The Perfect Lover
PENNY JORDAN
The breathtaking saga of The Perfect Family continues?She had found passion in Gareth Simmonds's arms. For one brief moment, in sun-drenched Italy, Louise Crighton had been able to forget her hurt at seeing the man she thought she loved fall for someone else.Ashamed at her unexpected?and uninhibited?response to Gareth, she had gone out of her way to avoid seeing him again. But now Gareth is back, as attractive as ever. One question burns in Louise's mind: Does Gareth still suspect that she'd used him as a substitute for another man?
This was what she had ached for...
She had been so hungry for him to kiss her like this, she acknowledged dizzily, as his mouth started to move over hers. She adjusted her body to get closer to him and felt him shift his weight to accommodate her.
Against his mouth she cried his name.... “Saul. Saul...Saul....”
Abruptly Louise found herself being set free, pushed away from the intimacy of the male body her own craved so badly. Only his hands still held her.
“Open your eyes, Louise,” she heard a harsh and shockingly familiar male voice demanding bitingly. “I am not your precious Saul, whoever he might be....”
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The PerfectSinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Crightons (#u381fcbe0-7bda-5480-af65-1821a20c5502)
A Perfect Family
The Perfect Seduction
Perfect Marriage Material
Figgy Pudding
The Perfect Lover
The Perfect Sinner
The Perfect Father
A Perfect Night
Coming Home
Starting Over
The Perfect Lover
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Cover (#ue280fbc9-dd80-5f8e-9bb2-d1a47a21501a)Excerpt (#ueb838316-a66c-5121-8998-bf89b2e7caef)About the Author (#uad1ea51f-de24-51f1-afd5-dc74a7fc4e36) The Crightons Title Page (#u4c3de423-4d7a-531b-8f2b-21c2ebdcc0f7) CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u381fcbe0-7bda-5480-af65-1821a20c5502)
‘MY GOODNESS, we are honoured, aren’t we? It isn’t very often these days that you manage to tear yourself away from the bureaucratic delights of Brussels.’
Louise tensed as she heard the sarcastic voice of her elder brother, Max. They had never got on particularly well, even as children, and in her view maturity had done nothing to improve either their relationship or her brother.
‘It was commented at Christmas that you weren’t around,’ Max continued jibingly. ‘But, of course, we all know Saul was really the reason for that, don’t we?’
Louise gave him an angry look before retorting, ‘Perhaps if you spent more time thinking about your own relationships and less talking about other people’s you might learn something genuinely worthwhile, but then you never were much good at appreciating what’s really of value in this life, were you, Max?’
Without giving him any opportunity to retaliate, Louise turned on her heel and walked quickly away from him.
She had promised herself that on this, her first visit home since she had started working in Brussels over twelve months ago, she would prove to her family just how much she had changed...matured...and just how different, distant almost, she was from the girl who...
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Saul, her father’s cousin, who was standing with his wife, Tullah, and the three children from his first marriage. Tullah had her arm around Megan, Saul’s daughter, while Saul held the little boy they had had together.
The large drawing room of her grandfather’s house seemed to be filled by the presence of her peers, proudly showing off their growing families.
Clustered around the fireplace were her cousin Olivia, with her husband and their two children, talking animatedly with Luke, from the Chester branch of the family, and his American wife Bobbie and their little girl, while Maddy, her brother Max’s wife, kept a discreet eye on Gramps, who was becoming increasingly irascible.
According to her mother, Maddy was close to a saint for humouring him the way she did. When Jenny Crighton had made this comment this morning, over breakfast, Louise had immediately pointed out that if Maddy could put up with being married to Max, then her grandfather must come as a form of light relief.
‘Louise,’ her mother had protested, but Louise had remained unrepentant
It was no secret in the family that Max was not a good or kind husband to Maddy, and privately Louise couldn’t understand why on earth Maddy stayed with him.
‘You’re looking very cross.’
Louise grimaced as she saw her twin sister. Twins were a feature of the Crighton family, in the same way that poppies were a feature of a field of corn—they sprang up all over the place, although as yet there were no sets in the current new generation.
‘They’ll come,’ her father’s aunt Ruth had predicted.
‘I’ve just been receiving the benefit of Max’s brotherly conversation,’ Louise informed her grimly. ‘He doesn’t change...’
‘No...’ Katie looked at her twin. ‘You know, in a lot of ways I feel quite sorry for him. He—’
‘Sorry for Max?’ Louise exploded. ‘What on earth for? He’s got everything he’s ever wanted—a cushy place in one of the country’s leading sets of chambers, with his pick of all the best briefs—and all he’s had to do to get it is to persuade poor Maddy to marry him.’
‘Yes, I know what he’s got in the material sense, Lou, but is he happy?’ Katie persisted. ‘I think he feels what happened with Uncle David far, far more than he’s ever shown. After all, they—’
‘They were both made in the same mould. Yes, I know,’ Louise cut in. ‘If you want my opinion, it would be a good thing for this family if Uncle David never surfaced again. Olivia as good as told me that her father had been guilty of serious malpractice when he and Dad were partners, and that if he hadn’t disappeared when he did...’
Both of them were silent for a moment as they remembered David Crighton, their father’s twin brother and Olivia’s father, and the near disaster he had plunged the family into prior to his disappearance some years earlier.
‘That’s all in the past now,’ Katie reminded her gently. ‘Dad and Olivia have managed to sort out all the problems they had been having with the practice—and in fact they’ve built up the business so much that they’ve decided they need to think about taking on an extra qualified solicitor to cope with the increased workload. But Gramps still misses David, you know. He was always—’
‘The favourite. Yes, I know. Poor Gramps. He never has had very good judgement, has he? First he makes David the favourite, ahead of Dad, and now it’s Max.’
‘Mum’s really glad that you were able to make it home for Gramps’s birthday,’ Katie told her sister quietly. ‘She was...upset at Christmas when you didn’t come home...’
‘When I couldn’t come home,’ Louise corrected her sharply. ‘I told you at the time. My boss put me under pressure to put together a report on the legal aspects of a new community law she thought might be passed, and I had no option but to agree. It wouldn’t have been worth coming home for what would have amounted to just about forty-eight hours, even if I could have got the flights.’
Three months after leaving university, and not wanting to take the next stage in her training to become a barrister immediately, Louise had taken a temporary post working for a newly appointed Euro MP who’d wanted someone to work for her as a legal researcher.
Six months ago the temporary post had become a permanent one, and while the hours were long and the work extraordinarily demanding, Louise had thrown herself into it with determination, knowing that the contacts she was making in Brussels would ultimately equip her to make a change of career should she want to do so.
Their choice of careers couldn’t have been more different, Katie acknowledged as she silently and sympathetically studied her twin. While Louise, true to her nature, had chosen to fling herself head-first into the maelstrom of politics and intrigues in the hothouse melting-pot atmosphere of Europe’s bureaucratic capital, she had opted to join a still very youthful and emergent new charity which had been set up to help young children across the world who had been made orphans and refugees by war.
‘Have you spoken to Saul and Tullah yet?’ Kate asked her sister softly.
Louise reacted sharply to her question, tensing and almost physically backing off from her as she replied angrily, ‘No, I haven’t...Why should I? For God’s sake, when is everyone in this wretched family going to stop behaving as though...?’ She stopped, and took a deep breath.
‘Look, for the last time, Saul means nothing to me now. I had a silly, stupid crush on him, yes. I made a total and complete fool of myself over him, yes. But...’ She stopped again, and shook her head.
‘It’s over, Katie. Over.’
‘Mum thought when you didn’t come home at Christmas—’ Katie began.
Louise wouldn’t let her finish, breaking in bitterly, ‘That what? That I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Saul? Or, worse, that I might—’
‘She thought that perhaps you’d met someone in Brussels.’ Katie overrode her with quiet insistence. ‘And that you weren’t coming home because you wanted to be with him...’
Interestingly, a soft tide of warm colour started to tinge her sister’s skin, and, even more interestingly, for once in her life she seemed almost lost for words as she turned her head and looked down at the carpet before saying quickly, ‘No. No, there isn’t anyone... at least not like that. I...’
It wasn’t totally true—there was someone, of sorts—but she knew perfectly well that the relationship Jean Claude wanted with her was one based on sex only.
Jean Claude was twelve years older than her, and moved in the higher echelons of Brussels’ diplomatic circles. He was, as he himself had told Louise, a career diplomat, who currently held a post connected with the French fishing industry.
Louise wasn’t quite sure as yet how she felt about him. He had a suave, dry sense of humour, and the kind of Gallic good looks that fell just short enough of outrageously handsome to ensure that he was very attractive to the female sex. Politics and the law, as Jean Claude had already teasingly commented to her, could make very exciting bedfellows.
‘Brazen, I think you mean,’ Louise had corrected him firmly.
‘Be careful if you’re looking for commitment,’ a colleague had already warned Louise. ‘He’s got a reputation for liking variety.’
Louise had shrugged away the other woman’s comments. Commitment was the last thing on her mind at the moment, and would be for a very long time to come. She might be over Saul in the sense that she was no longer suffering from the massive crush which had caused her to make such an idiotic fool of herself, but she was certainly far from over the feelings of humiliation and searing self-disgust—self-dislike—which had resulted from the sharp realisation of just how dangerously and potentially destructively out of control her feelings for Saul had threatened to become.
She would certainly never make that mistake again. Never allow herself to become such a victim, such a slave to her emotions ever again—she didn’t really understand how it had happened in the first place. Right from her early teens she had set her sights firmly on aiming for a career. Marriage, babies, emotions, although she’d once have openly welcomed them with Saul, were more Katie’s forte than her own. The terrifying force of her feelings for Saul had been an abberation, and the behaviour they had resulted in so totally abhorrent and repugnant to her that even now, nearly three years later, she could scarcely bear to think about it.
Yes, it was possible now for her to look at Saul with Tullah and the children without suffering even the smallest flicker of the emotion which had torn her apart and threatened every aspect of her normal life during those months when it had held its strangulating, choking grip on her life. But what wasn’t possible, what she suspected might never be possible, was for her to forget just how traumatic that time, those feelings had been.
Louise frowned, her thoughts switching from the past to the present as she recognised the suspiciously furtive way her younger brother Joss and their cousin Jack were edging their way towards the French windows.
Discreetly following them, she waited until Joss was on the point of unlatching the door before demanding sternly, ‘And just where do the pair of you think you are going?’
‘Lou...’
Considerably startled, her brother released his hold on the door handle and spun round to face her.
‘We were just going down to the greenhouse,’ Jack told her with virtuous innocence. ‘Aunt Ruth is growing some special seeds there and...’
‘The greenhouse?’ Louise questioned loftily. ‘This compelling expedition to view Aunt Ruth’s seedlings wouldn’t have been taken via the TV room, would it?’
The look of contrived injured innocence her brother gave her made Louise’s lips twitch slightly, but Jack wasn’t quite such a good actor, and his fair skin was already starting to flush with guilt. Both boys were ardent rugby fans, and Louise had overheard them pleading with her mother, without success, earlier in the day to be allowed to sneak away from the family party in order to watch their favourite game.
‘The All Blacks are playing,’ Joss told her pleadingly.
‘You’ll be all black, or rather your good behaviour record will be, if Mum catches on to what you’re up to,’ Louise warned him.
‘If we go now, we can just about catch the last half,’ Joss told her winningly. ‘And Mum won’t even notice. We’ll be back before she knows we’re gone.’
‘I don’t think...’ Louise began, but Joss was already reaching up to give her a fervent hug.
‘Thanks Lou, you’re the best,’ he announced. ‘And if Mum should ask...’
Louise shook her head firmly.
‘Oh, no...don’t drag me in. If you get found out, you’re on your own, the pair of you.’ But she was smiling affectionately as she returned her brother’s warm hug. After all, it wasn’t such a very long time ago that she herself had found such family gatherings rather dull, and had, like Joss and Jack, made her escape from them just as quickly as she could.
‘Bet you wish you could come with us,’ Joss whispered to her with an engaging grin before quickly sliding through the French window.
‘To watch the All Blacks? No, thanks,’ Louise retorted with a small female shudder, but she was smiling as she discreetly closed the French windows behind the two boys.
On the other side of the room Tullah, who had been watching the scene, touched Saul on the arm.
As he turned to look at her she took their son out of his arms and told him, ‘I’m just going to have a word with Louise.’
Frowning slightly, Saul watched her. She had totally transformed his life, and the lives of his three children from his first marriage.
Louise stiffened as she saw Tullah making her way towards her. She looked quickly over her shoulder, but the door from the drawing room was blocked by her father and Aunt Ruth, who were deep in conversation. Katie, whom she might have expected to be her ally, had somehow or other managed to melt away, and now there was no escape for her. Tullah was already at her side.
‘Hello, Louise...’
‘Tullah.’
‘You’ve had your hair cut. I like it. It suits you...’
‘Thank you.’
Automatically Louise touched one of the short feathery curls of her newly shorn hair. She had had her hair cut on impulse the day before she had flown home, and the feminine cut showed off the delicacy of her bone structure and emphasised the shape and colour of her dark eyes. The weight she had lost while away at university had never totally been replaced. She looked, Tullah acknowledged inwardly, almost a little too fine-boned and fragile, and she could well understand, as a mother herself, why Jenny should be a little bit anxious over her well-being.
As the silence between them stretched Louise was acutely conscious of the fact that virtually everyone else in the room was probably watching them and remembering...
As she turned to move away from Tullah, baby Scott reached out and, grinning winsomely at Louise, patted her cheek with one fat baby hand, pronouncing solemnly, ‘Pretty.’
Over his downy head Tullah’s sympathetic eyes met Louise’s wary, startled ones.
‘Oh, dear. I think I’m going to sneeze.’ Tullah told Louise. ‘Could you take him for me?’
Before Louise could protest she found herself holding a solid armful of gurgling, beaming baby, whilst Tullah dived into her jacket pocket for a tissue.
‘No. No, it’s gone...’ Tullah announced when the threatened sneeze was not forthcoming, but she made no attempt to take her son back from Louise as she commented, ‘It’s so nice to see virtually all the family here. I know your grandfather isn’t always the easiest person to get along with...’
‘You can say that again,’ Louise agreed wryly, gently detaching the baby’s clutching fingers from the gold chain she was wearing around her neck. ‘He’s got your colouring but Saul’s eyes,’ she told Tullah. ‘How have the other three...?’
‘So far, so good,’ Tullah told her, showing her her crossed fingers. ‘It’s probably been easier for them, and for us in one way, because they live with us full time. So there’s no question of them feeling that Scott, here, gets to see more of their father than they do.’
Scott, for some reason, had quite obviously taken an immediate liking to Louise, and much to her own astonishment, and Tullah’s patent amusement, he started to press loud juicy kisses against her face.
Louise, despite her determination to focus on her career, had always liked children and enjoyed their company. As a teenager she had often babysat for Saul, and had formed quite a close bond with his three, and now, to her chagrin, she suddenly felt her eyes filling with emotional feminine tears as Scott’s baby kisses touched her skin.
Quickly she handed him back to Tullah, telling her chokingly, ‘Tullah, I’m sorry...’
And both of them knew that it wasn’t what was happening now that she was apologising for.
Very gently Tullah touched her arm.
‘It’s over, Lou,’ she told her softly. ‘Forget it. We have. You were missed at Christmas—by all of us...’ As she turned to return to Saul and the children, she paused and dropped a light kiss on Louise’s cheek.
‘Forget it’, Tullah had said. Louise closed her eyes as Tullah walked away. If only she could. Tullah and Saul might have forgiven her, but she doubted that she would ever be able to forgive herself...
‘Is everything all right, darling?’
Louise forced a determined smile as she read the concern in her mother’s eyes.
‘Fine,’ she assured her. A quick look around her grandfather’s drawing room reassured her that she was no longer the object of everyone’s discreet attention. Taking a deep breath, Louise commented as steadily as she could, ‘I was just saying to Tullah that Scott has Saul’s eyes but her colouring...’
‘Yes, he has, hasn’t he?’ Jenny Crighton agreed gratefully, relief leaking through the anxiety that had gripped her.
In one sense it had been a relief when Louise had finally agreed to come home for her grandfather’s birthday, but in another...
Louise was her daughter, and she loved her, worried over her—how could she not do so?—but she had to admit that she had been anxious.
Louise had a quick temper coupled with a very easily bruised sense of pride. Watching Max talking with his sister earlier had made Jenny pray that Max wouldn’t do or say something to upset his sister and put her on the defensive.
Tullah and Olivia—Jenny’s niece and Louise’s cousin—had both tried to reassure Jenny that everything would be all right, that teenage crushes were something that happened to everyone, and that it was just Louise’s misfortune that hers had happened to be conducted under such a public glare of family attention, and that the object of her untrammelled teenage passion had been a member of her own family.
‘She behaved so very badly,’ Jenny had reminded them sorrowfully.
‘Things did get a little out of hand,’ Tullah had agreed. ‘But since Louise’s behaviour resulted in Saul and I getting together, and recognising how we really felt about one another far more quickly than we might otherwise have done, I have to admit that I feel more inclined to be grateful to her than anything else.’
‘Louise made a mistake,’ Olivia had added. ‘Making mistakes is something we all do, and personally I think she’ll end up a better, more well-rounded person for having had it brought home to her that she is fallible and human. She was rather inclined to think herself above everyone else,’ she had reminded Jenny ruefully. ‘A combination, perhaps, of a certain Crighton gene plus a very, very shrewd brain. What happened has softened her, made her realise that she’s a human being and that there are some things she can’t programme herself to achieve...’
‘Have you had anything to eat yet?’ Jenny pressed now. Jon, her husband, kept reminding her that Louise was now an adult woman, living her own life and holding down a very high-pressured job, but to Jenny she was still very much one of her babies, and to a mother’s concerned eye Louise looked just that little bit too slender.
‘I was just going to get myself something,’ Louise fibbed. She was well aware of just how generous Tullah had been in coming over to her like that, but despite that generosity there was still a small knot of anxiety in Louise’s stomach which made her feel that it would be unwise trying to eat.
‘I was just on my way to wish Gramps a happy birthday,’ she told her mother, and hopefully, once she had done so, she would be able to leave without the others thinking that...that what? That she was running away?
Running away. No, she wasn’t doing that, had never done that, despite what some people chose to think!
‘European Parliament...bunch of committee-making bureaucrats who are far too removed from what’s going on in the real world...’
Louise gritted her teeth as she listened to Ben Crighton, her grandfather and family patriarch, a few minutes later. As she was perfectly well aware, so far as he was concerned the only real way, the only worthwhile way, to practise the law was from a barrister’s chambers.
Excusing herself before she allowed him to provoke her into an argument, Louise couldn’t help feeling sorry for Maddy, who had moved into the old man’s large country house following an operation on his hip the year before.
The move, at first merely a temporary one to ensure that he had someone to care for him in the short term, had turned into a more permanent arrangement, with Maddy and the children living full time in Haslewich with Max’s grandfather while Max spent most of his time living and working in London.
Louise couldn’t understand how or why Maddy put up with Max’s blatant selfishness—and his equally blatant infidelities. She certainly would never have done so, but then she would never have married a man like her brother in a thousand lifetimes. She knew how much it distressed her parents that he had turned out the way he had Max was as unprincipled and selfish in other areas of his life as he was in his role as a husband.
Unlike their uncle David, Olivia’s father and her own father’s twin brother, Max might never have actually broken the law, but Louise suspected that he was perfectly capable if not of doing so, then certainly of bending it to suit his own purposes.
‘He doesn’t change, does he?’ The rueful, familiar tones of Saul’s voice coming from behind her caused Louise to whirl round, her face a stiff mask of wariness as she watched him.
The last time she and Saul had spoken to each other had been when he had consigned her to Olivia’s charge, having just made it clear to her that, far from returning her feelings for him, he would really prefer never to have to set eyes on her again.
Words spoken in the heat of the moment, perhaps, but they had left their mark, their scar upon her, not least because she knew how richly deserved his fury and rejection of her had been.
‘I suppose at his age...’ Louise began, and then shook her head and agreed huskily, ‘No. No, he doesn’t.’
Ridiculous for her, at twenty-two, to feel as uncomfortable and ill at ease as a guilty child, but nevertheless she did.
Whatever malign fate had decided to make Saul the object of her teenage fantasies and longings had long since upped sticks and decamped from her emotions. The man she saw standing in front of her might not have changed but she certainly had. The Saul she saw standing before her now was once again, thankfully, nothing more to her than another member of her family.
‘Your mother says you’re only paying a flying visit home this time.’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s right,’ Louise agreed. ‘Pam Carlisle, my boss, has been asked to sit on a new committee being set up to look into the problems caused by potential over-fishing in the seas off the Arctic. Obviously from the legal angle there’s going to be a lot of research work involved, which I’ll be involved in.’
‘Mmm...sounds like a good breeding ground for potential future Euro politicians in the Crighton family,’ Saul teased, but Louise shook her head.
‘No. Definitely not,’ she denied firmly. ‘Politics isn’t for me. I’m afraid I’m far too outspoken for a start,’ she told him ruefully. ‘And politics requires a great deal more finesse than I’ll ever possess.’
‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ Saul told her. ‘In more ways than one,’ he added meaningfully, forcing her to hold his gaze as he added quietly, ‘It’s time for us to make a fresh start, Lou. What happened happened, but it’s in the past now...’
Before she could say anything he added, ‘Tullah and I will be coming over to Brussels some time in the next few months on company business. It would be nice if we could meet up...go out for dinner together... ’
Saul worked for Aarlston-Becker, a large multinational company whose European head office was based just outside Haslewich. He and Tullah had met when she had gone to work in the company’s legal department under Saul.
Unable to do anything other than simply nod her head, Louise was stunned when Saul suddenly reached out and took her in his arms, holding her tightly in a cousinly hug as he told her gruffly, ‘Friends again, Lou.’
‘Friends,’ she managed to agree chokily, fiercely blinking back her tears.
‘And don’t forget...write to me...’
Louise grimaced as she listened to Katie’s firm command. ‘Why on earth did you have to go and get yourself involved with some wretched charity outfit that can’t even run to the expense of a fax machine?’ she groaned.
‘You tell me...but I do enjoy my job,’ Katie pointed out
They were saying goodbye at the airport, their mother having dropped them off on her way to a meeting of the charity she and their great-aunt Ruth had set up in their home town some years earlier.
‘Sorry I can’t see you off properly,’ she had apologised as they climbed out of her small car.
‘Don’t worry about it, Mum; we understand,’ Louise had consoled her.
‘You could always come over to Brussels to see me, you know,’ Louise told her twin abruptly now. ‘I’ll pay for the ticket, if that would help.’
Katie gave her a brief hug. She knew how difficult it was for her sister to admit that there were any chinks in her emotional armour, even to her twin. To the world at large, Louise always came across as the more independent one of the two of them, the leader. But in reality Katie believed that she was the one with the less sensitively acute emotions, even though she knew that Louise would have sharply denied such an allegation. Louise had always taken upon herself the role of the bigger, braver sister, but Katie knew that inside Louise was nowhere near as confident or as determinedly independent as others seemed to think.
Even their parents seemed to have been deceived by Louise’s outward assumption of sturdy bravado, and consequently she was the one who was always treated that little bit more gently, the one for whom extra allowances were always made, Katie acknowledged. A fact which made her oddly protective of her sister.
‘Oh, by the way, did you know that Professor Simmonds has been seconded to Brussels? Apparently he’s been asked to head some committee on fishing rights in the North Sea,’ Katie told her vaguely.
‘What? No, I didn’t know,’ Louise responded, her face paling.
‘No? I thought that perhaps you may have bumped into him,’ Katie told her innocently.
‘No, I haven’t!’ But if what Katie had just told her was true, Louise suspected that she was certainly going to do so. The committee Katie was talking about had to be the same one that Louise’s boss had just been co-opted onto. Of all the unwanted coincidences!
Louise’s thoughts rioted frantically, her stomach churning, but she dared not let Katie see how shocked and disturbed she was.
‘I know you don’t like him,’ Katie was saying quietly.
‘No. I don’t,’ Louise agreed curtly. ‘After all, he cost me my first, and—’
‘Louise, that’s not fair,’ Katie objected gently.
Louise looked away from her. There was so much that Katie didn’t know, that she couldn’t tell her.
Gareth Simmonds had been her tutor at Oxford at a particularly traumatic time in her life, and he had been a witness not just to that trauma, and the way she had made a complete and utter fool of herself, but he had also...
Louise bit her lip. The feeling of panic churning her stomach was increasing instead of easing.
‘That’s the final call for my flight,’ she told Katie thankfully, giving her twin a swift hug before grabbing hold of her flight bag and heading for her gateway.
Gareth Simmonds in Brussels!
That was all she needed!
CHAPTER TWO (#u381fcbe0-7bda-5480-af65-1821a20c5502)
GARETH SIMMONDS in Brussels! Louise gave a small groan and closed her eyes, shaking her head in refusal of the stewardess’s offer of a drink.
Trust Katie to wait to drop that bombshell on her until the last minute. Still, at least she had warned her, and forewarned was, as they say, forearmed.
Gareth Simmonds. She ground her teeth in impotent fury. She had been halfway through her first year when he had stepped into the shoes of her previous tutor, who’d had to retire unexpectedly on the grounds of ill health, and he and Louise had clashed right from the start.
She had resented the far more pro-active role he had made it plain he intended to play as her tutor. She had been used to his elderly and ailing predecessor, who had, in the main, been content to leave her to her own devices—something which had suited Louise down to the ground, giving her, as it had, ample opportunity to give the minimum amount of attention to her studies whilst she concentrated on what had become the far more important matter of making Saul fall in love with her.
The situation would have been bad enough if Gareth Simmonds had merely concerned himself with his official role as her tutor, but, no, that hadn’t been enough for him. He had had the gall...the cheek... the... the effrontery to take it upon himself to interfere in her personal life as well.
Louise’s tense shoulders twitched angrily. The last thing she needed right now—just when she was beginning to feel she was getting her life back on an even keel again, just when the events of the weekend had made her feel that at last, finally, she had begun to reclaim her sense of self-respect—was to have the whole ugly mess of her past dragged up again in the person of Gareth Simmonds.
He was going to Brussels to head a committee, Katie had said, when repeating to her the information she had garnered at an informal reunion of her old university classmates, and not just any committee either. Louise could feel her body starting to tense defensively. The thought that she might have to have any kind of contact with Gareth Simmonds was unacceptable, untenable. Anger, pride and panic started to well up inside her, causing her throat to tighten as though her own despairing emotions were threatening to choke her.
Gareth Simmonds. They had clashed straight away, something about him sending sharp, prickling, atavistic feelings of dislike and apprehension quivering through her body, and that had been before that disastrous confrontation between them at the end of her first year at Oxford, when he had sent for her and warned her of the potentially dire consequences of her not giving more time and attention to her work.
She had been far more headstrong and self-willed in those days, and the fact that he had had the gall to challenge her over anything, never mind the torment of her love for Saul, had driven her to retaliate. But he had been too quick for her, too subtle...too...
She had hated him with much the same intensity with which she had loved Saul, and with just as little effect, and the last thing she wanted or needed at this stage in her life was to be confronted with the physical evidence of her own youthful stupidity.
She could still remember...
There had been a good deal of giggling and gossip when he had first arrived at Oxford—the youngest Chair they had ever had, and the sexiest, according to his female students. Louise had shrugged her shoulders in disdain. However sexy others might find him, she was not interested. In her eyes he could never match up to Saul. No man could.
True, he might be over six feet with the kind of Celtic colouring that produced a lethal combination of thick dark hair and incredibly brilliant dark blue eyes, but for all Louise cared he could have modelled for the hunchback of Notre Dame.
‘Have you heard his voice,’ one besotted student had breathed, wild-eyed. ‘I could orgasm just listening to him.’
Louise had looked witheringly at her. Saul’s voice made her go weak at the knees, and Gareth Simmonds sounded nothing like him. In fact, the only things they did have in common were that they were both in their thirties—although Gareth Simmonds was a good seven years younger than Saul—and they could both display a decidedly brutal verbal toughness when they so chose. From Saul, the merest hint of a sharp word could reduce her to choking black misery. From Gareth Simmonds it tended to provoke a fierce desire to retaliate in kind.
He might have been her tutor, but that hadn’t given him the right to interfere in her life in the way he had done—and besides... But, no, she must not think about that—not now.
Abruptly Louise realised that the plane had landed.
Automatically she stood up and reached to retrieve her bag from the overhead locker, and then froze as the man occupying the seat behind her also stood up to do the same thing.
‘You!’ she whispered as she came face to face with the very man who had just been occupying her thoughts and exercising her temper.
‘Hello, Louise.’ Gareth Simmonds acknowledged her calmly. Shakily Louise grabbed her bag and turned her back on him. What an appalling coincidence that he should be on the same flight as her!
Determinedly keeping her back towards him, Louise edged her way into the aisle and headed for the exit.
A sharp wind whipped across the tarmac as they left the plane, and as she hurried towards the arrivals lounge Louise reassured herself that her quickened pace was caused by the chilly evening air, and certainly not by any fear of coming face to face with Gareth Simmonds a second time.
Once through Customs Louise headed for the taxi rank, giving the cab driver her address at the large block of apartments where she lived. The apartment she rented was small, and fearsomely expensive, but at least she lived on her own, she comforted herself as she paid off the taxi driver and walked into the apartment block foyer.
While she filled the kettle, Louise ran her answering machine tape. A small rueful smile curled her mouth as she heard Jean Claude’s familiar, sexy, smoky French accent. She had dated the Frenchman casually a few times, but was well aware of his reputation as an incorrigible flirt.
He was telephoning to ask if she was free for dinner during the week. Louise went to pick up and open her diary. She was due to accompany her boss to an inaugural meeting of the new committee in the morning. She suspected it might possibly run on until after lunch, and then at night there was an official dinner.
‘The French contingent especially are going to be asking some tricky questions,’ Pam Carlisle had warned Louise. ‘They’re none too happy about the fact that the Chair appointed is British. It’s only the fact that he’s known to be pro-European that’s persuaded them to give their grudging acceptance of his appointment. The disputed waters are, after all, still officially British.’
‘But they want to change that...’ Louise had guessed.
‘Well, they certainly want to get their own legal right to fish the waters.’
They had gone on to discuss the legal ramifications of the situation, and Louise had never thought to ask her boss the identity of the committee’s Chair. Why should she have done? It had never even crossed her mind that the new appointee could possibly be her ex-tutor and protagonist Gareth Simmonds. Hadn’t his prestigious lectureship coupled with the doting adoration of half the female student population been enough for him? Louise wondered bitterly.
‘I’ll bet he’s absolutely heaven in bed,’ she could remember one of her co-students breathing excitedly. ‘And he’s not married.’
‘Heaven in bed’. Louise tensed abruptly. He had certainly been hell out of it! To her at least.
‘He’s rumbled us,’ Katie had warned her. ‘He’s guessed that I’ve been sitting in at lectures to cover for you. He actually called me Katherine yesterday...’
‘So...?’ Louise had said grittily. ‘That is your name, isn’t it?’
‘It’s my name,’ Katie had agreed. ‘But at the time I was attending one of his lectures pretending to be you.’
‘He probably made a genuine mistake,’ Louise had told her irritably. She had gone home to Haslewich, on the pretext of having left some of her books behind on her last visit home, but in reality so that she could see Saul. To her chagrin, though, Saul had been away on business, and the whole exercise had proved to be a complete waste of time.
In those days she had not always treated her twin as considerately as she might have, Louise acknowledged now, as the boiling kettle disturbed her reverie, and in fact it was probably very true to say she had often been guilty of bullying and browbeating Katie into doing as she wanted.
Things were different now, of course. She had done what she could to make amends, and, as she was the first to acknowledge, there were areas in which her twin had shown considerably more strength of purpose and determination than she could ever have exhibited herself.
She had been in her late teens then, though, and so totally obsessed with Saul that nothing else, no one else, had been important.
Briefly she closed her eyes. This afternoon, when Saul had put his arms round her to give her that firm fraternal hug, initially her body had totally recoiled from his touch—not out of rejection but out of fear, a deep-rooted, instinctive, self-protective fear that there might be some hidden part of her that was still susceptible to her old romantic dreams. But to her relief what she had actually felt, all she had actually felt, had been a warm and very reassuring sense of peace and release, coupled with the knowledge that there was nothing, after all, for her to fear. Being hugged by Saul, being held in his arms, had meant no more to her than if he had been Olivia’s husband Caspar, or one of the Chester cousins, or indeed any other man of whom she had reason to be fond in a totally non-sexual and uncomplicated way.
She had known then that she was truly and totally free of the past, at least where Saul was concerned.
Frowningly she stirred her coffee.
She had behaved foolishly when she had been at university, there was no getting away from that fact, but she wasn’t alone in having done that—many other students had done the same.
She picked up her coffee mug too quickly and some of the hot liquid spilled onto her hand. She cursed angrily under her breath.
Damn Gareth Simmonds. Why on earth couldn’t he have stayed safely where he was in Oxford—and in her past?
The last thing she needed right now was having him around studying her... watching her with those too perceptive, too knowing evening-sky-blue eyes of his...judging her...just waiting for her to make a mistake...
Louise started to grind her teeth.
Well, she’d got news for him. She wasn’t the Louise she had been at Oxford any longer. She was a woman now, an adult, holding down a highly responsible and demanding job, proving that she could control and run her own life, that she didn’t need the constant back-up and support of her twin sister to be there at her side all the time, to do her bidding, to make her feel whole and complete. God, but she had hated him for throwing that accusation at her—just one of the scathing criticisms he had made of her!
It should have been Saul’s denouncement of her, after she had so dangerously tricked Tullah into following her into the maze and left her there at the masked ball, that should have remained like a scar on her consciousness, a dialogue that ran for ever through her head as she tried to argue her way out of it, but oddly it wasn’t. It was her arguments, her confrontations with her tutor about which she still had bad dreams, and still, in times of stress, played over and over again through her memory.
Oxford, the time after she had finally been forced to realise that Saul would never love her, that in fact he loved someone else. Oxford and Gareth Simmonds. Oxford, Italy—and Gareth Simmonds. Italy and Gareth Simmonds.
Picking up her coffee, Louise walked into her small sitting room and curled up on the sofa, closing her eyes. She didn’t want to relive those memories, but she could feel the weight of them pressing down on her, pushing their way into her consciousness just as Gareth Simmonds seemed to be pushing his way into the new life she had made for herself.
As though the debacle of the masquerade ball had not been punishment enough for her to contend with, that following week she had received a letter from Gareth Simmonds. A curt letter informing her that he wished to see her as there were certain matters concerning her work which he wished to discuss with her.
Her parents knew she had received the letter, and there had been no way she had been able to keep its contents a secret from them—although Katie had been sworn to secrecy over the worst of her excesses in skipping tutorials. If her mother and father had not actually stood over her while she went through the humiliation of telephoning Gareth Simmonds and making an appointment to see him, they had certainly left her in no doubt about their feelings of shock and disappointment at the way she had been abusing both her intelligence and the opportunity that going to Oxford had given her.
Furiously she had blamed Gareth Simmonds for adding to her problems, while having to give way to her parents’ firm insistence that they would drive her to Oxford for the interview, where she planned to stay for a few days in order to try to catch up with her work.
They had set out after breakfast, her mother patently unhappy and trying to control her tears and her father unexpectedly grim-faced and distant, and Louise had known what was going through both their minds. Was she, like her elder brother Max, going to turn out to be one of those Crightons who had inherited the same genes as her uncle David—the ‘S’ gene, as she and Katie had nicknamed it as teenagers. The ‘S’ standing for selfish, stupid and self-destructive.
She had wanted to reassure them, to tell them that there was nothing for them to worry about, but she had still been deep in shock herself, still traumatised not just by what she had done but by the frightening emotions which had given rise to her dangerous behaviour.
‘I can’t believe you could behave so appallingly,’ her father had told her grimly, his voice shaking slightly with emotion as he’d confronted her with the full enormity of what she had done after the ball.
‘What were you going to do? Leave Tullah in the maze until—’
‘No... No... I just...’ Tears streaming down her face, Louise had turned her head away from him, not able to bring herself to admit that she had been so obsessed by her need to make Saul see her as a woman, to make him love her as a woman, that she had simply seen Tullah as a hindrance who was standing in her way. Someone who was preventing Saul from seeing her, Louise, properly, and recognising that they were meant to be together.
Katie had travelled to Oxford with them to give her some moral support. She was also going to use the time to see friends who’d stayed up in Oxford to earn some money waiting at the local bars and restaurant. While her mother had fussed around her rooms, tidying up Louise’s discarded clothes and books, Katie had simply taken hold of her hand and gripped it tightly in a gesture of sisterly solidarity and love.
It was only when her mother had gone to shake her duvet and straighten up her untidy bed that Louise had finally moved, pushing her away and telling her fiercely, ‘I can do that...’
What had already happened was shameful enough. To have her mother move her pillow and discover that she slept with Saul’s purloined shirt beneath it would have been the ultimate humiliation.
When they were on their own Katie asked her awkwardly, ‘Do you...do you want to talk about it...?’
Angrily Louise shook her head.
‘Oh, Lou,’ Katie whispered sombrely, her voice full of pain and despair at what her twin had done, and love and pity for Louise herself.
‘Stop fussing,’ Louise commanded her.
‘I’m sure Professor Simmonds knows what we’ve been doing,’ Katie warned. ‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of the parents, but, as I told you, he’s definitely rumbled the fact that I’ve been standing in at his lectures for you,’ she went on. ‘Have you got the notes I did for you?’
‘Yes,’ Louise acknowledged shortly. ‘But how could he know of our switch? We’ve played tricks on our friends before now, and they’ve never realized.’
Katie waited several seconds before responding quietly, ‘It’s different with Professor Simmonds. He just seems to know. It’s almost as though he’s got some kind of sixth sense which allows him to tell the difference between us.’
‘Some sixth sense?’ Louise derided, scoffing. ‘He’s a professor of law, not a magician.’ But even so she was left feeling uneasy and on edge. Something about Gareth Simmonds challenged her to defy him and to get the better of him, and it infuriated her that so far all her attempts to do so had ended up in her ignominious defeat.
‘He called me Katherine,’ Katie reminded her. ‘Even though I was wearing your clothes and the others all believed I was you.’
‘Arrogant, self-assured pig,’ Louise muttered aggressively. ‘I loathe him.’
But nowhere near so much as she loathed herself.
After Katie had left to let her sister draw her thoughts together—they had made the decision that, although they both wanted to go up to Oxford, they did not want to live together, nor to be thought of as an inseparable pair, and so were taking different courses and rented separate accommodation—Louise picked up the course notes her twin had left for her. But although her eyes skimmed over their contents her brain was simply not capable of taking in their meaning. How could it, when it, like her emotions, was still struggling to come to terms with the death blow that events had dealt her?
She had been in love with Saul and had dreamed of him returning her feelings for as long as she had been capable of knowing what being in love meant, and it had simply never occurred to her that she would not ultimately win him. Why should it? Every other goal she had ever set herself she had reached, and it had never entered her head that securing Saul’s love would be any different.
Katie’s writing started to blur in front of her eyes. Shakily she flung the papers down, wrapping her arms around her body. She felt so cold inside, so empty, and yet at the same time filled with such an enormous weight of fear and pain.
Automatically she went over to her bed and felt beneath the pillow for Saul’s shirt, hugging it to her, closing her eyes and breathing in the warm Saul smell of him which still clung to it. But for once his faint but oh, so evocative scent failed to comfort her.
It wasn’t his shirt she wanted to hold, she acknowledged as she threw it away from her with a wrenching shudder. It was the man himself. Saul himself. But he had made it cruelly plain to her that that was never going to happen.
‘Saul, Saul, Saul...’ Helplessly she cried out his name, whispering it over and over again inside her head as the tears started to flow.
Worn out by the intensity of her emotions, she finally fell asleep, only to wake up in the early hours, cold and shivering, her eyes sore and hot
She was still fully dressed. She hadn’t eaten, but she knew that the very thought of food was totally repugnant to her. As she got up she caught sight of the discarded notes that Katie had given her, and her heart gave a small, anxious thud.
Gareth Simmonds wasn’t like old Professor Lewis. There was no way she would be able to sweet-talk him into overlooking the falling standard of her work—and Louise knew that it had been falling—but how could she be expected to concentrate on her studies when her thoughts, her heart, her whole self had been focused so totally on Saul?
‘Ah, Louise. Good. Thank you for returning to Oxford at short notice. Did your sister come with you?’
Despite the calm and apparently friendly tone of his voice as he invited her into his study, Louise was not deceived by her tutor’s apparent affability, nor by the way he’d emphasised the words ‘your sister’.
Her plan of action, before her arrival here in Gareth Simmonds’ study, had been to attempt to bluff things out, and to stick determinedly to the fiction that she had attended all his lectures and that he was at fault in mistaking her for Katie. But one look at his face, one brief clash between her own still sore and aching dark beautiful eyes and his far too clear and penetrative navy blue gaze, had been enough to alert her to the disastrous potential of such an unwise course of action.
‘Sit down,’ he instructed her when she failed to make any response—a first for Louise. She was not normally short of quick, sassy answers to even the most awkward questions.
It was a new experience for her to feel unnerved enough to hold her tongue and apprehensively await events. She could see a mixture of pity and irritation on his face that hurt her pride. How dared he pity her?
To her chagrin, she could feel her eyes starting to burn with the betraying sting of her emotions. Quickly she ducked her head. The last thing she wanted was for the urbane, controlled and hatefully superior man seated in front of her to guess that she wasn’t feeling anywhere near as sure of herself as she was trying to pretend, and that in fact, far from not giving a damn about what he was saying to her—as she was desperately trying to show—she was feeling thoroughly and frighteningly vulnerable, and shocked by the situation she had got herself into.
Blinking furiously to banish her tears, she was unaware of the fact that Gareth Simmonds had got up from behind his desk until she suddenly realised that he was standing beside her, the muscled bulk of his body casting not just a heavy shadow but inexplicably causing the air around her suddenly to feel much warmer.
‘Louise. The last thing I want to do is to make things hard for you. I know things haven’t been...easy for you and that emotionally...If there’s a problem that I...’
Immediately Louise stiffened. It had been bad enough having to cope with the mingled anger and pity of her family, but to have Gareth Simmonds offering her his lofty, condescending ‘understanding’ was more than she could bear.
‘The only problem I have right now is you,’ she told him aggressively, relieved to be able to stir up her own anger and use it to keep the humiliating threat of her tears at bay.
She thought she heard him catch a swiftly indrawn breath, and waited for his retaliation, but instead he simply said humorously, ‘I know that legally you’re an adult, Louise, but right now you remind me more of my six-year-old niece. I’m not your enemy, you know. I’m simply trying to help you.’
‘Don’t you dare patronise me. I am not your niece,’ Louise retaliated, standing up, her cheeks flushed with temper, fully intending to storm out of his office.
But before she could do so he stopped her, taking hold of her wrist and gently but determinedly pushing her back down into her chair. And then, before she could voice her anger, to her consternation he knelt down beside her chair, so that their eyes were level as he told her, ‘Stop making things so hard for yourself. You’ve got a first-class brain but it won’t do you any good whatsoever unless you stop letting it be overruled by that stiff-necked pride of yours. We all go through times in our lives when we need other people’s help, you know, Louise—’
‘Well, I don’t,’ Louise interrupted him rudely, adding fiercely, ‘And even if I did, the last person I would turn to for it would be you.’
There was a long pause before he finally said softly. ‘That’s a very interesting statement, Louise, and if I may say so, a rather dangerously challenging one.’
He was, Louise recognised with a sharp thrill of awareness, looking not into her eyes any more but at her mouth.
‘He is just so sexy,’ she remembered her fellow female students saying when they talked about him, and now, like someone hurtling recklessly into unexpected danger, she knew exactly what they meant.
As immediate as that recognition, and twice as powerful, was her panicky, virginal rejection of it. She didn’t want to see Gareth Simmonds as a sexually compelling and desirable man. She was only allowed to have that kind of reaction to Saul.
‘I want to go,’ she told him unsteadily. ‘I...’
‘Not yet. I haven’t finished talking to you,’ he had countered calmly. But he stepped back from her, as though somehow he had guessed just what she was feeling and wanted to make things just that little bit easier for her—which was totally impossible, of course. Louise knew that he disliked her every bit as much as she did him, and that he enjoyed making life difficult and unpleasant for her.
Holding her gaze, he said, ‘Very well, Louise, if you want to do this the hard way then that’s your choice. I do know what’s been going on, Louise, so don’t bother to waste my time or your own apparently failing brain power in trying to lie to me. In your shoes it would be pointless wasting the energy and intelligence you very obviously need for your studies on dreaming up unrealistic scenarios.
‘In my experience there are generally two reasons why a student suddenly fails to live up to his or her forecast academic expectations. One of those is that quite simply, and unfortunately for them, they can’t. By some fluke of fate and the examination board they’ve managed to get themselves onto a degree course they are in no way intellectually equipped to handle. The other...’
He paused and looked calmly at her. ‘The other is that for reasons of their own they have decided that they don’t want to, that there are other and no doubt more important matters to claim their attention. The solution in both cases is, however, the same. For those who don’t have the ability to continue with their course, to bring it to a swift end is, I think, the kindest way to end their misery. To those who have the ability, but who don’t wish to use it... It isn’t so much their misery one wants to bring to an end, but one’s own, and that of their fellow students...’
Louise stared at him in furious disbelief.
‘You’re threatening to have me sent down. You can’t do that,’ she told him flatly.
Gareth Simmond’s dark eyebrows had risen.
‘No? I rather think you’ll find that I can. But forgive me, Louise, I assumed that this must be what you wanted. After all...’ he picked up her course work and threw it disdainfully across his desk towards her ‘...to judge from this, continuing with your course is the last thing you really want to do.
‘Look,’ he went on, when Louise continued to glare at him. ‘If I’ve got it wrong, and the problem is that the work is too taxing for you, please tell me and I’ll try my best to get you transferred onto a less... demanding course. There are university standards,’ he reminded her, with deceptive gentleness, ‘and I’m afraid that-we do still strive for excellence rather than the mere pedestrian. If you feel that you’re not up to the work—’
‘Of course I’m up to it,’ Louise snapped angrily at him, her eyes flashing. How dared he stand there and suggest that she wasn’t up to the work? His predecessor had told her on more than one occasion, albeit perhaps in a roundabout way, that he considered her to be one of his most promising students. His predecessor... Louise clenched her fists.
‘When a student’s grades suddenly start to fall, some people believe that it’s more the teaching that’s at fault, rather than the pupil,’ she challenged him feistily.
Gareth eyed her thoughtfully.
‘Some people might,’ he agreed coolly. ‘But others might more intelligently suspect that the pupil’s nonappearance at nearly half her lectures and tutorials might have something to do with the situation. Wouldn’t you agree? I’m not a fool, Louise,’ he said, at her look of surprise. ‘I know very well that your sister has been standing in for you at my lectures.
‘Look,’ he continued, when Louise made no reply, ‘we could argue about this all day. The fact is, Louise, that you’ve been skipping lectures and missing out on vital course work. And you’ve lost weight,’ he told her abruptly, causing Louise to stare at him in astonishment. How on earth could he tell? Not even her twin or her mother had commented or appeared to notice—and with good reason, since she had taken to wearing loose baggy tops over her regulation jeans, knowing how much her mother would start to fuss if she thought for one moment that she wasn’t eating properly.
Olivia’s mother, although only a Crighton by marriage, had suffered from bulimia for many years, and her behaviour during the years of her marriage to David, her father’s brother, had left its scars on the family. Her own mother was fervently keen on healthy, sensible eating—mealtimes, until Louise had left home, had been old-fashioned family affairs, with everyone seated around the same table. Not that Louise had any problem with that—at least, not usually. She liked her food, and had a good healthy appetite, but just recently she had found herself unable to eat, too sick with longing and need, too hungry for Saul’s love to satisfy her appetite with anything else.
‘I appreciate that you’re having personal problems...’ Gareth said now.
But before he could finish, and suggest that she might benefit from talking them over with someone, she jumped in, demanding aggressively, ‘Who told you that? They—’
‘You did,’ Gareth interrupted her levelly as he studied her mutinous face. ‘You’ve lost weight You’re obviously not sleeping and you’re certainly not working,’ he reminded her quietly. ‘The facts speak for themselves. I don’t need a degree in psychology to interpret them.
‘Professor Lewis told me that he confidently expected you to get a double first. On the basis of your current course work I’d say you’d be lucky to make a third. It’s up to you, Louise. Either start giving your work some serious attention or...’
‘You’ll have me thrown out,’ Louise guessed bitterly.
Without giving him the opportunity to say any more, she snatched up her papers and stormed angrily out of his room.
God, but she hated him. Hated him!
‘Well, how did it go?’ Katie demanded. She had been waiting anxiously for Louise to return from her interview and now, as she came hurtling out into the quadrangle, almost running, Katie had trouble keeping up with her.
‘Slow down,’ she begged her, catching hold of her arm, ‘and tell me what he said.’
‘He said... He threatened to have me sent down,’ Louise told her flatly.
‘What? Oh, Lou, no! Did you tell him, explain...? Did you...?’
‘Tell him what?’ Louise asked bitterly.
‘About... about Saul... Did you explain? Did you—?’
Abruptly Louise stopped moving and turned round to face her twin.
‘Are you mad?’ she asked her grimly. ‘Tell Gareth Simmonds about Saul?’ She closed her eyes as she remembered the revolting pity she had seen in his eyes. How dared he pity her? How dared anyone?
‘He’s given me until Christmas to catch up...’
‘Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult.’ Katie tried to comfort her. ‘We’ve got the rest of the summer vac. And I can help you.’
‘I don’t want your help. I just want—’ Louise began angrily, and then stopped.
The force, the futility of her own feelings frightened her. She felt oddly sick and light-headed.
‘Why don’t we spend the evening together?’ she suggested to Katie, trying to make amends for her earlier bad temper. ‘We could have supper and share a bottle of wine. I’ve still got that case in my room that Aunt Ruth gave us at the beginning of term. She said it would come in useful for student parties...’
‘I’d love to but I’m afraid I can’t,’ Katie told her regretfully, shaking her head before explaining blushingly, ‘I...I’ve got a date and...’
‘A date? Who with?’ Louise questioned her sister.
But Katie shook her head and told her awkwardly, ‘Oh, it’s no one you know... Oh, Lou,’ she pleaded as she turned to give her twin a fierce hug, ‘I do understand how you must feel, but please, please try to forget about Saul.’
‘I wish to God I could,’ Louise told her chokily. ‘But I’m not to get the chance, am I? Not if I get sent down and I have to go back to Haslewich. Oh, Katie...’ It was on the tip of her tongue to plead with her twin to cancel her date and spend the evening with her, but then she remembered the look she had seen in Gareth Simmonds’ eyes when he had told her that he knew she had been using Katie to stand in at his lectures for her, and she resisted the impulse.
She was not, she assured herself fiercely, the selfish, thoughtless, self-absorbed person his look had implied. She would have done the same thing for Katie...if Katie had asked...
But Katie would not have asked, a small inner voice told her.
The summer afternoon had given way to evening. Louise stared tiredly around her room. Papers and textbooks covered every surface, and her head was swimming with facts she couldn’t assimilate; they floated in her brain like congealing fat on top of her mother’s home-made stock, coagulating and clogging.
Saul. Where was he now...? What was he doing...? She got up and walked into her small kitchenette. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten, but the mere thought of food made her feel sick.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Aunt Ruth’s wine stacked in a dusty corner. Dizzily she went and removed a bottle.
Aunt Ruth had quaintly old-fashioned ideas about how Oxford’s modern-day undergraduates lived. The wine she had chosen for her great-nieces had been carefully selected for its full-bodied richness. Ruth had imagined it would be drunk at the kind of under-grad gathering that featured in expensive TV dramas—adaptations of books set in a glittering gilded era.
Louise opened one of the bottles and poured herself a glass. She was not normally a drinker. Oh, she enjoyed a decent glass of wine with good food, and she had gone through the normal student ritual of drinking at the bar in the students’ union during the first few weeks at university, but that had simply been a rite of passage, something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
The red wine was rich and fruity, warming her throat and heating her cold, empty stomach.
Louise sank down onto the floor, owlishly studying the mass of paper she had spread all around her. Katie’s handwriting danced dizzily before her eyes. Frowningly she blinked as she tried to focus and concentrate, quickly finishing off her glass of wine.
It was making her feel distinctly better—lighter, number. It was even making it possible for her to think about Saul without that wrenching, tearing pain deep inside her, threatening to destroy her.
Saul...
As she walked erratically back from the kitchenette, having refilled her glass, Louise tried to summon up Saul’s beloved mental image and found, to her consternation, that she couldn’t—that for some reason his beloved, adored features had become amorphous and vague, sliding away before she could crystallise them into a hard image. Even more infuriatingly, the harder she tried to visualise him, the more impossible it became. Instead, the male image that came most easily to her mind’s eye was that of Gareth Simmonds.
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