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CHAPTER ONE
NOW that she was here, she had a curious feeling of anti-clio on but to bury the past and put it coth of will she had honed to a fine keenness over the years ‘Cold’ and ‘hard’ were how some people described her: business adversaries who had learned too late that her cloud of Titian hair and alns of weakness, ploys to soothe the o, but a banner of her determination to succeed as what she was and not because she illing to use it
She had lost count of the number of men who had invited her to their beds She had left the os bruised and their desire cooling to resentiven her some small measure of satisfaction, but that was not why she rejected them She was a woman whose emotions ran deep and secret, soest of all those eht her here to this ree, to this house…on this particular day
Harley, her closest business adviser, had expressed surprise when she told him what she intended to do He had wondered verbally that she should even have heard of the auction of some remote manor house in Yorkshire, neverit When he had questioned her reasons she had si him, as it still did on occasions
‘It will ood headquarters,’ was all she would tell hiainst arguing with her
A s that she should feel that small sense of let-down Today should be a milestone in her life Froht to be feeling elated She shuddered to think what her accountants would say if they knew of the a every scrap of inforarnered about the Deveril family And at last it had paid off A hundred yards in front of her stood the house
The first Deveril to build on this spot had been one of Williath to strength until the death of Richard III All four sons of the family had fallen at Bosworth but they had had wives, and one of those wives had produced a posthuiven for his father’sclose to their Yorkshire estates, but then one of the daughters had caught the eye of Prince Hal, and whether it was because he retained a soft spot for her or not, the Deverils did extre the Reformation
That hen the original property had been demolished; a fine new house, built with an eye to beauty rather than defence, sprang up on the site of the old
It was more than fifteen years since she had last seen this house Then, she had looked back on it as she left the village, swearing eternal hatred to those who lived in it How very young she had been! Of course, her hatred had faded, and with it over the years the hotly burning need to wreak vengeance on those who had caused it But Jenna’s desire to exact atoneo that Alan Deveril and his son, Charles, had both died in a car accident had shocked her into realising the futility of wasting her life in i fate All she had been left as a residue of bitterness, intensified by the news she had received later that as there was no direct heir, the house now stood empty
Out of all the people she had once known in this area, she only kept in touch with one couple, her old headmaster and his wife, and it was they that she and Lucy were staying with now Lucy! She sighed involuntarily as she thought about her rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter
Lucy hadn’t wanted to come with her to West Thorpe, but Jenna had insisted and for that insistence had had to endure sulks and silence during the long drive up fro up between them pained her Most parents encountered soe children she knew, but she was not le parent, and Lucy had been increasingly deht to know the identity of her father Jenna, of course, had refused to tell her Her ht be able to control her own business and a staff of a dozen or so people, when it cahter…
She resu with its mullioned s and fancy brickwork had been added to by a Georgian Deveril, whose rich bride’s dowry had enabled hi She had never been inside the house; the Deverils were not the sort of faant home Alan Deveril had been a snob of the first water It had always been his intention to arrange a e between Charles and a wealthy heiress—soer to trade their ain, bitterness darkening her green eyes to stormy jade
‘Jenna, there you are’
She turned at the sound of Harley’s voice, frowning slightly ‘Youon this place,’ he said frankly as he came up to her ‘It’s riddled with damp…half the s are rotten It will cost an absolute fortune to put everything right, and to what purpose? You could get yourself a modern office block in London for a tenth of the cost and far less hassle’
The petulance in his voice , he nevertheless considered hily His expensive pale grey suit and toning silk shirt looked very out of place in the tangled undergrowth of the house’s gardens He was perspiring slightly, Jenna noticed, so he always did when he was nervous Poor Harley, he had a hard ti up with her, but he was an excellent administrator, fussy to the point of irritation at times, but fanaticallytin business to the standard it had reached; now, although very few people nise her name, she could al of a cachet to clained by Jenna Stevens
‘It will htly, ‘and besides I’m sick of London’
Harley Tho he wasn?
??t going to get any more infor, always calmly controlled, there was still a vulnerability about her that made him anxious He couldn’t remember when he had seen a more beautiful woe and deeply green, her skin porcelain pale, her hair a thick old curls At twenty-nine, she could easily have passed for twenty-three or -four if it hadn’t been for her air of cool self-possession Tall and slim, her curves were nevertheless femininely voluptuous, especially her breasts Unlike him, her clothes did not betray her as a city person, her sleek tweeds fitting her as naturally as though she had worn them all her life
‘Where’s Lucy?’ she asked hi the details of the house