CHAPTER ONE
NOW that she was here, she had a curious feeling of anti-climax almost as though an inner voice was warning her not to go on but to bury the past and put it completely behind her. She silenced it using the strength of will she had honed to a fine keenness over the years. ‘Cold’ and ‘hard’ were how some people described her: business adversaries who had learned too late that her cloud of Titian hair and almost breathtakingly feminine features were not signs of weakness, ploys to soothe the male ego, but a banner of her determination to succeed as what she was and not because she was willing to use it.
She had lost count of the number of men who had invited her to their beds. She had left the majority of them with their egos bruised and their desire cooling to resentment. What did she care? Her rejection of them had given her some small measure of satisfaction, but that was not why she rejected them. She was a woman whose emotions ran deep and secret, some so secret that no one knew of them, and the strongest of all those emotions was the one which had brought her here to this remote Yorkshire village, to this house…on this particular day.
Harley, her closest business adviser, had expressed surprise when she told him what she intended to do. He had wondered verbally that she should even have heard of the auction of some remote manor house in Yorkshire, never mind want to attend it with the purpose of buying it. When he had questioned her reasons she had simply shrugged, her cool remote air infuriating him, as it still did on occasions.
‘It will make a good headquarters,’ was all she would tell him, and she said it in a tone of voice that warned him against arguing with her.
A small frown touched Jenna’s smooth forehead. It was annoying that she should feel that small sense of let-down. Today should be a milestone in her life. From the point of view of return on her capital alone she ought to be feeling elated. She shuddered to think what her accountants would say if they knew of the amount she had spent in secret on garnering every scrap of information there was to be garnered about the Deveril family. And at last it had paid off. A hundred yards in front of her stood the house.
The first Deveril to build on this spot had been one of William the Conqueror’s knights. The family had gone from strength to strength until the death of Richard III. All four sons of the family had fallen at Bosworth but they had had wives, and one of those wives had produced a posthumous son whom Henry VII had pardoned and forgiven for his father’s misdeeds. For a while the family had languished, keeping close to their Yorkshire estates, but then one of the daughters had caught the eye of Prince Hal, and whether it was because he retained a soft spot for her or not, the Deverils did extremely well out of the sack of the monasteries during the Reformation.
That was when the original property had been demolished; a fine new house, built with an eye to beauty rather than defence, sprang up on the site of the old.
It was more than fifteen years since she had last seen this house. Then, she had looked back on it as she left the village, swearing eternal hatred to those who lived in it. How very young she had been! Of course, her hatred had faded, and with it over the years the hotly burning need to wreak vengeance on those who had caused it. But Jenna’s desire to exact atonement had never entirely faded. The news eighteen months ago that Alan Deveril and his son, Charles, had both died in a car accident had shocked her into realising the futility of wasting her life in impossibly unrealistic dreams of challenging fate. All she had been left with was a residue of bitterness, intensified by the news she had received later that as there was no direct heir, the house now stood empty.
Out of all the people she had once known in this area, she only kept in touch with one couple, her old headmaster and his wife, and it was they that she and Lucy were staying with now. Lucy! She sighed involuntarily as she thought about her rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter.
Lucy hadn’t wanted to come with her to West Thorpe, but Jenna had insisted and for that insistence had had to endure sulks and silence during the long drive up from London. Lucy! The gulf that had recently sprung up between them pained her. Most parents encountered some problems with their teenage children she knew, but she was not most parents; she was a single parent, and Lucy had been increasingly demanding recently about her right to know the identity of her father. Jenna, of course, had refused to tell her. Her mouth compressed as she reflected wryly that although she might be able to control her own business and a staff of a dozen or so people, when it came to controlling her daughter…
She resumed her study of the house. The main Tudor building with its mullioned windows and fancy brickwork had been added to by a Georgian Deveril, whose rich bride’s dowry had enabled him to employ Robert Adam to design a new wing. She had never been inside the house; the Deverils were not the sort of family to invite the village children into their elegant home. Alan Deveril had been a snob of the first water. It had always been his intention to arrange a marriage between Charles and a wealthy heiress—someone whose parents were eager to trade their money for the Deveril name and title. Her mouth compressed again, bitterness darkening her green eyes to stormy jade.
‘Jenna, there you are.’
She turned at the sound of Harley’s voice, frowning slightly. ‘You must be mad to think of taking on this place,’ he said frankly as he came up to her. ‘It’s riddled with damp…half the windows are rotten. It will cost an absolute fortune to put everything right, and to what purpose? You could get yourself a modern office block in London for a tenth of the cost and far less hassle.’
The petulance in his voice made her smile faintly. Plump and slightly balding, he nevertheless considered himself something of a ladies’ man and dressed accordingly. His expensive pale grey suit and toning silk shirt looked very out of place in the tangled undergrowth of the house’s gardens. He was perspiring slightly, Jenna noticed, something he always did when he was nervous. Poor Harley, he had a hard time sometimes keeping up with her, but he was an excellent administrator, fussy to the point of irritation at times, but fanatically methodical, unlike herself. It had taken a long time for her to build up her interior design business to the standard it had reached; now, although very few people might recognise her name, she could almost pick and choose her clients. It had become something of a cachet to claim that one’s interiors had been designed by Jenna Stevens.
‘It will make an excellent showcase for our craftsmen,’ she said lightly, ‘and besides I’m sick of London.’
Harley Thomas sighed, 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.