Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

crying now, silent tears flooding down her cheeks. As he watched in distress, she lifted her hands to cover her face, her shoulders heaving as the tears slid through her fingers. Such grief couldn’t possibly be caused by the simple loss of an ornament, Guy knew.

      ‘Jenny, what is it? What’s wrong?’ he asked.

      For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to tell him. The sight of her grief, all the more shocking because of its very silence, as though the pain was so great that she couldn’t endure the added agony of giving it voice, made his own stomach muscles clench in angry helplessness. Automatically he moved closer to her, wrapping both arms around her.

      He was right. She had lost weight; he could feel her bones through her skin. She seemed tiny and fragile, frighteningly so.

      ‘Jenny,’ he urged, wanting to hold her even closer and yet afraid to do so in case he hurt her.

      ‘All right,’ she acquiesced, misunderstanding the reason for the pleading, questioning way he said her name. ‘If you must know, Jon has left me.’

      Guy felt his whole body stiffen in surprise and disbelief. ‘Jenny,’ he muttered huskily, totally unable to voice his stunned emotions.

      ‘Jenny what?’ she demanded tearfully.

      ‘Jenny, it can’t be true….’

      ‘Oh, but it is true. You’ll hear all about it soon enough.’

      He couldn’t see her face, but he sensed that she had stopped crying although she was trembling in his arms as though her body was unable to contain the intensity of her pain and outrage.

      ‘The whole town’s been talking about it … and who can blame them? If they think they’ve got something to talk about now, just wait until they find out why he’s gone.’

      She began crying again. Great noisy, gulping sobs this time. Guy held her tightly.

      ‘Why has he gone, Jen?’ he questioned gently, as gently as though he were speaking to a child, somehow knowing that this was what she needed, that possibly for the first time in her life she needed to be allowed to behave instinctively and emotionally instead of sensibly and logically, to put herself first instead of others.

      ‘He’s fallen in love with Tiggy—Tania,’ she admitted painfully, pushing herself away from him slightly and looking up into his face, her eyes full of misery and despair. ‘And who can blame him? You only have to look at her …’

      ‘She’s nowhere near the woman that you are, Jen,’ Guy told her roughly. ‘My God, if he’s left you for her, then he’s a fool.’

      ‘No, not a fool. He’s just doing what he’s always been taught … trained to do. All his life he’s been taking responsibility for David and now that David is so ill, what could be more logical than taking responsibility for David’s wife, as well?’

      She started to laugh a wild, dangerous laugh, one on the edge of hysteria, that made Guy’s heart ache unbearably for her.

      He wanted to be able to offer her some form of comfort and reassurance but he suspected that there was none that she would accept—or at least not from him. He had always known how much she loved Jon and he assumed that Jon felt the same way about her, yet despite his awareness of her suffering, he could not help wanting to take advantage of the opportunity that fate had given him.

      ‘Look, why don’t we close the shop for an hour? We aren’t normally that busy on Monday morning. We’ll go and have a cup of tea and you can tell me all about it.’

      ‘Oh, Guy.’ Fresh tears started to fall. ‘I still can’t really believe that it’s happening, that Jon has actually gone. A temporary separation, to give him time to think, that’s what he’s calling it. The children, everyone else, thinks …’ She bit her lip. ‘Everyone else thinks it’s because of David … the shock of his heart attack and that Jon is … that he will—’

      ‘That he’s having a mid-life crisis accelerated by David’s illness,’ Guy supplied for her. ‘Perhaps he is.’

      Jenny shook her head. ‘I don’t know … I don’t know anything any more,’ she told him painfully.

      ‘It could just be a temporary thing,’ Guy felt bound to comfort her. ‘You’ve been married a long time and—’

      ‘Jon married me because he felt he had to, not because he loved me,’ she broke in tensely.

      Guy stared at her.

      It was the first time in all the years he’d known her that she had referred to the fact that she was pregnant when she and Jon had married.

      There had been a certain amount of gossip at the time, of course. He, as a schoolboy, had overheard something about it without being particularly interested in what it meant and later he had assumed that the subsequent death of the child shortly after his birth had been so painful that the subject was simply never referred to. It had never occurred to him to question the happiness of the marriage.

      ‘The two of you may originally have married because you were carrying Jon’s child,’ he agreed, ‘but—’

      ‘No.’ Jenny shook her head, her eyes darkly sombre as she looked not so much at him as through him, he realised, as though she was looking back into the past. ‘No,’ she continued, ‘I wasn’t carrying Jon’s child. It was David’s….’

      Guy willed himself not to betray his shock or to ask her any questions. Instead he simply took one of her hands and, holding it gently between his own, said quietly, ‘Come on … let’s go and have that cup of tea.’

      She went with him as docilely as a small child, watching whilst he locked up the shop and then allowing him to guide her down the street.

      He knew exactly where he intended taking her—the only place where they could be guaranteed the degree of privacy he knew they, she, needed—but cautiously he took a circuitous route towards it. Generation upon generation of Cookes had learned to value the habits and instincts of stealth and caution and to stake their lives on them. Now it wasn’t so much his life that was at stake as Jenny’s reputation. This was still very much a small country town after all and Jenny was now in the highly invidious position of being a ‘single’ woman.

      He felt her tense slightly as he led her along the maze of narrow back streets and then out onto the road that led to his own house, but she didn’t say anything as he drew her arm through his own and walked her towards his home.

      ‘I’ve never been inside your house before,’ she commented as he led her through the small front door.

      ‘No,’ he agreed.

      He wondered how she would react if he told her how often he had pictured her here, and not just here downstairs in his little living room, but upstairs in the huge old oak four-poster that virtually filled the open-plan upper storey of the house. When he had initially bought the bed he found he had to have the small existing bedrooms knocked into one to accommodate it and a small extension built out over the kitchen to house the bathroom.

      The bed had at one time come from the local castle, or so local rumour had it, although how on earth it had ever actually been moved from its original place, Guy had no idea. He had bought it from a farmer’s wife who had complained that she was sick of the huge, ugly old thing. He had had to employ someone to take it apart and rebuild it again but it had been worth it.

      From his neat and compact kitchen he could watch Jenny as she stood in the centre of his living room, slowly taking in her surroundings. Did she realise yet what she had told him? Had she meant to tell him or …?

      The kettle boiled, he made the tea, poured two cups, put them on a tray and carried it through to the living room.

      ‘Now,’ he instructed, ‘sit down and tell me everything.’

      ‘I’ve already told you,’ Jenny said heavily. ‘Jon’s left me, he’s in love with