Lovers Touch. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ illusions about the reasons behind his proposal.

      He didn’t want her … No, what he wanted was her home … her name … her family title … for his son … their son … And he had made no apology for wanting them either; but then, why should he? To Joss, everything in life was a commodity with a price on it. The price of the gift he wanted to give his son was marriage to her. It was as simple as that.

      The phone rang abruptly, making her jump. It was the vicar’s wife, reminding her that she was bringing the Young Wives up to the house to tour round the greenhouses later in the week.

      If only there was someone she could turn to for advice and counsel. Her closest friend throughout her schooldays was now married, with a busy household, her husband being a doctor. They lived near Cambridge, and as well as her own baby girl there were also two older children from Robert’s first marriage. It hadn’t been easy for her friend to make the decision to take on a widower with two young children, and there had been many long telephone calls between Liz and Nell before Liz had finally decided to commit herself to Robert.

      Now she was blissfully happy, and fully deserved to be, and yet for all the confidences they had shared over the years, Nell had never told her how she felt about Joss. Perhaps she had hoped that by keeping silent she could somehow pretend that those feelings didn’t exist?

      But they did, and today Joss had scoured her soul by what he had said to her; by the ruthlessness he had displayed; by his total lack of any consideration of her own feelings.

      How could she possibly marry him? And yet, how could she not …? She had promised Gramps that she would do everything in her power to hold on to Easterhay; how could she live with herself if she refused to honour that promise?

      It was easy to tell herself that her grandfather was the product of a different age, that her promise need not be kept … that no one would blame her for refusing Joss, bearing in mind his reasons for marrying her. It should be the easiest thing in the world for her to simply say ‘No’, but she couldn’t. Conscience … pride … or just sheer, stubborn love for her home and her family … She didn’t really know which, or if it was a combination of all three. Or even perhaps if she had inherited more from her reckless ancestress then just her blonde hair, and, for the first time in her life, was actually going to throw herself blindly into the arms of fate.

      The morning papers brought in the shocking realisation that Joss wasn’t leaving anything to chance. There was a photograph of him prominently displayed on the society page of The Times, and underneath the caption, ‘Millionaire entrepreneur Joss Wycliffe announces that he is shortly to be married. The bride is not Naomi Charters, the actress whom he has currently been escorting, but the daughter of an old friend, Lady Eleanor de Tressail. The couple will marry within the next few months.’

      Nell sat down at the breakfast-table, feeling faintly sick. How dared Joss take her acceptance for granted like this! He wasn’t allowing her anything … no pride, no compassion … nothing.

      She pushed away her bowl of cereal and reached for the coffee-pot, her hand trembling.

      There was a large pile of mail beside her plate, and it contained far too many ominous buff envelopes. She picked up the top one, her heart sinking as she recognised the familiar Inland Revenue stamp. When she opened it her heart sank even further.

      It was a reminder that there were still death-duties to be paid, and the sum seemed astronomical. On the other side of the panelled dining-room was a lighter piece of panelling where a Gainsborough had once hung. It had been sold when her grandmother died. Now there was nothing more to sell … Other than herself … She shivered tensely. Dear God, why on earth couldn’t Joss have at least tried to make it easy for her … at least pretended to feel something for her, even if they both knew it was a pretence? This way … this way … he was making sure that she knew exactly what it was he wanted out of their marriage, and it wasn’t her.

      The phone rang, and she knew before she picked it up that it would be Joss.

      She was right; his clipped, slightly accented voice was abrasive on her ear.

      ‘I’m coming over at twelve, and I’ve arranged for Williams to be there at one. There’ll be certain legal arrangements to be made and I thought you’d want him there, seeing as he’s your solicitor …’

      He was moving too fast. Bullying her … pushing her in a direction she wasn’t sure she wanted to go; but when she tried to protest he hung up on her. She could picture him without even trying. He would be standing in his study, an anonymous square room, which like the rest of his house looked more like an expensive hotel than a home.

      He would probably be wearing one of those fine Savile Row wool suits in some dark, formal fabric. Joss liked good clothes and he wore them well, but nothing could totally disguise what her grandfather had described as his buccaneering quality; that arrogant maleness that no amount of city suiting could tame.

      His dark hair would be lying flat to his skull, thick and clean, his mouth curled into that thin, taunting smile he gave her so often; nothing like the smile he gave other women.

      She got up unsteadily and called to the dog, Heicker. She came to heel obediently. Joss had trained her.

      Outside it was one of those crisp September days when frost and the scent of woodsmoke mingled in the air and the sky was a clear pale blue with the sun dappling yellow and bright through the turning leaves.

      Deliberately Nell avoided walking past the greenhouses and the stables which had once housed her grandfather’s hunters. She herself liked to ride, but she did not enjoy hunting other than for its pageantry. She was too squeamish, too conscious of the purpose for which the hounds were bred, and as a teenager she had always drawn a sigh of relief when the day ended without the fox being caught.

      Her grandfather had had no such qualms, of course. To him, fox were vermin and hunting a sport. Right up until his death, the local hunt had started their Boxing Day meet at Easterhay. The traditional stirrup cup prepared in the kitchen for the huntsmen came from a recipe supposedly brought back from France by a de Tressail who had been exiled there by Henry VII and whose French wife was supposed to have been connected to the powerful de Guise family, uncles of Mary Stuart through her French mother. Whatever its true origins, it went down well with the huntsmen. She wondered if Joss would want to continue the tradition. Did he hunt? she wondered. Certainly not from birth as her father and grandfather had done, but at some point or other in his life Joss had taken enough time away from making money to acquire a sophisticated degree of polish.

      Despite Joss’s taunts, Nell was no snob. Although he didn’t seem to realise it, she admired Joss for what he had achieved, and her doubts about the wisdom of marrying him had nothing to do with the fact that he had been born in a Glaswegian slum and she in an expensive private nursing home.

      Twelve o’clock, he had said … it was gone ten now. And then David arriving at one … He was determined to make her agree, then. Even to the extent of involving the family solicitor. Poor David, how little he understood the Josses of this world. Nell suspected that David was terrified of Joss, although he hid it beneath a stiffly formal manner more suited to a man of fifty-odd than one of twenty-six.

      Like her, David had been brought up in an old-fashioned tradition, knowing almost from the cradle that he was destined to succeed his father as a country solicitor. There had been a time when she had wondered if she might fall in love with him. But that had been before she saw Joss.

      For some reason she couldn’t entirely analyse herself, she chose to wait for him, not in her grandfather’s library, СКАЧАТЬ