Injured Innocent - Penny Jordan Mills & Boon Modern

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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 life-style 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?

      What if it was? Legally she had every right to share his guardianship. Amanda must have wanted her to do so otherwise she would never have appointed her in the first place. But then Amanda would never have expected to die at twenty-seven. Neither would John, Lissa argued mentally with herself.

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