Unspoken Desire
Unspoken Desire
PENNY JORDAN
Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now."You never did want to face reality, did you?" Frazer accused. "You always were a daydreamer… living more in your imagination than in real life. "Frazer Aysgarth had never forgiven Rebecca for what she'd done those many years ago – despite the fact she'd sacrificed herself for his sake.Now that they would be sharing the same house, Rebecca wondered if there was any hope that he'd see her as the woman she really was…
Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.
About the Author
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Unspoken Desire
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
‘REBECCA my dear…such a relief! For one moment when you didn’t answer the phone straight away I thought perhaps you’d decided to fly out to Australia to see your parents and brother. How is dear Robert, by the way, and Ailsa and the girls? They must be getting quite big now. How old are they? Four and two, isn’t it? It’s…’
‘Aunt Maud,’ Rebecca interrupted firmly, tucking the receiver under her chin, and trying to concentrate on the essays she was marking while at the same time following the convoluted drift of her great-aunt’s vague conversation.
‘Ah, yes…The reason I’m ringing you, my dear, is that I desperately need your help.’
Her help? Rebecca’s frown wasn’t caused entirely by the essay of a pupil who was destined to follow his father into the latter’s merchant bank, and yet at ten years old still seemed to think the word instalment possessed a double ‘l’.
‘My help?’ She couldn’t resist the faintly ironic underlining of the possessive pronoun. At the other end of the line in faraway Cumbria there was the kind of humming silence that told her that her point had been made.
‘Well, my dear, there was simply no one else I could turn to,’ came the dramatic response. Aunt Maud at her thespian best, Rebecca reflected ruefully, catching the note of pathos that had been added to her great-aunt’s original vagueness. ‘I would have got in touch with your mother, but since she’s in Australia…’
A slight suspicion of aggrieved irritation there, Rebecca suspected, and no wonder. She could well imagine that, whatever kind of help it was she needed, Maud Aysgarth would rather have approached her soft-hearted and far too put-upon mother than herself.
Her mind was more on her marking than her aunt’s conversation. Those people who believed that schoolteachers did nothing during the long school holidays really ought to see her desk right now, loaded down as it was, not only with the end-of-term essays from the pupils she taught at an exclusive co-educational private prep school, but also the uncompleted work schedules and plans for the coming autumn and winter terms, she reflected grimly. She loved teaching and always had, and counted herself privileged to have a job teaching in a school as well equipped and well run as the one she did…a private London prep school whose pupils were on the whole well-behaved and keen to learn.
Thinking of her work caused her to lose the thread of her aunt’s conversation; after all, what could there possibly be to worry about at Aysgarth with Frazer in charge?
Aysgarth was Frazer’s private kingdom, a kingdom in which nothing was allowed to go wrong, nothing allowed to intrude which Frazer did not want intruding, as she knew to her cost.
Aysgarth was a granite-hard house owned by a granite-hard man. And yet she loved the house, and once she had thought…
‘So you see, my dear, with Frazer away and myself in charge, there was really no one else I could turn to. I don’t know how long it will take you to get up here, but…’
Get up there? Had Aunt Maud gone mad or had she? She must know quite well that if Frazer hadn’t actually forbidden Rebecca to put as much as a fingertip on Aysgarth property, then he had certainly made it quite plain that her presence was not one he wanted or welcomed, and why. Rebecca laughed mirthlessly and soundlessly to herself. Why? Because once she had been idiotic enough to want to protect him from hurt. For that she had been condemned and ostracised, made to feel as though she were a Judas and worse.
Dear God, the last thing she needed right now was to start walking down that painful path again. It was over, in the past…totally without relevance to her life. A good life—a life filled with a job she enjoyed, friends who shared her interests and tastes, men who took her out, flattered her, flirted with her and, above all, did not look at her with cold grey eyes, the colour of ice, so dark with contempt and bitterness that they shrivelled her very soul.
She was happy, content; her life was rich and full. There was no room in it for useless daydreams, for might-have-beens. She was twenty-six years old, mature, well adjusted, self-sufficient.
Or she had been until Great-Aunt Maud had started interfering in her life, reminding her of things best forgotten. And then something her aunt had said hit her.
‘Frazer isn’t at Aysgarth? But he must be! Rory and Lillian left the children there because…’
‘That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, my dear. Frazer was here, but at the very last minute he had to take over from one of his colleagues, who was due to give a lecture tour in the States. Frazer had no option but to go in his place, as Head of the Institute. He’ll be gone for nearly three months.’
‘Three months?’ Rebecca was appalled. ‘What about the children?’ From what her mother had told her, Frazer’s niece and nephew, his brother’s children, were a pretty unruly pair, who required a very firm hand on the reins. Eight-year-old twins whose easygoing father had never made any real attempt to discipline them, and who with their mother had calmly dumped them on Frazer eight months ago, so that he could take up a new job in Hong Kong.
‘Well, Frazer did make proper arrangements for them,’ Aunt Maud was saying defensively. She had always hated anyone criticising Frazer. After his and Rory’s parents had been killed in an air crash she had moved into Aysgarth House at Frazer’s request. He had been eighteen then and Rory a much younger twelve. ‘He hired a young woman to take charge of them.’
A sniff accompanied the almost scathing words ‘a young woman’, and Rebecca, who had heard all about the twins’ exploits from her mother who regularly kept in touch with Frazer, her much younger cousin, repressed a faint sigh of sympathy for the girl concerned.
‘What’s happened to her?’Rebecca asked drily.
‘She’s left—handed in her notice and said that there was no way she was going to be responsible for the twins. Undisciplined brats, was how she referred to them.’
In her mind’s eye, Rebecca pictured her great-aunt’s magnificently Edwardian bosom heaving in righteous indignation at this slur on the Aysgarth line, but she was long past being intimidated by the long shadow that name had once cast across her life—a long, long time ago when she had been awed and impressed by the stories her mother had told her about her ancestors’ long-ago deeds of valour.
Holidays spent at Aysgarth had not helped to dispel the awe—not with Frazer there, ten years her senior. Darkly if rather grimly handsome even in those days, a silent spectator of hers and Rory’s games, a dark-visaged god who had walked casually into her life and her heart.
‘Well, aren’t they?’ she said wryly now, groaningly dismissing her own ridiculous vulnerabilities.
There was a moment’s silence and then her great-aunt admitted with obvious difficulty, ‘Perhaps they are a little high-spirited, but at their age…’
‘They’re out of control,’ Rebecca interrupted crisply, ‘and I suspect that one of the reasons Rory has dumped them on Frazer is that he hopes that Frazer will apply some of that famous discipline of his on them. What they really need is to go to a good school where their energies and high spirits will be channelled properly.’
‘Exactly!’Maud pounced eagerly. ‘That’s just why I’m ringing you…with your teaching experience.’Much, much too late Rebecca saw the trap closing fast around her. ‘Of course, if your dear mother were here…However, I remember how much you enjoyed staying at Aysgarth as a child…all those long summer holidays…’
Rebecca silently and grimly acknowledged the application of a generous amount of emotional pressure to her aunt’s argument. Without actually putting it into so many words, her aunt was implying that it was her duty to drop everything and go haring off to Cumbria in order to take charge of Rory’s twins…that she owed it to the family to do so.
A dozen good reasons why she ought to refuse came readily and easily to mind; not the least of them the fact that she had already made tentative plans to spend at least part of her summer break touring Greece with some friends, but even as the words formed she found herself being relentlessly and determinedly dragged into her great-aunt’s carefully woven net.
She made one last bid for freedom, saying desperately, ‘Aunt Maud, you know that Frazer won’t like it!’
There was a telling silence and then her aunt’s voice, vague and faintly ominously tired, saying plaintively, ‘Oh, dear…but, Rebecca, that was all so long ago. I’m sure Frazer has forgotten all about it. He never was one to hold a grudge…such a silly quarrel anyway.’
Silly or not, it had been important enough to keep her away from Aysgarth for the eight years, and to keep Frazer from inviting her there.
They had met twice in all that time; once briefly at the twins’ christening…an appearance which pride alone had demanded she put in when, as she remembered all too well, Frazer had treated her with grim and very determined silence, as though she had physically ceased to exist.
The second occasion had been when her brother Robert and Ailsa had got married. She had been bridesmaid, Rory’s two toddlers attendants along with some of Ailsa’s cousins, and in the hurly-burly of looking after half a dozen assorted children, she had managed to avoid any kind of direct confrontation with Frazer very nicely indeed.
To have her presence requested, almost demanded, in fact, at Aysgarth after all this time was the last thing she had expected.
If Frazer had been there it would have been impossible for her to go…not because of his dislike of her, but for the sake of her own pride, but of course, he wasn’t there. If he had been there the problem wouldn’t have arisen in the first place; but the problem had arisen, and despite all her doubts, all the reasons why she ought firmly but pleasantly to refuse to go to her great-aunt’s aid, she knew that she couldn’t do it.
Illogical, ridiculous it might be, but there was a debt she owed, if not to Frazer himself, then at least to Maud, who had made both her and Robert so very welcome in the days when her father’s career had meant that he and their mother were so often out of the country.
Now it was her turn to repay that kindness…and repay it she must, if only to prove that whatever Frazer might think, it was by her own decision that she stayed away from Aysgarth, and not because of any stipulation of his.
Not that he had ever verbally announced that she was not to return; the veto had been more subtle than that, and more hurtful. And it had been there, no matter how much Aunt Maud might try to gloss over it now.
Knowing she was probably going to regret it, she gave in, but warned, ‘It will be the end of the week before I can get up there.’
IT WAS ONLY after she had replaced the receiver that Rebecca wondered what on earth she had committed herself to. Virtually three full months looking after two thoroughly undisciplined children, in a house whose owner both disliked and despised her.
Her flatmate was astounded when she told her what she had agreed to do.
‘But you had so much planned!’ she expostulated. ‘The trip to Greece, and…’
‘I know, but it is an emergency and I felt obliged to help out. A family emergency.’
Kate Summerfield frowned at her. ‘You’ve never mentioned having family in Cumbria before—and I don’t recall you ever going to see them.’
The two girls had shared a flat since leaving university, and when Rebecca had announced four years previously that she intended to buy her own small property Kate had readily agreed to become her lodger.
‘For a very good reason,’ Rebecca told her wryly, and proceeded to explain.
‘You mean he actually banned you from visiting the house? What on earth had you done?’
Rebecca shook her head.
‘It wasn’t as obvious as that. There was no direct ban as such. It was far more subtle than that…just the intimation that my presence was no longer welcome.’
‘Why? What had you done? Pawned the family jewels or something?’ Kate joked.
‘Not exactly.’ Rebecca bit her lip. She had never discussed the reason for Frazer’s ban with anyone, not even her parents, who, like Maud, presumed that they had quarrelled about something far less serious.
‘It’s rather a long story,’ she said slowly, groping for the right words, suddenly almost desperately wanting to unburden herself to someone. Her conversation with Maud had resurrected old hurts, opened old wounds, and the need to share them with someone overpowered her normal reticence on the subject.
Kate looked speculatively at her and said, ‘I’ve got plenty of time. Come on, tell me all about it.’
‘Well, it was just after my eighteenth birthday. My parents were away at the time out in South America. I was going to spend the summer holiday at Aysgarth as usual. Rory came to collect me from school. He wanted to show off his new car. He’d been married about six months then, and Lillian was expecting the twins.
‘Frazer hadn’t wanted him to get married. He thought he was too young at twenty-one to make such a commitment, but Rory overruled him. I could tell the moment he picked me up that something was wrong—we’d always got on very well together.’
‘Just like brother and sister?’ Kate interposed questioningly.
Rebecca returned her look and said truthfully, ‘Exactly like brother and sister. I asked him what was wrong and on the way home he told me. He’d been having an affair and Frazer had found out. They’d been seen together and somehow or other Frazer had got to know about it. Frazer was demanding to know who it was that he was involved with.’
‘And?’ probed Kate as Rebecca’s voice slowed down.
‘And Rory didn’t want to tell him.You see, the woman he’d been involved with was actually Frazer’s girlfriend. She and her family had only recently moved to the area and Rory seemed to think that Frazer was pretty keen on her.’
‘And?’ Kate probed again.
Rebecca shrugged her shoulders tiredly. ‘It’s all very simple really. Rory asked me if I’d let him tell Frazer that it had been me he’d been involved with.’ She gave a faint sigh. ‘I suppose it was naïve of me, but when Rory said how much Frazer loved Michelle and how much it would hurt him if he found out that she and Rory had been having an affair—well, I…’
‘You were eighteen years old, desperately in love and only too anxious to do anything you could to save the object of that love from pain,’ Kate hazarded wryly.
Rebecca laughed a little sadly. ‘Was I so very obvious?’ she questioned.
Her friend shook her head. ‘It all fits. I take it you were in love with this Frazer.’
‘I certainly thought I was,’ Rebecca agreed drily, ‘although, in the light of the events that followed, that love very quickly turned to hatred. It was never any more than a teenage crush really,’ she added dismissively.
It had rather jolted her that Kate had so easily recognised her true feelings, and she wondered how many other people at the time had known exactly how she’d felt about Frazer. She had certainly done very little to hide her adoration of him.
‘Are you trying to tell me that this Frazer actually believed you were having an affair with Rory?’ Kate asked in some astonishment.
Rebecca frowned. ‘Well, yes. Well, yes, he did. He was furious about it, of course—accused me of trying to break up Rory’s marriage, pointed out that Rory’s wife was expecting, said all the usual sort of things one might expect.’
‘And he really genuinely had no idea that you were making it up?’
‘No,’ Rebecca told her blankly. ‘Why?’
Kate shrugged and said drily, ‘Well, no reason. He seems a bit of an idiot, though—first of all he doesn’t realise the girl he’s in love with is having an affair with his brother and then he believes that the girl who loves him is having an affair with his brother. A bit dense, is he?’ she questioned.
Rebecca’s frown deepened. ‘No, he isn’t. In fact if anything he’s extremely perceptive—too perceptive sometimes.’
Kate said nothing, but the look she gave her friend said it all for her.
‘He would have wanted to believe me,’ Rebecca told her defensively, without even knowing why she should want to defend Frazer. He certainly didn’t deserve it, nor need it, not when she remembered the tongue-lashing he had given her when Rory had confessed to him that it was she with whom he had been involved.
‘You mean it was preferable to believe that you were guilty of enticing his brother into an extramarital relationship rather than his girlfriend?’ Kate demanded scathingly. ‘That isn’t perception, Rebecca, it’s sheer bloody-minded stupidity. What happened?’ she asked offhandedly. ‘About his relationship with the girlfriend, I mean.’
Rebecca frowned again. ‘That’s the odd thing about it all, really. It just sort of petered out. Well, at least that’s the impression that the rest of the family seemed to have. I suppose pride kept Frazer from admitting the truth to anyone, that he’d loved her and lost her.’
‘Mmm,’ Kate commented absently. She appeared to be concentrating on a small speck of fluff on the carpet. ‘And the two of you kept your distance from one another ever since, is that it?’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘Frazer made it plain to me that my presence wouldn’t be welcome at Aysgarth in the future. Nothing he’s ever said or done has contradicted that impression.’
‘And now you’re being summoned up to Cumbria to look after his brother’s brats in his absence,’ Kate supplied wryly. ‘Well, I wonder what he’s going to say when he finds out about that.’
‘Do you think perhaps I oughtn’t to go?’ Rebecca asked anxiously.
Despite her stunning good looks and her undoubted intelligence, not to mention her skill with her pupils, Rebecca had a sometimes disconcerting lack of self-worth, something which had always puzzled Kate, but which she now suspected she knew the reason for.
‘On the contrary,’ Kate told her firmly. ‘I think you ought to go,’ and then, as she saw relief lighten her friend’s features, she added softly, ‘I suppose it never occurred to you that you could tell him the truth?’ She watched as the colour left Rebecca’s face and added, as though unaware of it, ‘After all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t now, is there? As you said yourself, the relationship with the girl in question petered out. Why haven’t you told him, Rebecca?’ she pressed.
Rebecca turned her back on her, fidgeting with some papers on her desk.
‘Why should I? There’s no reason to. If he wants to believe the worst of me, then let him.’
‘Well, it certainly provides a very effective barrier to hide behind,’ said Kate obliquely, watching in compassion as the telltale colour ran up under her friend’s fair skin. It was an unusual combination, that blonde, silky fall of hair and that pale Celtic skin. Unusual and very, very attractive.
Kate had lost count of the number of men she had introduced to her flatmate, who had promptly all fallen head over heels with her air of fragile, almost haunted vulnerability. As far as she knew, Rebecca had never even come close to returning their feelings. She had often wondered why her friend appeared so immune to the male sex. Now she suspected she had found the answer.
‘I can’t do it,’ Rebecca suddenly burst out despairingly. ‘I can’t go up there!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kate told her dampeningly. ‘Of course you can, and so you should. You’ve already told your aunt you will. It would be unfair to let her down. What are you frightened of, Rebecca?’ she probed gently. ‘Even if this Frazer should return home early and find you there, he’s hardly going to physically throw you out, is he? I think in your shoes,’ she mused thoughtfully, ‘I should rather enjoy the opportunity to make him indebted to me.’
Rebecca gave her a despairing look. She didn’t know Frazer. She had no idea that Frazer of all people was the very last person to relish being indebted to anyone, and especially to her.
‘But then, of course, he’s already indebted to you, isn’t he?’ Kate added almost as though she had read the course of her thoughts, and when Rebecca stared at her she added softly, ‘You sacrificed your good name and feelings to protect that of his girlfriend and his feelings,’she pointed out wryly. ‘You’re not frightened of him, are you, Rebecca?’ she asked curiously, knowing full well the effect her question would have.
‘Of course I’m not,’ Rebecca denied robustly.
‘Good. Then there’s nothing to stop you fulfilling your promise to your aunt, is there?’
For a moment Rebecca was silent, then she agreed hollowly, ‘No. Nothing at all.’
CHAPTER TWO
KNOWING that and actually believing it were two very different things, as Rebecca quickly discovered as she made her preparations to leave for Cumbria. Instead of worrying about Frazer and his all too likely reaction to the discovery that she was installed in his home, it would be far more profitable for her to spend her time worrying about how she was going to control the twins, she reflected as she packed her small car for the journey north.
The class of ten-year-olds she taught were in the main intelligent and well-disciplined children. All the reports she had heard of Rory’s twins suggested that, although they might possess intelligence, they certainly did not possess any self-discipline, and by all accounts resented any attempt to impose it on them. Remembering her own and Robert’s feelings when their parents had to constantly go away without them, Rebecca wondered privately if their unruliness did not perhaps spring more from a desire to capture parental attention rather than from any inborn disruptiveness.
Great-Aunt Maud possessed not only an Edwardian bosom, but in addition an Edwardian attitude to life, and at her behest Rebecca had promised that she would try to be at Aysgarth for four o’clock in time for afternoon tea.
‘That will give you an ideal opportunity in which to meet the children,’ Aunt Maud had informed her, and Rebecca, suddenly remembering from her own childhood her great-aunt’s ability on occasions to put aside her vagueness and apparent fragility and reveal all the assets of a master tactician, wondered a little uneasily why it was that Maud required her assistance in managing the twins. After all, as she remembered very well, Great-Aunt Maud had had no difficulty at all in keeping both her and Robert under control.
That had been almost twenty years ago, though, when her aunt had been in her fifties. Now she was in her seventies, and it was hardly to be expected that she could keep a watchful eye on two energetic and by all accounts extremely difficult eight-year-olds.
Aysgarth was on the more distant side of Cumbria, far away from the popular Lake District, in what Rory had on more than one occasion disconsolately described as the back of beyond.
Rebecca, despite the fact that she had lived and worked in London for well over six years, did not share his views. In London she had a lifestyle she enjoyed and a job she loved, but, given freedom of choice, she knew that she could quite easily adapt to a more rural lifestyle.
It surprised her to see how far the motorway system had now penetrated into Cumbria, giving her the advantage of gaining a good half-hour on her estimated journey time. With that half-hour in mind, a couple of miles away from Aysgarth and halfway down a very narrow country lane that led not only to the house but to the several farms beyond it, she pulled her car in to the side of the road and got out, locking it.
Fifty yards or so down into the valley lay one of the favourite spots of her childhood and teenage years. The river ran through the valley, dammed at one end to form a small pool from which it spilled over a weir, dropping quite a formidable distance into the far end of the valley and beyond that the valley below it.
The valley was wooded, shadowy with trees and their secrets. Underfoot the ground was springy and resinous with pine needles and roots. Despite the fact that the weather forecasters had promised them a good summer, so far there had been very little evidence of it, and as Rebecca made her way down the steep-sided valley she saw that the river below was flooded from the heavy spring rains.
Down below her in the valley bottom, a movement caught her attention. She focused on it abruptly, frowning as she saw the two small jean-clad figures hurrying in the direction of Aysgarth House. The twins. She would have recognised them through their similarity to their dark-haired and dark-visaged uncle anywhere, and she mused ruefully on the oddity of heredity and the fact that it should be Rory’s children who had inherited so much of Frazer’s dark colouring. Rory himself took after his and Frazer’s mother, being fair-haired and blue-eyed, whereas Frazer took after their father, possessing the dark-haired, grey-eyed, hard-chiselled look which had always been formidably recognisable as Aysgarth features.
It was not their similarity to their uncle that brought a frown to Rebecca’s forehead, though; it was the fact that the two children, barely eight years old, were apparently free to wander the countryside at will. She could remember herself how very strict not only Aunt Maud but also Frazer himself had been about her liking to wander here in this remote and beautiful valley. How he had drummed into her the danger of going too near the weir, or being tempted to even think about swimming in the pool, which was extremely deep and possessed dangerous hidden currents.
It was true that the twins had not been swimming, but she seemed to remember she had been well into her teens before Frazer had lifted the ban that stipulated that she was never ever allowed to come down here on her own.
As the twins approached, some instinct made her draw back into the shadow of the enclosing trees. The path they were on ran several yards away from her, and as she knew, turned abruptly several yards away to veer in the direction of Aysgarth House. As they passed her she could hear Peter saying anxiously to his sister. ‘Are you sure it’ll work, Helen? Are you sure it’ll make her go away?’
Rebecca stiffened, knowing instinctively that they were discussing her own arrival.
Frowning fiercely, Helen Aysgarth was a minute replica of her formidable uncle.
‘Maybe not at first,’ she allowed judiciously, ‘but it won’t take long.’
‘Why did Aunt Maud have to send for her anyway?’ Peter muttered bitterly. ‘A schoolteacher! As if we didn’t have enough of schoolteachers when we’re at school!’
‘We’ll soon get rid of her,’ Helen comforted her twin. ‘After all, we got rid of Carole, didn’t we?’
Both of them giggled and Peter added victoriously, ‘And Jane. Uncle Frazer was really angry when we told him Jane wanted to marry him, wasn’t he?’
‘Furious,’ Helen agreed with obvious enjoyment.
With every word she overheard, Rebecca’s heart sank further. What on earth was she letting herself in for, and why?
‘Norty says Cousin Becky will soon teach us to mind our manners,’ Peter reminded his sister.
Helen said witheringly, ‘Cousin Becky! We’ve never even met her, have we, apart from that once at the wedding, and I bet she isn’t coming here because of us at all. I bet it’s because of Frazer. Norty says he’s the best catch in the area and it’s high time he settled down and had some children of his own.’
Furious, exasperated and conscious of a growing numbness in her cramped limbs, Rebecca stayed where she was.
Norty—Mrs Norton—was Frazer’s housekeeper. She had been with the family during Frazer and Rory’s parents’ lifetime, and Rebecca remembered her with particular fondness. She hoped it wasn’t from the housekeeper that the twins had got the idea that she had come up here solely on account of Frazer, and as for that idea—well, she decided grimly, she would very quickly disabuse them of it!
She wasn’t a shy eighteen-year-old any more. What she had once felt for Frazer had long ago died—perhaps a little more violently and cruelly than it would have done in the normal course of events, but its death had been a necessary one. Most girls went through a period of intense emotional adulation for some older man. Most of them, though, were far too sensible to fix that adulation on a member of their own family.
She had thought of Frazer as some kind of Olympian being, all-knowing, all-wise, allseeing. No virtue had been too high for him to reach. What a fool she had been when, desperate and trapped, Rory had begged her to help him, she had done so willingly, delighting in the opportunity to sacrifice herself for the greater good. Frazer’s greater good.
If she had expected that somehow or other he would divine the truth, she had been bitterly disappointed. If she had expected that he would not only divine the truth, but lavish praise and gratitude on her for that sacrifice, she had been doubly disappointed. What he had in actual fact done was to read her such a savage and bitter lecture that it had been months if not years before she had ever been able to hold up her head again.
At first shock had numbed the worst of her feelings of degradation and humiliation, but then, as the shock wore off, reality had begun to take its place; the reality of realising that Frazer condemned her for what he had termed as her criminal and idiotic folly in becoming involved in an affair with his brother.
If once she had hoped he would come to see the truth, now she no longer did. Now she doubted that it would make any difference even if he did know the truth. Frazer had never liked being wrong about anything, she remembered bitterly.
The children were walking past her now, and just as they started to move out of sight she heard Peter saying anxiously, ‘You don’t think she’ll see the glass and stop, do you?’ and her heart somersaulted in sudden shock and outrage as she heard Helen telling him matter-of-factly,
‘She can’t, not where we put it.’
‘Do you think she’ll know we’ve done it?’Peter demanded. ‘Do you think she’ll tell Aunt Maud?’
‘No,’ Helen assured him, ‘but later on, when she realises that we intend to make her leave, then she’ll know we did it,’she added with relish.
‘But she isn’t like the others,’ Peter told his sister. ‘She’s our cousin.’
‘Our second cousin,’Helen contradicted flatly. ‘And you know what’ll happen if she stays. She’ll just be like all the others, mooning about after Uncle Frazer, and then, if he gets interested in her and marries her and they have children of their own, what’s going to happen to us?’
All the anger and disbelief Rebecca had been experiencing as she listened to the twins plotting vanished abruptly as she heard the fear and loneliness behind those last words. What was going to happen to them indeed? By all accounts Rory and Lilian’s marriage was not a happy one. The reason that Lillian had agreed to accompany Rory on this Hong Kong contract in the first place, according to what Rebecca’s mother had confided to her, was that she felt it necessary to keep an eye on her errant husband.
Since the children were not allowed to go with them, it had been necessary to find somebody else to take charge of them. Frazer, of course, had been the natural choice.
Having herself been the child of parents who of necessity had had to spend long periods of time out of the country, her father before he had retired having been a diplomat, Rebecca was very familiar with the attacks of isolation and loneliness that could hit children separated from their parents for long periods of time. That was one of the reasons she made such a good teacher, or so her head had told her. She readily understood the fears and anxieties of those children who actually boarded at the school and seemed to have the knack of being able to soothe and comfort them. However, while she and Robert had had parents who had been absent for long periods during their childhood, they had never for one moment doubted their parents’ love and concern for them.
Helen and Peter, it seemed, did, and perhaps with good reason, she acknowledged uneasily. It was no secret in the family that Lillian had been annoyed when she’d discovered that she was pregnant a matter of months after she and Rory were married.
She had been twenty, Rory twenty-two—two spoiled and self-indulgent young people who had married on a whim and conceived the twins without a moment’s thought for the future responsibilities they would bring.
Rory had always been lightweight compared with Frazer, eager to taste every one of life’s pleasures, self-indulgent to the extreme. Fun to be with if fun was all one wanted from life, but with no substance to fall back on for life’s difficult and unhappy times.
‘If Frazer gets married, his new wife won’t want us living at Aysgarth. Everyone says that,’ Helen reminded her brother. ‘That means we’ll have to go away to boarding school or go and live with Gran and Gramps in Brighton.’
‘Perhaps Mum and Dad might come back and Dad will get a job here in England,’ Peter suggested hopefully, but Helen quelled his suggestion with a stern frown.
‘You know he won’t,’ she told her brother. ‘We heard them arguing about it last Christmas, don’t you remember? Mum said she’d leave Dad if it wasn’t for us. Anyway, I don’t want them to come back, because they’re always quarrelling and arguing. I want to stay here at Aysgarth with Frazer.’
Their voices faded as they made their way along the path away from her, and Rebecca felt her heart turn over with pity and compassion for them. Adults forgot how much children saw and heard and felt. Only when she was sure they were safely out of sight and earshot did she make her own way back to her car.
The lane from here to Aysgarth was straight, apart from one particularly bad bend about fifty yards away. Thoughtfully she left her car where it was and walked towards it. As she had suspected, as she rounded the bend, she saw on the road in front of her some dangerously sharp shards of glass which, had she driven over them, must surely have severely damaged if not completely destroyed her tyres.
What neither of the twins could possibly know was that eighteen months before their birth, a very severe accident had been caused on this very bend by broken glass, though not left deliberately in that instance. A bottle which had fallen accidentally from a crate and not been noticed had broken on the road and the young couple in the car had been killed when their tyres had punctured and the car had swerved out of control off the road, plunging down into the valley, where it had burst into flames.
Rebecca was far too sensible and knew far too much about children of the twins’ age to imagine for a moment that they had thought far enough ahead to realise the possible outcome of their plans to get rid of her. Death, if they thought about it at all, was to children of that age a concept outside their grasp, unless they were unfortunate enough to suffer the loss of someone close to them.
As she picked up the glass and carefully put it in her handkerchief, carrying it back to the car with her, she pondered on how best to deal with the problem facing her.
All her desire to return to London was now gone. The twins needed her help, even if they themselves did not recognise it.
She got back into her car in a very thoughtful frame of mind indeed. The twins might not be able to recognise their need, but others might. The Great-Aunt Maud she remembered, despite her assumed vagueness and love of drama, had possessed more than her fair share of her nephew’s astuteness. Could it be that Maud had summoned her, not so much because she needed help in keeping the twins under control, but because she saw that they needed something more than mere discipline, and perhaps because she was hoping that, given the similarity of their childhood, Rebecca might be able to reach out and give the twins the reassurance and love they so obviously needed.
She was still turning these thoughts over in her mind as she drove in past the gates to Aysgarth. The house had been built by a Victorian Aysgarth who had made his money from the boom in railways and promptly retired to Cumbria with his wife and family.
It was a large, square building, more sturdy than elegant, three storeys high with deep, ample cellars. The sturdy Victorian furniture had been retained by the various generations of Aysgarths to inhabit the house, so that the rooms possessed an air of solid comfort rather than fashionable luxury.
It was a house in which one instantly felt at home, or at least that had always been Rebecca’s impression of it as a child. As she drove past the front door to park her car, she saw that the back door was standing open.
Aysgarth was remote enough for its inhabitants not to need to worry about the intentions of any passing caller, and as Rebecca got out of the car she heard a familiar shrill barking and kneeled down just in time to wad off the ecstatic welcome of a spaniel of rather large size and dubious parentage.
The best thing that could probably be said about Sophy was that she was extremely affectionate, the worst that she was also extremely scatty. As an adult Rebecca had always been rather surprised that Frazer of all people, so meticulous, so hard-edged and determined about everything he did, should actually have given house room to this overexuberant little stray who had wandered into the grounds of Aysgarth House a few weeks before Rebecca’s own eighteenth birthday. She had been the one who had found her and who had taken her into the house, bundling her shivering, soaking form in a towel and rubbing her dry till she stopped shivering.
She had pleaded with Norty to be allowed to keep the dog until Frazer came back from the Institute. In those days he had not headed the impressive and very important scientific institute whose work was always shrouded in so much secrecy, but he had still worked hard with very long hours, and it had been almost nine o’clock that evening before he had put her mind at rest and announced that yes, she could keep the stray, providing no one turned up to claim it.
Within twenty-four hours of being in the household, Sophy had firmly and determinedly attached herself to Frazer, becoming not her dog, but Frazer’s. However, it seemed she had remembered her, Rebecca reflected as she bent down and scratched behind the long floppy ears.
‘Ah, Rebecca! I thought it must be you.’ Silver-haired, pink-and white-skinned, dressed always in lavender, cream or black, Great-Aunt Maud, Rebecca had often thought, would surely look far more at home in some genteel establishment in Bournemouth rather than up here in the granite hills of Cumbria.
Indeed she had for a time after being widowed lived in the south of England, but immediately upon Frazer’s request to her to come and take charge of the house she had given up that life and had remained at Aysgarth ever since.
‘Ten to four—excellent!’ she announced approvingly, waiting for Rebecca to join her, ‘I’ve already warned Mrs Norton that you would be here for afternoon tea. The twins are upstairs washing their hands and faces and changing out of those disgusting jeans all children seem to insist on wearing these days. I can’t think what the world’s coming to. In my day little girls dressed like little girls,’ she added disapprovingly, ‘not in this ridiculous dual-sex uniform of jeans that everyone seems to favour these days.’
Rebecca, remembering her own mother’s gentle remonstrations and explanations when she herself had protested bitterly about the smocked velvet dress Aunt Maud had insisted on buying for her the Christmas she was twelve years old, considering herself far too grown-up for such a childish outfit, repressed a small smile.
‘And while I think about it,’Aunt Maud continued, ‘that’s another thing that will have to be sorted out. Both of them need new clothes. Such a nuisance, that girl Frazer appointed leaving the way she did.’
‘Why did she leave?’ asked Rebecca quietly, curious to hear what her aunt would say, wondering exactly how much Maud knew about the twins’ plans.
The hallway to Aysgarth was large and square with a parquet floor and an impressive carved wooden staircase running up three sides of it. At the rear of the hall was a large stained glass window, depicting various scenes of relevance to the original builder of the house, including one displaying the arms and colours of the railway which had made him his money.
‘Oh, I expect it was the usual thing,’ snorted Maud, startling Rebecca for a moment until she added in explanation, ‘too few young men and not enough to do on her days and evening off.Young girls these days don’t know how fortunate they are,’ she continued severely. ‘In my day, a girl was expected to get married whether she wanted to or not. We didn’t have the freedom you do these days. I’m glad to see you haven’t rushed into marriage, Rebecca,’ she added approvingly, then rather spoilt the effect of this phrase by adding musingly, ‘How old are you now? It must be nearly thirty, surely.’
‘Twenty-six, actually,’Rebecca told her, feeling irritated with herself for her own defensive correction of her aunt’s over-estimation of her age.
‘Twenty-six—mm…A very sensible age for a young woman, I’ve always thought.’
Rebecca wasn’t sure if she actually liked being described as sensible, but she put aside the thought to examine later, following her aunt into what was always described as the small sitting-room, although in fact it was a well-proportioned room that faced south and because of that was a favourite room for the family’s daytime use.
The yellow damask curtains had faded over the years to a soft appealing primrose. Rory and Frazer’s mother had replaced the original covers on the settees and chairs with new ones in a rich blue which had now also faded pleasantly. The walls were hung with straw-coloured silk and a faded blue and gold rug covered the parquet floor.
The familiar sight of her aunt’s embroidery frame standing to one side of the fireplace took Rebecca back to her own childhood. She had never actually seen a piece of embroidery completed by Aunt Maud, and she had a shrewd suspicion that the old lady adopted the embroidery as a skilful means of extricating herself from any duties she didn’t wish to perform.
‘Mrs Norton will bring tea through in a second. In the meantime, tell me, my dear, how are your parents and Robert and his family?’
‘They’re very well,’ Rebecca told her, describing the exploits of her niece and nephew to her as relayed to her through the medium of her sister-in-law’s latest letter.
‘Such a pity you couldn’t have gone to Australia with your parents,’ Aunt Maud commented, then pursed her lips and added thoughtfully, ‘although in the circumstances…’
She broke off as Mrs Norton came in, pushing a tea trolley. The housekeeper beamed when she saw Rebecca, who quickly and fondly embraced her, asking her how she was. It was a good five minutes before she left, confirming that she would go upstairs and find out what was delaying the twins.
‘So why didn’t you go with your parents, my dear?’ Aunt Maud pursued as she poured the tea. ‘Is there perhaps a young man in London?’
Mischievously Rebecca deliberately pretended not to understand, frowning and looking quite as vague as her aunt as she asked innocently.
‘A young man? London is full of young men, Aunt Maud. Which one was it in particular?’
‘You know exactly what I mean, Rebecca,’ Aunt Maud interrupted her sternly. ‘Is there a particular young man in your life whose presence there made you prefer to stay in London rather than to accompany your parents?’
Cautiously Rebecca hesitated, then said lightly, and not altogether untruthfully, ‘There isn’t one particular young man, Aunt Maud, but I do have several men friends whom I date from time to time.’
‘Date?’ snorted Aunt Maud. ‘What kind of word is that, and you an English teacher as well? These young men—are their intentions towards you serious, or…’
Rebecca couldn’t help it—she burst out laughing.
‘They’re friends, Aunt Maud. People whose company I enjoy.’ She broke off as the sitting-room door opened and the twins came in. A complete metamorphosis appeared to have taken place, not only in their clothes but also in their attitude. Nothing could have been more friendly or appealing than the way they both welcomed her, Rebecca acknowledged, and perhaps because of that and because of what she knew she deliberately decided to punish them a little, waiting until Maud had performed the necessary introductions and the twins were settled with their milk and biscuits before opening her handbag and removing the handkerchief as though to blow her nose.
When the shards of glass fell on to the floor, she looked at them in feigned surprise, meanwhile watching the twins’ faces. Peter’s showed a sharp stab of fear and guilt; Helen’s on the other hand remained impassive after one brief lightning look into her own face.
‘Rebecca, what on earth…?’Aunt Maud began.
Rebecca quickly apologised, getting down on the floor to remove the glass and saying quickly, ‘Good heavens, I’d forgotten about that! I found it on the road. Luckily I’d stopped the car to look at the view—if I hadn’t I would have been bound to have run over it, doing heaven alone knows what damage to the car.’
‘Glass?’ Aunt Maud was frowning heavily. ‘How on earth could that have got there?’
Peter shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Helen was made of sterner stuff; although her face had gone pale, she remained resolutely still.
‘Oh, I expect some tourists dropped it,’ Rebecca said lightly. ‘You know how careless they are. They wouldn’t have realised the potential danger they were causing—not just to cars, but to animals as well—you know how scatty Sophy is,’ she continued mercilessly. ‘She could quite easily have run down there and cut her paw.’
She heard Helen gulp quite audibly and suppressed a small stab of remorse. She doubted that the child had even thought of the potential danger to anyone other than her, their victim, but a timely reminder of how easily somebody or something else could have been injured by the glass might not go amiss.
‘Well, I don’t know. So careless and thoughtless! As you say, it must have been trippers. Nobody local would have done something so stupid,’ said Aunt Maud.
‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’ Rebecca said gently, looking directly at the twins as she added, ‘It was just as well that I saw it in time.’
‘Just as well indeed,’ Aunt Maud approved, then, turning to the twins, she announced firmly, ‘There will be no more running wild for you two now that Rebecca’s here. She’s a schoolteacher and she’ll know exactly how to keep the pair of you occupied.’
Rebecca’s heart sank as she listened to Aunt Maud’s admonishment. The very last thing she wanted was to be held up to the children as some kind of disciplinarian and ogre. Neither, however, did she want either of them to think she was going to deliberately court their approval, so she held back the words she had been about to say and instead, pursuing another line of thought, said calmly,
‘You said Frazer was going to be away for three months in all. I’m afraid I won’t be able to stay quite as long as that. Two and a half months is the very most I can spare,’ she fibbed, and added, ‘I’ve promised to go back to school two weeks early to help with the preparations for the new term.’
She didn’t look at the twins as she spoke, but wondered a little grimly what they would make of her announcement, telling them as it did that she had no intention of staying on until Frazer returned. She hoped her statement had put at rest their concern that she intended to take Frazer away from them, but instead of reassuring them it seemed to bring an expression of extreme truculence to Helen’s face as she began sulkily, ‘But Frazer…’
‘Uncle Frazer, Helen,’ Great-Aunt Maud interrupted loftily. ‘You’re only a little girl and you must not address an adult by his or her Christian name. It’s not polite.’
‘But Frazer said I could,’ Helen persisted doggedly, only to be frowned down by a very cold stare indeed from her great-aunt.
Rebecca, remembering the effect of that haughty stare, felt sorry for her, but Helen, it seemed, was made of far tougher material than she had been at that age, because she simply ignored the look being turned upon her and, putting down her glass and plate, got up unceremoniously.
‘Peter and I are going out to play.’
Aunt Maud watched them go in grim silence, then turned to Rebecca and said, ‘You see what I mean about their needing discipline, Rebecca? I really am at my wits’ end. Frazer says we must be patient with them and take into account the unfortunate circumstances of their home background. He was never in favour of Rory marrying so young; neither for that matter was I.
‘I agree that it’s very unfortunate that neither of their parents seems to take a proper interest in their off spring, but I feel that Frazer is far too indulgent with them.’
‘And I’m supposed to remedy that?’ Rebecca asked her gently.
Her aunt had the grace to look a little embarrassed.
‘Not remedy it, perhaps,’ she allowed with a small smile, ‘but maybe alleviate it, just a little.’
She got up with a sigh, suddenly looking every one of her seventy-odd years. She patted Rebecca lightly on the shoulder and said surprisingly, ‘You always were a very kind child, Rebecca. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to have taken advantage of that kindness, but I really was at my wits’ end. I’m no longer physically capable of taking charge of two energetic eight-year-olds.’
There was sadness as well as resignation in her voice, and Rebecca felt an upsurge of her earlier compassion, this time not for the twins but for her aunt as well.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ she promised her. ‘But it isn’t going to be easy.’
CHAPTER THREE
IT CERTAINLY wasn’t. Rebecca had been at Aysgarth for just over a week and so far had made absolutely no progress at all in winning the twins’ trust. They avoided her at every opportunity, and for the last two days the only time she had seen them had been at mealtimes and then later in the evening when, at her own insistence, she had helped Norty put them to bed.
Frazer had telephoned once during the week she had been there. On picking up the receiver and hearing his voice, she had been so parlysed with shock that she had been unable to do anything other than pass the receiver over to Mrs Norton. Luckily perhaps in the circumstances, because she had a pretty shrewd idea that neither the housekeeper nor Aunt Maud had seen fit to inform Frazer of the fact that his self-appointed governess to the children had left and that Rebecca had taken her place.
The sound of his voice had disturbed her more than she wanted to admit, at once so familiar and alien.
When Aunt Maud came to take the receiver from the housekeeper to speak to her nephew, Rebecca discovered that it was impossible for her to leave the room. It was as though some invisible and painfully tight thread kept her within hearing distance of his voice.
Dazedly she heard Aunt Maud confirm that she and the twins were well, and although her brain registered the fact that no mention was made either of the governess’s leaving or of her own arrival she was feeling far too shocked to insist on Aunt Maud’s informing Frazer at once of her presence at Aysgarth. That she herself was now party to the deception that Maud was perpetrating against her nephew only struck her when Maud finally replaced the receiver.
‘You didn’t tell Frazer about my being here,’ she reminded the older woman wryly.
‘Didn’t I, dear?’ Aunt Maud instantly fell back on her prime means of defence, adopting a vague and slightly puzzled attitude.
‘No, you didn’t,’ Rebecca reaffirmed quietly.
For a moment Aunt Maud looked a little bit guilty, then she said triumphantly, ‘But, my dear, he must know you were here. Mrs Norton told me you’d answered the telephone.’
What could she say? How could she admit that she had been so shocked emotionally by the sound of his voice that her vocal cords had virtually become paralysed?
‘I…I passed the receiver straight over to Mrs Norton,’ she said uncomfortably, ‘so I never actually spoke to Frazer.’
She bit her lip and then, much as it went against the grain to take to task this now elderly but still very awesome old lady for whom she still felt a slight residue of her childhood awe, she knew she had to tell her how uncomfortable she was about the fact that she was here at Aysgarth, living in Frazer’s house without his knowledge, while being fully aware herself of how little he would want her there. And yet she wondered how to say as much in a way that would convince Aunt Maud that Frazer must be told and yet at the same time stop her asking any far too awkward questions about the nature of the supposed quarrel which had led to his reluctance to have her staying in the house.
To her relief and amazement, Aunt Maud took the burden of responsibility off her shoulders by patting her arm gently and saying in a kindly manner, ‘You came here at my insistence, Rebecca, and to help me. If at a later stage Frazer should choose to take anyone to task about that, then, my dear, I’m afraid that my nephew is not the man I’ve always found him to be. In the absence of their parents and Frazer those children are my responsibility, and a responsibility which I take very seriously. But you can see for yourself that I’m far too old to keep an eye on them.’
Rebecca had to admit that this was true. Helen and Peter, while a little afraid of their great-aunt, were adept at manoeuvring themselves out of her presence. They had far, far more freedom than Rebecca remembered having at the same age, even here at Aysgarth.
Mrs Norton had told her on more than one occasion that they were regular little devils, especially, as she put it, ‘Miss Helen’. Helen was the ringleader, the bolder of the two. Her awareness of the vulnerabilities and vanities that went up to make the adult psyche were far too great for a child of her own age, Rebecca considered.
‘Perhaps a good boarding school might be the answer,’ she suggested cautiously now, but Aunt Maud shook her head decisively.
‘Don’t think I haven’t suggested it, my dear, but Frazer won’t hear of it. He believes the children need the security of living at home.’
‘But we all went to boarding school,’ Rebecca protested.
‘Yes, but Frazer contends that you all, especially you and Robert, had a far more secure and emotionally stable home background than the twins.’
Rebecca had to acknowledge that this was true; but, while she could see Frazer’s point in wanting to keep the twins at Aysgarth, she still wished she had not allowed herself to be dragooned into coming up here to share that responsibility.
‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ Aunt Maud comforted her. ‘I know you’re finding things difficult at the moment, but I have every faith in your ability to bring those two to a proper realisation of at least a little discipline in their lives.’
Aunt Maud had more faith in her than she had in herself, Rebecca admitted ruefully. It had shaken her hearing Frazer’s voice so unexpectedly like that, reminding her of things she had thought safely tucked away in the past. She had been fifteen when she first fell in love with him, dreamy-eyed and vague, her feelings more innocent and cerebral than physical.
She had likened him to all her favourite fictional heroes, had spent her holidays dreamily following him as much as she could, content to worship from afar. At sixteen her feelings had become sharper and far more painful; the physical awareness of her maturing body had both delighted and embarrassed her.
She remembered how the Christmas she was sixteen, when Frazer had bent to kiss her in the cousinly fashion that was his habit, she had ducked out of the way, petrified of betraying not just her feelings but her total lack of sophistication and experience. She so desperately wanted to be older, more experienced, more on what then had seemed to be Frazer’s unattainably sophisticated level.
She remembered that that Christmas there had been a girl staying at Aysgarth—Frazer’s latest girlfriend, a pretty and no doubt very pleasant girl, but Rebecca had invested her with all manner of unpleasant traits.
She had been desperately jealous of her and her relationship with Frazer. She remembered that she had refused to join the others on their annual walk to watch the Boxing Day meet set off. She remembered as well that, while Rory had jeered at her for being sulky and childish, Frazer had looked at her with thoughtful, concerned eyes. On reflection she realised that it was hardly surprising that he took his responsibility towards the twins so seriously. Even though only a handful of years had removed him in age from Rory, Robert and herself, he had always somehow or other seemed so very much more mature, a halfway stage between themselves and their parents.
She remembered her utter embarrassment when later that same holiday he had come up to her when she was sitting in her room daydreaming over an impossible sequence of events which concluded with him sweeping her into his arms and proclaiming his undying love. She remembered how he had knocked on her bedroom door and walked in, a tall dark-haired, jean-clad figure, wearing an old check woollen shirt, his body carrying the tang of fresh male sweat after his labours outside clearing a fresh fall of snow from the drive.
Rebecca remembered how her sensitive, newly emerging awareness had reacted to that very maleness of him; how a fierce thrill of pleasure had run through her as he sat down beside her on the window-seat. His first words to her, though, quickly dashed her foolish hopes.
He had come, he told her gently, to find out if something was wrong; if perhaps there was a problem at school. The knowledge that he so obviously still considered her to be a schoolgirl, a child, had been so bitterly painful that she had found it impossible to respond to anything he said, retreating further and further into her own protective shell, putting between them what she now recognised had been the beginning of a distance which neither of them had ever broached.
After that, with growing maturity, and aware of how potentially embarrassing for all concerned it would be if her feelings for him were ever to become public knowledge, she had made a point of avoiding him whenever she stayed at Aysgarth, spending more time in Rory’s company than she did in Frazer’s—and apparently so effectively convincing him that he was nothing more to her than merely an older and rather boring cousin that, when Rory had claimed she was the one with whom he was breaking his marriage vows, Frazer had had no difficulty whatsoever in believing him, which of course was exactly what she and Rory had wanted. So why afterwards had she felt that savage backlash of agonising pain that he should so easily have accepted their deceit? What had she expected him to do? Deny their claims and in doing so say passionately that he knew that she, Rebecca, could not possibly be involved with anyone else, because she loved him…and moreover that that love was returned?
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PENNY JORDAN
Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now."You never did want to face reality, did you?" Frazer accused. "You always were a daydreamer… living more in your imagination than in real life. "Frazer Aysgarth had never forgiven Rebecca for what she'd done those many years ago – despite the fact she'd sacrificed herself for his sake.Now that they would be sharing the same house, Rebecca wondered if there was any hope that he'd see her as the woman she really was…
Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.
About the Author
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Unspoken Desire
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
‘REBECCA my dear…such a relief! For one moment when you didn’t answer the phone straight away I thought perhaps you’d decided to fly out to Australia to see your parents and brother. How is dear Robert, by the way, and Ailsa and the girls? They must be getting quite big now. How old are they? Four and two, isn’t it? It’s…’
‘Aunt Maud,’ Rebecca interrupted firmly, tucking the receiver under her chin, and trying to concentrate on the essays she was marking while at the same time following the convoluted drift of her great-aunt’s vague conversation.
‘Ah, yes…The reason I’m ringing you, my dear, is that I desperately need your help.’
Her help? Rebecca’s frown wasn’t caused entirely by the essay of a pupil who was destined to follow his father into the latter’s merchant bank, and yet at ten years old still seemed to think the word instalment possessed a double ‘l’.
‘My help?’ She couldn’t resist the faintly ironic underlining of the possessive pronoun. At the other end of the line in faraway Cumbria there was the kind of humming silence that told her that her point had been made.
‘Well, my dear, there was simply no one else I could turn to,’ came the dramatic response. Aunt Maud at her thespian best, Rebecca reflected ruefully, catching the note of pathos that had been added to her great-aunt’s original vagueness. ‘I would have got in touch with your mother, but since she’s in Australia…’
A slight suspicion of aggrieved irritation there, Rebecca suspected, and no wonder. She could well imagine that, whatever kind of help it was she needed, Maud Aysgarth would rather have approached her soft-hearted and far too put-upon mother than herself.
Her mind was more on her marking than her aunt’s conversation. Those people who believed that schoolteachers did nothing during the long school holidays really ought to see her desk right now, loaded down as it was, not only with the end-of-term essays from the pupils she taught at an exclusive co-educational private prep school, but also the uncompleted work schedules and plans for the coming autumn and winter terms, she reflected grimly. She loved teaching and always had, and counted herself privileged to have a job teaching in a school as well equipped and well run as the one she did…a private London prep school whose pupils were on the whole well-behaved and keen to learn.
Thinking of her work caused her to lose the thread of her aunt’s conversation; after all, what could there possibly be to worry about at Aysgarth with Frazer in charge?
Aysgarth was Frazer’s private kingdom, a kingdom in which nothing was allowed to go wrong, nothing allowed to intrude which Frazer did not want intruding, as she knew to her cost.
Aysgarth was a granite-hard house owned by a granite-hard man. And yet she loved the house, and once she had thought…
‘So you see, my dear, with Frazer away and myself in charge, there was really no one else I could turn to. I don’t know how long it will take you to get up here, but…’
Get up there? Had Aunt Maud gone mad or had she? She must know quite well that if Frazer hadn’t actually forbidden Rebecca to put as much as a fingertip on Aysgarth property, then he had certainly made it quite plain that her presence was not one he wanted or welcomed, and why. Rebecca laughed mirthlessly and soundlessly to herself. Why? Because once she had been idiotic enough to want to protect him from hurt. For that she had been condemned and ostracised, made to feel as though she were a Judas and worse.
Dear God, the last thing she needed right now was to start walking down that painful path again. It was over, in the past…totally without relevance to her life. A good life—a life filled with a job she enjoyed, friends who shared her interests and tastes, men who took her out, flattered her, flirted with her and, above all, did not look at her with cold grey eyes, the colour of ice, so dark with contempt and bitterness that they shrivelled her very soul.
She was happy, content; her life was rich and full. There was no room in it for useless daydreams, for might-have-beens. She was twenty-six years old, mature, well adjusted, self-sufficient.
Or she had been until Great-Aunt Maud had started interfering in her life, reminding her of things best forgotten. And then something her aunt had said hit her.
‘Frazer isn’t at Aysgarth? But he must be! Rory and Lillian left the children there because…’
‘That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, my dear. Frazer was here, but at the very last minute he had to take over from one of his colleagues, who was due to give a lecture tour in the States. Frazer had no option but to go in his place, as Head of the Institute. He’ll be gone for nearly three months.’
‘Three months?’ Rebecca was appalled. ‘What about the children?’ From what her mother had told her, Frazer’s niece and nephew, his brother’s children, were a pretty unruly pair, who required a very firm hand on the reins. Eight-year-old twins whose easygoing father had never made any real attempt to discipline them, and who with their mother had calmly dumped them on Frazer eight months ago, so that he could take up a new job in Hong Kong.
‘Well, Frazer did make proper arrangements for them,’ Aunt Maud was saying defensively. She had always hated anyone criticising Frazer. After his and Rory’s parents had been killed in an air crash she had moved into Aysgarth House at Frazer’s request. He had been eighteen then and Rory a much younger twelve. ‘He hired a young woman to take charge of them.’
A sniff accompanied the almost scathing words ‘a young woman’, and Rebecca, who had heard all about the twins’ exploits from her mother who regularly kept in touch with Frazer, her much younger cousin, repressed a faint sigh of sympathy for the girl concerned.
‘What’s happened to her?’Rebecca asked drily.
‘She’s left—handed in her notice and said that there was no way she was going to be responsible for the twins. Undisciplined brats, was how she referred to them.’
In her mind’s eye, Rebecca pictured her great-aunt’s magnificently Edwardian bosom heaving in righteous indignation at this slur on the Aysgarth line, but she was long past being intimidated by the long shadow that name had once cast across her life—a long, long time ago when she had been awed and impressed by the stories her mother had told her about her ancestors’ long-ago deeds of valour.
Holidays spent at Aysgarth had not helped to dispel the awe—not with Frazer there, ten years her senior. Darkly if rather grimly handsome even in those days, a silent spectator of hers and Rory’s games, a dark-visaged god who had walked casually into her life and her heart.
‘Well, aren’t they?’ she said wryly now, groaningly dismissing her own ridiculous vulnerabilities.
There was a moment’s silence and then her great-aunt admitted with obvious difficulty, ‘Perhaps they are a little high-spirited, but at their age…’
‘They’re out of control,’ Rebecca interrupted crisply, ‘and I suspect that one of the reasons Rory has dumped them on Frazer is that he hopes that Frazer will apply some of that famous discipline of his on them. What they really need is to go to a good school where their energies and high spirits will be channelled properly.’
‘Exactly!’Maud pounced eagerly. ‘That’s just why I’m ringing you…with your teaching experience.’Much, much too late Rebecca saw the trap closing fast around her. ‘Of course, if your dear mother were here…However, I remember how much you enjoyed staying at Aysgarth as a child…all those long summer holidays…’
Rebecca silently and grimly acknowledged the application of a generous amount of emotional pressure to her aunt’s argument. Without actually putting it into so many words, her aunt was implying that it was her duty to drop everything and go haring off to Cumbria in order to take charge of Rory’s twins…that she owed it to the family to do so.
A dozen good reasons why she ought to refuse came readily and easily to mind; not the least of them the fact that she had already made tentative plans to spend at least part of her summer break touring Greece with some friends, but even as the words formed she found herself being relentlessly and determinedly dragged into her great-aunt’s carefully woven net.
She made one last bid for freedom, saying desperately, ‘Aunt Maud, you know that Frazer won’t like it!’
There was a telling silence and then her aunt’s voice, vague and faintly ominously tired, saying plaintively, ‘Oh, dear…but, Rebecca, that was all so long ago. I’m sure Frazer has forgotten all about it. He never was one to hold a grudge…such a silly quarrel anyway.’
Silly or not, it had been important enough to keep her away from Aysgarth for the eight years, and to keep Frazer from inviting her there.
They had met twice in all that time; once briefly at the twins’ christening…an appearance which pride alone had demanded she put in when, as she remembered all too well, Frazer had treated her with grim and very determined silence, as though she had physically ceased to exist.
The second occasion had been when her brother Robert and Ailsa had got married. She had been bridesmaid, Rory’s two toddlers attendants along with some of Ailsa’s cousins, and in the hurly-burly of looking after half a dozen assorted children, she had managed to avoid any kind of direct confrontation with Frazer very nicely indeed.
To have her presence requested, almost demanded, in fact, at Aysgarth after all this time was the last thing she had expected.
If Frazer had been there it would have been impossible for her to go…not because of his dislike of her, but for the sake of her own pride, but of course, he wasn’t there. If he had been there the problem wouldn’t have arisen in the first place; but the problem had arisen, and despite all her doubts, all the reasons why she ought firmly but pleasantly to refuse to go to her great-aunt’s aid, she knew that she couldn’t do it.
Illogical, ridiculous it might be, but there was a debt she owed, if not to Frazer himself, then at least to Maud, who had made both her and Robert so very welcome in the days when her father’s career had meant that he and their mother were so often out of the country.
Now it was her turn to repay that kindness…and repay it she must, if only to prove that whatever Frazer might think, it was by her own decision that she stayed away from Aysgarth, and not because of any stipulation of his.
Not that he had ever verbally announced that she was not to return; the veto had been more subtle than that, and more hurtful. And it had been there, no matter how much Aunt Maud might try to gloss over it now.
Knowing she was probably going to regret it, she gave in, but warned, ‘It will be the end of the week before I can get up there.’
IT WAS ONLY after she had replaced the receiver that Rebecca wondered what on earth she had committed herself to. Virtually three full months looking after two thoroughly undisciplined children, in a house whose owner both disliked and despised her.
Her flatmate was astounded when she told her what she had agreed to do.
‘But you had so much planned!’ she expostulated. ‘The trip to Greece, and…’
‘I know, but it is an emergency and I felt obliged to help out. A family emergency.’
Kate Summerfield frowned at her. ‘You’ve never mentioned having family in Cumbria before—and I don’t recall you ever going to see them.’
The two girls had shared a flat since leaving university, and when Rebecca had announced four years previously that she intended to buy her own small property Kate had readily agreed to become her lodger.
‘For a very good reason,’ Rebecca told her wryly, and proceeded to explain.
‘You mean he actually banned you from visiting the house? What on earth had you done?’
Rebecca shook her head.
‘It wasn’t as obvious as that. There was no direct ban as such. It was far more subtle than that…just the intimation that my presence was no longer welcome.’
‘Why? What had you done? Pawned the family jewels or something?’ Kate joked.
‘Not exactly.’ Rebecca bit her lip. She had never discussed the reason for Frazer’s ban with anyone, not even her parents, who, like Maud, presumed that they had quarrelled about something far less serious.
‘It’s rather a long story,’ she said slowly, groping for the right words, suddenly almost desperately wanting to unburden herself to someone. Her conversation with Maud had resurrected old hurts, opened old wounds, and the need to share them with someone overpowered her normal reticence on the subject.
Kate looked speculatively at her and said, ‘I’ve got plenty of time. Come on, tell me all about it.’
‘Well, it was just after my eighteenth birthday. My parents were away at the time out in South America. I was going to spend the summer holiday at Aysgarth as usual. Rory came to collect me from school. He wanted to show off his new car. He’d been married about six months then, and Lillian was expecting the twins.
‘Frazer hadn’t wanted him to get married. He thought he was too young at twenty-one to make such a commitment, but Rory overruled him. I could tell the moment he picked me up that something was wrong—we’d always got on very well together.’
‘Just like brother and sister?’ Kate interposed questioningly.
Rebecca returned her look and said truthfully, ‘Exactly like brother and sister. I asked him what was wrong and on the way home he told me. He’d been having an affair and Frazer had found out. They’d been seen together and somehow or other Frazer had got to know about it. Frazer was demanding to know who it was that he was involved with.’
‘And?’ probed Kate as Rebecca’s voice slowed down.
‘And Rory didn’t want to tell him.You see, the woman he’d been involved with was actually Frazer’s girlfriend. She and her family had only recently moved to the area and Rory seemed to think that Frazer was pretty keen on her.’
‘And?’ Kate probed again.
Rebecca shrugged her shoulders tiredly. ‘It’s all very simple really. Rory asked me if I’d let him tell Frazer that it had been me he’d been involved with.’ She gave a faint sigh. ‘I suppose it was naïve of me, but when Rory said how much Frazer loved Michelle and how much it would hurt him if he found out that she and Rory had been having an affair—well, I…’
‘You were eighteen years old, desperately in love and only too anxious to do anything you could to save the object of that love from pain,’ Kate hazarded wryly.
Rebecca laughed a little sadly. ‘Was I so very obvious?’ she questioned.
Her friend shook her head. ‘It all fits. I take it you were in love with this Frazer.’
‘I certainly thought I was,’ Rebecca agreed drily, ‘although, in the light of the events that followed, that love very quickly turned to hatred. It was never any more than a teenage crush really,’ she added dismissively.
It had rather jolted her that Kate had so easily recognised her true feelings, and she wondered how many other people at the time had known exactly how she’d felt about Frazer. She had certainly done very little to hide her adoration of him.
‘Are you trying to tell me that this Frazer actually believed you were having an affair with Rory?’ Kate asked in some astonishment.
Rebecca frowned. ‘Well, yes. Well, yes, he did. He was furious about it, of course—accused me of trying to break up Rory’s marriage, pointed out that Rory’s wife was expecting, said all the usual sort of things one might expect.’
‘And he really genuinely had no idea that you were making it up?’
‘No,’ Rebecca told her blankly. ‘Why?’
Kate shrugged and said drily, ‘Well, no reason. He seems a bit of an idiot, though—first of all he doesn’t realise the girl he’s in love with is having an affair with his brother and then he believes that the girl who loves him is having an affair with his brother. A bit dense, is he?’ she questioned.
Rebecca’s frown deepened. ‘No, he isn’t. In fact if anything he’s extremely perceptive—too perceptive sometimes.’
Kate said nothing, but the look she gave her friend said it all for her.
‘He would have wanted to believe me,’ Rebecca told her defensively, without even knowing why she should want to defend Frazer. He certainly didn’t deserve it, nor need it, not when she remembered the tongue-lashing he had given her when Rory had confessed to him that it was she with whom he had been involved.
‘You mean it was preferable to believe that you were guilty of enticing his brother into an extramarital relationship rather than his girlfriend?’ Kate demanded scathingly. ‘That isn’t perception, Rebecca, it’s sheer bloody-minded stupidity. What happened?’ she asked offhandedly. ‘About his relationship with the girlfriend, I mean.’
Rebecca frowned again. ‘That’s the odd thing about it all, really. It just sort of petered out. Well, at least that’s the impression that the rest of the family seemed to have. I suppose pride kept Frazer from admitting the truth to anyone, that he’d loved her and lost her.’
‘Mmm,’ Kate commented absently. She appeared to be concentrating on a small speck of fluff on the carpet. ‘And the two of you kept your distance from one another ever since, is that it?’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘Frazer made it plain to me that my presence wouldn’t be welcome at Aysgarth in the future. Nothing he’s ever said or done has contradicted that impression.’
‘And now you’re being summoned up to Cumbria to look after his brother’s brats in his absence,’ Kate supplied wryly. ‘Well, I wonder what he’s going to say when he finds out about that.’
‘Do you think perhaps I oughtn’t to go?’ Rebecca asked anxiously.
Despite her stunning good looks and her undoubted intelligence, not to mention her skill with her pupils, Rebecca had a sometimes disconcerting lack of self-worth, something which had always puzzled Kate, but which she now suspected she knew the reason for.
‘On the contrary,’ Kate told her firmly. ‘I think you ought to go,’ and then, as she saw relief lighten her friend’s features, she added softly, ‘I suppose it never occurred to you that you could tell him the truth?’ She watched as the colour left Rebecca’s face and added, as though unaware of it, ‘After all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t now, is there? As you said yourself, the relationship with the girl in question petered out. Why haven’t you told him, Rebecca?’ she pressed.
Rebecca turned her back on her, fidgeting with some papers on her desk.
‘Why should I? There’s no reason to. If he wants to believe the worst of me, then let him.’
‘Well, it certainly provides a very effective barrier to hide behind,’ said Kate obliquely, watching in compassion as the telltale colour ran up under her friend’s fair skin. It was an unusual combination, that blonde, silky fall of hair and that pale Celtic skin. Unusual and very, very attractive.
Kate had lost count of the number of men she had introduced to her flatmate, who had promptly all fallen head over heels with her air of fragile, almost haunted vulnerability. As far as she knew, Rebecca had never even come close to returning their feelings. She had often wondered why her friend appeared so immune to the male sex. Now she suspected she had found the answer.
‘I can’t do it,’ Rebecca suddenly burst out despairingly. ‘I can’t go up there!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kate told her dampeningly. ‘Of course you can, and so you should. You’ve already told your aunt you will. It would be unfair to let her down. What are you frightened of, Rebecca?’ she probed gently. ‘Even if this Frazer should return home early and find you there, he’s hardly going to physically throw you out, is he? I think in your shoes,’ she mused thoughtfully, ‘I should rather enjoy the opportunity to make him indebted to me.’
Rebecca gave her a despairing look. She didn’t know Frazer. She had no idea that Frazer of all people was the very last person to relish being indebted to anyone, and especially to her.
‘But then, of course, he’s already indebted to you, isn’t he?’ Kate added almost as though she had read the course of her thoughts, and when Rebecca stared at her she added softly, ‘You sacrificed your good name and feelings to protect that of his girlfriend and his feelings,’she pointed out wryly. ‘You’re not frightened of him, are you, Rebecca?’ she asked curiously, knowing full well the effect her question would have.
‘Of course I’m not,’ Rebecca denied robustly.
‘Good. Then there’s nothing to stop you fulfilling your promise to your aunt, is there?’
For a moment Rebecca was silent, then she agreed hollowly, ‘No. Nothing at all.’
CHAPTER TWO
KNOWING that and actually believing it were two very different things, as Rebecca quickly discovered as she made her preparations to leave for Cumbria. Instead of worrying about Frazer and his all too likely reaction to the discovery that she was installed in his home, it would be far more profitable for her to spend her time worrying about how she was going to control the twins, she reflected as she packed her small car for the journey north.
The class of ten-year-olds she taught were in the main intelligent and well-disciplined children. All the reports she had heard of Rory’s twins suggested that, although they might possess intelligence, they certainly did not possess any self-discipline, and by all accounts resented any attempt to impose it on them. Remembering her own and Robert’s feelings when their parents had to constantly go away without them, Rebecca wondered privately if their unruliness did not perhaps spring more from a desire to capture parental attention rather than from any inborn disruptiveness.
Great-Aunt Maud possessed not only an Edwardian bosom, but in addition an Edwardian attitude to life, and at her behest Rebecca had promised that she would try to be at Aysgarth for four o’clock in time for afternoon tea.
‘That will give you an ideal opportunity in which to meet the children,’ Aunt Maud had informed her, and Rebecca, suddenly remembering from her own childhood her great-aunt’s ability on occasions to put aside her vagueness and apparent fragility and reveal all the assets of a master tactician, wondered a little uneasily why it was that Maud required her assistance in managing the twins. After all, as she remembered very well, Great-Aunt Maud had had no difficulty at all in keeping both her and Robert under control.
That had been almost twenty years ago, though, when her aunt had been in her fifties. Now she was in her seventies, and it was hardly to be expected that she could keep a watchful eye on two energetic and by all accounts extremely difficult eight-year-olds.
Aysgarth was on the more distant side of Cumbria, far away from the popular Lake District, in what Rory had on more than one occasion disconsolately described as the back of beyond.
Rebecca, despite the fact that she had lived and worked in London for well over six years, did not share his views. In London she had a lifestyle she enjoyed and a job she loved, but, given freedom of choice, she knew that she could quite easily adapt to a more rural lifestyle.
It surprised her to see how far the motorway system had now penetrated into Cumbria, giving her the advantage of gaining a good half-hour on her estimated journey time. With that half-hour in mind, a couple of miles away from Aysgarth and halfway down a very narrow country lane that led not only to the house but to the several farms beyond it, she pulled her car in to the side of the road and got out, locking it.
Fifty yards or so down into the valley lay one of the favourite spots of her childhood and teenage years. The river ran through the valley, dammed at one end to form a small pool from which it spilled over a weir, dropping quite a formidable distance into the far end of the valley and beyond that the valley below it.
The valley was wooded, shadowy with trees and their secrets. Underfoot the ground was springy and resinous with pine needles and roots. Despite the fact that the weather forecasters had promised them a good summer, so far there had been very little evidence of it, and as Rebecca made her way down the steep-sided valley she saw that the river below was flooded from the heavy spring rains.
Down below her in the valley bottom, a movement caught her attention. She focused on it abruptly, frowning as she saw the two small jean-clad figures hurrying in the direction of Aysgarth House. The twins. She would have recognised them through their similarity to their dark-haired and dark-visaged uncle anywhere, and she mused ruefully on the oddity of heredity and the fact that it should be Rory’s children who had inherited so much of Frazer’s dark colouring. Rory himself took after his and Frazer’s mother, being fair-haired and blue-eyed, whereas Frazer took after their father, possessing the dark-haired, grey-eyed, hard-chiselled look which had always been formidably recognisable as Aysgarth features.
It was not their similarity to their uncle that brought a frown to Rebecca’s forehead, though; it was the fact that the two children, barely eight years old, were apparently free to wander the countryside at will. She could remember herself how very strict not only Aunt Maud but also Frazer himself had been about her liking to wander here in this remote and beautiful valley. How he had drummed into her the danger of going too near the weir, or being tempted to even think about swimming in the pool, which was extremely deep and possessed dangerous hidden currents.
It was true that the twins had not been swimming, but she seemed to remember she had been well into her teens before Frazer had lifted the ban that stipulated that she was never ever allowed to come down here on her own.
As the twins approached, some instinct made her draw back into the shadow of the enclosing trees. The path they were on ran several yards away from her, and as she knew, turned abruptly several yards away to veer in the direction of Aysgarth House. As they passed her she could hear Peter saying anxiously to his sister. ‘Are you sure it’ll work, Helen? Are you sure it’ll make her go away?’
Rebecca stiffened, knowing instinctively that they were discussing her own arrival.
Frowning fiercely, Helen Aysgarth was a minute replica of her formidable uncle.
‘Maybe not at first,’ she allowed judiciously, ‘but it won’t take long.’
‘Why did Aunt Maud have to send for her anyway?’ Peter muttered bitterly. ‘A schoolteacher! As if we didn’t have enough of schoolteachers when we’re at school!’
‘We’ll soon get rid of her,’ Helen comforted her twin. ‘After all, we got rid of Carole, didn’t we?’
Both of them giggled and Peter added victoriously, ‘And Jane. Uncle Frazer was really angry when we told him Jane wanted to marry him, wasn’t he?’
‘Furious,’ Helen agreed with obvious enjoyment.
With every word she overheard, Rebecca’s heart sank further. What on earth was she letting herself in for, and why?
‘Norty says Cousin Becky will soon teach us to mind our manners,’ Peter reminded his sister.
Helen said witheringly, ‘Cousin Becky! We’ve never even met her, have we, apart from that once at the wedding, and I bet she isn’t coming here because of us at all. I bet it’s because of Frazer. Norty says he’s the best catch in the area and it’s high time he settled down and had some children of his own.’
Furious, exasperated and conscious of a growing numbness in her cramped limbs, Rebecca stayed where she was.
Norty—Mrs Norton—was Frazer’s housekeeper. She had been with the family during Frazer and Rory’s parents’ lifetime, and Rebecca remembered her with particular fondness. She hoped it wasn’t from the housekeeper that the twins had got the idea that she had come up here solely on account of Frazer, and as for that idea—well, she decided grimly, she would very quickly disabuse them of it!
She wasn’t a shy eighteen-year-old any more. What she had once felt for Frazer had long ago died—perhaps a little more violently and cruelly than it would have done in the normal course of events, but its death had been a necessary one. Most girls went through a period of intense emotional adulation for some older man. Most of them, though, were far too sensible to fix that adulation on a member of their own family.
She had thought of Frazer as some kind of Olympian being, all-knowing, all-wise, allseeing. No virtue had been too high for him to reach. What a fool she had been when, desperate and trapped, Rory had begged her to help him, she had done so willingly, delighting in the opportunity to sacrifice herself for the greater good. Frazer’s greater good.
If she had expected that somehow or other he would divine the truth, she had been bitterly disappointed. If she had expected that he would not only divine the truth, but lavish praise and gratitude on her for that sacrifice, she had been doubly disappointed. What he had in actual fact done was to read her such a savage and bitter lecture that it had been months if not years before she had ever been able to hold up her head again.
At first shock had numbed the worst of her feelings of degradation and humiliation, but then, as the shock wore off, reality had begun to take its place; the reality of realising that Frazer condemned her for what he had termed as her criminal and idiotic folly in becoming involved in an affair with his brother.
If once she had hoped he would come to see the truth, now she no longer did. Now she doubted that it would make any difference even if he did know the truth. Frazer had never liked being wrong about anything, she remembered bitterly.
The children were walking past her now, and just as they started to move out of sight she heard Peter saying anxiously, ‘You don’t think she’ll see the glass and stop, do you?’ and her heart somersaulted in sudden shock and outrage as she heard Helen telling him matter-of-factly,
‘She can’t, not where we put it.’
‘Do you think she’ll know we’ve done it?’Peter demanded. ‘Do you think she’ll tell Aunt Maud?’
‘No,’ Helen assured him, ‘but later on, when she realises that we intend to make her leave, then she’ll know we did it,’she added with relish.
‘But she isn’t like the others,’ Peter told his sister. ‘She’s our cousin.’
‘Our second cousin,’Helen contradicted flatly. ‘And you know what’ll happen if she stays. She’ll just be like all the others, mooning about after Uncle Frazer, and then, if he gets interested in her and marries her and they have children of their own, what’s going to happen to us?’
All the anger and disbelief Rebecca had been experiencing as she listened to the twins plotting vanished abruptly as she heard the fear and loneliness behind those last words. What was going to happen to them indeed? By all accounts Rory and Lilian’s marriage was not a happy one. The reason that Lillian had agreed to accompany Rory on this Hong Kong contract in the first place, according to what Rebecca’s mother had confided to her, was that she felt it necessary to keep an eye on her errant husband.
Since the children were not allowed to go with them, it had been necessary to find somebody else to take charge of them. Frazer, of course, had been the natural choice.
Having herself been the child of parents who of necessity had had to spend long periods of time out of the country, her father before he had retired having been a diplomat, Rebecca was very familiar with the attacks of isolation and loneliness that could hit children separated from their parents for long periods of time. That was one of the reasons she made such a good teacher, or so her head had told her. She readily understood the fears and anxieties of those children who actually boarded at the school and seemed to have the knack of being able to soothe and comfort them. However, while she and Robert had had parents who had been absent for long periods during their childhood, they had never for one moment doubted their parents’ love and concern for them.
Helen and Peter, it seemed, did, and perhaps with good reason, she acknowledged uneasily. It was no secret in the family that Lillian had been annoyed when she’d discovered that she was pregnant a matter of months after she and Rory were married.
She had been twenty, Rory twenty-two—two spoiled and self-indulgent young people who had married on a whim and conceived the twins without a moment’s thought for the future responsibilities they would bring.
Rory had always been lightweight compared with Frazer, eager to taste every one of life’s pleasures, self-indulgent to the extreme. Fun to be with if fun was all one wanted from life, but with no substance to fall back on for life’s difficult and unhappy times.
‘If Frazer gets married, his new wife won’t want us living at Aysgarth. Everyone says that,’ Helen reminded her brother. ‘That means we’ll have to go away to boarding school or go and live with Gran and Gramps in Brighton.’
‘Perhaps Mum and Dad might come back and Dad will get a job here in England,’ Peter suggested hopefully, but Helen quelled his suggestion with a stern frown.
‘You know he won’t,’ she told her brother. ‘We heard them arguing about it last Christmas, don’t you remember? Mum said she’d leave Dad if it wasn’t for us. Anyway, I don’t want them to come back, because they’re always quarrelling and arguing. I want to stay here at Aysgarth with Frazer.’
Their voices faded as they made their way along the path away from her, and Rebecca felt her heart turn over with pity and compassion for them. Adults forgot how much children saw and heard and felt. Only when she was sure they were safely out of sight and earshot did she make her own way back to her car.
The lane from here to Aysgarth was straight, apart from one particularly bad bend about fifty yards away. Thoughtfully she left her car where it was and walked towards it. As she had suspected, as she rounded the bend, she saw on the road in front of her some dangerously sharp shards of glass which, had she driven over them, must surely have severely damaged if not completely destroyed her tyres.
What neither of the twins could possibly know was that eighteen months before their birth, a very severe accident had been caused on this very bend by broken glass, though not left deliberately in that instance. A bottle which had fallen accidentally from a crate and not been noticed had broken on the road and the young couple in the car had been killed when their tyres had punctured and the car had swerved out of control off the road, plunging down into the valley, where it had burst into flames.
Rebecca was far too sensible and knew far too much about children of the twins’ age to imagine for a moment that they had thought far enough ahead to realise the possible outcome of their plans to get rid of her. Death, if they thought about it at all, was to children of that age a concept outside their grasp, unless they were unfortunate enough to suffer the loss of someone close to them.
As she picked up the glass and carefully put it in her handkerchief, carrying it back to the car with her, she pondered on how best to deal with the problem facing her.
All her desire to return to London was now gone. The twins needed her help, even if they themselves did not recognise it.
She got back into her car in a very thoughtful frame of mind indeed. The twins might not be able to recognise their need, but others might. The Great-Aunt Maud she remembered, despite her assumed vagueness and love of drama, had possessed more than her fair share of her nephew’s astuteness. Could it be that Maud had summoned her, not so much because she needed help in keeping the twins under control, but because she saw that they needed something more than mere discipline, and perhaps because she was hoping that, given the similarity of their childhood, Rebecca might be able to reach out and give the twins the reassurance and love they so obviously needed.
She was still turning these thoughts over in her mind as she drove in past the gates to Aysgarth. The house had been built by a Victorian Aysgarth who had made his money from the boom in railways and promptly retired to Cumbria with his wife and family.
It was a large, square building, more sturdy than elegant, three storeys high with deep, ample cellars. The sturdy Victorian furniture had been retained by the various generations of Aysgarths to inhabit the house, so that the rooms possessed an air of solid comfort rather than fashionable luxury.
It was a house in which one instantly felt at home, or at least that had always been Rebecca’s impression of it as a child. As she drove past the front door to park her car, she saw that the back door was standing open.
Aysgarth was remote enough for its inhabitants not to need to worry about the intentions of any passing caller, and as Rebecca got out of the car she heard a familiar shrill barking and kneeled down just in time to wad off the ecstatic welcome of a spaniel of rather large size and dubious parentage.
The best thing that could probably be said about Sophy was that she was extremely affectionate, the worst that she was also extremely scatty. As an adult Rebecca had always been rather surprised that Frazer of all people, so meticulous, so hard-edged and determined about everything he did, should actually have given house room to this overexuberant little stray who had wandered into the grounds of Aysgarth House a few weeks before Rebecca’s own eighteenth birthday. She had been the one who had found her and who had taken her into the house, bundling her shivering, soaking form in a towel and rubbing her dry till she stopped shivering.
She had pleaded with Norty to be allowed to keep the dog until Frazer came back from the Institute. In those days he had not headed the impressive and very important scientific institute whose work was always shrouded in so much secrecy, but he had still worked hard with very long hours, and it had been almost nine o’clock that evening before he had put her mind at rest and announced that yes, she could keep the stray, providing no one turned up to claim it.
Within twenty-four hours of being in the household, Sophy had firmly and determinedly attached herself to Frazer, becoming not her dog, but Frazer’s. However, it seemed she had remembered her, Rebecca reflected as she bent down and scratched behind the long floppy ears.
‘Ah, Rebecca! I thought it must be you.’ Silver-haired, pink-and white-skinned, dressed always in lavender, cream or black, Great-Aunt Maud, Rebecca had often thought, would surely look far more at home in some genteel establishment in Bournemouth rather than up here in the granite hills of Cumbria.
Indeed she had for a time after being widowed lived in the south of England, but immediately upon Frazer’s request to her to come and take charge of the house she had given up that life and had remained at Aysgarth ever since.
‘Ten to four—excellent!’ she announced approvingly, waiting for Rebecca to join her, ‘I’ve already warned Mrs Norton that you would be here for afternoon tea. The twins are upstairs washing their hands and faces and changing out of those disgusting jeans all children seem to insist on wearing these days. I can’t think what the world’s coming to. In my day little girls dressed like little girls,’ she added disapprovingly, ‘not in this ridiculous dual-sex uniform of jeans that everyone seems to favour these days.’
Rebecca, remembering her own mother’s gentle remonstrations and explanations when she herself had protested bitterly about the smocked velvet dress Aunt Maud had insisted on buying for her the Christmas she was twelve years old, considering herself far too grown-up for such a childish outfit, repressed a small smile.
‘And while I think about it,’Aunt Maud continued, ‘that’s another thing that will have to be sorted out. Both of them need new clothes. Such a nuisance, that girl Frazer appointed leaving the way she did.’
‘Why did she leave?’ asked Rebecca quietly, curious to hear what her aunt would say, wondering exactly how much Maud knew about the twins’ plans.
The hallway to Aysgarth was large and square with a parquet floor and an impressive carved wooden staircase running up three sides of it. At the rear of the hall was a large stained glass window, depicting various scenes of relevance to the original builder of the house, including one displaying the arms and colours of the railway which had made him his money.
‘Oh, I expect it was the usual thing,’ snorted Maud, startling Rebecca for a moment until she added in explanation, ‘too few young men and not enough to do on her days and evening off.Young girls these days don’t know how fortunate they are,’ she continued severely. ‘In my day, a girl was expected to get married whether she wanted to or not. We didn’t have the freedom you do these days. I’m glad to see you haven’t rushed into marriage, Rebecca,’ she added approvingly, then rather spoilt the effect of this phrase by adding musingly, ‘How old are you now? It must be nearly thirty, surely.’
‘Twenty-six, actually,’Rebecca told her, feeling irritated with herself for her own defensive correction of her aunt’s over-estimation of her age.
‘Twenty-six—mm…A very sensible age for a young woman, I’ve always thought.’
Rebecca wasn’t sure if she actually liked being described as sensible, but she put aside the thought to examine later, following her aunt into what was always described as the small sitting-room, although in fact it was a well-proportioned room that faced south and because of that was a favourite room for the family’s daytime use.
The yellow damask curtains had faded over the years to a soft appealing primrose. Rory and Frazer’s mother had replaced the original covers on the settees and chairs with new ones in a rich blue which had now also faded pleasantly. The walls were hung with straw-coloured silk and a faded blue and gold rug covered the parquet floor.
The familiar sight of her aunt’s embroidery frame standing to one side of the fireplace took Rebecca back to her own childhood. She had never actually seen a piece of embroidery completed by Aunt Maud, and she had a shrewd suspicion that the old lady adopted the embroidery as a skilful means of extricating herself from any duties she didn’t wish to perform.
‘Mrs Norton will bring tea through in a second. In the meantime, tell me, my dear, how are your parents and Robert and his family?’
‘They’re very well,’ Rebecca told her, describing the exploits of her niece and nephew to her as relayed to her through the medium of her sister-in-law’s latest letter.
‘Such a pity you couldn’t have gone to Australia with your parents,’ Aunt Maud commented, then pursed her lips and added thoughtfully, ‘although in the circumstances…’
She broke off as Mrs Norton came in, pushing a tea trolley. The housekeeper beamed when she saw Rebecca, who quickly and fondly embraced her, asking her how she was. It was a good five minutes before she left, confirming that she would go upstairs and find out what was delaying the twins.
‘So why didn’t you go with your parents, my dear?’ Aunt Maud pursued as she poured the tea. ‘Is there perhaps a young man in London?’
Mischievously Rebecca deliberately pretended not to understand, frowning and looking quite as vague as her aunt as she asked innocently.
‘A young man? London is full of young men, Aunt Maud. Which one was it in particular?’
‘You know exactly what I mean, Rebecca,’ Aunt Maud interrupted her sternly. ‘Is there a particular young man in your life whose presence there made you prefer to stay in London rather than to accompany your parents?’
Cautiously Rebecca hesitated, then said lightly, and not altogether untruthfully, ‘There isn’t one particular young man, Aunt Maud, but I do have several men friends whom I date from time to time.’
‘Date?’ snorted Aunt Maud. ‘What kind of word is that, and you an English teacher as well? These young men—are their intentions towards you serious, or…’
Rebecca couldn’t help it—she burst out laughing.
‘They’re friends, Aunt Maud. People whose company I enjoy.’ She broke off as the sitting-room door opened and the twins came in. A complete metamorphosis appeared to have taken place, not only in their clothes but also in their attitude. Nothing could have been more friendly or appealing than the way they both welcomed her, Rebecca acknowledged, and perhaps because of that and because of what she knew she deliberately decided to punish them a little, waiting until Maud had performed the necessary introductions and the twins were settled with their milk and biscuits before opening her handbag and removing the handkerchief as though to blow her nose.
When the shards of glass fell on to the floor, she looked at them in feigned surprise, meanwhile watching the twins’ faces. Peter’s showed a sharp stab of fear and guilt; Helen’s on the other hand remained impassive after one brief lightning look into her own face.
‘Rebecca, what on earth…?’Aunt Maud began.
Rebecca quickly apologised, getting down on the floor to remove the glass and saying quickly, ‘Good heavens, I’d forgotten about that! I found it on the road. Luckily I’d stopped the car to look at the view—if I hadn’t I would have been bound to have run over it, doing heaven alone knows what damage to the car.’
‘Glass?’ Aunt Maud was frowning heavily. ‘How on earth could that have got there?’
Peter shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Helen was made of sterner stuff; although her face had gone pale, she remained resolutely still.
‘Oh, I expect some tourists dropped it,’ Rebecca said lightly. ‘You know how careless they are. They wouldn’t have realised the potential danger they were causing—not just to cars, but to animals as well—you know how scatty Sophy is,’ she continued mercilessly. ‘She could quite easily have run down there and cut her paw.’
She heard Helen gulp quite audibly and suppressed a small stab of remorse. She doubted that the child had even thought of the potential danger to anyone other than her, their victim, but a timely reminder of how easily somebody or something else could have been injured by the glass might not go amiss.
‘Well, I don’t know. So careless and thoughtless! As you say, it must have been trippers. Nobody local would have done something so stupid,’ said Aunt Maud.
‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’ Rebecca said gently, looking directly at the twins as she added, ‘It was just as well that I saw it in time.’
‘Just as well indeed,’ Aunt Maud approved, then, turning to the twins, she announced firmly, ‘There will be no more running wild for you two now that Rebecca’s here. She’s a schoolteacher and she’ll know exactly how to keep the pair of you occupied.’
Rebecca’s heart sank as she listened to Aunt Maud’s admonishment. The very last thing she wanted was to be held up to the children as some kind of disciplinarian and ogre. Neither, however, did she want either of them to think she was going to deliberately court their approval, so she held back the words she had been about to say and instead, pursuing another line of thought, said calmly,
‘You said Frazer was going to be away for three months in all. I’m afraid I won’t be able to stay quite as long as that. Two and a half months is the very most I can spare,’ she fibbed, and added, ‘I’ve promised to go back to school two weeks early to help with the preparations for the new term.’
She didn’t look at the twins as she spoke, but wondered a little grimly what they would make of her announcement, telling them as it did that she had no intention of staying on until Frazer returned. She hoped her statement had put at rest their concern that she intended to take Frazer away from them, but instead of reassuring them it seemed to bring an expression of extreme truculence to Helen’s face as she began sulkily, ‘But Frazer…’
‘Uncle Frazer, Helen,’ Great-Aunt Maud interrupted loftily. ‘You’re only a little girl and you must not address an adult by his or her Christian name. It’s not polite.’
‘But Frazer said I could,’ Helen persisted doggedly, only to be frowned down by a very cold stare indeed from her great-aunt.
Rebecca, remembering the effect of that haughty stare, felt sorry for her, but Helen, it seemed, was made of far tougher material than she had been at that age, because she simply ignored the look being turned upon her and, putting down her glass and plate, got up unceremoniously.
‘Peter and I are going out to play.’
Aunt Maud watched them go in grim silence, then turned to Rebecca and said, ‘You see what I mean about their needing discipline, Rebecca? I really am at my wits’ end. Frazer says we must be patient with them and take into account the unfortunate circumstances of their home background. He was never in favour of Rory marrying so young; neither for that matter was I.
‘I agree that it’s very unfortunate that neither of their parents seems to take a proper interest in their off spring, but I feel that Frazer is far too indulgent with them.’
‘And I’m supposed to remedy that?’ Rebecca asked her gently.
Her aunt had the grace to look a little embarrassed.
‘Not remedy it, perhaps,’ she allowed with a small smile, ‘but maybe alleviate it, just a little.’
She got up with a sigh, suddenly looking every one of her seventy-odd years. She patted Rebecca lightly on the shoulder and said surprisingly, ‘You always were a very kind child, Rebecca. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to have taken advantage of that kindness, but I really was at my wits’ end. I’m no longer physically capable of taking charge of two energetic eight-year-olds.’
There was sadness as well as resignation in her voice, and Rebecca felt an upsurge of her earlier compassion, this time not for the twins but for her aunt as well.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ she promised her. ‘But it isn’t going to be easy.’
CHAPTER THREE
IT CERTAINLY wasn’t. Rebecca had been at Aysgarth for just over a week and so far had made absolutely no progress at all in winning the twins’ trust. They avoided her at every opportunity, and for the last two days the only time she had seen them had been at mealtimes and then later in the evening when, at her own insistence, she had helped Norty put them to bed.
Frazer had telephoned once during the week she had been there. On picking up the receiver and hearing his voice, she had been so parlysed with shock that she had been unable to do anything other than pass the receiver over to Mrs Norton. Luckily perhaps in the circumstances, because she had a pretty shrewd idea that neither the housekeeper nor Aunt Maud had seen fit to inform Frazer of the fact that his self-appointed governess to the children had left and that Rebecca had taken her place.
The sound of his voice had disturbed her more than she wanted to admit, at once so familiar and alien.
When Aunt Maud came to take the receiver from the housekeeper to speak to her nephew, Rebecca discovered that it was impossible for her to leave the room. It was as though some invisible and painfully tight thread kept her within hearing distance of his voice.
Dazedly she heard Aunt Maud confirm that she and the twins were well, and although her brain registered the fact that no mention was made either of the governess’s leaving or of her own arrival she was feeling far too shocked to insist on Aunt Maud’s informing Frazer at once of her presence at Aysgarth. That she herself was now party to the deception that Maud was perpetrating against her nephew only struck her when Maud finally replaced the receiver.
‘You didn’t tell Frazer about my being here,’ she reminded the older woman wryly.
‘Didn’t I, dear?’ Aunt Maud instantly fell back on her prime means of defence, adopting a vague and slightly puzzled attitude.
‘No, you didn’t,’ Rebecca reaffirmed quietly.
For a moment Aunt Maud looked a little bit guilty, then she said triumphantly, ‘But, my dear, he must know you were here. Mrs Norton told me you’d answered the telephone.’
What could she say? How could she admit that she had been so shocked emotionally by the sound of his voice that her vocal cords had virtually become paralysed?
‘I…I passed the receiver straight over to Mrs Norton,’ she said uncomfortably, ‘so I never actually spoke to Frazer.’
She bit her lip and then, much as it went against the grain to take to task this now elderly but still very awesome old lady for whom she still felt a slight residue of her childhood awe, she knew she had to tell her how uncomfortable she was about the fact that she was here at Aysgarth, living in Frazer’s house without his knowledge, while being fully aware herself of how little he would want her there. And yet she wondered how to say as much in a way that would convince Aunt Maud that Frazer must be told and yet at the same time stop her asking any far too awkward questions about the nature of the supposed quarrel which had led to his reluctance to have her staying in the house.
To her relief and amazement, Aunt Maud took the burden of responsibility off her shoulders by patting her arm gently and saying in a kindly manner, ‘You came here at my insistence, Rebecca, and to help me. If at a later stage Frazer should choose to take anyone to task about that, then, my dear, I’m afraid that my nephew is not the man I’ve always found him to be. In the absence of their parents and Frazer those children are my responsibility, and a responsibility which I take very seriously. But you can see for yourself that I’m far too old to keep an eye on them.’
Rebecca had to admit that this was true. Helen and Peter, while a little afraid of their great-aunt, were adept at manoeuvring themselves out of her presence. They had far, far more freedom than Rebecca remembered having at the same age, even here at Aysgarth.
Mrs Norton had told her on more than one occasion that they were regular little devils, especially, as she put it, ‘Miss Helen’. Helen was the ringleader, the bolder of the two. Her awareness of the vulnerabilities and vanities that went up to make the adult psyche were far too great for a child of her own age, Rebecca considered.
‘Perhaps a good boarding school might be the answer,’ she suggested cautiously now, but Aunt Maud shook her head decisively.
‘Don’t think I haven’t suggested it, my dear, but Frazer won’t hear of it. He believes the children need the security of living at home.’
‘But we all went to boarding school,’ Rebecca protested.
‘Yes, but Frazer contends that you all, especially you and Robert, had a far more secure and emotionally stable home background than the twins.’
Rebecca had to acknowledge that this was true; but, while she could see Frazer’s point in wanting to keep the twins at Aysgarth, she still wished she had not allowed herself to be dragooned into coming up here to share that responsibility.
‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ Aunt Maud comforted her. ‘I know you’re finding things difficult at the moment, but I have every faith in your ability to bring those two to a proper realisation of at least a little discipline in their lives.’
Aunt Maud had more faith in her than she had in herself, Rebecca admitted ruefully. It had shaken her hearing Frazer’s voice so unexpectedly like that, reminding her of things she had thought safely tucked away in the past. She had been fifteen when she first fell in love with him, dreamy-eyed and vague, her feelings more innocent and cerebral than physical.
She had likened him to all her favourite fictional heroes, had spent her holidays dreamily following him as much as she could, content to worship from afar. At sixteen her feelings had become sharper and far more painful; the physical awareness of her maturing body had both delighted and embarrassed her.
She remembered how the Christmas she was sixteen, when Frazer had bent to kiss her in the cousinly fashion that was his habit, she had ducked out of the way, petrified of betraying not just her feelings but her total lack of sophistication and experience. She so desperately wanted to be older, more experienced, more on what then had seemed to be Frazer’s unattainably sophisticated level.
She remembered that that Christmas there had been a girl staying at Aysgarth—Frazer’s latest girlfriend, a pretty and no doubt very pleasant girl, but Rebecca had invested her with all manner of unpleasant traits.
She had been desperately jealous of her and her relationship with Frazer. She remembered that she had refused to join the others on their annual walk to watch the Boxing Day meet set off. She remembered as well that, while Rory had jeered at her for being sulky and childish, Frazer had looked at her with thoughtful, concerned eyes. On reflection she realised that it was hardly surprising that he took his responsibility towards the twins so seriously. Even though only a handful of years had removed him in age from Rory, Robert and herself, he had always somehow or other seemed so very much more mature, a halfway stage between themselves and their parents.
She remembered her utter embarrassment when later that same holiday he had come up to her when she was sitting in her room daydreaming over an impossible sequence of events which concluded with him sweeping her into his arms and proclaiming his undying love. She remembered how he had knocked on her bedroom door and walked in, a tall dark-haired, jean-clad figure, wearing an old check woollen shirt, his body carrying the tang of fresh male sweat after his labours outside clearing a fresh fall of snow from the drive.
Rebecca remembered how her sensitive, newly emerging awareness had reacted to that very maleness of him; how a fierce thrill of pleasure had run through her as he sat down beside her on the window-seat. His first words to her, though, quickly dashed her foolish hopes.
He had come, he told her gently, to find out if something was wrong; if perhaps there was a problem at school. The knowledge that he so obviously still considered her to be a schoolgirl, a child, had been so bitterly painful that she had found it impossible to respond to anything he said, retreating further and further into her own protective shell, putting between them what she now recognised had been the beginning of a distance which neither of them had ever broached.
After that, with growing maturity, and aware of how potentially embarrassing for all concerned it would be if her feelings for him were ever to become public knowledge, she had made a point of avoiding him whenever she stayed at Aysgarth, spending more time in Rory’s company than she did in Frazer’s—and apparently so effectively convincing him that he was nothing more to her than merely an older and rather boring cousin that, when Rory had claimed she was the one with whom he was breaking his marriage vows, Frazer had had no difficulty whatsoever in believing him, which of course was exactly what she and Rory had wanted. So why afterwards had she felt that savage backlash of agonising pain that he should so easily have accepted their deceit? What had she expected him to do? Deny their claims and in doing so say passionately that he knew that she, Rebecca, could not possibly be involved with anyone else, because she loved him…and moreover that that love was returned?
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Пенни Джордан
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now."You never did want to face reality, did you?" Frazer accused. "You always were a daydreamer… living more in your imagination than in real life. "Frazer Aysgarth had never forgiven Rebecca for what she′d done those many years ago – despite the fact she′d sacrificed herself for his sake.Now that they would be sharing the same house, Rebecca wondered if there was any hope that he′d see her as the woman she really was…