Stronger than Yearning

‘I’m very glad to hear you say it.’ He was standing behind her now and she could feel the heat of his breath against her nape.

Instinct told her that in another moment he would kiss her, and she moved away, saying quickly, ‘You’ll see that I’ve got my car back. They managed to locate the problem and put it right almost straight away. Where are we dining?’

If Graham was disappointed by her reaction he did not betray it. ‘A new place that’s been recommended to me. I don’t know what it’s like, but apparently they serve an excellent nouvelle cuisine menu.’

Nouvelle cuisine! Jenna’s heart leapt and twisted inside her like a stranded fish. Against her will she was forced to remember the meals she and James had eaten in their honeymoon suite. Those too had been nouvelle cuisine…delicate, light morsels designed to tempt even the most flagging appetite.

‘Jenna?’

The sharp query in Graham’s voice brought her back to the present. ‘Sorry…I was thinking about something else. It sounds lovely,’ she added, giving him a smile.

‘But nowhere near as lovely as you look.’

There was a deepening, husky timbre to his voice that warned Jenna to tread carefully.

‘That’s very complimentary of you, kind sir,’ she responded lightly. ‘You look rather dashing yourself.’

Once again, Graham responded to the light warning in her voice. ‘I’ll just get my jacket,’ he told her, ‘and then we can be on our way.’

While he was gone, Jenna glanced round his small sitting-room. It was pleasantly furnished, and had a masculine, bookish air about it; very much the room of a man who was a bachelor. It made her wonder slightly why Graham was still unmarried. He must be well into his thirties…Had he been married at some time perhaps? It struck her how little she knew about him and how incurious she was. Too incurious perhaps to be genuinely emotionally involved enough with him to contemplate an affair?

‘Autumn’s on the way,’ Graham commented as they drove out of York. ‘Some of the leaves are already turning.’

They made desultory conversation as he drove them to their destination—a renovated barn by a quiet millpond.

The restaurant was well patronised, and the food every bit as excellent as Graham had been told, but throughout the meal Jenna was conscious of an increasing tension emanating not just from her but from Graham as well.

It was gone eleven when they finally finished their liqueurs and paid the bill.

Jenna had dawdled deliberately over her meal, knowing that by now James would have guessed just what she had done. She tried to picture his reaction and found disturbingly that she could not.

The tension between them increased as Graham drove them back to York.

As he parked his car at the back of his shop next to Jenna’s he turned to her and said huskily, ‘Jenna, will you come up and have a nightcap before you go?’

This was the moment. Jenna knew it as surely as though he had spelled it out for her. If she said yes now she was saying yes to far more than a mere nightcap. The choice was still hers. She knew that Graham would not press or force her in any way. Part of her urged her to refuse, to leave now before any real damage was done, but another part of her, unbearably goaded by James and everything that he had done to her, pushed her on into reckless responsiveness.

‘Yes…yes, I will…’

The soft, breathy words seemed to fall into a pool of thick silence. For a moment neither of them spoke and then Graham was galvanised into action, unclipping his seat-belt and getting out of the car, helping Jenna from her seat as he opened her door, taking her arm possessively through his own as he led her up the flight of stairs to his door.

The moment they were inside the door he took her in his arms, kissing her with a passionate abandon she found instantly stifling and offensive. Unbelievably, all those sensations she had expected to feel in James’s embrace and had not done so, surfaced now, as Graham’s mouth continued to savage her own.

She was filled with a mindless, clawing panic, a terrifying fear that obliterated all reason and logic. She began to fight wildly against his constraining arms, blind to everything but her need to be free. He released her immediately, and with her release came a return to sanity. She didn’t know which of them was shaking the most, Jenna thought guiltily. In the half-light of the room she could see Graham’s pale face, and shaking body. She bit her lip torn between anguish and despair. She had hurt him and that was the last thing she had intended to do, but she had been so blindly, so selfishly intent on punishing James that she had not spared a thought for anything else.

She reached out and touched his arm tentatively and winced when she saw the anger laced with bitterness darken his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised huskily, knowing there was no way she could explain away her terrified lack of response to him with mere social phrases. It must have been as blindingly obvious to him as it had been to her that she was not able to respond to him, and hate herself though she might for hurting him, there was no way she could wipe away from either of their memories what had happened.

‘I think you’d better go.’ He sounded angry and terse and Jenna could not blame him. Although she had not actually led him on she had certainly, tonight at least, encouraged him to think that she would welcome his love-making.

As she turned towards the door he added bitterly, ‘If that’s the way you treat your husband, I’m surprised that he’s so desperate to keep you.’

Jenna turned and hesitated. James? Desperate to keep her? Her mouth compressed. If he was, it was not for the reason that Graham so obviously supposed.

‘I was not aware that he was,’ her voi

ce sounded more defeated than she realised and she caught Graham’s responsive sigh as he said tightly,

‘Well, let’s just say he was desperate enough to come round here the other day and tell me to keep away from you.’