Stronger Than Yearning. PENNY JORDAN
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knowing he wasn’t going to get any more information out of her than he already had. At times infuriating, always calmly controlled, there was still a vulnerability about her that made him anxious. He couldn’t remember when he had seen a more beautiful woman. Her bone structure was delicately feminine, her eyes large and deeply green, her skin porcelain pale, her hair a thick mass of red-gold curls. At twenty-nine, she could easily have passed for twenty-three or -four if it hadn’t been for her air of cool self-possession. Tall and slim, her curves were nevertheless femininely voluptuous, especially her breasts. Unlike him, her clothes did not betray her as a city person, her sleek tweeds fitting her as naturally as though she had worn them all her life.
‘Where’s Lucy?’ she asked him, flicking open the pamphlet outlining the details of the house.
‘Sulking in the car,’ he told her wearily. ‘God, Jenna, have you thought of the trouble she’s going to give you if you do move up here? She’s dead against it.’
‘So she says, but she’ll be at school most of the time.’ School! That was another of Lucy’s grievances and probably a justifiable one, but what alternative had she had? As a busy woman building up her career she had not had the time to devote to a growing child. At first she had managed with a housekeeper and Lucy had attended a local school in London, but then as Jenna’s business had expanded, she was required to be out more and more in the evenings and had been worried about Lucy’s isolation from other children her age. In the end, the decision to send her to boarding school had seemed the only answer, and until recently she had thought Lucy enjoyed her school. It had been carefully chosen, being neither too lax nor too strict, and she was always meticulous about visiting her and keeping time free during the school holidays to spend with her. Only last summer, she and Lucy and two of Lucy’s friends had spent six weeks in the Aegean. It was the old story … she needed to work to support them both and yet by working she was forced to abandon her traditional role as mother.
She made a pretence of studying the leaflet in front of her, not wanting Harley to see her concern. Once he suspected she had doubts, he would do everything he could to dissuade her, Jenna knew that. But it was only a pretence because she knew the facts about the house off by heart. She had never been inside the main part of the Hall, but already she could visualise its rooms, feel its air of timelessness … sense the inbred belief of those who had lived there of their right to be the privileged few. But now, they no longer had that right. If she was successful at the auction the Hall would be hers, and, ridiculous though it was, her need to own it … to possess that which had once belonged to the proud Deverils who had so disdained those lower down the social ladder than themselves that they were not permitted to put a foot inside the place, was a strong motivating force in her life.
‘Well, are you going to go inside?’
She was, but in her own good time and alone. ‘Later,’ she said non-committally, adding, ‘look, why don’t you take Lucy back to West Thorpe, it’s going on for lunchtime. I’ll join her there later.’
‘Would you like me to stay overnight?’
When she had rung Bill Mather to tell him that she and Lucy were coming up to Yorkshire he had instantly insisted that they were to stay with him and his wife, Nancy, but there was no spare room for Harley and to be honest she didn’t want him there, trying to pressurise her into changing her mind.
If she bought the Hall, even at the reserve price, it would take every spare bit of cash she had, and even then she would have to borrow heavily. But it would be worth it. It would be worth every single penny.
‘You go back to London,’ she told him. ‘The Sedgerton contract should be in from the solicitors soon and I’d like you to go over it for me … I’m not sure I trust them completely …’
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