That night she had deliberately drunk more wine than usual with her evening meal, hoping it would douse the fires of desire burning through her body, but all it had done had been to relax her inhibitions and pride to such an extent that later…but no…she wasn’t going to think about that now…about how she had gone to James and…Jenna could feel the deep tide of colour washing over her skin, her fingers curling tensely into her palms as she tried not to think about that and all the other nights since when James had reduced her to a wanton, eager creature she barely recognised as herself, as his love-making raised her to the heights.
Heights from which she swiftly tumbled back to reality each morning, Jenna reminded herself bitterly. God, how she hated and loathed herself!
Possibly more even than she hated James. While she could accept that it was perfectly feasible for a man to experience desire without love or respect, she found it almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that she could experience such an intensity of desire for a man she knew she hated.
James seemed to derive a good deal of amusement from the situation. How many times since that first night had he tormented her with her own words, demanding to know who she thought she was making love to—himself or his ancestor, and if she refused to give him the right answer…She put down her pen, shuddering with the memory of the punishment he could invoke.
Sexually he could exercise a control over her that both terrified and fascinated her. She continually fought against him, loathing the fact that it was possible for him to generate such an intense reaction within her, and yet helpless against the fiercely swift tides of desire that ran within her at his lightest touch.
This week he was spending a few days in London—something he had done on several occasions in the two months they had been living at the Hall. On each occasion, she told herself, she was glad to see him go, and on each occasion the very first night of his absence she lay wakeful and aching for the warm reality of him in bed beside her. They no longer even had separate rooms. James would not allow it.
Sighing faintly she closed her heart against the desolation creeping over her. Sometimes it seemed that the harder she fought against the sexual chemistry that existed between them the stronger it became. Unlike her, James seemed to suffer no shame or self-contempt in desiring her. And he did desire he
r—he had told her so with his tongue as well as with his body, in ways that it still made her shudder delicately to recall.
‘Jenna…can I come in?’
She had been so engrossed in her own painful thoughts that she hadn’t heard the tap of Sarah’s crutches over the parquet floor. Her step-sister-in-law had progressed to them only the previous week, and Jenna had organised a special meal to celebrate the occasion.
‘I’m only working on the accounts,’ Jenna told her, pulling a wry face. ‘I’m only too glad to be interrupted.’
‘Has James gone?’ Sarah carefully avoided looking at her as she manoeuvered herself down into a chair.
Jenna sighed faintly. Although he never betrayed it to anyone she knew that James was hurt by Sarah’s continual avoidance of him. Against her will she felt slightly sorry for him, and as always when she suffered these ambivalent feelings towards him Jenna tried to push them aside. Why should she feel sorry for him? Perhaps because she knew that in this instance he was being condemned unfairly, her conscience suggested mildly.
That much was true. Jenna knew that Sarah still resented what she considered to be James’s rejection of her own mother, and even though she was now well on the way to full recovery from the trauma of the accident, Jenna knew that she still retained a slight residue of irrational conviction that somehow James was to blame for what had happened to her parents.
‘I’ve just come from the other wing,’ Sarah told her. ‘The ceiling in the hall is almost finished.’ Her eyes glowed vividly in her small pale face. ‘Jenna, it is just so beautiful.’
Jenna smiled. The same artist who was doing the ceiling in the ballroom had been commissioned to do a similar trompe l’oeil allegorical work on the vaulted hall ceiling, and Sarah spent part of every day in there watching him work, fascinated by the scene growing in front of her eyes.
She was a gifted artist herself, and Jenna had not missed the long and earnest conversations Sarah had with the young Royal Art College graduate whom Geoffrey Rust employed as his assistant.
She watched as Sarah looked down at her hands for several seconds. ‘Jenna, I’d like to go to art school,’ she burst out at last. ‘Watching what’s been done here has been so fascinating.’
‘Well, you certainly do have the talent,’ Jenna agreed, frowning slightly before choosing her next words, and then adding quietly, ‘but, Sarah, have you thought about how arduous it will be?’
‘Too arduous for me because I’m virtually a cripple?’ Sarah queried bitterly.
‘Now that just isn’t true. You are making an excellent recovery. The doctor said as much last month when we went to see him. By the time you’re ready to go to art school you should be fully recovered…but it won’t be easy, Sarah,’ she added gently.
‘No, and if it hadn’t been for——’ She broke off, her face flushing slightly.
‘Go on,’ Jenna urged her. ‘If it hadn’t been for what, Sarah? For your accident? For your parents’ deaths? For James?’
She watched the younger girl colour darkly as she mentioned James’s name.
‘I can’t help it, Jenna,’ Sarah admitted, twisting her fingers together anxiously. ‘I know that logically he wasn’t to blame. How could he be? But deep down inside I still feel that he’s glad about what happened, that my mother is dead. I know he never liked her.’
Jenna sighed faintly and glanced at her watch. In half an hour the retired schoolteacher they were employing to give Sarah private lessons until she was fit enough to go back to school would be arriving. She had every logical reason to avoid dealing with the issue that Sarah had just raised. She could quite reasonably simply pass the problem on to James to deal with, after all Sarah was his half-sister. She knew that she ought to feel pleased that Sarah felt this resentment against him, but oddly enough she could not, because she realised what damage it was doing to Sarah to carry such a heavy burden of guilt mixed with anger and resentment. Jenna turned her chair away from her desk, so that she could look at her step-sister-in-law.
‘Sarah, I’m going to tell you something now about James that is extremely private.’ Quickly she outlined the story of James’s mother as Lady Carmichael had told it to her, finishing by saying, ‘So you see that as the boy James was when your mother and his father married he must naturally have felt resentful on his own mother’s behalf.’
‘You’ve said as much to me before,’ Sarah admitted, ‘but then, I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t want to believe that James could possibly have felt as I do. I even resented the fact that he might have shared my feelings. I wanted them to be my own.’
‘We all feel like that at some time in our lives,’ Jenna comforted her. ‘But I honestly believe, Sarah, that as he grew older James ceased to resent your mother’s marriage to his father. He learned to get over the feelings he had as a teenager, because he realised how damaging they could be. Just as you must realise the same thing and try to get over it. I know it won’t be easy. It never is easy to rid ourselves of our deepest convictions. They’re part of us, and really, deep down, we don’t want to part with them…’
As she said the words, it suddenly struck Jenna that they had a particular relevance to herself. She had always told herself that sex was something she could never enjoy, and now because she did she resented the man who had made her realise the truth. Ridiculous, she told herself angrily. There were other reasons why she resented James, reasons that had nothing to do with the wild hunger he knew how to build up inside her.