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.
‘I was hoping you might be able to supply me with the name of a good architect in Yorkshire,’ she told him.
‘Yorkshire—rather far afield for you, isn’t it?’
Briefly she explained the situation to him.
‘So you intend moving your business up there as well?’ He frowned slightly. ‘Are you sure that’s a wise move in these recessionary times?’