Whisper The Darkness Part 11

'What?'

Joanna was confused, and he turned his cold amber eyes in her direction. 'Don't pretend you don't understand, Miss Seton.

Anya has told me about young Trevor's visit this morning, and some arrangement you have with him if he succeeds in finding a woman to work at Ravengarth!'

Joanna gasped. She might have known that Anya would not let such a heavensent opportunity escape her, and while it was not unreasonable that she should have told her father about the housekeeper, it was obvious she had been listening at the door long before she chose to make her entrance. How else could she have known about the bargain Paul had suggested? He had certainly not repeated it in her hearing.

'Paul offered to ask one or two people in the village whether they would consider working at Ravengarth, that's all,' she declared tersely. 'I think it was kind of him. After all, you've had no luck in obtaining a housekeeper, and at least if one of the village women does come to work for you, she won't be requiring accommodation.'

Jake turned to look at her once again. 'And you think that is a recommendation?' he asked bleakly. 'Are you not aware of the talk there'll be in the village right this moment, now they know Mrs Harris has departed?'

Joanna's face burned. 'Does it matter?' she exclaimed, unable to sustain his searching gaze. 'As you persistently point out, I am young enough to be your daughter!'

'But you're not my daughter,' he snapped, forced to halt as they reached the sliproad on to the motorway. 'And the longer you remain at Ravengarth, the more convinced I become that your staying is a mistake.'

Joanna sank back in her seat as if he had struck her. It was obvious, he was only keeping her on because of the minor success she was having with Anya, and she guessed that if he could find some older woman to do the job die was doing she would be dismissed, just like Mrs Harris. It was a daunting thought, and it successfully destroyed what little exhilaration was left to her. She remained silent during the remainder of the journey to Heronsfoot, and stayed in the Range Rover while he went into the vet's. What was the point of getting involved? she asked herself bitterly; he was determined to maintain the barrier of detachment with her, just as he did with everyone else.

He wasn't long, and presently he came striding back to the vehicle, tall and disruptively masculine in his black leather jacket and corded pants. His s.h.i.+rt, one of the coa.r.s.e grey s.h.i.+rts she herself had washed and ironed, was open at the throat, exposing the strong column of his neck, and with the breeze ruffling the smooth dark hair, he looked dark and disturbing.

His eyes met hers as he pulled open his door and got inside, levering his long length behind the wheel. For a heart-stopping moment they looked at one another without either fear or aggression, and Joanna's lips parted on an involuntary breath.

She didn't want to break that unguarded contact, and it was Jake who leant forward and deliberately started the engine before she could say anything.

Heronsfoot was a village similar to Ravensmere, but as it was just off the motorway it was considerably busier. There were several shops and a cafe Joanna had seen as they drove through, and now, hardly aware of what she was saying, she used them as a delaying tactic.

'Is-is there a pharmacy here?' she exclaimed, as he swung away from the kerb, and heard the sudden intake of his breath as he was obliged to answer her.

'There's a chemists,' he amended shortly. 'Why? Is there something else you want?'

'Yes.' Joanna thought furiously. 'I-er-I need some nail varnish remover.'

'Nail varnish remover?' Jake applied his brakes reluctantly.

'Can't it wait?'

'Until when?' she enquired ironically. 'You've just told me I mustn't shop in Ravensmere.'

His lips thinned, but he pulled into the kerb again, and indicated the small leaded-paned shop window opposite. 'Don't be long,' he advised, with an impatient gesture, and grateful for the reprieve, she pushed open her door, deliberately leaving her purse behind.

The chemist was a young man, and he smiled understandingly when she confessed that she had left her money in the car. It wasn't every day he had such an attractive young woman in his shop, and he watched the unconscious swing of her hips as Joanna sauntered across the road again and tapped on Jake's window.

'I've forgotten my purse,' she said innocently, as he wound the window down. 'Could you possibly come and pay for it for me?

It will save me having to unpack all those things.' She pointed to the shopping bag on the back seat of the vehicle.

Jake hesitated, looked as though he was going to object, and then thrust open his door. Joanna watched him triumphantly, then turned and walked back to the shop with him following. She was well aware of the cafe only two doors further along, but when they emerged from the chemist a few moments later she pretended a spontaneous exclamation.

'Would you mind if we had a cup of tea before going back?'

she asked, depending on that unguarded moment to win the day, and was bitterly disappointed when he strode across the road.

'If you want a cup of tea, get it,' he advised shortly. 'I'll wait for you in the Rover, but don't be long.'

Joanna pursed her lips. 'I don't have any money.'

'Then you'll have to do without, won't you?' he retorted, evidently deducing what she had had in mind, and with a feeling of impotence she came back to the car.

'I wanted to talk to you,' she said half sulkily, as he pulled away, but Jake did not immediately answer her. He drove in silence until they were clear of the small town, and then he said harshly: 'I do not like being made a fool of, Miss Seton.'

Joanna flushed. 'That wasn't my intention.'

'No?' He glanced sideways at her. 'But you didn't really want to go to the chemists, did you? Your real objective was the cafe.

I should tell you, I do not take tea in cafes, unless it's unavoidable.'

Joanna sighed. 'If you're about to tell me your appearance is responsible -' she began, and then broke off in dismay when he brought the Range Rover to an abrupt halt.

'We will have no psycho-a.n.a.lysing here, Miss Seton,' he snapped savagely, turning in his seat so that the heat of his breath was tangible against her temple. He made an impatient gesture before continuing: 'I thought I knew why you came here. I believed what my sister told me. But it becomes more and more apparent that you're not satisfied to simply get on with the job for which you were employed. I concede that you've had some small success with Anya, and for this reason I've tried to be tolerant, but I will not permit the kind of familiarity between us you seem bent on promoting.'

Joanna stared at him, at once aghast and resentful of his perception.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' she muttered, her lower lip jutting. 'Just because I forgot my purse and you had to help me...'

'You didn't forget your purse,' retorted Jake coldly, reaching round into the back and extracting the offending article from the top of her shopping bag. 'It was a little trick to get me out of the car. Well, you succeeded, but that's all. Do you understand?'

Joanna held up her head. 'When I came here, Mr Sheldon, you talked of me being too-imaginative; has it occurred to you that you might be the imaginative one, not me?'

Jake's mouth hardened perceptibly, and the air around them moistened and condensed on the windows. The fast- misting panes enclosed them in an atmosphere of isolation that was almost claustrophobic, Joanna felt, cutting down her surroundings to the leather-seated interior of the car, her vision to the scarred lean face of the man beside her.

'You invite violence, do you know that?' he snapped, tugging angrily at the hair at the back of his neck. 'You're not dealing with some youth, enamoured by the flattery of your interest! You and I have to work with one another, that's all. Anything else is out of the question.'

Joanna was astounded now, as much by his effrontery as by her reactions to it. 'You have no grounds for making such an outrageous statement!' she protested incredulously. 'Just because I'm trying to create the kind of situation where we might- discuss matters that affect us both -'

'Like Trevor finding a housekeeper for us, you mean?' Jake overrode her coldly, and she pressed her lips together.

'I've told you. Paul had your best interests at heart -'

'Yours, you mean,' he corrected her bleakly. 'I may be disfigured, but my eyes are as good as anyone else's. I know why- Paul is suddenly so helpful, and it has nothing to do with me or Anya.'

Joanna was incensed. 'Jealous, Mr Sheldon?' she jeered, unable to hide the derision in her voice, only to freeze into immobility when his hands imprisoned her shoulders, pressing her back against the dark green leather of the upholstery. He was much closer now, only the length of an arm away, and a bent arm at that. The tawny amber eyes held her frozen gaze with the expertise of the snake with the rabbit, and her heart seemed suspended by the expression in their depths.

'This is the moment you've been waiting for, isn't it?' he said suddenly, and she realised in dismay that he was taunting her now.

'We've all seen those old movies, haven't we? The heroine mocks the hero one time too many, and he responds in the age-old way of all heroes.' His lips twisted. 'Only I'm no hero, Miss Seton, and I fear you're not the stuff of which heroines are made either. You're trembling-I can feel it. Why? Isn't a little romantic diversion what you're missing? Isn't that the reason why I'm being flattered by all this unwarranted attention?'

It was awful, but she could think of nothing to say in her own defence. 'You-you're a brute!' she got out chokingly. 'Let go of me!

You have no right to treat me like this. How many times must I tell you, I only wanted to talk!'

His narrow-eyed gaze held hers for a moment longer, grew speculative, then pensive, and finally moved down over the delicate planes of her face to the vulnerable uncertainty of her mouth. And she was vulnerable, she realised with a pang. Weak, and vulnerable, and pathetically inexperienced. The young men she had known had not prepared her for the complexities of Jake's character, and her little charade seemed puerile in the face of his denunciation.

'What did Marcia tell you about me?' he demanded roughly, making no move to release her. 'What manner of man did she say I was? I suppose she told you about Beth, and the accident-and why I'm living the life of a country yokel?'

'She didn't-that is-I don't know your sister,' protested Joanna desperately. 'It was Aunt Lydia who-arranged everything.'

'Lady Sutton?'

'Yes.'

Jake's eyes narrowed in disbelief. 'But you've heard about my wife, haven't you? And the reasons why I left London.'

'Mr Sheldon, I don't think -'

'What don't you think?' he overrode her a little cruelly. 'That it has anything to do with you? No, I'd agree with you, it hasn't.

But you're here-and perhaps I feel the need to talk to someone.'

Joanna wished she'd never started this. 'Mr Sheldon -'

'I was an engineer, you know,' he remarked, almost as if he was talking to himself. 'In electronics, the career of the future.

That is where the future lies, you know, in electronics. Silicon chips!' His lips twisted. 'But I won't be a part of it.'

Joanna s.h.i.+fted nervously beneath his numbing grasp. She had the feeling that- by her reckless behaviour she had triggered off some morbid introspection, that could only bring pain and bitterness to him, but she didn't know how to reverse the process.

'Why?' she asked now, searching for a means to rea.s.sure him, and the harsh mouth twisted in unwilling recollection.

'It was the accident, you see,' he went on, in that flat monotone.

'Afterwards, I couldn't concentrate on anything, not without getting this G.o.d-awful pain in my head. It was hopeless. When I tried to work, I couldn't. The simplest calculations were beyond me.

Resistors, transistors, microprocessors; my brain just couldn't absorb the information. I'd lost the ability to work effectively.' He shook his head. 'I guess you could say these scars were a G.o.dsend. At least they gave me an excuse to get out of London, to lick my wounds in private.'

'So you bought Ravengarth?'

Joanna wondered if he was really aware of how painful his grip on her shoulder was, but her words were more honestly an attempt to divert his anger until she could wriggle out of his grasp.

'Yes,' he said, his thumb probing the narrow bones of her shoulder through the thickness of her jacket. 'I'd always enjoyed painting as a hobby, and I thought I might enjoy the rustic life. I knew I had to do something or go mad, and a smallholding like Ravengarth seemed the most sensible idea. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked out as I expected.' His brows descended, and she realised he was remembering her behaviour again. 'Not as I expected at all.'

'Don't you think we ought to be going back?' she ventured, hoping that now he had unburdened himself he might be more willing to respond to her suggestion, but all it brought was a deepening of his brooding gaze.

'That was not what you had in mind earlier,' he pointed out tormentingly. 'Surely I'm not scaring you, Miss Seton? Surely, after all you've said about this face, it hasn't suddenly begun to frighten you.'

Joanna pressed her lips together. 'Your face has nothing to do with it,' she exclaimed tautly. 'I've told you before, you've lived with it too long. It's not repulsive-not repulsive at all.'

'So if I put it close to yours-like this,' he came nearer until she could see every pore of his dark flesh, every ridge of scar tissue, every betraying spasm as the muscles tightened in his jaw, 'you wouldn't draw back from me?'

'No!'

But she did. Not through any revulsion against his appearance, rather because his nearness frightened her in other ways, ways she hardly understood, but which left her weak with the awareness that she had to restrain herself from touching him.

'Liar!' Clearly he had misunderstood her involuntary withdrawal, and his face contorted with contempt. 'You can't bear to be this close to me, can you? It screws you up. Well, let's see how you react to a more physical demonstration ...' and lowering his head, he found her mouth with his.

Joanna's lips were already parted in protest, and his unexpected a.s.sault found no opposition. At the touch of those firm lips, her resistance faltered, and he only needed that involuntary submission to succeed in his intent. She was already far too aware of the muscled strength of his body, and his weight crus.h.i.+ng her back against the seat was itself a potent intoxicant.

She had unb.u.t.toned her coat in the warmth of the car, and his chest was hard against the thinly protected fullness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It didn't help to know that they were swollen and hardened against his broad chest, responding without her consent to the demanding pressure of his body.

But it was his mouth which wrought the most damage, invading and possessing the moist sweetness of hers. What had begun as an attempt to discourage her deepened into a pa.s.sionate possession, and his hands which only minutes before had been bruising the bones of her shoulders were now probing the small of her back, gripping her narrow waist, sliding under the hem of her s.h.i.+rt to find the pointed nipples eager for his exploration.

Her half-hearted attempts to deter him were met with resistance, and besides, she was invaded by an unfamiliar weakness in her thighs as his hard fingers continued the sinuous ma.s.sage. She was glad she was not wearing a bra that afternoon, and she surged against him inviting his unrestrained caress.

His mouth descended in a burning trail of kisses from her lips to her nape, and her hands groped for him, for the lapels of his jacket, like a drowning man groping for a lifeline. It was an instinctive response to his sensuous violation, and almost unaware her fingers probed the taut muscles of his thigh.

His withdrawal was as unexpected as the devastating effect he had had on her. One minute his mouth was stroking hers, moving sensually upon it, teaching her how little she had known of her own emotions, and the next she was thrust away from him, her tentative fingers arrested in their search, his breath expelling from his lips in a mutter of self-revulsion. With a savage oath he rested his elbows on the steering wheel, pus.h.i.+ng back the thickness of his hair with both hands, his dark face twisted into an expression of self disgust.

'My G.o.d!' The words were wrung from him, harsh and contemptuous in that charged atmosphere. 'What the h.e.l.l am I doing? Letting you provoke me like this! I must be out of mind!'

Joanna didn't know what to say, what to do. She felt helpless against the storm of emotion he had aroused inside her, and dazed by her response to the ruthless arrogance of his a.s.sault. It was both troubling and humiliating to know that he had torn down every defence she raised against him, leaving her shocked and exposed to the raw brutality of his verbal attack.

'I don't think there's any point in conducting a postmortem,'

she got out at last, unsteadily, smoothing her hair with shaking fingers, and he turned violent eyes in her direction.

'You don't?' There was cold sarcasm in his tone.

'No.' Joanna endeavoured to compose her defence. 'It- I-what happened-happened. It's not something -'

'You invited it, is that it?' he demanded savagely, and she caught her breath.

'No -'

'But you did, Miss Seton. You're a provoking person. I knew that the first time I laid eyes on you.'

'So why did you keep me, then?' she cried, stung by his coldness after the interlude they had just shared. 'Why didn't you just tell me I wasn't suitable, instead of letting me stay under false pretences?'

'Beggars can't be choosers, Miss Seton,' he responded, bleakly. 'A trite saying, but true. And now, I think, we ought to be getting back.

Until other arrangements can be made, you will continue as Anya's governess, but that's all. You'll be happy to know, I'm sure,' the sarcasm was back now, 'that I was successful at last in finding a housekeeper -'

'Did Paul -' she began, her face brightening slightly, but he killed her antic.i.p.ation with a hard smile.

'On my own merits, Miss Seton. From the agency in Penrith. I told you, I didn't need anyone's a.s.sistance. Mrs Parrish arrives tomorrow.

Perhaps that will help to scotch any rumours about our relations.h.i.+p which your friends the Trevors may have promoted, and also terminate your amateur attempts at housekeeping!'