PENNY JORDAN - A Rekindled Passion

All through the toasts and speeches she was conscious of growing tension, of an anxiety that balled in her stomach and made it impossible to concentrate on anything bar the dark-haired man sitting just within her vision.

Afterwards, while Sophy and John circulated among their guests, she tried to escape, but she had barely reached the opening of the marquee when Joss stopped her.

Her heart lodged painfully in her throat, her pulses hammering frantic messages of fear.

‘Your daughter looks very beautiful,’ he told her gravely. ‘John is a very lucky man.’

Stock compliments and phrases, with no nuance in them to make her muscles tense and her eyes flicker with distraught dread…nothing in his eyes to warn her that he had guessed that Sophy was his child…just a fine hardening of his mouth that made him suddenly look older and very bitter as he added devastatingly, ‘And so is James.’

James…She looked round wildly, her heart hammering with frantic, desperate ferocity. James was standing several yards away, talking to John’s mother.

‘Joss, there you are. It’s time we left.’ The redhead drew level with them and glowered warningly at Kate. ‘You know you promised we wouldn’t be staying long.’

Kate winced at her lack of manners, wondering faintly if the woman realised that she was doing her a favour and that the last thing she wanted was for Joss to linger.

She gave them both a polite, controlled smile and said brightly, ‘It was good of you to come. Please do excuse me,’ and quickly sidestepped them both, heading for the house and security.

It was a good half-hour before she was able to accept that they had actually gone and that she was safe, but the shock of Joss’s unexpected appearance had taken its toll, and it was impossible for her to relax and enjoy what was left of the day.

By the time the last of the guests were leaving she had a pounding headache, and the last thing she wanted to do was to join John’s family for the celebratory meal they had organised at the Fleece.

Sophy and John had gone. They were flying to Antigua for a three-week honeymoon, and Sophy’s face had been blissfully rapt as she and John left for the airport.

‘Takes you back, doesn’t it?’ John’s mother had sighed…and had then bitten her lip in embarrassment and apologised.

‘Heavens, I’m sorry…that was tactless.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Kate had assured her, and then, because of the pity she could see in her eyes, she had added firmly, ‘And besides, the relationship I had with Sophy’s father was as important to me as though we were married. It was only later when I discovered that he already had a wife and a child.’

Mary Broderick bit her bottom lip guiltily. She hadn’t meant to raise unhappy memories for Sophy’s mother, and, despite her initial shock at discovering that her son’s mother-in-law was a woman of thirty-seven who looked barely thirty, and who had conceived her daughter outside marriage when she was only sixteen during a relationship with an already married man, once she had met Kate she had quickly realised that, however deplorable the circumstances of Sophy’s conception, her mother was not to blame for them.

‘Do you never see him…hear from him?’ she asked awkwardly, wanting to fill the painful silence.

Kate shook her head quickly and lied, ‘And nor do I want to.’

Her head was pounding with sickening intensity. All she wanted to do was to go and lie down on her bed, but instead she had the evening to go through.

When it was all over, she would sleep for a week, she promised herself tiredly as she forced a smile to her lips and tried to appear as though she was enjoying herself.

OF COURSE, she didn’t. On Monday morning it was back to her normal routine of preparing the very special sandwiches that she and Lucy delivered to offices in York, along with their special executive lunches.

They were frantically busy, with two of their staff off on holiday and Kate having to drive into York in their van to make the deliveries and pick up fresh supplies.

After that she had an appointment with a woman who wanted them to cater for her husband’s fortieth birthday party, and then there was an evening reception in York, but thankfully Lucy was doing that.

The week whirled by and it was Friday before she knew it. Thankfully she had managed to give herself Friday afternoon off. The house was desperately untidy and needed cleaning from top to bottom, she acknowledged ruefully, and then there was the garden…The marquee people had been as careful as they could, but…

Acknowledging wryly that her afternoon off was likely to prove more arduous than working, she rushed back from York, dropped off the fresh supplies at Lucy’s home and then hurried home.

All afternoon she worked at top speed, refusing to acknowledge that part of her determination to keep busy was rooted in her desperate need to hold at bay the shock of seeing Joss again so unexpectedly and unwantedly.

By six o’clock she was exhausted, but she refused to allow herself to rest. There was still the garden to do, and it was silly not to take advantage of the long summer evening.

She hadn’t bothered to stop for lunch and she wasn’t hungry now. In fact, she hadn’t been hungry all week, and had lost a dramatic amount of weight. Lucy had noticed it and teased her about it, saying that it was the bride who traditionally wasted away, not her mother, and Kate had grimly let her believe that it was the build-up to Sophy’s wedding that had caused her to drop so many pounds, rather than admitting the truth.

At nine o’clock, her back aching and her muscles trembling with exhaustion, she acknowledged that it was time to give up.

Wincing as her strained muscles protested, she went inside and straight upstairs to her bedroom.

After her parents’ death, although she had cleared out their room, she had felt unable to move into it, and so she was still using the bedroom she had grown up in. She and Sophy had shared a bathroom, her parents having their own, and she acknowledged tiredly how empty the house felt now that she was living in it on her own.

Showered and dried, she grimaced slightly at her unmade-up face and wildly curling hair. All she wanted to do was to go to bed, but there were the books waiting downstairs for her attention…if she could just spend a couple of hours on them now…

Tiredly she went down to the comfortably shabby sitting-room at the back of the house. It overlooked the garden and had been her parents’ favourite room.

Both she and Sophy had grown up in this room with its faded chintz furniture, and its worn rugs and polished parquet floor.

She got the books out and sat down at the desk that had belonged to her mother.

She was so tired that it was virtually impossible to concentrate on what she was doing. The french windows were open, admitting the cool evening air and the musky scent of the bourbon roses.

Her back ached appallingly. If she could just lean back in the chair and close her eyes for a couple of minutes…

When the expensive Jaguar saloon car purred up over the gravel, she was too deeply asleep to hear it.

It stopped alongside her own car, the driver’s door opening and then closing again with a quiet click.

The man who emerged from the car straightened up and looked warily at the silent house.

It had been a long drive from London, and an even longer week, with this meeting on his mind throughout the length of it. He had been hard pressed to leave the office early, but eventually he had managed it. The ailing company he had taken over from his father twenty-odd years ago was now high-powered and very successful, but there were times when that success tasted like ashes in his mouth.