Читать книгу Bitter Betrayal - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

‘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.