear the hum of conversation, but it was a distant, unobtrusive hum, as though she and Luke were sealed into an intimacy that locked out the rest of the human race.

And then Angelica piped up shrilly and uncertainly, ‘But, Jenneth, you promised that you were going to be my pretend mummy…’

Under the sardonic, bitter eyes of her father Jenneth turned towards the little girl, the words of denial burning her throat until she saw the vulnerable look in her eyes and knew that she just could not do it.

CHAPTER THREE

THE rest of the afternoon turned into a nightmare over which Jenneth felt she had no control whatsoever. Angelica had attached herself to her with all the skill and determination of a limpet. Although in other circumstances she might have been able to detach herself sufficiently to feel a certain degree of unkind amusement at Luke’s very obvious frustration with his daughter’s apparent instant rapport with her, at the moment, all her energy was concentrated on simply getting through the appalling ordeal without betraying to anyone just what she was going through. She was only too aware of the curious, knowing eyes on her of people who had watched her grow up and fall in love with the man now seated opposite her at one of the beautifully decorated round tables in the marquee on the vicarage lawn.