Lovers Touch. PENNY JORDAN
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rang, and she knew before she picked it up that it would be Joss.
She was right; his clipped, slightly accented voice was abrasive on her ear.
‘I’m coming over at twelve, and I’ve arranged for Williams to be there at one. There’ll be certain legal arrangements to be made and I thought you’d want him there, seeing as he’s your solicitor …’
He was moving too fast. Bullying her … pushing her in a direction she wasn’t sure she wanted to go; but when she tried to protest he hung up on her. She could picture him without even trying. He would be standing in his study, an anonymous square room, which like the rest of his house looked more like an expensive hotel than a home.
He would probably be wearing one of those fine Savile Row wool suits in some dark, formal fabric. Joss liked good clothes and he wore them well, but nothing could totally disguise what her grandfather had described as his buccaneering quality; that arrogant maleness that no amount of city suiting could tame.
His dark hair would be lying flat to his skull, thick and clean, his mouth curled into that thin, taunting smile he gave her so often; nothing like the smile he gave other women.
She got up unsteadily and called to the dog, Heicker. She came to heel obediently. Joss had trained her.
Outside it was one of those crisp September days when frost and the scent of woodsmoke mingled in the air and the sky was a clear pale blue with the sun dappling yellow and bright through the turning leaves.
Deliberately Nell avoided walking past the greenhouses and the stables which had once housed her grandfather’s hunters. She herself liked to ride, but she did not enjoy hunting other than for its pageantry. She was too squeamish, too conscious of the purpose for which the hounds were bred, and as a teenager she had always drawn a sigh of relief when the day ended without the fox being caught.
Her grandfather had had no such qualms, of course. To him, fox were vermin and hunting a sport. Right up until his death, the local hunt had started their Boxing Day meet at Easterhay. The traditional stirrup cup prepared in the kitchen for the huntsmen came from a recipe supposedly brought back from France by a de Tressail who had been exiled there by Henry VII and whose French wife was supposed to have been connected to the powerful de Guise family, uncles of Mary Stuart through her French mother. Whatever its true origins, it went down well with the huntsmen. She wondered if Joss would want to continue the tradition. Did he hunt? she wondered. Certainly not from birth as her father and grandfather had done, but at some point or other in his life Joss had taken enough time away from making money to acquire a sophisticated degree of polish.
Despite Joss’s taunts, Nell was no snob. Although he didn’t seem to realise it, she admired Joss for what he had achieved, and her doubts about the wisdom of marrying him had nothing to do with the fact that he had been born in a Glaswegian slum and she in an expensive private nursing home.
Twelve o’clock, he had said … it was gone ten now. And then David arriving at one … He was determined to make her agree, then. Even to the extent of involving the family solicitor. Poor David, how little he understood the Josses of this world. Nell suspected that David was terrified of Joss, although he hid it beneath a stiffly formal manner more suited to a man of fifty-odd than one of twenty-six.
Like her, David had been brought up in an old-fashioned tradition, knowing almost from the cradle that he was destined to succeed his father as a country solicitor. There had been a time when she had wondered if she might fall in love with him. But that had been before she saw Joss.
For some reason she couldn’t entirely analyse herself, she chose to wait for him, not in her grandfather’s library, the room with which she was most familiar in the house, but in a small, north-facing sitting-room which three centuries before had been the preserve of the ladies of the family, and which was now never used, as testified to by the fine film of dust on the small French escritoire. She touched it idly, admiring the delicate marquetry work. This desk had been part of the dowry of the family’s second French bride, Louise, a shy, prim-looking child of fourteen who had died giving birth to her first child, and whose portrait hung next to that of her husband in the long gallery.
The air in the room was faintly musty. A distinct chill penetrated through Nell’s thin blouse, and when she saw Joss drive up she shivered violently, hugging her arms around her body.
He wasn’t in his Rolls, but driving the Aston Martin. Its rich plum paintwork went well with his dark colouring, she noted idly, as after swinging long legs from the car, he straightened up and closed the door.
Even the way he moved had a certain animal assurance; no hesitation or doubts there, Nell reflected wryly as he walked towards the main entrance looking neither to his left nor his right, his head not downbent as so many people’s were when they walked, but tilted at an arrogant angle.
Anyone not knowing him would think he was more at home here in this house than herself, Nell acknowledged.
Her grandfather’s staff were old-fashioned and set in their ways, and she knew that Johnson, who had been her grandfather’s batman and then his valet, and who was now supposed to be retired, but who had begged her to allow him to stay on at the house, rather than retire to the estate cottage her grandfather had left him, would insist on announcing Joss formally to her before allowing him admittance to the room.
Against one wall of the small room, painted to pick out the soft colours of the faded blue silk wallpaper, was a small table decorated with gilded flowers, and above it a matching mirror.
It gave Nell back her reflection with the cruel honesty of the room’s northern light. Not plain precisely, but certainly not lushly beautiful like the women she had seen photographed with Joss. Her features were neat and regular, surprisingly dark lashes surrounding the clear grey of her eyes, her skin, that delicate, translucent, very English skin that looked its best under softly rainwashed skies.
All her life, almost, she had worn her hair plaited, and the neatly twisted coils lying flat against her skull heightened the delicacy of her bone-structure, but Nell saw none of the rare delicacy of her features, seeing instead only that she was a pale, washed-out shadow of her stepsister’s dark beauty.
As a teenager she had experimented with make-up, trying to copy the effects she had seen in magazines, but on her the effects had been garish, and so now she rarely wore more than pale pink lipstick.
Liz had tried to persuade her into Harvey Nichols the Christmas before last when they had met in London for a shopping trip, telling her that modern make-ups with their subtle colours were far more suited to her delicate colouring than those which had been fashionable during their early teens, but, all too aware of the fact that Grania was coming home for Christmas, Nell had shrunk from inviting Joss’s mockery by doing anything that might be construed as an attempt to catch his attention.
The salon door opened and Joss walked in, making her step back from the mirror.
‘Where’s Johnson?’ she asked him huskily, flustered to see him standing there when she had anticipated a few more moments’ grace.
Something gleamed in Joss’s eyes, something predatory and intimidating, but when he spoke his voice was cool and distant.
‘Since I’m shortly to become a member of the family, I told him there was no need to stand on ceremony.’
Nell gripped the edge of the table.
‘You told Johnson that we’re going to be married?’
‘You object? Why? We are going to be married, aren’t we, Nell?’
She looked mutely at him and then said sadly, ‘Do I have any choice?’
‘No—and I haven’t said a word to Johnson,’ he told her calmly. ‘I’m not totally without awareness, Nell … some of the rough edges have been rubbed off, you know. I know you will want to tell the staff our good news yourself …’
There was an ironic look in his eyes as he said the words ‘our good news’ and, despite her firm determination not to do so, Nell felt herself