Unspoken Desire. PENNY JORDAN

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