Penny Jordan - Stronger Than Yearning

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Cover

Title Page Stronger than Yearning Penny Jordan www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Copyright

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.