Книга - Bitter Betrayal

Bitter Betrayal
PENNY JORDAN


Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now.It happened all the time… Jenneth told herself she wasn't the only woman in the world to have been let down by the man she loved and expected to marry. She knew people went on to rebuild their lives and find lasting relationships. So why couldn't she put the past behind her?The fact that she still loved him was totally irrelevant now. But Luke Rathby wasn't the sort of man who was easily forgotten.And when he came back into Jenneth's life, he created havoc all over again…










Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.




About the Author


PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.




Bitter Betrayal

Penny Jordan







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




CHAPTER ONE


‘YOU’RE doing what?’ Jenneth asked her oldest and closest friend in astonishment, almost unable to believe what she was hearing, despite the crystal clarity of Louise’s excited voice.

‘Married. You know…to have and to hold, et cetera et cetera…A mortgage…kids…the whole bit,’ Louise repeated obligingly, while Jenneth’s astonishment almost hummed along the telephone wire from York to London.

Jenneth clutched the receiver and said protestingly, ‘But you’ve always sworn you’d never marry! You wanted to be independent. You…’

‘That was before I met George,’ Louise told her unrepentantly.

George! Jenneth almost boggled, not just at the thought of her high-flying, career-orientated girlfriend getting married, but at the thought of her marrying a man called George…Had she ever been asked to stretch her imagination to the almost impossible lengths of visualising Louise getting married, she would have believed it would be to someone with a far more exotic name than George…

Sighing faintly, she ignored her cooling cup of coffee and the fact that unless she terminated her telephone call right now she was never going to get the preliminary sketches for the McGrath mural finished by lunchtime, and said severely, ‘You never said anything two months ago when we met for lunch.’

‘I hadn’t met him then,’ said Louise simply, and then added quickly, ‘Look, Jen, I want you to be there…on the day, I mean. We’re getting married in three weeks’ time, at home, in the village church. We’re having the whole bit…George says we might as well, since neither of us will get the chance again. I can’t wait for you to meet him. I wish we could get together before the wedding, but George is going to be away in Japan on business…’

She chuckled richly as she heard Jenneth saying in a faint voice, ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing any of this.’

They had virtually grown up together and had been close friends all their lives, living in the same small village, going to the same school, and even later on to the same university, and then Jenneth’s parents had moved further north and she had gone with them, eventually setting up her existing small studio in the barn attached to her parents’ house outside York, while Louise had found herself a job in London in the frenetic world of advertising.

That had been seven years ago. Now Louise had her own agency, while Jenneth had developed her artistic talents to the point where she was greatly in demand locally for the murals which had become her speciality. In addition she had a half-share in a small private gallery in York itself. She and Louise had never totally lost touch, but these days it was impossible for them to meet as often as both of them would have wished.

Jenneth’s parents had been killed just after their move to the north, leaving Jenneth solely responsible for the welfare of her then pre-teenage twin brothers…

There had been times when they had been a heavy responsibility indeed, but the knowledge that her parents would have wanted them all to stay together, coupled with her own deep-rooted sense of duty and responsibility, had helped her through the worst of the bad times.

The twins had now just finished their last year at school, two tall fair-haired males who towered over her and at times almost swamped her with their fierce protectiveness towards her…

Well knowing why Jenneth hadn’t given her an instantaneous response, Louise coaxed, ‘Promise me you’re going to be there. It’s three weeks on Saturday. I’m not having any bridesmaids or anything like that, but I need you there, Jenneth…Seriously…’

There was just enough emotion in her voice for Jenneth to check the automatic refusal hovering on her lips, and Louise took advantage of her silence to add, ‘I’ve booked you a room at the Feathers. Can’t put you up at home, I’m afraid, the place will be brimming over with aged aunts and the like, although Mum and Dad are both looking forward to seeing you…’

‘I don’t know if I can make it, Louise,’ Jenneth told her, staring unseeingly out of her studio window and into the verdant jungle of the house’s back garden.

The house had a very large garden, far too large for her to manage, but she and the twins loved their home. The barn which she had had converted into her studio was ideal for her work, and none of them had wanted to move after the accident, although once the boys were at university…They had been arguing about it ever since Christmas, Kit and Nick both determined to persuade her not to put the house up for sale, even though she had pointed out to them that once they were at university it would be far too large for her, and that the money from the sale would realise lump-sum nest-eggs for them when they set out into the world.

Her hand clenched around the receiver, her palm suddenly sticky with tension, with all that she wanted to say and could not—partly because the words simply refused to be spoken, clogging her throat, and partly because of the old habit of ingrained reticence. So unlike Louise’s outgoing, frank inability to do anything other than say what she was thinking and feeling.

She did it now, taking a deep breath that Jenneth could actually hear, and then, while a bird soared and sang overhead outside, she heard her friend saying softly, ‘Luke won’t be there, if that’s what’s worrying you. He’s away in the States on business. Please say you’ll be there.’

Although she hadn’t moved, Jenneth experienced a familiar dizzying, frightening sensation of fear-induced panic. She hesitated, wanting to find the right words to preserve her dignity…to deny the importance of what Louise was saying, to break through her own reserve and pour out from her heart the feelings which she herself had made taboo between them, eight years ago, by refusing to discuss them with anyone…especially not with Luke’s cousin, even if she was also her own best friend.

‘Jenneth, please…’ Louise wheedled, and as the spectre of Luke rose mockingly to taunt her with her own cowardice she took a deep breath and said huskily,

‘Yes, of course I will…’

They talked for another few minutes, or rather Louise talked and Jenneth listened, while she waited for her agitated heartbeat to slow down to normal and the tension to leave her body. As she listened, she wondered what she would have said had Luke been attending the wedding…and then, a little cynically, asked herself silently if Louise would have invited her had that been the case.

Of course she would, she told herself after they had said their goodbyes and she had replaced the receiver.

Although she had never been able to hide from her friend how much she dreaded the thought of being brought face to face with Luke, thankfully Louise had spent the six-month span of Jenneth’s engagement to him studying abroad, and, being Louise, had sought no other explanation for the ending of that engagement other than the one Jenneth gave her, which was simply that they had both realised it was a mistake.

In the early days, when self-hatred had burned her like acid, she had privately blamed herself for her parents’ death, knowing that their move to York had in part been prompted by their concern for her, but the years had eased that particular torment a little. There were other torments, though, that would never go away. It was useless telling herself that she was far too sensitive. The anguish of hearing from Luke’s own lips that, while professing to love her, he had been seeing someone else and that that someone else was now carrying his child, was something she could never eradicate.

It was burned into her as though by torture; and, like any victim of such cruelty, she carried the brand of Luke’s rejection of her in her soul—deep within her. Behind the calm, pleasant mask she wore for the world there lived a very different person indeed. Some people thought of her as aloof, claiming that her manner matched the coolness of her Nordic fall of wheat-blonde hair and the unfathomable greyness of her dark-lashed eyes.

In response she possessed an aura of calm which had been hard won and which she had learned to project to protect herself. When she moved it was with contained, controlled movements that made those who were baffled and infuriated by the distance at which she held them condemn her as withdrawn and emotionless, not realising that the reverse was the truth, and that it was to protect herself from her own acute vulnerability that she had had to learn the savagely painful lesson of concealing her real feelings.

Now what had at first been a disguise she had assumed for the sake of her pride had become an intrinsic part of her, to such an extent that it was only Louise and the twins who were still able to penetrate the façade of remoteness.

Over the years she had learned to temper her own feelings of rejection and grief with the received wisdom of experience and age, telling herself that the relationship between her and Luke would never have worked; that at twenty-one she had been far too immature, and that the engagement would have petered out anyway, given time.

What still did have the power to confuse her was why Luke had got engaged to her in the first place. Eight years her and Louise’s senior, he had seemed to her a god-like creature set on the heights, way, way above her touch. All through her teens she was in turn giddy, shy, self-conscious and finally spellbound in his presence, whenever school holidays threw the three of them together and Luke, who was away first at boarding-school, then at university, and finally lecturing abroad, came home.

His family, unlike hers, had been part of the village for several generations. His father was the local GP, and his mother, despite the fact that the crippling multiple sclerosis from which she suffered had weakened her health appallingly, took as active a role as she could in village affairs. Tender-hearted, and popular with everyone who knew her, she had gently approved of Luke’s engagement to Jenneth.

Luke had loved his mother very deeply, treating her with the same protective concern with which the twins were now trying to suffocate Jenneth, although in Luke’s mother’s case she had far more need of that protectiveness than Jenneth.

In looks, however, Luke took after his father; he had his tall, very male leanness, and his thick, dark hair.

Louise had once shocked her by telling her that her mother’s brother, Luke’s father, had had something of a reputation with their sex, before he’d met and married Luke’s mother. She had been a local heiress, and Luke’s father had fallen in love with her and married her despite the opposition of her family. Jenneth had always thought it a very romantic story.

Now Luke’s mother was dead. She had died several months after Luke had married…

Automatically Jenneth ducked her head, letting her hair swing forward to conceal her expression, even though there was no one there to see her. Even now, the thought of that agonising time when Luke had told her so clinically and coldly, as though every word he said to her had to be weighed and accounted for, that he was marrying someone else—a someone else who had already conceived his child—still had an overpowering and disturbing effect on her.

How often had she told herself that thousands of young women were rejected by men they thought loved them, and that they, unlike her, went on to form other, lasting, less destructive relationships without any difficulty at all? How often had she chided herself both verbally and mentally for behaving like a wilting Victorian heroine, falling into what used to euphemistically be called a ‘decline’ because her world had been turned upside-down by the discovery that the love she had thought its surest foundation had never really existed?

Oh, outwardly she had done all the right things: listened to Luke’s cruel revelations with a white face and burning eyes, breaking down only once, when he had told her about the coming baby. She had been stunned and reached for him disbelievingly, sick with shock and pain, but he had not responded. And in the months that followed she had put on as brave a face as she could, finishing her time at university, refusing to give in to the cowardly temptation not to go home for the holidays, prattling with mock sophistication to her friends about the life she was leading…the men she was dating…

Her parents had seen through her, though…and, aware of her anguish and, she suspected, of the deep wound Luke had dealt to the very essence of her womanhood, had announced that her father was taking semi-retirement and that they were all moving back to York, which had been her father’s childhood home.

It had been a measure of the depth of the love she had once felt for Luke that she had almost refused to go with them…hoping against hope for the miracle that would give Luke back to her, unable to believe even now that it was really over. And then she had seen him in the village, with his wife and their child…He had been holding the baby, while his wife was talking earnestly to another couple. She had stopped dead in the street, measuring the distance between them and ignominiously preparing for flight. The baby had had dark hair like Luke’s…A little girl, so Louise had told her apologetically, with embarrassment and compassion…And the girl who was his wife…younger than Jenneth, dark-haired, welldressed and almost shy, she had looked at Jenneth, obviously not realising who she was, and had then turned to Luke, saying quite clearly as she took the baby from him, ‘Come along, darling—I think it’s time we left.’

Sick at heart, Jenneth hadn’t gone home, but had gone instead down the path along the river, a favourite haunt from her early teens where she used to idle her way home from school after she’d left Louise, daydreaming about life and Luke with all the innocence of her extreme youth.

Now, with a cynicism that sat oddly on her slender shoulders, she wondered what would have happened if she too had conceived Luke’s child. And it had been a distinct possibility: right up to the very weekend before he had announced that he was ending their engagement and why, Luke had been trying to persuade her to allow them to become lovers.

She closed her eyes abruptly, not wanting to remember the fiercely impassioned way he had made love to her that summer, breaking off when she had pleaded with him to stop, as she tremulously explained that he would be her first lover, and that she was afraid.

He had seemed to understand, teasing her about her fears, but she had thought that underneath his amusement he had been pleased that he would be her first lover.

How often during those first arid months without him had she asked herself if things would have been different had she been different? But she had stalwartly refused to allow herself to believe that, if Luke had really loved her, he would have turned to someone else for the sexual satisfaction she had not given him.

His betrayal of her, though, had had a lasting effect on her awareness of herself as a woman, destroying something so intrinsic within her that, as the years passed, she had privately likened herself to an animated doll without any real deep inner core…love, desire, all the emotions which filled the lives of other people were a foreign territory to her. She loved the twins, of course, and she enjoyed the company of her few good friends, but in a one-to-one relationship with a man she discovered that she just could not function…The mere hint of anything approaching intimacy made her remember how she had suffered through Luke’s rejection, and as the years passed she had deemed it wiser to hold the male sex well at bay. And now Louise was getting married…her friend who had always been so fiercely independent.

She knew that most people who knew her put her single state down to the responsibility she felt for the twins. It was a convenient excuse, but one she would no longer have once they were at university. Not that men were exactly beating a path to her door, urgently exclaiming their desire…She grimaced a little at the thought, mentally reviewing the men who had invited her out recently. There was Colin Ames, the local vet, a kind-hearted, raw-boned man, divorced with three small children, who was quite obviously looking for a substitute mother not just for his children, she suspected, but for himself as well.

There was Greg Pilling, who at thirty-five was still single, and considered something of a heartbreaker locally; he had a large house on the other side of the village and business interests which took him to London for four days out of every seven. Privately Jenneth suspected he was involved with someone down there whose identity he wished to keep secret for reasons best known to himself…because she was already married? Jenneth wondered cynically.

There were one or two others, pleasant, kind men who were quite obviously excellent husband and father material, but she refused to allow herself to get involved.

It wasn’t so much what Luke had done, she told herself these days, it was the fact that he had had the power to do it that made her avoid emotional commitments…it was the memory of her own intense vulnerability that kept her from allowing anyone too close to her.

Of course, in the years immediately following her parents’ deaths, any kind of intimate relationship with a man had been impossible. The twins had needed her too much, and her life had been so closely tied up with theirs that there was no space in it for anyone else. But now the twins were virtually adult—and it was Louise who had unwillingly forced her into this introspective mood, Jenneth reflected wryly, standing up and acknowledging that it was impossible now to try and concentrate on her work.

It was too late now to wish she had not made the commitment to attend the wedding, even if Luke was not going to be there…there would be other people there who would remember…

What? That she and Luke had been engaged, eight years ago, for the space of less than six months? That that engagement had been broken and that Luke had married someone else, and that subsequently they had had a child? So what? It was only in her own mind that the spectre of Luke’s rejection loomed so destructively…

Sometimes she suspected that Louise saw more than she said, even though her friend had accepted her explanations at face-value when she’d come home to discover that the engagement was over and that Luke was married to someone else.

It had been Louise who had given her the news some years ago that Luke’s wife was dead…a postscript added to a birthday card that had shocked her into a week of nightmare dreams of such intense reality that she had woken from them sweating and crying, shivering under the burden of knowing that even now Luke had the power to affect her intensely both emotionally and physically.

That had been the year Louise had coaxed her to go home with her for Christmas, and because the twins had pleaded with her to accept the invitation she had given way, never expecting to find that Luke was also at home, visiting his aunt and uncle.

His father lived in America now, and Luke, who had followed his father into medicine, was a consultant at one of the large teaching hospitals.

The sight of him, so familiar and once so desperately dear, had frozen her to the floor of Louise’s parents’ hallway. The twins, walking in behind her, had bumped into her…Someone had made the necessary introductions, she couldn’t remember who, and under cover of the general noise and confusion she had found herself confronting Luke, while her insides cringed with remembered anguish and misery, and she masked her face with the cool, remote smile she had perfected.

He had had his daughter with him, a bright, mischievous three-year-old, who plainly adored her daddy, and looked so like him that Jenneth had felt as though someone had slid a knife into her heart and turned it.

For some unfathomable reason she still didn’t understand, and which had seemed unreasoningly cruel of fate, Luke’s daughter had chosen to attach herself both to Jenneth and the twins, following them everywhere, watching them with Luke’s dark green eyes, smiling at them with Luke’s smile, but Jenneth had resisted the aching, yearning need within her to respond to the child’s overtures, to pick her up and cuddle her, to open her arms to her and hold her as she so plainly wanted to be held, with something approaching Luke’s proud, contemptuous disdain of her.

She remembered how Luke had walked into the sitting-room one day while she was there alone with Angelica, desperately trying to withstand the child’s very obvious desire for feminine affection. He had picked his daughter up, plainly recognising both the withdrawal and rejection in Jenneth’s refusal to touch his child, his mouth grim with dislike of her where once it had been soft with desire and love…or so she had thought. But that of course had just been an illusion.

She hadn’t realised how he had interpreted the twins’ adolescent teasing about the fact that she had very recently ended a brief relationship with one of her clients; nor that he had assumed quite wrongly from her brothers’ totally erroneous description of that relationship that she and Christopher Harding had been lovers, but the barbed comment he had made to her about the dullness of his aunt and uncle’s home without the presence of her lover to enliven it for her had been something she had seized gladly upon to bolster her shaky pride, smiling insincerely back at him as she said lightly, ‘It’s only for a week…’

And Luke had responded jeeringly, ‘And you can live quite easily without him in your bed for that length of time, is that it?’

And then, with a rush of anger she could only regret later, she had retaliated rashly—and thoroughly untruthfully—saying, ‘Christopher and I have been lovers for quite some time,’ and then from somewhere she had produced a feline smile, and added, ‘He goes away on business quite a lot, and when he does…’

‘You replace him in your bed with someone else,’ Luke had finished for her, totally misunderstanding what she had been about to say, which was that when Christopher was away she coped quite adequately without him. Before she could correct him, he had continued bitterly, ‘How you’ve changed. And to think that—’

He had stopped speaking as the twins came bursting into the room, and after that they had each studiously avoided the other, Luke taking good care to make sure his small daughter came nowhere near her.

She had told herself that she had been glad…glad that she had finally shown him that she was a woman and desirable to others, even if not to him…glad that she had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with him or with his child…glad that she had finally and irrevocably broken away from the old Jenneth, who had adored him to the point of lunacy, who had loved him just as intensely…and who had gone on loving him long after he had made it plain that he most certainly did not love her.

And that had been the last time she had seen him.




CHAPTER TWO


AS THE date of Louise’s wedding drew closer, Jenneth found herself regretting more and more that she had agreed to go. It was not that she didn’t want to see her friend married and wish her and her new husband good luck; she did, and, had Louise chosen anywhere but Little Compton as the venue for her wedding, Jenneth knew that she would have been anticipating it with a glad heart, and more than a touch of delighted curiosity about the man who had so radically changed her old friend’s determined stance on the joys of the single state.

As it was, even with Louise’s reassurance that Luke would not be attending the wedding, she was increasingly conscious of the fact that there would be other people there who remembered her younger self, and her love for Luke; they would remember their engagement and Luke’s subsequent marriage to someone else; and then, in the manner of village people the world over, they would look at her ringless hands and speculate among themselves as to the reasons for her unmarried state.

Standing in her studio, she gave a tiny shudder of revulsion at the thought of their curiosity and pity, wishing that she had the courage to telephone Louise and tell her firmly that she could not attend the wedding. There were, after all, half a dozen genuine reasons she could conjure up for not attending, and one of them was in front of her now on her desk, she acknowledged ruefully, frowning over the preliminary sketches she had been asked to prepare for a large mural to cover the walls of the children’s ward in one of York’s large hospitals.

The commission had come to her via a client of hers, who had spearheaded a campaign to raise funds to support the specialised ward, which had been in danger of collapsing.

An exceedingly large donation from a millionaire local businessman had resulted not only in the ward being fully re-equipped with several vital pieces of advanced technology, but there had also been sufficient money left over for her ex-client, who was chairwoman of the fund-raising committee, to announce briskly that they could afford to do something about the almost institutionalised drabness of the ward’s emulsion-painted walls.

She had approached Jenneth, who had been delighted to accept the commission, which she had offered to do at much less than her normal rates, and in return she had virtually been given carte blanche with the design.

The problem now facing her was what to choose to catch the imagination and attention of children suffering so desperately, and of such very disparate ages.

Her lack of concentration in favour of worrying about the ordeal of Louise’s wedding didn’t help, and she was still frowning over the vague notes she had scribbled down when the studio door opened and Kit came in.

Jenneth watched him walking towards her with the familiar loping stride that both he and his twin had inherited from their father, her heart as always caught up in a wave of mingled love and apprehension…Love because they were both so very dear to her, and apprehension because guiding two exuberant and very high-spirited boys through their teenage years had not always been easy.

Their A levels now behind them, and the long summer holiday just begun, Jenneth realised anew with almost every day that passed that they were now virtually adult. Certainly both of them were emotionally mature and wellbalanced, something for which she modestly refused to take the credit, putting it down to the fact that their parents had provided them all with a stable and loving background during their early years.

Kit grinned at her as he advanced towards her and asked, ‘Any chance of borrowing your car? I’m playing tennis over at Chris Harding’s this afternoon, and Nick’s taken the Metro.’

The rather battered but roadworthy Metro that Jenneth had bought them as a joint eighteenth birthday present had done sterling service in the six months they had owned it, but, although they were twins, her brothers enjoyed different hobbies and had different sets of friends. So far she had ignored the broad hints she had been given about the necessity for another car. The hints had been good-humoured, both boys being well aware that, although their father’s insurance policies had provided a roof over their heads, and a small but steady income, any luxuries had to be paid for out of Jenneth’s commissions.

Since they were both sensible and very good drivers, she had no qualms about loaning them her own car when she wasn’t using it, but on this occasion she shook her head with genuine regret and explained, ‘I have to go in to York with some paintings for the gallery, and I promised Eleanor I’d do it this afternoon. I could drop you off on the way, if you like,’ she offered obligingly.

‘Only if you let me drive,’ Kit countered with a grin. It was a standing joke between them that Jenneth, inclined to daydream, especially when her work engrossed her, was sometimes rather an erratic driver. She blushed even now to recall the occasion on which she had been so deeply involved mentally in the mural she was working on that she had driven down the narrow lane that led from their house to the main road and straight into a ditch, necessitating an anxious call to their nearest neighbour, a local farmer, who obligingly came out with his tractor to haul her sturdy Volvo estate car back on to the lane.

Kit and Nick knew all about Louise’s forthcoming wedding and, although she hadn’t said so to them, both of them were also aware of Jenneth’s reluctance to attend, just as they were both also fully aware of her inner withdrawal whenever the subject of Little Compton and its inhabitants came up.

Both of them were far too fond and protective of their sister to probe, but both of them were also curious. Although Jenneth herself was unaware of it, they had taken on bets on whether or not she would attend the wedding, and Kit, who had bet his twin that she would, intended to make use of the drive to his friend’s house to ensure that she did.

Not very long ago he and Nick had put their heads together, and decided that before they left for university they would have to do something about their sister’s future.

‘She needs to get married,’ Kit had announced, causing Nick to lift his eyebrows and jeer ‘chauvinist’ at him. But Kit had shaken his head, and replied, ‘I don’t mean it that way…Sure, financially she can support herself—after all, she’s supported us for long enough—but don’t you sometimes think that it’s almost as though there’s a part of her missing somehow? She needs a husband and a family.’

‘To take her mind off what we’re getting up to?’ Nick suggested with a grin.

Although physically identical, emotionally they were very different, but on this occasion both of them had agreed that they had somehow or other to sort out their sister’s life for her, so that when they left she would not be on her own.

To this end they had conducted an exhaustive survey to find a man they considered suitable to become Jenneth’s husband, and their brother-in-law.

Their hopes had risen to a high-water mark after the incident of Jenneth’s accidental journey into the ditch; Tim Soames was virtually their next-door neighbour, single, comfortably off, the right age—a pleasant, easygoing man, with broad shoulders and a ruddy face.

He obligingly assisted them by asking Jenneth out, but after a couple of dates and several visits to the house he had suddenly stopped calling and, when pressed, Jenneth had told them calmly that although she liked him she didn’t want to get involved.

That was the whole trouble, Kit reflected, darting a quick glance at his sister as she slid into the passenger seat beside him. She didn’t want to get involved. But she needed someone in her life…someone who would care for her and protect her. Someone who would see beneath the calm surface to the real person below.

They had the car windows open because of the heat; the countryside was in a rare spate of perfect June weather, and the draught caught at her hair, tangling its silky smoothness. Jenneth lifted her hand to push it out of the way, reflecting irritably that she really ought to have it cut and that shoulder-length hair on a woman of twenty-nine was an absurd and foolish clinging to a youth long gone.

Watching her, Kit grinned to himself, remembering a jealous girlfriend of Nick’s who had bitterly refused to believe that Jenneth was their sister, having seen her and Nick out together, and been convinced that Nick was two-timing her; and it was true that no one who didn’t know them would ever guess that there was over ten years between them.

‘I suppose while you’re in York you’ll be looking for an outfit to wear for Louise’s wedding,’ announced Kit, with male superiority for the female of the species’ preoccupation with clothes, something which must surely be instilled in the male psyche at conception, Jenneth reflected crossly, because he certainly hadn’t learned that male disparagement of her sex’s vanities from her.

She took the bait as Kit had known she would, reminding him sardonically that it had been less than four months ago that he had virtually retired to his bedroom in a sulk, and all because Nick had borrowed his treasured original 501s. She was totally unaware of the fact that she was already the victim of the opening salvo in Kit’s battle to win his bet.

After she had dropped him off at his friend’s house, Jenneth continued her journey to York, wryly admitting that clothes for the wedding had been the last thing on her mind, and equally acknowledging that it would be perceived by the other guests as an insult to Louise if she did not turn up dressed accordingly.

Eleanor Coombes, her partner in the gallery, a brisk, cheerful widow in her mid-forties with a married daughter and one small granddaughter, welcomed her warmly when she parked her car at the rear of their small premises just inside the city wall.

It didn’t take them long to unload the canvases; in addition to Jenneth’s own work they sold work by other local artists, mainly watercolour landscapes, and offered a framing and restoration service, which was Eleanor’s contribution to the business.

Eleanor came from a wealthy background; she had met her husband while in Italy on a post-university course in the restoration of paintings, skills which she had not used during her marriage. However, after her husband’s death, finding herself virtually alone in the huge, gaunt house twenty miles outside York, her daughter working away in London and time hanging heavily on her hands, she had been introduced to Jenneth at a party given by a mutual acquaintance. Their friendship had grown, and ultimately Eleanor had approached Jenneth with an offer to finance a gallery in partnership with Jenneth, suggesting that she should take care of the day-to-day running of the business, leaving Jenneth free to spend more time painting. She also acted in part as Jenneth’s unofficial agent, and since their partnership had begun Jenneth acknowledged that her commissions had almost doubled.

‘Something wrong?’ Eleanor asked her, noticing her absorbed manner and slight frown.

Jenneth shook her head. ‘Not really…An old friend—my best friend, actually—is getting married next weekend, and she wants me to go to the wedding…’

‘And you haven’t a thing to wear,’ guessed Eleanor with a grin, tactfully not commenting on the wary shadow that darkened her friend’s eyes. She had learned over the years to allow Jenneth her privacy, but she, like the twins, although with a good deal more experience of life and far more maturity, often reflected that it was an appalling waste that a young woman so obviously designed by nature to nurture and mother should have so firmly turned her back on any relationship that would have allowed her to fulfil that role.

Eleanor was no misty-eyed romantic. Her own marriage had not been easy; her husband had been almost twenty years her senior and very demanding, but they had loved one another and had gradually come to understand how to make allowances for one another’s needs and prejudices. She genuinely missed his companionship and mourned his death, even though she had been a widow for over seven years. Unlike Jenneth, though, her life wasn’t devoid of an emotional and sexual relationship. She had a lover: a divorced man whose relationship with his wife had left him wary and bitter; she was wise enough and mature enough to accept the pleasure and happiness that the relationship gave her, without needing or wanting more than John was able to give. She had reached an age where she prized her own independence…which she had no intention of relinquishing in order to take on the potential problems of a second marriage to a man with two very possessive and sometimes aggressive teenage daughters, and a whole host of emotional problems of his own that could not be solved by the pleasure they gave one another in bed.

Jenneth’s case was different, though. Jenneth was born to be a mother…and if the more feminist of her peers felt it necessary to take her to task for such a view, then let them. There was nothing wrong in being a woman who was emotionally designed first and foremost to fulfil that role, and it was her view that by suppressing it, Jenneth was destroying an intrinsic part of herself. She whole-heartedly shared the twins’ view that Jenneth should marry.

‘Mmm…well, there’s no shortage of excellent dress shops in York,’ she said now, ignoring the way Jenneth’s body tightened as though she was mentally preparing for flight. From what? Eleanor wondered curiously, studying her friend while appearing not to do so. ‘I could come with you, if you like,’ she offered. ‘Rachel’s coming in this afternoon—I was going to spend a couple of hours doing the books…’

Jenneth knew when she was being backed into a corner. And, realistically, she could hardly not go to the wedding. Louise would be hurt, and since Luke was not going to be there…Not for the first time, Jenneth wished that fate had seen fit to bestow upon her a nature that was less vulnerable.

‘Petrol tank’s full, tyres and oil are checked…Your suitcase is in the back…’

Jenneth raised her eyes heavenwards as Nick calmly ticked these items off on his fingers. Anyone listening would have thought that she was the twins’ junior and not the other way around. She wasn’t travelling south in the outfit Eleanor had bullied her into buying for the wedding. Instead she had allowed herself sufficient time to go to the Feathers beforehand and get changed.

It was barely seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, the sky a soft blue, hazed over with a mist that promised heat for later in the day. A perfect late June day…

In Little Compton, Louise, who had decided to spend several days at home before the wedding, would probably just be waking up. She had confessed to Jenneth over the telephone that she had succumbed to persuasion and temptation and had bought herself a wedding dress that bid to outshine anything that Scarlett O’Hara might ever have worn…

‘Cream and not white,’ Louise had told her, with her rich, unabashed chuckle.

George was far from being the first man in her friend’s life; Louise wasn’t promiscuous, but there had been several men with whom she had fallen in love, several lovers in her life from whom she had always managed to part on good terms, and it was obvious from what she had said to Jenneth that neither she nor George regretted those previous relationships.

It was going to be a long drive south, and Jenneth had decided to ignore the motorways because of the number of roadworks causing major delays.

By the twins’ reckoning she would reach Little Compton by twelve o’clock at the latest. Louise was getting married at three, and she had promised to be at the house to help her friend get ready beforehand and then afterwards to help her get changed before she and George left for their honeymoon.

‘A kind of unofficial bridesmaid,’ Louise had told her, and Jenneth had winced, remembering how once she had eagerly made Louise promise to perform that office for her.

The drive south was without incident, the roads, although busy, not oppressively so.

She reached the familiar countryside east of Bath just before eleven o’clock. Outwardly very little had changed in the seven years since she had left, although the large number of German marque cars bore witness to the fact that the new motorway was making this part of the country more accessible to those who earned their living in London.

Little Compton itself was just far away enough from the motorway to be unaffected by these changes. As she crested one of the gentle hills that surrounded it, Jenneth slowed down to look down on the untidy straggle of cottages that marked its one main road, the Feathers at one end of it, and the church at the other.

She suppressed the memories that threatened to come storming back…long, lazy summer afternoons spent with Luke, the young Jenneth bemused and thrilled by the almost magical way he had suddenly realised that she was no longer just a friend of his cousin’s but a person in her own right. Down there where the river meandered its lazy course, a glistening, fluid ribbon shadowed by willows, Luke had kissed her for the first time. Without wanting to, Jenneth remembered how her whole body had responded to that kiss, almost vibrating with shocked pleasure like a highly tuned instrument. He had laughed tenderly against her mouth and asked her if she knew what it did to him to feel that kind of response. It had been in that same spot only three months later that he had proposed to her, saying tersely that he knew he was rushing her, but that he was leaving to work in California at the end of the summer and that he wanted to take with him her promise to wait for him.

Later, when she had given him her breathless, almost incredulous answer, he had taken her in his arms and kissed her with a fierce passion that had set her heart pounding and made her totally unable to resist when he had laid her down on the soft grass beneath the trees and, between kisses that turned her bones to liquid, gently unfastened the shirt she was wearing to bare her breasts first to his eyes, then to his hands and, finally, shockingly and blissfully, to his mouth.

If he had pressed her then, they would have been lovers, but he hadn’t and, once the announcement of their engagement had been made, their time alone together had seemed to diminish, mainly because Luke’s mother’s health had started to deteriorate, and Jenneth had fully understood and backed his need to put his mother first.

Shaking her head to dispel the unwanted images shimmering just below the surface of her mind, she put her foot on the accelerator and turned firmly away, driving towards the village.

The landlady of the Feathers welcomed her warmly, and showed her immediately to her room, a comfortably furnished attic with a dormer window, and its own private bathroom…The Feathers had once, long ago in the days of coach travel, been a posting house, and Jenneth’s bedroom overlooked the enclosed courtyard to the rear of the village street.

‘Louise said you’d prefer to be in here,’ the landlady told her cheerfully, and as Jenneth agreed with her calm, slightly remote smile she reflected that it was typical of Louise that she should be known to everyone in the village by her Christian name, even though her visits home were these days limited to flying half-day stays at Christmas and other anniversaries.

The Feathers had changed hands since Jenneth’s day, and the landlady was more interested in talking about the wedding and the amazement it had caused in the village than displaying curiosity about Jenneth herself. Her indifference released some of Jenneth’s tension, and as the landlady left, promising to send someone up with a light salad lunch and a pot of coffee, Jenneth reflected ruefully that she had probably blown people’s reaction to her appearance at the wedding totally out of proportion. This realisation helped to steady her nerves, and when a shy waitress came upstairs with the promised lunch Jenneth felt relaxed enough to pick up the telephone and dial the familiar number of Louise’s family home.

Louise’s mother answered the telephone, recognising Jenneth’s voice immediately and responding warmly to her hesitant enquiries as to the state of the bride-to-be.

By the time Louise herself picked up the receiver, she was ready to dismiss all her fears as simply the working of her own self-indulgent imagination, and agreed readily to go straight round to the house immediately she had changed.

She chose not to drive her car to Louise’s parents’ home, but to walk there instead, not down the main street of the village, but along the path that ran behind the cottages and then skirted the churchyard.

Jenneth had always found it slightly surprising that her outspoken, very modern-minded friend should be the daughter of a vicar, and she knew that, to David Simmonds’ credit, he had never tried to impose his own religious beliefs on his daughter.

He greeted Jenneth warmly as, through habit, she walked round to the back door of the vicarage and he opened it to her knock. Louise’s mother bustled into the kitchen and kissed Jenneth affectionately. A tall, dark-haired woman, she betrayed her physical relationship to Luke’s father and to Luke himself, having the same strong bone-structure and thick, dark hair. Louise, she had always insisted, was a throwback, and certainly her friend’s vivid red hair and pale, creamy skin bore no resemblance to either of her parents’ colouring.

Jenneth was told to go straight upstairs, and found her friend sitting in front of her bedroom mirror, clad in an almost indecently feminine chemise of cream satin and lace while she peered myopically into the mirror and tried to apply mascara to her lashes.

‘Damn!’ she exploded as Jenneth walked in.

‘Let me do it for you,’ suggested Jenneth calmly, taking charge and deftly applying the necessary coats of dark grey colour to the long but sandy lashes, asking humorously, ‘What happened to the contact lenses?’

‘I daren’t risk them,’ Louise replied gloomily. ‘I’m bound to start howling and wash the damn things out…’

‘There’s always your glasses,’ Jenneth told her mischievously.

As a schoolgirl Louise had been obliged to wear the regulation National Health corrective glasses, and now she scowled horribly into Jenneth’s laughing eyes and threatened, ‘You dare mention those…’

The scowl disappeared as they both burst out laughing and, ignoring her perfection of her delicately made-up face and the artfully arranged tumble of red curls that brushed her naked shoulders, Louise stood up and hugged Jenneth affectionately, saying emotionally, ‘Oh, Jen, I’m so glad you’re here…’

Listening to her, Jenneth felt guilty and ashamed of her craven impulse to renege on her promise, and hugged her back in a silent exchange of emotion that held memories of the years and times they had shared.

‘Isn’t this ridiculous?’ Louise sniffed as Jenneth released her. ‘I feel as weepy and emotional as a Jane Austen heroine…’

‘You certainly aren’t dressed like one,’ Jenneth told her forthrightly, eyeing the extremely provocative creation of satin and lace that purported to have the utilitarian purpose of sleeking her friend’s soft curves and supporting the delicate cream stockings she was wearing.

Louise grinned at her, totally unabashed.

‘Like it? George chose it,’ she told Jenneth wickedly, and then drew her attention to the tiny row of satin-covered buttons that fastened down the front.

‘He said that thinking about me wearing this is the only thing that’s going to keep him going through the whole ordeal of the ceremony,’ she added with another grin, and Jenneth was forced to mentally review her opinion of her friend’s husband-to-be. Despite his name, he was obviously far from being the stalwart, sober, almost dull character she had envisaged.

From downstairs, they both heard Louise’s mother call up warningly, ‘You’ve only got half an hour left, Louise…’ and, remembering her supposed role, Jenneth picked up the billowing silk and net underskirt from the bed and presented it to her friend, helping her to fasten the tapes that tied at the back, and then helping her into the frothing creation of raw silk and lace that had swung gently in the breeze from the window.

Stupidly, once the last small button had been fastened, and she was able to walk in front of her friend and survey the finished effect, Jenneth discovered that her eyes were misty with tears and her voice choked with emotion.

‘You look…wonderful…’ was all she could manage, but it seemed to be enough, because Louise hugged her tightly and then swore huskily.

‘Damn! I daren’t start wailing now or my blessed mascara is bound to run…’ And then, more soberly, she said, ‘Jen, this should be you and not me. You’re made for marriage…children…’ A frown touched her face and, sensing instinctively that she was about to mention Luke, Jenneth trembled with relief when the door suddenly opened and Louise’s parents came in with a bottle of champagne and four glasses.

By the time they had toasted the bride and allowed her one glass of champagne to bolster her failing courage, it was time to leave for the church.

Louise had elected to walk there, proudly escorted by her father, and it seemed to Jenneth, watching her from the sidelines, that the whole village had turned out to wish her well.

Louise’s godfather was giving her away, and Jenneth felt tears spring to her eyes as her father handed her over to his cousin before disappearing inside the church where he would conduct the ceremony.

Most of the guests were already inside, and Jenneth hurried to her own place in a pew to the rear of the small, quiet building, just in time to watch Louise drift beautifully down the aisle.

Although she tried not to let it do so, the familiarity of the comfortable church where she herself had once envisaged being married made her ache inside with a pain she had thought she was long ago past feeling.

Her eyes blurred with tears which she readily recognised were not for the awe and mysticism of the service, but, self-pityingly, for herself. Through the blur of them she was distantly aware of someone entering the pew: a young girl with dark, shiny hair, framing an elfin face, and dressed in a pretty, crisp cotton dress, with a dropped waistline and a neat sailor collar. Behind the girl was a man, but Jenneth didn’t look at him, all her concentration fixed on the bride and groom as she willed herself not to give in to the tears burning the backs of her eyes and making her throat raw with pain.

It was stupidity and self-indulgent folly to remember that once she had believed that she would be married here…that she would walk down the narrow ancient aisle to find Luke waiting for her…to have their marriage blessed and sanctified here in the mellow darkness of the church where members of his family had been married for so many generations.

Some memories, though, could not be suppressed…like the one of Luke bringing her in here when he’d given her her engagement ring, and kissing her finger before sliding on to it the narrow band of gold with its brilliant ring of diamond fire surrounding the central sapphire. He had kissed her once, tenderly, chastely…her mouth twisted over her almost medieval choice of word, and yet there was nothing else that truly described the sanctity of that moment…and her body shook, racked by a tremor of anguish as she fought to suppress the memories threatening to overwhelm her and acknowledged inwardly that this had been what she had feared. Not the speculative looks of others, but her own deep inner vulnerability…her own painful memories…her own still aching need to understand just what had motivated Luke to deceive her so cruelly and surely so unnecessarily. Why get engaged to her in the first place if he had known all along that all he wanted from her was a sexual relationship? Why make promises he had no intention of keeping when he must have known she was so fathoms deep in love with him that she would have given herself to him blindly, with the right kind of persuasion?

The tears she was fighting to suppress overwhelmed her, and ran betrayingly down her face. She bent her head protectively, hoping the soft swing of her hair would conceal her face from the other people in the pew beside her, and bit her bottom lip hard to suppress the vast welling of emotion that threatened her. And then, to her astonishment, she felt something soft touch her hand, and a low but insistent little voice whispered urgently to her.

‘You can use my handkerchief, if you like…I brought two because Daddy said that ladies always need them at weddings…’ This last statement was delivered importantly, as though everything that Daddy said ought to be recorded in the statute books, and Jenneth turned her head automatically, unable to resist the confiding voice and gesture. The handkerchief was crumpled and colourful but, because all her life she had loved and understood children, Jenneth took it, and firmly blew her nose on it while she and her rescuer exchanged conspiratorial feminine glances.

‘I wanted to bring some confetti,’ her new friend confided engagingly, obviously deciding that the loan of the handkerchief and its acceptance constituted a basis for shared confidences. ‘But Mrs. Mack wouldn’t buy any for me. She doesn’t approve of weddings.’

In front of them the bridal pair were making their vows. Louise’s father gave the blessing and above them the organ music swelled triumphantly; as though on cue, the church doors were flung open to admit the brilliance of the June sunshine, and high up in the church tower the great bells which had been cast in the same year that St Paul’s rose from its ashes gave joyful tongue to the happiness of the hour.

Automatically, as the light flooded the church behind them, Jenneth turned her head, and then froze with shock as she found herself looking straight into the familiar features of the one person she would have fled to the ends of the earth to avoid.

‘Luke…’

His name was a strangled sound on her lips, the shocked pallor of her face causing the man watching her to narrow his eyes consideringly as he looked from her blonde head to his daughter’s dark one. It had been a last-minute decision to attend his cousin’s wedding, prompted by his daughter’s very obvious but patiently borne disappointment, rather than any desire to see Louise married.

If the news of his appointment had not meant the cancellation of his lecture tour in America less than a week after it had begun he wouldn’t have been here at all. Angelica had expressed herself delighted to learn that she was going to have her father’s company during the long school holidays after all, and had been even more pleased to learn that they would be moving from London to a city called York, which her father had told her she would like very much.

Since she readily accepted her father’s word as being above and beyond that of any other authority, she was envisaging the impending move with a pleasure and excitement that was only in part tinged with the knowledge that their existing housekeeper, with whom she was not always in accord, would not be moving with them.

Angelica didn’t enjoy being the responsibility of a housekeeper. What she wanted was a real mother like other girls had…but to achieve that her father would have to remarry, and she had judiciously over the last few months been casting her eye about in order to supply the need in their lives that her father seemed neglectful in attending to…

For a moment Jenneth actually thought she was going to faint, but then pride came to her rescue, and she forced herself to regain control of her failing senses, wondering bitterly what premeditated cruelty it was that had motivated Luke to choose this particular pew, and to curse her own susceptibility in believing Louise’s assurances that her cousin was not going to attend the wedding.

The bride and groom were coming down the aisle towards them. Angelica, blissfully unaware of the fierce undercurrents seething between the two adults, grasped Jenneth’s hand and demanded, ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’ Then, without realising it, she acquitted Louise of any blame for Luke’s appearance by adding innocently, ‘We weren’t going to come today, but Daddy had to come back from America because he’s got a new job, and I persuaded him to bring me…’This was accompanied by a wide beam of pleasure, to which Jenneth in her vulnerable and defenceless state found it impossible not to respond.

‘Can we sit with you at the reception?’ Angelica asked eagerly, following up her advantage with innocent swiftness. ‘I don’t have a mummy and I don’t like the way people look at me and Daddy when we’re on our own,’ she confided appealingly to Jenneth, while in the background Jenneth heard Luke snap warningly,

‘Angelica, that’s enough…’

As tears started in the clear green eyes, so like Luke’s that Jenneth acknowledged she ought to have known immediately who she was, she found herself instinctively protecting the child from her father’s anger, saying fiercely, ‘Don’t…’ and then, before she could overcome her own shock, Angelica announced happily,

‘See, Daddy, she doesn’t mind at all. I knew you wouldn’t…’Cos you’re here on your own, too, aren’t you?’ she said artlessly, adding with a childish forthrightness that struck Jenneth to the heart, ‘You aren’t wearing a wedding ring, so that means that you’re not married, doesn’t it? And I expect you don’t want to sit on your own either. It will be fun,’ she finished, beaming up at Jenneth. ‘We can pretend that we’re a real family…’

And, before Jenneth could make the appalled denial that was choking in her throat, Louise and George drew level with them, and she had a moment’s startled realisation that her friend’s husband looked nothing like George-like, and that Louise was wearing a totally unfamiliar look of blissful bemusement that made her own heart ache treacherously.

Somehow or other she discovered that she was outside with the rest of the guests crowding around the newly married couple, and that Angelica had fixed herself firmly to her side, and was clutching her hand with what almost amounted to possessiveness, chattering brightly to her so that Jenneth hadn’t the heart to reject her and quell the happiness in her eyes by telling her that she wanted nothing to do with her.

It was several moments before they managed to break through the crush to reach Louise, and when her friend saw the little girl clinging firmly to Jenneth’s side, her eyes darkened with dismay and she said uncertainly, ‘Jenneth, I promise you I had no idea…’

Before Jenneth could say anything, Angelica clutched even harder at her hand and announced, not just to Louise, but also to the crowd of people within earshot of her carrying, piping voice, ‘Jenneth’s going to be my pretend mummy, Aunt Louise.’

As Jenneth heard the hard male voice say warningly behind her, ‘Angelica,’ she felt the shock of her body’s awareness of Luke’s tall male presence behind her, and her body trembled so visibly that she was not surprised to see the concern in Louise’s eyes.

If she had felt that the day could hold nothing worse than it had already held, she found she was wrong, when she heard Louise’s mother saying firmly. ‘Luke, Jenneth looks as though she’s about to faint…help her, will you?’

Against her back and arm she felt the hands whose touch had tormented her dreams for far too many years, holding her firmly but dispassionately, as Luke briskly obeyed his aunt’s instructions and manoeuvred her out of the crush of people around the church porch and into the privacy of the churchyard.

Now, when she would have given anything to faint and thereby escape a situation which was fast outstripping the very worst of her nightmares, her body remained stubbornly determined not to allow her that escape.

Instinctively she pulled away from Luke, not surprised that he let her go—he must be loathing this every bit as much as she was, but he could only be suffering revulsion, and not the agonising awareness of feelings she ached to be able to deny which were oppressing her.

‘How are you getting back to the house?’ she heard him asking her distantly, and, too surprised to lie, she told him.

‘Walking? In this heat?’ She watched the dark eyebrows draw together, and saw that the years had not been entirely kind to him and that, although nothing ever could diminish his masculinity, there were hard grooves etched either side of his mouth, and tiny lines fanning out from his eyes, suggesting that his life had not been without pain.

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.





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