Stronger than Yearning Page 6

  The auctioneer was heading towards her, claiming her attention, and when Jenna looked again James Allingham had disappeared.

  * * *

  The old Hall was hers! Even now Jenna could hardly believe it. She had spent the rest of the day sorting out all the formalities connected with the purchase. A telephone call to her bank had secured for her the increased mortgage facilities she would require and Jenna quailed a little as she contemplated the financial burden she had taken on. She was in no doubt about her ability to pay off the mortgage eventually, but initially it would be a struggle.

  She gave a brief mental shrug. She would just have to hope for some good commissions locally in the early months.

  A small voice inside her reminded her that fortune was seldom so kind. Harley would go mad, she acknowledged as she took a taxi from the estate agent’s office back to Bill’s and Nancy’s.

  Instead of feeling excited, enthusiastic, she was conscious of a flat, let-down feeling. Telling herself it was merely reaction she walked towards the front door.

  Lucy was sitting sulkily in front of the television. She barely glanced up as Jenna walked in.

  ‘Well, how did it go?’

  Thank heavens for Bill, Jenna thought, sinking into the chair he indicated. ‘I got it.’

  ‘You don’t sound too pleased about it.’

  ‘I had to pay over the reserve price.’ That was the excuse she was using to herself to cover her lack of enthusiasm and it certainly seemed to deceive Bill.

  ‘I hope you haven’t taken on more than you can handle,’ he warned her worriedly. ‘Old houses like the Hall gobble up money.’

  ‘I know, but as I intend to use it as a showplace for the craftsmen I employ, I’m hoping to be able to set a certain amount of the cost off as a business expense.’ Jenna hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. Her accountants had cautioned her against hoping for too much when it came to convincing the tax authorities of the authenticity of her claim.

  ‘Even so…’ Bill was still frowning, but he smiled briefly as Nancy came into the room carrying a tea tray.

  ‘I heard you come in,’ Nancy told her. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘She got it,’ Bill answered for her.

  ‘Oh. What happened to James Allingham then? He didn’t strike me as a man who would easily give up something he wanted.’

  Jenna agreed with her, but she only shrugged. There had been something odd about the way James Allingham had suddenly lost interest in the bidding…no…not lost interest, she corrected herself…it had been as if something more important had demanded his attention. But what could have been more important than securing the house he had told her in no uncertain terms he intended to have?

  ‘I wonder where he comes from,’ Nancy mused. ‘He had a faintly American accent.’

  ‘I doubt that we’ll see him again,’ Jenna interrupted. Lucy had turned round to look at her and a spasm of alarm shivered down her spine as she saw the look of bitter disappointment cross the girl’s face. Was Lucy in danger of forming a crush on James Allingham? The thought was distinctly disquieting even though Jenna knew that it was unlikely that they would see him again. However, she had enough problems with Lucy already without adding any more.

  * * *

  ‘So…what do you intend to do now?’

  It was two days since the auction and Jenna was sitting in the kitchen with Bill, drinking coffee. She cupped her hands round her mug and stared thoughtfully at it.

  ‘I’ll have to go back to London—I intend to keep an office going there. Richard Hollis, my assistant, will run it. We’ve got several contracts on at the moment but nothing that Richard can’t handle.’ As she talked, she was mentally going over the work they had in hand. None of it was threatening to prove difficult and she felt that she could with perfect safety hand it over to Richard.

  ‘I can’t move in to the Hall—not yet. Far too much needs to be done, but on the other hand it’s going to be hard work supervising everything from London.’

  ‘Why not stay with us?’ Bill suggested.

  Jenna shook her head. ‘No. It wouldn’t be fair on you and Nancy,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be coming and going all the time, using the telephone. One of the first things I’ll have to do when I get back is to find out if any of my craftsmen have contacts up here.’ She would also need a good architect, she reflected, and a sympathetic builder. Until she knew the Hall was hers she hadn’t allowed herself to think too much beyond the auction but now the auction was over and…

  ‘And Lucy?’ Bill questioned, watching her.

  ‘I took her out of school to bring her up here with me. She’s due back next Monday.’

  ‘She won’t like it,’ Bill warned her.

  Jenna nibbled worriedly at her bottom lip. ‘I know she won’t, Bill, but what else can I do? A London day school is out. I’ve seen what those kids get up to, you haven’t. The way she’s behaving at the moment I couldn’t trust Lucy not to get in with some wild crowd.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what’s wrong,’ Bill suggested quietly. ‘Perhaps you should trust her, Jenna.’

  He watched her shrug and persisted. ‘Yes, I know you only want to protect her, but can’t you see? In her eyes, by refusing to talk to her about her father, by refusing to listen to her grievances, you’re refusing to believe her worthy of trust, and her views worthy of being respected.’

  Bill had taught teenagers for many years, Jenna recognised, and she could also see that what he was saying made sense.

  ‘I don’t know, Bill. Perhaps at the end of this term, in the summer…There’s nothing I want more than to see her happy, but she says she hates Yorkshire. More to spite me than anything else, I suspect. At least at school she has her friends. I just don’t know what to do.’

  She was more worried about Lucy than she wanted to admit. The way her niece had sprung to champion James Allingham had reminded her that Lucy was balanced very precariously between childhood and womanhood. With the problems that existed between them at the moment it would be all too easy for Lucy to decide to throw off the yoke of childhood and seek solace for her grievances in open rebellion.

  ‘She lacks a man’s presence in her life. You both do, Jenna.’ Bill’s quiet criticism wounded her, and she put down her mug, getting up and pacing angrily up and down.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Bill,’ she exclaimed. ‘Don’t you start! What am I supposed to do? Go out on the streets and grab the first man who walks past?’

  ‘Don’t fly up at me,’ Bill chided her. ‘Sit down and we’ll talk about this calmly.’

  Unwillingly she did so.

  ‘You know I’ve never interfered in your life, Jenna, but I hate to see what’s happening to you. You should have a husband and children of your own. I…’

  ‘Bill, the days are long gone when a woman wasn’t complete without a man at her side. I don’t want a husband, and as for children…I have Lucy. For heaven’s sake, at Lucy’s school more than half the girls are from single-parent families. It means nothing nowadays.’

  ‘Does it?’ She could feel Bill watching her.

  ‘Perhaps to you, Jenna, but not to Lucy. If you’re not careful she’s going to start looking for a father substitute for herself and I hate to think where that could lead. Look, I’m not suggesting you marry the first man who comes along simply for Lucy’s sake, I am telling you that she needs a male influence in her life that she can identify with, whether that man is her actual father or someone else, and the person best equipped to provide her with the right sort of male influence right now is you. I know that what happened to Rachel hurt you badly, Jenna, but all men aren’t like that.’

  ‘I know that.’ She got up again, pacing tensely. ‘I’m not a complete fool, Bill, it’s just that…well, I’ve never met any man who I would want to give up my freedom for. Sometimes I wonder if I’m capable of sexual love,’ she added bleakly.

  She heard the scrape of Bill’s chair as he got up, and then the weight of
his arm round her shoulders. ‘With that hair, and your temper ..!’ His eyes were laughing at her. ‘You’re capable of it all right, but somehow you’ve managed to train your mind to tell you that you’re not.’

  * * *

  Three days later, back in London, Jenna found that she couldn’t get what Bill had said out of her mind. On Sunday she was taking Lucy back to school, and although Jenna had tried on several occasions to talk seriously to her niece, Lucy had proved extremely unco-operative. Every time Jenna asked her if she had a moment to spare, Lucy was either on the point of going out, or she had to speak urgently to a schoolfriend, or there was something else of equal importance she had to do. Jenna was no fool, she knew that Lucy was deliberately punishing her because of her refusal to discuss her father, but what could she do? As she waited for the coffee to perk, Jenna heard the newspaper plop through the apartment’s outer door. It was Thursday and she had several appointments that morning, most of them connected with the Hall in one way or another. Richard had proved a marvellous help, taking all the work on hand off her shoulders so that Jenna could concentrate on organising the initial work on the Hall.

  Harley had proved at first disbelieving and then disapproving when she told him how much she had paid. Like Lucy, he was sulking with her. Sighing faintly, Jenna opened the kitchen door and called out to Lucy. The younger girl was spending the day with a schoolfriend who, coincidentally, had also been off school, and they were going shopping together.

  Jenna’s first appointment of the morning was with the firm of architects she normally used for any major reconstruction work required by her clients; she was hoping they would be able to recommend a Yorshire-based firm of architects to her. She had already unearthed a professional guide that listed builders qualified to work on restoring period buildings, and she was slowly going through it, writing down the names of those within reasonable travelling distance of West Thorpe.

  ‘Lucy, come on, you’re going to be late!’ she called again, pouring out a cup of coffee and walking into the small hallway to get the paper.

  The front-page headlines were familiarly depressing and Jenna glanced at them briefly before turning to the gossip column. The previous evening she had attended a party thrown by one of her clients to show off her new décor, and her hostess had told Jenna that she had invited several society columnists. The moment she opened the paper on the society page a photograph caught Jenna’s eye. She stared blankly at it for several seconds before reading the caption beneath it. ‘Millionaire James Allingham returns to Britain following the deaths of his father and step-mother in car crash!’

  There was no mistaking the dominatingly masculine features of the grim-faced man in the photograph, even with his expression stripped of all emotion save for a certain dark bleakness.

  Several days ago James Allingham flew to New York, following the tragic news that a car driven by his step-mother, Lorraine, had been involved in a multiple pile-up on a New York freeway. Allingham, who was in Yorkshire at the time, arrived in New York just in time to see his father before he died. His step-mother, Lorraine, died later in hospital, his step-sister, Sarah, being the only survivor of the accident. A millionaire in his own right, James Allingham shares an inheritance from his father of the latter’s large art collection and a chain of hotels throughout the Caribbean. Allingham’s own fortune was founded on the holiday and marina complex he developed on the Caribbean island of St Justine which he inherited from his grandfather when he was twenty-one. Since Allingham is not married, and has always led a somewhat peripatetic life, it will be interesting to see if he now succumbs to the blandishments of one of his many female ‘friends’ and takes the plunge into matrimony. His step-sister, Sarah, who is fourteen years old was severely injured by the accident, and it is rumoured that James Allingham is her sole guardian. However, he has returned to his Knightsbridge house alone.

  Grimacing with distaste Jenna put the paper down. So now she knew why James Allingham had left the auction so abruptly. She shivered slightly. No matter what she felt about him personally, she couldn’t help but be torn by compassion for his step-sister. The speculatively coy tone of the article sickened her, with its covert intrusive curiosity and she pushed the paper on one side in disgust, getting up to call Lucy yet again.

  Her niece appeared several seconds later, touslehaired and still sulky, her answers to all Jenna’s too-bright questions monosyllabic to the point of rudeness.

  ‘I’m going now, Lucy.’ Jenna made herself sound cheerfully unaware of Lucy’s attitude. ‘I’ll be back about five.’ On a sudden impulse she hesitated and added, ‘Look, how would you like to go out to dinner tonight? Just the two of us, we’ll go somewhere glamorous and——’

  ‘I’m eating at Janet’s.’

  Recognising that she had been snubbed, Jenna pressed her lips firmly together. ‘Well, perhaps another time then,’ she added brightly. ‘Have a nice time.’

  It was ridiculous that a woman who could run her own business successfully should quail beneath the resentment of a fifteen-year-old, Jenna told herself wryly as she stepped outside. Even though she hated to admit it to herself, it would be a relief in a way when Lucy was back at school. At the moment having her in the house was like living with a time-bomb. But simply because Lucy was back at school didn’t mean their problems had disappeared, Jenna reminded herself. Somehow, she and Lucy were going to have to find a common meeting ground. Without knowing why, she found herself thinking about James Allingham. How was he coping with his step-sister? Compared with him, her problems were minimal, Jenna told herself, but, then, no doubt man-like, he could hand over the care and comfort of his step-sister to others without any of the guilt she as a woman had to endure for abandoning her allotted female caring role.

  On several occasions during the day Jenna found her thoughts returning to James Allingham. Each time she made a conscious effort to dismiss him from her mind, blaming his intrusiveness on the intense antipathy she had felt towards him. But now that antipathy was tempered with compassion, especially for his step-sister.

  Jenna had been too young to remember anything about her own parents—her father had worked for one of the major oil companies and both he and her mother had been killed during a tribal uprising when he was working in a remote desert area. She had had to rely on Rachel’s dim memories of their parents to form an impression of them. Her aunt had never spoken about them, grimly dissuading the two sisters from doing so as well. Jenna had grown up with the uncomfortable feeling that, for some reason, her aunt had disapproved of their parents. Although their father had been her sister’s only child she had never talked to the girls about his childhood or his parents. If she hadn’t had Rachel…

  Abruptly, Jenna came to a full stop in the street, appalled to realise the parallels that could be drawn between her aunt’s attitude and her own. But she would gladly have talked to Lucy about her parents if it had been possible…

  But how was Lucy to know the reason why she was so evasive about her father? Shaking off the chilly sensation of despair running down her spine, Jenna straightened her shoulders and hurried on. It was pointless regretting her omissions of the past now. Lucy was far too vulnerable at the moment to accept the truth.

  As she stepped into the building which housed her architects Jenna remembered Bill’s suggestion that she marry and provide Lucy with a substitute father-figure. Her mouth compressed slightly, her body instinctively shrinking from the thought of the sexual intimacy marriage would bring. No matter how much she analysed her own emotions or how logically she tried to look at things, Jenna was forced to admit that what had happened to Rachel had left its scars on her too. In some way that went deeper than logic could she was frightened of committing herself to a sexual relationship with anyone. She had seen what had happened to her sister, and even though she knew quite well that all men were not rapists the effect of Rachel’s death had been so traumatic that it had somehow frozen her ability to grow to full womanhood. Inside sh
e was still a frightened teenager, Jenna told herself as she stepped out of the lift, and the only way she could ever contemplate marriage would be if it were merely a business arrangement, excluding any form of physical contact.

  She closed her eyes briefly in a surge of mental torment as she imagined the reaction of the men who knew her in her business life if they were ever to discover the truth. She would instantly lose all her credibility and be demoted to the role of ‘frigid spinster’. That was the reason why she had always been at such pains to cultivate the glamorous sophisticated image she had been surprised to find herself labelled with when she first started working for John Howard. It made a very safe barrier to hide behind and she had played the part for so long now that it was almost second nature.

  The receptionist behind the desk greeted her with a respectful smile and buzzed through on her intercom as Jenna sat down. She wasn’t kept waiting long, and as she was shown through into the partners’ office Jenna noted that it was Craig Manners, the senior partner, who held open the door for her and pulled out her chair.

  ‘Jenna…what can we do for you?’ he asked her once his secretary had poured their coffee.

  ‘Not an awful lot on this occasion,’ Jenna told him, crossing one slim leg over the other as she watched him quickly mask his disappointment. In the past, she had put several good contracts their way. Sometimes her clients wanted more than mere interior redecoration and once they started talking about structural alterations Jenna was always firm about insisting they sought qualified advice. She herself was no architect or builder and while design-wise she could often help her clients to crystallise their somewhat vague ideas, she was scrupulous about telling them that she had no qualifications in those other fields.