PENNY JORDAN - A Rekindled Passion

He walked to the back door and knocked briefly on it. There was no bell, and when no one answered his summons he turned to glance back at the car parked next to his own and his frown deepened.

Her car was here, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she was in. Then the faint movement of the open french windows on the other side of the back door caught his eye and he walked curiously towards them.

The light was just beginning to fade, the room illuminated by a lamp on the desk several feet away.

There were papers scattered on it; the breeze had lifted some of them on to the floor; a familiar blonde head lay on the desk, pillowed on two slender, tanned arms.

The breath locked in his throat as he stared at her ringless left hand. He took a step towards her and then another, stopping abruptly when he saw the silver photograph frame on the desk.

He focused hungrily on the photograph inside it. Her daughter. His daughter. Then with a bitter frown he overcame his qualms and reached out to shake her awake.

The sensation of a hand on her shoulder was at once both familiar and alien, bringing her instantly out of her exhausted doze and into alert tenseness.

As she opened her eyes she struggled to sit up, wincing as her stiff neck muscles protested.

Someone was leaning towards her, blocking out the light from the lamp so that his features were indistinct, and then he said her name and a wild shudder convulsed her.

‘Kate, wake up,’ he demanded peremptorily, and to her own astonishment she heard herself saying grumpily and mundanely, as though the sight of him here in her sitting-room was nothing unexpected at all.

‘I am awake. What do you want? What are you doing here, Joss?’

Her mind, fogged by exhaustion and shock, relaxed its normally vigilant hold on her defences. She lifted her head, rubbing her stiff neck muscles and glaring at him fiercely.

‘How did you get in?’

She saw the open french windows and grimaced wryly. It was her fault. She had left the french windows open.

A little to her surprise, she saw his mouth thin angrily as he too looked at the open doors.

‘Anyone could have walked in here,’ he told her tersely.

Her eyes widened a little as she caught the note of reproval in his voice.

‘Anyone could,’ she agreed drily. ‘But you did. Why? What are you doing here, Joss?’

Her brief surge of shock-born defiance left her as he responded derisively, ‘I think you already know the answer to that question. I’ve come to talk to you about your daughter… our daughter…’

He stressed the possessive pronoun, watching her with eyes that seemed to see right inside her soul. Hard, bitter eyes, that seemed to blame and accuse; but who was he to accuse her? Why should he feel bitter?

He had caught her off guard, and as she struggled to reassemble her defences she licked her over-dry lips, tension seeping into her muscles and paralysing them.

‘What do you mean?’ she challenged, knowing as she spoke that she had hesitated for far too long.

He gave her a derisive look.

‘You know exactly what I mean, Kate.’

She moved restlessly in her chair. It was hard and uncomfortable, making her feel even more physically vulnerable. She longed for the soft comfort of one of the easy chairs by the fire where she could at least relax her compressed muscles, but he was standing right in front of her, making it impossible for her to move without brushing past him.

‘That was some shock, seeing you so unexpectedly like that last week—and then to discover, almost by accident, that—’ He broke off abruptly. ‘My cousin, John’s mother, invited me to have dinner with them last Sunday. We had a most illuminating conversation.’

The grey eyes bored into her, making her heart pound with fear. She wanted to drag her gaze away, to break the hypnotic concentration of his eyes and the anger she could sense he was only just able to control.

‘Sophy is my child.’ He said it flatly, refusing to allow her the opportunity to deny it.

She moistened her dry lips again, wanting to tell him that he was wrong, but her throat muscles refused to respond to her need and she could only stare wildly and betrayingly at him, while the colour came and went under her skin.

Her exhausted brain couldn’t cope with the hostility emanating from him. Last weekend she had dreaded this very confrontation…dreaded the denouement which would have ruined Sophy’s wedding day, and when it had not come she had reassured herself that acknowledging Sophy as his child was the very last thing Joss was likely to do.

Safe and reassured, she had started to let go of her fear, and in doing so had rendered herself vulnerable.

Her whole body ached with shock and fear.

‘I can’t see the point in dragging up the past now,’ she challenged him bitterly.

He stared at her for a moment as though he had never seen her before, his eyes merciless, his mouth a hard line of contempt. She focused on it despairingly and then, whether because of her fear or her exhaustion, she did not know which, she suffered the shockingly hallucinatory sensation of suddenly slipping back in time, so that when she looked at his mouth she remembered how it had felt moving against her own…how she had felt…almost sick with excitement and desire, wanting him so much…loving him so much…

‘The point is that I have already missed out on the first twenty years of my daughter’s life,’ Joss told her gratingly, destroying the fragile spell of the past and jolting her into the present, ‘and I do not intend to miss out on the next twenty. You had no right to do what you did, Kate,’ he told her savagely. ‘All right, so you discovered that you no longer wanted me…that there was no place for me in your life, but…What’s wrong?’ he asked her roughly, seeing the way the colour drained from her face, leaving it pinched and white with shock, her eyes enormous in its delicacy, their soft depths betraying her disbelief and pain.

It was a look that no one could have manufactured, painful and haunting enough to make him stop in his tracks to focus on her and study her.

‘What’s wrong, Kate?’ he repeated less savagely.

She had started to tremble violently, her reaction so intense that he reacted instinctively to it, reaching out to clasp her wrists firmly in warm fingers as though in comfort, while he registered the frantic race of her pulse.

She made an inarticulate sound of pain in her throat and tried to stand up…to escape. What was he trying to do to her? Why was he trying to pretend, to lie, to hurt her more than she had already been hurt?

Her cramped muscles refused to respond to her need to get away from him, and as she tried to pull herself free and push past him her legs simply refused to support her. She fell heavily against him, with an impotent cry of frustrated panic.

The too familiar scent of him was all around her, and as she struggled to escape from it she felt his arms locking round her. The silk shirt he was wearing felt nothing like the T-shirts and rough woollen shirts he had worn before, but the body beneath it was the same, hard and warm, its scent and shape dangerously evocative of the past. The harder Kate tried to escape from the miasma of emotions pouring through her, the more impossible escape became. Confused, exhausted, unable to understand why he was accusing her

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