Stronger Than Yearning

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

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

CHAPTER ONE

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.

‘It will make an excellent showcase for our craftsmen,’ she said lightly, ‘and besides I’m sick of London.’

Harley Thomas sighed, knowing he wasn’t going to get any more information out of her than he already had. At times infuriating, always calmly controlled, there was still a vulnerability about her that made him anxious. He couldn’t remember when he had seen a more beautiful woman. Her bone structure was delicately feminine, her eyes large and deeply green, her skin porcelain pale, her hair a thick mass of red-gold curls. At twenty-nine, she could easily have passed for twenty-three or -four if it hadn’t been for her air of cool self-possession. Tall and slim, her curves were nevertheless femininely voluptuous, especially her breasts. Unlike him, her clothes did not betray her as a city person, her sleek tweeds fitting her as naturally as though she had worn them all her life.

‘Where’s Lucy?’ she asked him, flicking open the pamphlet outlining the details of the house.

‘Sulking in the car,’ he told her wearily. ‘God, Jenna, have you thought of the trouble she’s going to give you if you do move up here? She’s dead against it.’

‘So she says, but she’ll be at school most of the time.’ School! That was another of Lucy’s grievances and probably a justifiable one, but what alternative had she had? As a busy woman building up her career she had not had the time to devote to a growing child. At first she had managed with a housekeeper and Lucy had attended a local school in London, but then as Jenna’s business had expanded, she was required to be out more and more in the evenings and had been worried about Lucy’s isolation from other children her age. In the end, the decision to send her to boarding school had seemed the only answer, and until recently she had thought Lucy enjoyed her school. It had been carefully chosen, being neither too lax nor too strict, and she was always meticulous about visiting her and keeping time free during the school holidays to spend with her. Only last summer, she and Lucy and two of Lucy’s friends had spent six weeks in the Aegean. It was the old story … she needed to work to support them both and yet by working she was forced to abandon her traditional role as mother.

She made a pretence of studying the leaflet in front of her, not wanting Harley to see her concern. Once he suspected she had doubts, he would do everything he could to dissuade her, Jenna knew that. But it was only a pretence because she knew the facts about the house off by heart. She had never been inside the main part of the Hall, but already she could visualise its rooms, feel its air of timelessness … sense the inbred belief of those who had lived there of their right to be the privileged few. But now, they no longer had that right. If she was successful at the auction the Hall would be hers, and, ridiculous though it was, her need to own it … to possess that which had once belonged to the proud Deverils who had so disdained those lower down the social ladder than themselves that they were not permitted to put a foot inside the place, was a strong motivating force in her life.

‘Well, are you going to go inside?’

She was, but in her own good time and alone. ‘Later,’ she said non-committally, adding, ‘look, why don’t you take Lucy back to West Thorpe, it’s going on for lunchtime. I’ll join her there later.’

‘Would you like me to stay overnight?’

When she had rung Bill Mather to tell him that she and Lucy were coming up to Yorkshire he had instantly insisted that they were to stay with him and his wife, Nancy, but there was no spare room for Harley and to be honest she didn’t want him there, trying to pressurise her into changing her mind.

If she bought the Hall, even at the reserve price, it would take every spare bit of cash she had, and even then she would have to borrow heavily. But it would be worth it. It would be worth every single penny.

‘You go back to London,’ she told him. ‘The Sedgerton contract should be in from the solicitors soon and I’d like you to go over it for me … I’m not sure I trust them completely …’

It wasn’t unknown for some of her wealthy clients to try and wriggle out of paying for her work, and for that reason Jenna was insistent upon watertight contracts.

Harley leapt as eagerly at the bait as she had hoped. ‘I’ll get on to it the moment it arrives. How long do you think you’ll stay up here for?’

‘Just until after the auction.’

So she was still determined to go ahead. He sighed gustily. Privately, he thought she was mad even to contemplate buying such a vast, and undeniably crumbling pile. He shuddered to think what the bank would say, and of course, it would have to be bought in the company’s name, especially if she intended to use it as a showcase for their work. Who on earth would come all the way from London up here, though?

Almost as though she had read his mind, Jenna drawled laconically, ‘They aren’t all devoid of money and taste north of Watford, you know, Harley. There’s a vast untapped market up here and if we get in first, it could prove an extremely lucrative business.’

‘But our contacts, our craftsmen, they’re all in London.’

‘So we’ll pay them to travel — or find more.’

He knew her stubbornness of old, knew it and in many ways admired it. Not many women of her youth and with her commitments would have left a safe, well-paid position with an established firm to set up on her own, but she had. He had first heard of Jenna through a friend whose apartment she had decorated. He had gone to her initially to find out what she could do for a small Chelsea Mews flat he had bought and which he wanted modernising in order to sell at a profit. He had walked into her office to find it in chaos, paper everywhere, and her vivid, haunting beauty had almost robbed him of breath. He soon learned that under the chaos was a very keen business mind, but her untidiness had him itching to put things in order.

When she had let slip the fact that she was looking for a business administrator, he had leapt at the chance to join her, and even to this day wasn’t sure if he had actually angled for the job or if she had simply let him think he had.

Their partnership worked well. She was a generous employer, content to leave the administrative side of the business completely to him, and he took a pride in the neat lists of schedules and work plans he kept locked away in his desk, carefully monitoring the progress of each contract, checking that all flowed smoothly.

Initially he had been almost desperately in love with her, but he soon learned that it was pointless. She was the only woman he knew who seemed to be able to live her life without a man in it. In all the years he had worked with her he had never known whether she had a lover and, if so, who. On balance he rather doubted it, which seemed incredible, given her startlingly good looks and the fact that she had a fifteen-year-old daughter. Proof positive, surely, that once there must have been a man. And that she must have been extremely young …

He wasn’t sure of her exact age, she looked younger than she was. What had happened to Lucy’s father? Had he been married perhaps? Had they quarrelled? Had he perhaps been a boy as young as she must have been? Was it Lucy’s conception and birth that had soured her against men? None of them were questions he would have dared to ask her, and over the years his love had faded to admiration tinged with a wistful yearning that things might have been different.

Left by herself, Jenna walked towards the house. Sharp knives of tension speared her stomach. Those who knew her would have been stunned had they known how she was feeling. Jenna never betrayed any emotion, any weakness and yet here she was, dreading setting one foot inside the house she had come so far to see and yet knowing that she must.

The Hall was rectangular and dark. Someone had painted over the elegant Georgian plasterwork in a revolting shade of brown, so that even the light pouring in through the high windows did nothing to alleviate the gloom. Dust and the smell of damp permeated the air. A double staircase curved up to the first floor, the stairs elegant and shallow. All Jenna’s inborn sense of colour and fitness rebelled at what had been done to this once-gracious room.

Two sets of double doors led off the hall with another two single doors further towards the back of it. This main entrance was in the new wing of the house and, as she knew from the sketch plan she had, contained a large drawing-room, the library, a dining-room, and another room which was described as a ‘back parlour’.

Although badly scratched, the mahogany of the double doors into the drawing-room seemed firm and dry; the brass handles and locks decorating them were probably the originals, Jenna reflected, marvelling at the workmanship that meant they opened outwards easily despite their weight without so much as a squeak.

The drawing-room was at the far end of the new wing, and, from the smell of damp pervading it, had probably suffered the most neglect. A leaking downspout, or a hole in the roof, Jenna decided knowledgeably, studying the betraying mould-stains discolouring the faded silk wallpaper at the far end of the room.

Over the years, the original Adam design had been mutilated as only the Victorians and Edwardians had known how, but she could see how the room once must have looked and how it could look again. Against her will, Jenna found as she walked through the dusty neglected rooms that she was slowly falling in love with the house, the one thing she had made no calculation for at all. Against all reason, its neglect called out to her, making her ache to restore it to what it had once been. Moving from room to room she forgot why she had originally come here, and knew only a powerful feeling that the house had to be hers. It went against all logic and reason, but it was strong enough to blot out everything else, even Lucy, waiting for her at the Mathers’, even the fact that originally she had wanted the house simply because it had once belonged to the Deverils, everything. She had heard of love at first sight, but had never envisaged herself falling so deeply in love with a house that the thought of not owning it caused actual physical pain.

Not even the open evidence of damp and the knowledge that it would need a fortune spending on it could put her off. Already she could imagine how it would look; how it would come to life under her expert care and love.

On the first floor, a galleried landing overlooked the main hall with four doors leading off it. Jenna had already noticed several paintings hanging on the walls — the house was being sold complete with contents — but this was the first one that had caused her to spare it more than a passing glance. The portrait was of a man, dressed in clothes of the late Georgian era. His dark hair was worn unpowdered, curling close to his skull, and the painter had somehow managed to capture on canvas the sitter’s aura of intense masculinity. A cynical rakehell character, Jenna suspected moving closer to the portrait.

The words ‘James Deveril, aged 32, 1817’ were painted on the frame, and it seemed to Jenna as she studied him that the dark blue eyes watched her, coolly mocking her.

As far as she knew most of the Deverils had been fair-haired Saxon types whereas this man was dark, his hair as jet black as a gypsy’s, his skin tanned as though he had spent some time in hotter climates than Yorkshire’s.

Fascinated by him against her will, Jenna wondered who he was. It shouldn’t be difficult to find out — the Deveril history was well documented in the local library as she already knew.

What on earth was wrong with her? she chided herself, moving away. The moment she entered this house she had been acting in a manner totally foreign to her normal behaviour.

She walked from the Georgian wing into the old, Tudor part of the Hall. Here the rooms were small, oddly shaped, the windows mullioned and the ceilings beamed. The Georgian wing fronted the house and the original Tudor building ran at right angles to it, a good-sized courtyard was at the back of the building enclosed on two sides by the house itself and on the other two by stables and outbuildings. Now neglected and weed-covered, Jenna could already see how attractive this area could eventually be.

Beyond the house lay the grounds, which included a small park planted with specimen trees, collected by an adventuring Deveril who had had business interests in the West Indies, but the rich farmland that lay beyond the house’s immediate environs was being sold separately. Not that she would have wanted it, Jenna admitted, studying the plans at the back of her sale pamphlet, the land that went with the house afforded it plenty of privacy. She remembered as a child cycling past the lodge gates, intensely curious about what lay behind the protective ring of trees that hid the house from sight.

Today wasn’t the first time she had visited the house, though; there had been one other occasion on which she had been here. As she stepped out through the back door into the derelict yard her mouth twisted bitterly. On that occasion she had made the mistake of ringing the front doorbell, and had been sent round to the servants’ entrance for her pains. ‘Servants’ entrance’, dear God, how antiquated it all seemed now, ridiculously so; the hallmark of a family desperate to preserve the old ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘master’ and ‘servant’ image. Then she had been totally over-awed, embarrassed and humiliated. How naïve she had been! A true product of her remote village upbringing by a spinster great-aunt.

Having finished her inspection she walked back towards her car, lost in memories of the past.

‘Nice car!’ The unexpected intrusion of the deep male voice into her thoughts unbalanced her, and she swung round tensely, colour flushing up under her skin as she found herself being studied by a pair of openly appreciative male eyes. The visual impact of coming face to face with a man so similar to the portrait of James Deveril, which she had just been studying, made her usual cool poise desert her, and she could only glance from him to her scarlet Ferrari in disorientated bewilderment.

‘Sorry if I startled you!’ His eyes crinkled in warm amusement, laughter tingeing his voice as he added, ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost! Have you? They do say that one of the wives of one of the Deverils walks sometimes at full moon … though no one’s ever seen her during the day.’

He had a faint accent that she couldn’t place, and angry at herself for her bemused reaction, Jenna threw him a cold look. The laughter died from his eyes immediately, and he sketched her a briefly mocking bow, drawling lightly, ‘Sorry if I spoke out of place, ma’am …’

He was dressed in jeans and a checked cotton work-shirt, his hair tousled, the open neck of his shirt revealing a deep vee of tanned flesh and the beginnings of a tangle of dark hair. Who was he? He was so like James Deveril that he must have some Deveril blood somewhere … but why not? There had been several Deverils in the past who had taken what they considered their droit de seigneur over the village girls; this man could be the descendant of one of them. He couldn’t be a legitimate member of the family; there weren’t any alive.

‘Thinking of buying it, are you?’ He nodded towards the house as he spoke, his eyes lingering on the full thrust of her breasts as she turned to unlock her car.

Seething inwardly Jenna ignored him, hoping that he would take the hint and leave her alone, but when he kept on prowling appreciatively round her car, she began to suspect he was deliberately trying to infuriate her, and she snapped shortly, ‘Look, I can see that you consider yourself something of a local Don Juan, but I’m really not interested. If I were you I’d get back to work before your employers discover that you’re missing.’

She had expected him to be disconcerted by her put-down, but instead he merely laughed, stepping away from the car as she slid in to fire the engine. The car needed servicing and was being rather temperamental. It refused to start, despite several attempts to get it going, and all-too-conscious of his amused scrutiny, Jenna willed herself not to give way to temper.

‘Here, let me.’

His arrogance left her breathless, stupefaction giving way to fury as he opened her door, turned the key in the ignition and the car fired right away.