A Reason for Being by Penny Jordan

Author:Penny Jordan [Jordan, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781488080913
Publisher: Harlequin Presents
Published: 1989-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

LATER, when she was rational enough to care who might have witnessed her self-betrayal, she was glad that Marcus had been fully occupied in his study and that the girls were at school; that way at least she need not fear that anyone else had witnessed the total disintegration which had torn her apart when the truth sank in.

She wasn’t yet strong enough to admit whether it was love or hatred she felt for Marcus, but what she could no longer deny was that it was the strongest emotion she had ever experienced in her life. Far too strong an emotion, and as she carefully placed the shards of broken pottery outside in the dustbin her movements were those of an old woman, not one of not quite twenty-eight.

The sun warmed the ancient walls of the house and the rough cobbles of the courtyard, but its heat failed to penetrate through the intense cold which had gripped her.

How could she stay here in the knowledge that she was as still as dangerously capable of focusing her whole life on Marcus now as she had been ten years ago? How could she stay, and yet, how could she not?

She wasn’t a teenager any more, but a mature woman with loyalties and responsibilities. She couldn’t simply turn and run away any more. There were the girls to think of… Her promise to them that she would stay… Herself to face if she broke that promise. And this time, surely, forewarned was forearmed?

It wasn’t going to be as it had been before. Marcus was already engaged. She was not that same child who had misguidedly persuaded herself that he loved her.

Oh, God, why on earth had she come back here? Why on earth had she allowed herself to give in to that crazy need to make atonement…to reach out to her past and bridge the distance between it and her future?

Unless this was to be her penance…this the payment which would be exacted from her for the past: that she must stand and watch, a silent, anguished witness to Marcus’s love for and life with someone else.

She realised she was still standing in the courtyard. She turned her head and the brilliance of the sunshine blinded her. She shaded her eyes instinctively, her hand betraying her agitation with its fine tremor.

Dear heaven, this couldn’t be happening, but it was… While she stood here as motionless as the stone doves on the rim of the drinking fountain, her world had turned full circle around her, leaving her defenceless to the enormity of what had happened.

‘Boss said you wanted to have a word about the kitchen garden.’

The Northumberland accent was familiar to her, but the voice wasn’t, nor the man who addressed her, shocking her out of the bewilderment and into the realisation that anyone could have walked out of the house and read her unguarded face.

Luckily he had approached her from behind, and before she turned round she managed to compose herself a little.

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