Sick at heart, Jenneth hadn’t gone home, but had gone instead down the path along the river, a favourite haunt from her early teens where she used to idle her way home from school after she’d left Louise, daydreaming about life and Luke with all the innocence of her extreme youth.
Now, with a cynicism that sat oddly on her slender shoulders, she wondered what would have happened if she too had conceived Luke’s child. And it had been a distinct possibility: right up to the very weekend before he had announced that he was ending their engagement and why, Luke had been trying to persuade her to allow them to become lovers.
She closed her eyes abruptly, not wanting to remember the fiercely impassioned way he had made love to her that summer, breaking off when she had pleaded with him to stop, as she tremulously explained that he would be her first lover, and that she was afraid.
He had seemed to understand, teasing her about her fears, but she had thought that underneath his amusement he had been pleased that he would be her first lover.
How often during those first arid months without him had she asked herself if things would have been different had she been different? But she had stalwartly refused to allow herself to believe that, if Luke had really loved her, he would have turned to someone else for the sexual satisfaction she had not given him.
His betrayal of her, though, had had a lasting effect on her awareness of herself as a woman, destroying something so intrinsic within her that, as the years passed, she had privately likened herself to an animated doll without any real deep inner core…love, desire, all the emotions which filled the lives of other people were a foreign territory to her. She loved the twins, of course, and she enjoyed the company of her few good friends, but in a one-to-one relationship with a man she discovered that she just could not function…The mere hint of anything approaching intimacy made her remember how she had suffered through Luke’s rejection, and as the years passed she had deemed it wiser to hold the male sex well at bay. And now Louise was getting married…her friend who had always been so fiercely independent.
She knew that most people who knew her put her single state down to the responsibility she felt for the twins. It was a convenient excuse, but one she would no longer have once they were at university. Not that men were exactly beating a path to her door, urgently exclaiming their desire…She grimaced a little at the thought, mentally reviewing the men who had invited her out recently. There was Colin Ames, the local vet, a kind-hearted, raw-boned man, divorced with three small children, who was quite obviously looking for a substitute mother not just for his children, she suspected, but for himself as well.
There was Greg Pilling, who at thirty-five was still single, and considered something of a heartbreaker locally; he had a large house on the other side of the village and business interests which took him to London for four days out of every seven. Privately Jenneth suspected he was involved with someone down there whose identity he wished to keep secret for reasons best known to himself…because she was already married? Jenneth wondered cynically.
There were one or two others, pleasant, kind men who were quite obviously excellent husband and father material, but she refused to allow herself to get involved.
It wasn’t so much what Luke had done, she told herself these days, it was the fact that he had had the power to do it that made her avoid emotional commitments…it was the memory of her own intense vulnerability that kept her from allowing anyone too close to her.
Of course, in the years immediately following her parents’ deaths, any kind of intimate relationship with a man had been impossible. The twins had needed her too much, and her life had been so closely tied up with theirs that there was no space in it for anyone else. But now the twins were virtually adult—and it was Louise who had unwillingly forced her into this introspective mood, Jenneth reflected wryly, standing up and acknowledging that it was impossible now to try and concentrate on her work.
It was too late now to wish she had not made the commitment to attend the wedding, even if Luke was not going to be there…there would be other people there who would remember…
What? That she and Luke had been engaged, eight years ago, for the space of less than six months? That that engagement had been broken and that Luke had married someone else, and that subsequently they had had a child? So what? It was only in her own mind that the spectre of Luke’s rejection loomed so destructively…
Sometimes she suspected that Louise saw more than she said, even though her friend had accepted her explanations at face-value when she’d come home to discover that the engagement was over and that Luke was married to someone else.
It had been Louise who had given her the news some years ago that Luke’s wife was dead…a postscript added to a birthday card that had shocked her into a week of nightmare dreams of such intense reality that she had woken from them sweating and crying, shivering under the burden of knowing that even now Luke had the power to affect her intensely both emotionally and physically.
That had been the year Louise had coaxed her to go home with her for Christmas, and because the twins had pleaded with her to accept the invitation she had given way, never expecting to find that Luke was also at home, visiting his aunt and uncle.
His father lived in America now, and Luke, who had followed his father into medicine, was a consultant at one of the large teaching hospitals.
The sight of him, so familiar and once so desperately dear, had frozen her to the floor of Louise’s parents’ hallway. The twins, walking in behind her, had bumped into her…Someone had made the necessary introductions, she couldn’t remember who, and under cover of the general noise and confusion she had found herself confronting Luke, while her insides cringed with remembered anguish and misery, and she masked her face with the cool, remote smile she had perfected.
He had had his daughter with him, a bright, mischievous three-year-old, who plainly adored her daddy, and looked so like him that Jenneth had felt as though someone had slid a knife into her heart and turned it.
For some unfathomable reason she still didn’t understand, and which had seemed unreasoningly cruel of fate, Luke’s daughter had chosen to attach herself both to Jenneth and the twins, following them everywhere, watching them with Luke’s dark green eyes, smiling at them with Luke’s smile, but Jenneth had resisted the aching, yearning need within her to respond to the child’s overtures, to pick her up and cuddle her, to open her arms to her and hold her as she so plainly wanted to be held, with something approaching Luke’s proud, contemptuous disdain of her.
She remembered how Luke had walked into the sitting-room one day while she was there alone with Angelica, desperately trying to withstand the child’s very obvious desire for feminine affection. He had picked his daughter up, plainly recognising both the withdrawal and rejection in Jenneth’s refusal to touch his child, his mouth grim with dislike of her where once it had been soft with desire and love…or so she had thought. But that of course had just been an illusion.
She hadn’t realised how he had interpreted the twins’ adolescent teasing about the fact that she had very recently ended a brief relationship with one of her clients; nor that he had assumed quite wrongly from her brothers’ totally erroneous description of that relationship that she and Christopher Harding had been lovers, but the barbed comment he had made to her about the dullness of his aunt and uncle’s home without the presence of her lover to enliven it for her had been something she had seized gladly upon to bolster her shaky pride, smiling insincerely back at him as she said lightly, ‘It’s only for a week…’
And Luke had responded jeeringly, ‘And you can live quite easily without him in your bed for that length of time, is that it?’
And then, with a rush of anger she could only regret later, she had retaliated rashly—and thoroughly untruthfully—saying, ‘Christopher and I have been lovers for quite some time,’ and then from somewhere she had produced a feline smile, and added, ‘He goes away on business quite a lot, and when he does…’
‘You