Sinful Nights(31)

She had not been able to believe it when she received the phone call  from Amanda's and John's solicitors. She had gone to see them  immediately, taking time off work to do so, and had been stunned to hear  of the tragic accident that had taken place while Amanda and John were  visiting John's parents in Miami.

If Joel hadn't been looking after the children that weekend; they too  would have been killed. Lissa shuddered deeply again. Even now she could  barely take it in. She had had no idea until the solicitors told her  that Amanda had appointed her joint guardian of the girls, along with  John's brother, but it was not a responsibility she had any intention of  shirking, no matter what the solicitors might think. Her mouth  tightened slightly as she remembered the carefully worded comments of  the solicitor, and his cool surprise that she should not want to  extricate herself immediately from any responsibility towards the  children. When she had taxed him about it he had coughed in vague  embarrassment and then said half apologetically that Mr Hargreaves  …  Mr  Joel Hargreaves, that was, had given him to understand that she would  not wish to accept any responsibility for her nieces.

Lissa, who suspected she knew Joel Hargreaves and the way his mind  worked far better than Mr Lawson, had seethed inwardly, knowing that  what Joel had been intimating was not so much that she should not wish  to take on the children, but that he considered her an unfit person to  do so.

But she did wish to take on her share of the responsibility. She owed it  to her sister and her parents-not to mention little Emma and Louise-but  it was not just that, she admitted to herself. There still burned  inside a deep seated sense of injustice, an intense need to show Joel  Hargreaves just how wrong all his assessments of her were. To prove that  the great Joel Hargreaves was not as infallible as he and apparently  everyone else liked to believe. And that was why she had had the  nightmare  …  That was why she had dreamed so painfully of events which  had happened more than six years ago. That was why she could not forget  the humiliation she had suffered at his hands.

She sipped her coffee, refusing to allow her thoughts to slide backwards  into the past. She had taught herself now to ignore the past  …  All  right so she could not erase it  …  could not entirely put it behind her  and close a door on it, but she could refuse to allow herself to dwell  obsessively on it.

When she had come to London she had vowed to put the past behind her.  She had fought valiantly against her own inner sense of inadequacy. She  had found herself a good job, which she thoroughly enjoyed, working as a  secretary cum P.A. to an up-and-coming young architect, Simon Greaves.  She had bought her small one bedroomed flat, albeit with the aid of what  sometimes seemed to be an extremely onerous mortgage. She owned a  little car  …  took regular holidays. Had a pleasant circle of friends  …   never lacked dates. All in all, to the casual observer, her life was a  very comfortable and modestly successful one. She had come out from  behind the shadow of her elder sister, or so she had told herself  …  but  did one ever wholly recover from the traumas of childhood. Wasn't it  true that somewhere deep inside herself she still considered herself  unworthy; inferior; judging herself as her parents had judged her,  simply because she was not a carbon copy of Amanda.    

 



 

Stop that! She abjured herself, pushing aside the duvet and padding  towards the bathroom. She was wide-awake now and might as well get up.  She had a very busy morning ahead of her, with a meeting with her  parents' solicitors sandwiched in at lunchtime. She had already seen  them twice and not been wholly surprised to discover that despite her  parents, pleasant lifestyle they had left behind them few assets. The  house had been mortgaged very recently to provide her parents with an  annuity, which of course had ceased with their death, but it was not to  discuss her parents' few assets that Lissa wanted to see their  solicitors. It was to discuss her legal position with regard to her  nieces. She didn't need sixth sense to guess that Joel Hargreaves would  do everything in his power to have her guardianship of the girls set  aside, but Amanda had stipulated that she wanted her as guardian to her  daughters, and it was an act of faith and love that Lissa wasn't going  to turn her back on.

Despite the fact that Amanda had always been their parents' favourite  she and Lissa had always got on reasonably well. They had never been  close, but they had always loved one another. In fact Lissa could only  remember her sister being angry with her on one occasion. Stop it, she  cautioned herself again. Stop thinking about that.

But it was easier said than done, which accounted for the fact that the  past still haunted her in the shape of tormenting nightmares, even after  all this time. At seventeen she had been so innocent  …  so naive and  trusting, but she had been judged as being wanton and wild, and the  scars of that judgment still haunted her.

After she had showered, she rubbed herself dry briskly, grimacing  ruefully at her mane of red-brown hair and her tall, slender body.  Amanda had been small and cuddly, entrancingly feminine, whereas she as a  teenager had been gawky and awkward to the point of being plain. Now  when Simon called her elegant and classy, she was tempted to deny his  compliments, to make him see that whatever elegance she now had was  simply a disguise; armour behind which she could hide all her  deficiencies. She herself saw very little to admire in her height, or in  the classic bone structure of her face. Her hair which she wore long  was probably her best feature, if one overlooked the fact that it was  not blonde, just as her eyes were a cool hazel green and not blue. But  then hadn't she realised long ago that she was not and never could be  another Amanda. She was herself, warts and all. Sighing faintly she made  up her face with practiced skill. The grooming course she had invested  in when she first came to London at the suggestion of her first employer  had taught her to re-assess herself as the person she was, not as a  shadow of her sister, but she had stood in Amanda's shadow for too long  to be able to wholly accept that she was capable of taking the limelight  in her own right. The classic coolness of her demeanour was in direct  contrast to her own inner insecurity, but few people guessed that. Not  even Simon who was her boyfriend as well as her employer really knew  what she hid away from public view.

Simon! Unwittingly Lissa bit her lower lip, marring its fullness with  the sharp bite of her teeth. She had worked for him for eighteen months  and for the last six they had been dating. She liked and admired Simon;  physically he was a very attractive male, tall and blond with a ready  smile and easy charm, but when it came to the crunch; when it came to  the point of giving herself to him as a woman  …  of taking him as her  lover, she held back. She knew that he found her sexual coldness towards  him hurtful, but how could she explain to him that every time she came  close to allowing a man to touch her  …  any man  …  she was instantly  confronted by a mental image of Joel Hargreaves' darkly contemptuous  features; and that the image was powerful enough to instantly quench  whatever desire she might previously have felt. Joel as the mental  guardian of her morals exerted a far more powerful veto on her ability  to respond sexually to anyone than the most vigilant of parents. And it  was all so ridiculous and unnecessary. The real Joel didn't give a damn  what she did with her life; and anyway she was way, way past the age of  consent at twenty-three. It was stupid and unnecessary that she was  still a virgin. She heartily wished herself rid of the burden of her  unwanted innocence, but every time she met a man she felt she could  respond to, Joel came between them. She knew quite well why of course.  But it was one thing to know, it was another to overcome the mental  barriers created by the past.

Stop thinking about that now,' she ordered herself. She would need all  her powers of concentration today when she saw her parents' solicitors.  She knew quite well that Joel would try to take the children away from  her, to stop her from taking up her role as co-guardian. He had already  flown out to Miami to arrange the funerals of Amanda and John and both  sets of parents and he had taken the children back with him, all before  Lissa had even been informed of the accident. The children were now  living with him, and Lissa knew she would have to fight to preserve her  own rights towards them. Quite why she was so determined to take up  those rights, she found it difficult to say. It was true that she was  fond of both her nieces; they were her sister's children of course, but  she loved them in their own right. However, if Joel had not been her  co-guardian  …  If John's brother had been a different man  …  a married man  perhaps whom she liked and approved of, wouldn't she have been quite  happy to hand the children into the care of he and his wife? Wasn't it  partially because it was Joel who was her co-guardian; Joel her bitter  enemy that she was summoning all her forces, all her rights under the  law to oppose his high-handed decision to make himself solely  responsible for the girls, by the simple expedient of arrogantly  ignoring her co-guardianship?