The Perfect Seduction
PENNY JORDAN
The Crighton family has been the cause of scandal and heartache for Bobbie Miller—and she wants revenge. All she has to do is seduce the sinfully attractive Luke Crighton and the family secrets will be hers to expose. But the perfect seduction backfires when Bobbie becomes ensnared in her own dangerous trap.Follow the turbulent lives of the Crighton family in his dramatic sequel to A Perfect Family"Penny Jordan does an exciting job of delving into the depths of compulsive relationships."—Romantic Times"Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters."—Publishers Weekly"Jordan's record is phenomenal."—The Bookseller
Welcome to Penny Jordan’s miniseries featuring the Crighton family.
This is no ordinary family because, although the affluent Crightons might appear to have it all, shocking revelations and heartache lie just beneath the surface of their perfect, charmed lives.
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 (#u888e2c95-fc47-5720-9f2b-4bf303d3aa26)
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 Seduction
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Cover (#ub5556fb4-bfde-54fb-b7ab-41fd2186e4da)Excerpt (#ud3d79bfc-f30a-5956-a8a9-85ff70c8fcaf)About the Author (#ue01e5417-b450-56d6-9701-f4a6133122cc) The Crightons Title Page (#uc86804eb-8e50-5ce0-9af7-99f53fd51176) CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT EPILOGUE Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u888e2c95-fc47-5720-9f2b-4bf303d3aa26)
JOSS saw her first. He was on his way back from visiting his great-aunt Ruth in her house on Church Walk and she was standing in the churchyard studying the headstones, her head bent over one of them, a tumble of thick, glossy blonde curls obscuring her face. When she looked up, alerted to his presence by the sound of a small twig cracking under his foot, Joss stared at her in open wonder and awe.
She was tall, much much taller than him; at least six foot, he estimated.
‘And a couple of inches,’ she drawled in amusement as she watched the way he was assessing her height, ‘and then I guess you’d be somewhere roundabouts right. I-guess no one kinda likes to think of a woman being over six foot. Tell them you’re five-eleven, it’s okay and my, aren’t you lucky being so tall, but tell them you’re sixone going on six-two and they think you’re a freak. After all, what kinda right-thinking woman allows herself to grow too tall for most of your average guys.’
‘I don’t think you’re too tall,’ Joss told her gallantly, manfully squaring his own ten-year-old shoulders and looking up into her eyes.
And what eyes they were, surely the deepest, darkest blue that ever was. Joss had never seen eyes like them before. He had never seen anyone like her before.
She watched him gravely for a second before her mouth curled into a smile that made Joss’s insides turn to jelly and told him, ‘Why that’s mighty kind of you, but I guess I know what you’re really thinking ... that for a woman this tall finding a boy tall enough for me to look up to is kinda hard. Yes, well, you’re right,’ she went on with another dazzling smile, ‘and if you happen to know of any—’
‘I do,’ Joss told her quickly, already fiercely protective of her; already determined that no one should dare to criticise her or find her less than complete perfection, not even she herself. As he gazed at her, his eyes mirrored the intensity and immediacy of his first calf-love.
Speculatively she hesitated, not wanting to hurt him and yet at the same time wary of any involvement that might deflect her from her purpose in being there.
Haslewich might not be on any official tourist route like Chester, but she had been determined to visit it and, as yet, she had still not seen the remains of the castle and its wall, nor the newly sanitised salt-works that had recently been opened to the public as a tourist attraction, never mind the rest of the town’s historic sites. So far, in fact, all she had done was glance around the churchyard.
‘I’ve got two cousins,’ she heard Joss telling her. ‘Well, they aren’t exactly cousins,’ he acknowledged. ‘They’re really seconds, or maybe even thirds, I don’t know which. Aunt Ruth would know.
‘But anyway, James is six foot two and Luke is even taller and then there’s Alistair and Niall and Kit and Saul, too, I suppose, although he’s quite old—’
‘Gee...I’m really impressed,’ Bobbie interrupted him gently.
‘I could always introduce you to them,’ Joss offered enthusiastically. ‘That is, if you’re going to be here for a while...?’
He let the question hang.
‘Well, that kinda depends. You see ... gee ... I’m sorry but I don’t know your name. We haven’t introduced ourselves yet, have we? I’m Bobbie, short for Roberta,’ she told him whilst inwardly acknowledging ruefully that she really didn’t have the time to waste on this sort of thing, but he was just so appealing and not a day over ten or eleven. Give him another ten or fifteen years and he was going to be dynamite. She wondered absently what his cousins were actually like.
‘Bobbie...I like that,’ he told her and she hid her smile as the look in his eyes told her that whatever her name had turned out to be, it would have got an equally enthusiastic response. ‘I’m Joss,’ he added, ‘Joss Crighton.’
Joss Crighton. That altered everything. Thick eyelashes veiled her eyes.
‘Well now, Joss Crighton, suppose you and I go find a diner and get to know one another a little bit better and you can tell me all about these cousins of yours. Would they be Crightons, too?’ she asked him casually.
‘Yes, they are,’ he agreed. ‘But ... well, it’s a long story.’
‘I can’t wait to hear it. They’re my favourite kind,’ she assured him solemnly.
As he fell into step beside her, matching his own stride to her long-legged, elegantly feminine walk, Joss couldn’t help stealing awed glances at her.
She was wearing cream trousers and a shirt in the same colour with a camelly-coloured coat over the top; her blonde hair, now that she had lifted her head, hung down past her shoulders in thick, luxurious waves. Joss could feel his heart threatening to burst with pride and delight as he guided her through the town square and into one of the pretty, narrow streets that led off it.
‘Gee, is that really real?’ she paused to enquire as they passed a clutch of half-timbered Elizabethan buildings, huddled together for support.
‘Yes, they were built in the reign of Elizabeth I,’ Joss told her importantly. ‘The main structure of wooden beams is infilled with panels of wattle and daub—that’s sort of bits of branches held together with a mixture of straw, mud and other things,’ he told her kindly.
‘Uh-huh,’ Bobbie responded, refraining from telling him that she had majored in British history before switching her talents to a more modeRN and financially rewarding field.
‘We don’t actually have diners in this country,’ Joss informed her politely, ‘but there is a ... a place just down here....’
Bobbie hid her amusement. No doubt he was taking her to the town’s McDonald’s. Only, as she soon discovered, he wasn’t and she hesitated fractionally as he directed her attention to a very smart and up-market-looking wine bar, glancing thoughtfully from the sign above the doorway that stipulated that alcoholic beverages were not supplied to persons under eighteen to Joss’s very obviously nowhere near eighteen-year-old face and back again. She didn’t want to hurt his dignity, but at the same time she didn’t exactly relish the thought of being asked to leave because she was accompanied by a minor.
‘I can go in so long as I don’t have anything alcoholic to drink. I know the people who run it,’ he explained as he pushed the door open for her. At the same time he crossed his fingers behind his back as he tried to calculate just what he could buy with what was left of his week’s bus fare and spending money, which was all he had in his pocket, and whether or not Minnie Cooke, who ran the wine bar, would give him any credit.
Minnie’s brother, Guy, was in partnership with Joss’s mother in an antique business, which they ran. She recognised Joss as soon as he walked into the wine bar, her eyebrows lifting slightly as she looked from Joss to his companion.
‘Yes, Joss?’ she asked him cautiously.
‘I ... er ... we’d both like a drink and something to eat,’ he told her firmly, adding in a far less certain voice, ‘Minnie, could I have a word with you?’
‘Look, why don’t you let me make this my treat?’ Bobbie offered, guessing his dilemma. He was just at an age when any kind of public humiliation, no matter how slight, was a major issue, and the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt or slight him in any way, but Minnie Cooke, too, had summed up the situation and stepped into the breach.
‘Why don’t you find yourselves a table. I’ll send someone over to take your order. We can sort out the bill later,’ she added to Joss quietly, as Bobbie made her way to a table.
Whoever Joss’s companion was, she certainly was a stunningly beautiful woman, Minnie acknowledged as she dispatched one of her many nieces to take their order. She was most probably a guest they had staying with the family. Olivia, Joss’s cousin, was married to that American, wasn’t she?
‘Jade,’ she told her niece sharply, ‘go and serve table four.’
‘I’ll have a glass of Perrier with lemon and ice,’ Bobbie told Jade easily. ‘Nothing to eat, though.’
‘I’ll have the same.’ Joss couldn’t quite conceal his relief as he heard Bobbie order, beaming his approval at her across their shared table.
‘So,’ she prompted after Jade had brought them their drinks. ‘These cousins of yours.’ She put her elbow on the table and leaned her chin on her hand as she smiled at him.
Joss was completely bewitched. A huge lump filled his throat and he had the same indescribable feeling that he always got when he watched the young badger or fox cubs coming out for their first night’s play in the spring, watched over by their mothers. Like them, she touched his emotions in a way he simply didn’t have the words to describe.
Guiltily Bobbie nibbled on her bottom lip. She really ought not to be doing this. He was so young and so vulnerable. She was here for a purpose, she reminded herself sternly, and she couldn’t let herself be swayed from that self-chosen task now, especially not by...
‘I guess with their kinda height they must be sports jocks, huh,’ she joked to Joss as she banished her unwanted thoughts.
‘No,’ Joss told her seriously.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her; he had never seen anyone remotely like her. There couldn’t be anyone like her. She was unique, wonderful, perfect and certainly nothing like his own twin sisters or the other girls he knew. She was older than them, of course, just how much older he wasn’t quite sure but she must be twenty-something.
‘Luke and James are both barristers,’ he told her. ‘That is, they’re...’ He tried to think of the American term, suddenly realising that she might not fully understand just what a barrister was.
But apparently she did, because she shook her head and told him firmly, ‘Yes, I know ... lawyers, huh. Gee. I guess I’d have preferred it if they were sports jocks,’ she confessed, wrinkling her nose.
‘Well, they are, sort of,’ Joss assured her. ‘James played rugger for his school and so did Luke and Luke was an Oxford Blue, as well. That’s...that’s with rowing,’ he explained.
‘Rowing...’ Bobbie just managed to conceal her smile. When she had been doing her master’s, there had been a couple of guys over from Oxbridge working alongside her. ‘And you’re sure that they’re as tall as you say they are?’ she teased him mock-seriously.
Joss nodded his head.
‘And they’re really your cousins...?’
‘Third cousins, I think,’ Joss agreed.
‘Third cousins... Gee... I guess you’d better explain to me what that means,’ Bobbie coaxed him, mentally silencing the scornful inner voice that demanded to know why she needed to ask that question when she had a whole string of thirds and fourths of her own back home.
‘Well, I’m not sure exactly what it means,’ Joss began, ‘but you see in the beginning there was Great-Grandfather Josiah. He came from Chester with his wife to start a new solicitor’s practice here in Haslewich because of a quarrel he had had with his father and brothers in Chester and so the Crighton family here in Haslewich is separate from the Crightons who live in Chester, but we are still related. Luke and James and their sisters, Alison and Rachel, as well as Alistair, Niall and Kit all belong to the Chester branch of the family. Luke’s father, Henry, and his brother, Laurence, are both barristers, too, or at least they were. They’re now both retired. Luke is a QC, that’s Queen’s Counsel. That’s what Gramps wants Max to be, but I’m not sure—’
‘Whoa, hang on...hang on.’ Bobbie laughed. ‘Who are Gramps and Max? It’s all just too confusing...’ She shook her head.
‘It wouldn’t be,’ Joss assured her with great daring, ‘if you met them.’
‘Met them?’ Bobbie’s dense blue eyes widened in curiosity. ‘Well now, there’s a thought, but—’
‘We... my twin sisters are having a party this weekend to celebrate their eighteenth birthdays,’ Joss hurried on eagerly. ‘It’s going to be held at the Grosvenor... that’s a hotel in Chester. You could come and then you could meet them all....’
‘I could come...’ Bobbie frowned. ‘Well now, Joss, that’s mighty kind of you, but I don’t think...’
‘You could come as my friend,’ Joss told her. ‘It’s allowed...I am allowed to take a friend. It will be all right....’
A friend maybe, Bobbie conceded but she doubted that the type of friend his parents had in mind when making such an agreement was a twenty-six-year-old woman they didn’t know, especially when... Joss was watching her ... waiting, a look of mingled pleading and hope in his eyes, and she didn’t have the heart to disappoint him, and besides ... why look a gift horse in the mouth after all...?
‘And I’ll get to meet these tall cousins of yours, you say?’ she responded, pretending to be weighing the matter up.
Joss nodded his head.
‘And you think he’ll like me, do you, this Luke? Wasn’t that who you said was the taller of the two?’
‘Well, er...’ Suddenly Joss was flushing and unable to meet her eyes.
‘What is it?’ she quizzed him. ‘Doesn’t he like blondes?’
‘Oh yes, he does,’ Joss assured her fervently, immediately looking so mortified that she had to fight hard not to explode into laughter as she guessed what was wrong.
‘Ah...he likes blondes, but not great tall ones, is that it?’ she enquired gently. ‘He’s the type who prefers them small and shrimp-sized to match the size of his own brain. Poor guy, I guess it’s not his fault that he has such poor taste. So I guess I’ll just have to concentrate on James, won’t I? It’s all right,’ she told Joss with a kind smile. ‘When a girl gets to be my height she kinda learns not to be too fussy.’
‘James is very nice,’ Joss assured her.
‘But Luke’s the number-one guy, right?’ Bobbie guessed.
Joss paused judiciously for a moment before pronouncing, ‘James is more easygoing than Luke. He doesn’t... Luke always notices everything, even when you think he hasn’t, and then he—’
‘He lets you know about it, right?’ Bobbie offered shrewdly. ‘I guess he’s the domineering type, a control freak.’ She wrinkled her deliciously shaped nose, her mouth curling into a slightly cynical smile. ‘I kinda think of the two of them, I’d definitely prefer James and—’
‘No...no, you wouldn’t,’ Joss felt bound to tell her. ‘You see, girls like Luke,’ he explained carefully and then added, ‘Olivia, she’s my real cousin and she’s married to an American. She says Luke’s a real-life personification of a tall, dark and handsome grade A male with just a hint of brooding sexuality thrown in and that it’s no wonder he can have his pick of the female population.’
‘He sounds a real wow,’ Bobbie muttered grimly.
Joss gave her an uncertain look before offering helpfully, ‘Olivia says that he would be an awful lot happier if he was either less spectacularly sexy or less intelligent.’
As she digested this comment before making any response, Bobbie reflected inwardly that Olivia, whoever she was, would probably be discomfited to realise that her comment, which had obviously been intended for an adult audience, had been overheard by Joss’s perceptive young ears.
‘Beauty and brains,’ she marvelled in a sweetly derisive voice whilst keeping these thoughts to herself. ‘Looks like I’m going to have some competition. Perhaps I’d better go for the other one after all.’
Joss pondered the matter. ‘Well, if you come with me to the twins’ birthday party, you’ll be able to see them both,’ he suggested winningly.
For a second, Bobbie hesitated, her natural essential kindness and honesty overcoming the determination that had brought her so many thousands of miles. It wasn’t really fair to use Joss, who was quite plainly innocent of any guile or self-seeking in what quite possibly could turn out to be a very messy situation indeed, but if she didn’t... His unexpected invitation offered her a short cut that was really too generous a gift of fate for her to ignore and besides...
‘You are still coming, aren’t you?’ Joss pressed her anxiously. Still?
‘Well, I’d like to,’ Bobbie agreed, ‘but are you sure your family won’t—’
‘Mum’s already said that I can bring a friend and it’s a buffet meal and not a sit-down thing and there’ll be plenty to eat and...’
Almost tripping over his words in his haste to get them out, Joss raced on, whilst Bobbie listened chin in hand and hid a small, rueful smile. He really was very young.
‘And it’s at a hotel in Chester, this party...?’
‘Yes, the Grosvenor, you’ll like it,’ Joss assured her. ‘It’s part owned by the Duke.’ His forehead suddenly furrowed. He had a vague awareness that a series of complex arrangements had been made to ferry all the guests to Chester and it struck him that it would hardly be gentlemanly or gallant to suggest that his guest make her way to the hotel on her own, but on the other hand... ‘Er...I don’t know where you’re staying,’ he began manfully.
‘That’s okay,’ Bobbie returned easily, immediately understanding his dilemma. ‘I know where the Grosvenor is and I can make my own way there.’ No need to tell him that she was actually staying in the hotel herself, even if the small deceit, so unfamiliar to her normal openness, did sit uncomfortably on her conscience.
‘Oh good, I could meet you in reception,’ Joss offered. ‘Mum wants us to be there early and the thing isn’t due to start until eight so I could meet you then if you like.’
‘Eight will be fine with me,’ Bobbie assured him.
They had both finished their drinks. Joss checked furtively in his pocket; with luck he would just about have enough money to pay for them.
‘Until Saturday, then,’ Bobbie told him as they parted company outside the wine bar.
‘Until Saturday,’ Joss agreed and then flushed as he asked her anxiously, ‘You will be there, won’t you?’
‘You can bet on it,’ Bobbie promised him.
Thoughtfully Bobbie made her way back to where she had parked her hire-car. Fate, it seemed, was on her side. Her walking pace increased as she glanced at her watch to check what time it would be back home; there was a phone call she had promised to make.
‘James, have you got a moment?’
James looked up as his elder brother walked into his office. In anyone else’s company James would automatically have attracted the discreet attention and admiration of the women who saw him. Six foot two with the strong, broad-shouldered body of an ex-Rugby player, he was boyishly handsome in a way that was accentuated by the thick, soft brown hair that flopped over his forehead and the generous warmth of his smile. At thirty-two he looked younger; he was the kind of man who women knew instinctively would be kind to animals, children and old ladies, and inevitably they wanted to mother him.
No woman in her right mind on the young side of forty, and a good many of those over it, felt in the least like mothering Luke.
‘I wonder why it is that whenever I think of Luke the word that most easily comes next to mind is lust?’ Olivia had once asked James ruefully.
James had simply shaken his head.
There was no doubt that with Luke being almost six foot four and having shoulders even more powerfully broad than his own, the classic Crighton profile with its strong nose and even stronger jaw (which had somehow passed him by), combined with very dark brown almost black hair and smoky grey eyes, had the kind of effect on women that could only be likened to unexpectedly swallowing a strong alcoholic drink. First came the shock of its unexpected power in the nervous system, followed by the lethal combination of dizziness and euphoria linked to a dangerous diminishment of logic and self-control.
And the pity of it was that rather than enjoying the effect he had on the female sex, Luke, whilst not oblivious to it, was certainly dismissively contemptuous of it—and, it had to be said, of the women who reacted to it.
‘I wanted to have a word with you about the Marshall case before I leave for Brussels.’
‘You haven’t forgotten that we’ve got the Haslewich do on at the Grosvenor this weekend, have you?’ James asked him.
Luke shook his head as he perched on the comer of his brother’s desk. Both of them were qualified barristers working from the same set of chambers as their father and uncle used to, but it was Luke who was the most senior, having been appointed a Queen’s Counsel the previous year, one of the youngest in the country, a fact about which his father had lost no time bragging to his cousin, Ben Crighton, in Haslewich.
Henry and Ben were a generation removed from the original quarrel that had split the Crighton family, but they still continued the subtle interfamily rivalry their fathers had begun, much to Luke’s irritation.
He had far more important things to worry about than outdoing his cousin, Max Crighton, and he had no wish to take up the baton of family competitiveness and run with it even if Max was showing signs of wishing to do so.
‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ he agreed, ‘although I can’t say that I’m particularly looking forward to it.’
‘Mmm...well, it certainly won’t be boring,’ James commented. ‘Max is coming up from London with his wife.’
‘Mmm...’ was Luke’s only comment.
‘He’s doing pretty well for himself by all accounts,’ James continued. ‘He’s got a good tenancy, though. You’d be hard put to find a better set of chambers, and—’
‘He’s got a good tenancy?’ Luke broke in dryly, emphasising the word ‘he’s’. ‘I rather thought his sudden advancement into the upper echelons of one of London’s most prestigious sets of chambers owed more to the efforts of his father-in-law than to Max himself.’
‘You’ve never really liked him, have you?’ James asked his brother.
‘No, I haven’t,’ Luke agreed, coldly adding, ‘it’s hard to think of him as Jon’s son. If David had been his father...’
‘That was an odd business, wasn’t it?’ James said. ‘The way David just upped and left like that after his heart attack, disappearing...’
‘Mmm...I dare say he had his reasons,’ Luke commented obliquely. He had heard certain rumours about David—none of them ever verified, but he had sensed that despite the strenuous and meticulous efforts that Jon had made to track down his twin brother, he was almost relieved not to have been able to find him.
In Luke’s opinion Jon had always been the better one of the pair even if Jon’s own father had always shown a public and very marked preference for David. And now Jon and Jenny’s twin daughters were eighteen. God, that made him feel old. He was virtually twice their age, and as his great-aunt Alice had reminded him pugnaciously the last time he had seen her, fast approaching an age where, in her words, he ran the danger of no longer being seen as an eligible bachelor but rather an unpleasant misanthrope.
He knew that he was commonly considered to be aloof and disdainful; that he had the reputation of being overly arrogant, too sure of himself and dismissive of women who made a play for him; that he was, in fact, immune to the vulnerability of falling in love.
Not so. He had once been in love and very, very deeply, or so he had thought at the time, but she had married someone else and lived to regret it. She had told him this when she had come to see him, tears filling her eyes as she confessed that her marriage was over and that she needed his help to find a good divorce lawyer.
‘Have you thought long and hard about what you’ll be giving up,’ he had asked her seriously.
‘Of course I have,’ she had cried, pushing trembling fingers into her hair as she went on tearfully, ‘but do you really think that any of that matters. That his wealth, his title, that any of it means anything when I’m so unhappy...?’
‘You married him,’ he pointed out bluntly to her.
‘Yes,’ she had agreed, her mouth trembling as much as her hand had done earlier. ‘At eighteen I believed I loved him. At eighteen you can convince yourself of anything you want to believe. He seemed so...’
‘So rich,’ he offered.
She had given him a hurt look.
‘I didn’t stop to think. He swept me off my feet. I thought then you should never have let me go, Luke,’ she told him quietly.
He paused for a moment before answering her evenly, ‘As I remember it, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. You told me that you loved him and that you didn’t love me.’
‘I was lying,’ she whispered huskily. ‘I did love you, very, very much, but...’
‘You loved him more,’ he offered cynically.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, tears filling her eyes, ‘or at least I believed that I did. Please help me, Luke,’ she implored him. ‘I don’t know who else to turn to.’
‘Go and see this man—he’s a first-class divorce lawyer,’ he told her stiffly, scribbling a name and address down on a piece of paper and handing it to her without looking at her.
That had been six weeks ago. He had not seen or heard from her since, but he had not stopped thinking about her, remembering... She had been eighteen to his twenty-two; all Eve, all woman, teasing him, taunting him, laughing at him as he was unable to prevent himself from showing how he felt about her. It had been his first real experience of the intensity of emotional and physical love. And his last. He had been determined on that. Never again would any woman be allowed to put him through what she had—the pain, the self-contempt, the sheer intensity of emotions that had led only to the destruction of his pride and the humiliation of watching her walk away with another man. Any woman ... no matter who she might be.
Oh yes, he had seen the look in Fenella’s eyes as she sat opposite him and had guessed just what she was thinking. Her husband, despite his title and his wealth, or maybe because of them, was not the kind of man a woman would dream of having as her lover. A man’s man was generally how others described him, if they wanted to be tactful and generous. Overweight, boorish, self-opinionated, a traditionalist who said openly that he believed a woman’s place was in the home and, his being closer now to fifty than forty, it was understandable, Luke acknowledged cynically, why Fenella might prefer a generous divorce settlement and the chance to find herself a more congenial and appealing man. But that man was most definitely not going to be him.
Jenny was putting the final touches to the icing on the twins’ decorative birthday cake when Joss came bursting in. Predictably, Louise had announced earlier in that slightly bossy way that characterised her that they did not want their cake decorated with sickly, yukky flowers and things.
‘What do you want, then?’ Jenny had asked her, slightly exasperated. Both the girls were due to start university at the beginning of the autumn term and whilst she knew she was going to miss them, as she had commented ruefully to Jon, there were going to be certain advantages to their departure. The lack of arguments over their constant breaking of what Jenny considered to be a perfectly reasonable and even overgenerous curfew during school term time was one thing, and the other was the ability to go into her wardrobe without discovering that the very thing she wanted to wear was missing, presumed grubby and crumpled on the twins’ bedroom floor.
‘Something serious and meaningful,’ Louise had responded in answer to her mother’s wry question. She had given her father a lofty look as he teased, ‘Oh, you mean something like the Benjamin Bunny cake you drove us all crazy over...?’
‘That was years ago,’ she protested, turning her back on him as she informed her mother, ‘No. What we want is something that shows what Katie and I are planning to do with our lives.’
‘Oh, you mean a replica of your mother’s car with the petrol tank empty and a scraped front number plate,’ Jon offered helpfully.
‘No, that is not what I mean,’ Louise informed her father frostily, adding, ‘and anyway it wasn’t me who cracked the number plate, and as for the petrol... Do you know how much petrol actually costs?’
‘I have a fair idea, yes,’ Jon agreed mildly, causing Jenny to remind them both firmly that they were straying off the subject.
‘Oh, you know, Mum... something with a bit of a legal flavour to it.’
In the end, having got no further help from either of her daughters, Jenny had opted for a huge, plain iced cake decorated in darker icing with the scales of Justice.
‘Mum,’ Joss demanded, throwing down his school bag before going straight to the fridge and opening the door.
‘Joss, supper will be ready in half an hour,’ Jenny reminded him firmly, adding, ‘and you’re late. Where have you been?’
‘Mum, you know you said I could take a friend to the party on Saturday?’ Joss reminded her, ignoring her question.
‘I did say that, yes,’ Jenny agreed cautiously, ‘but...’
As a special treat Jon had announced that he had booked a large suite at the Grosvenor so that the girls and Jenny could get changed without worrying about crumpling their dresses on the journey from home and so that they did not have to travel back again until the morning after the party. Now Jenny, who had been planning to make sure that Joss went up to bed well before the party ended, wondered if they were going to be called upon to provide accommodation for Joss’s friend, as well.
‘You know we’re all staying overnight at the Grosvenor, Joss?’ she warned her son, ‘and I don’t know if your friend—’
‘That’s all right. I...I’ve arranged to meet them there,’ Joss told her hurriedly.
‘Oh well, in that case,’ Jenny agreed, relieved. There were innumerable things she still had to do and typically Louise had suddenly started being difficult about the outfit she had decided to wear, claiming that she had never wanted a dress at all and that she would much rather have worn trousers.
‘Mum, about my friend...’ Joss began excitedly.
But Jenny shook her head and told him impatiently, ‘Not now, Joss, please. I’ve got a hundred and one things left to do and you really ought to go and make a start on your homework before supper.’
‘But, Mum,’ Joss protested.
‘Homework,’ Jenny commanded firmly, adding, ‘and while you’re upstairs you might remind Jack that he still hasn’t produced his sports kit and if he wants it clean for football practice tomorrow...’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Joss agreed, going through the kitchen and heading for the stairs and the large, comfortably furnished bedroom-cum-study he shared with his cousin Jack, who had been living with them since the break-up of his parents’ marriage and the disappearance of his father, David.
Jack’s mother, Tania, after a long period of rehabilitation at a special centre for the treatment of people with eating disorders, was now living with her parents on the South Coast. Not yet entirely recovered from the years of suffering from bulimia, she had asked Jenny and Jon if Jack, her son, could continue to live with them.
Jenny had been happy to agree. In the time that he had been with them, Jack had become almost another son, the blood tie between him and her own children very close; their fathers were twins and everyone, but most importantly Jack himself, felt that it was better for him to remain in his present stable and familiar surroundings than to be uprooted to move south to live with his mother and maternal grandparents.
Although only two years separated them in age, at twelve going on thirteen to Joss’s ten, Jack had already entered puberty whereas Joss had not. Both boys got on well together, but Jack was now virtually a teenager growing towards young manhood, whilst Joss in many ways was still a boy, and being male, neither of them was inclined to confide in the other. Since Jack was engrossed in reading a sports magazine when Joss walked into their shared bedroom, the younger boy saw no reason to tell him about his encounter with Bobbie or inform him of the fact that he had invited her to his sisters’ party.
Possessed of a sunny, happy temperament with little inclination to brood or go looking for trouble and a logical way of reasoning things, it simply hadn’t occurred to Joss that his parents might not view with equanimity the discovery that his ‘friend’ and their guest at the party was not another ten-year-old boy but, in fact, a twenty-six-year-old woman.
It had occurred to Bobbie, though, as she ruefully admitted during the course of her telephone call home, surreptitiously timed so that she could speak to her sister when no one else was about to overhear them.
‘It’s the perfect access to the family and right into the heart of it, Sam,’ Bobbie admitted a little reluctantly. ‘I couldn’t believe it when he introduced himself to me as Joss Crighton.’
‘And how old did you say this kid was?’ Samantha Miller demanded of her sister.
‘I’m not sure, somewhere around ten or maybe eleven. He’s a real cutie, huge brown eyes and thick hair.’
‘Sounds great,’ Samantha commented enthusiastically.
Bobbie laughed. ‘Oh, he is!’
‘And you say he’s asked you to his sisters’ eighteenth birthday party?’
‘Mmm...’
‘What else did you find out? Did you—’
‘No, not yet,’ Bobbie interrupted her sister quickly. ‘We were a bit public for me to cross-question him too deeply and we might have been overheard. I don’t want anyone getting suspicious of either of us.’
‘Cross-question, I like that,’ Samantha told her grimly.
‘How are things at home?’ Bobbie asked, her voice suddenly becoming slightly tense and anxious. ‘How is Mom?’
‘She doesn’t have a clue,’ Samantha assured her, ‘although even if I say so myself I am doing rather a good job of running interference for you. The first couple of days you were gone she was going crazy, asking me if I knew where you were, if there was some man... Poor Mom, she’s just so desperate to get at least one of us married off.’
‘What did you tell her?’ Bobbie asked.
‘I said you’d mentioned something about needing to get away now that you aren’t seeing Nat any more.’
‘Oh thanks. So now she’ll be thinking I’m suffering from a broken heart,’ Bobbie told her sister indignantly.
‘Having her thinking that is better than having her guess the truth. When is this party by the way? We don’t have a lot of time, not if...’
‘No, I know. It’s on Saturday, at the Grosvenor in Chester where, as good luck has it, I’m staying. It will be the perfect opportunity, not just for me to find out as much as I can from Joss, but also to study the family in general.’
‘Do you think you-know-who will be there?’ Samantha asked, her voice suddenly tensing and becoming brittle with hostility and anger.
‘I don’t know.’
‘When I think of what they’ve done, the unhappiness they’ve caused...’
‘I know, I know....’ Bobbie paused, then said, ‘Look, Sam, I’d better go. I’ll ring you after the party and tell you what I’ve managed to find out.’
She was just about to replace the receiver when she remembered something she had omitted to tell her sister.
‘I nearly forgot,’ she hastened to add. ‘You’ll never guess what...’ Laughing ruefully, she proceeded to tell Samanatha about Joss’s descriptions of, and revelations about, his Chester cousins.
‘What? Cousin Luke sounds like a real ape,’ came Samantha’s immediate and gutsy response, ‘the type that goes for cutesy, brain-dead little blonde bimbos he can wear like a Band-Aid on his pathetic inadequacies. Personally, I’ve always preferred to judge a man by the size and warmth of his heart, not—’
‘Sam...’ Bobbie warned her sister, laughing.
‘What? Oh! What a thing to suggest. I meant size as in height and not...’ Samantha began in wounded dignity, only to break down in a fit of giggles. ‘Well, good luck with Cousin Luke,’ she teased her sister before ringing off. ‘He sounds the perfect match for you, Bobbie, everything you’ve always wanted in a man.’
‘Doesn’t he just,’ Bobbie agreed with heavy irony.
After she had replaced the receiver, she walked over to her window and stared unseeing through the glass. It was no mere whim or casual impulse that had brought her to England, to Chester, to Haslewich, but rather a quest that had been a part of both her and her twin sister’s lives for as long as they had been old enough to understand the story of their mother’s life.
Sombrely Bobbie walked back towards the bed. She supposed she would have to find something suitable to wear for this party. It had been difficult enough getting away without her mother asking what she was up to and without worrying about packing any kind of formal evening wear; as she knew, to her cost, when you were six foot plus, buying off the peg wasn’t always an option.
In the small New England town where Bobbie and her sister had grown up, people were accustomed to their height; after all, it was a family trait. Dad was nearly six-five and his parents were tall, as well, and so were all their paternal kith and kin who were scattered around the area.
Stephen Miller’s family could trace their ancestors right back to one of the founding Pilgrim families and it had not been easy for their mother to gain their acceptance in view of her own family background or rather... Fiercely Bobbie checked her thoughts. As Sam had told her before she left the States, it was high time that justice was done, the tables turned, and a certain person made to see just what they had lost through their pride and cruelty, and her own niggling sense of reluctance and unease had to be severely restrained.
CHAPTER TWO (#u888e2c95-fc47-5720-9f2b-4bf303d3aa26)
‘JENNY dear, I’m awfully sorry but I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to make it on Saturday after all.’
‘Oh, Aunt Ruth,’ Jenny protested into the telephone receiver. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Ruth assured her niece by marriage firmly. ‘It’s just that Olivia and Caspar’s babysitter has let them down at the last minute and so I’ve offered to babysit Amelia for them instead. I don’t think they’ve had a single night out since Amelia arrived eight months ago.’
‘No, they haven’t,’ Jenny agreed. ‘Jon tried to persuade Olivia not to rush back to work, but you know how conscientious she is, she insisted. At least during the summer holiday, Caspar has been at home to look after her.’
‘Mmm... I know she’s beginning to get a bit anxious because they haven’t managed to find another suitable nanny as yet.’
‘Poor girl, it must be so hard for her. I know how much she loves her work but I’d have hated to have to let someone else bring up my children especially when they were babies. When you read these stories of mothers giving up their babies, I often wonder... I know it’s something that I could never bring myself to do. Ruth, are you still there?’ she asked anxiously into the silent receiver.
‘Yes, I’m still here,’ Ruth answered crisply, adding, ‘What you say is all very well, Jenny, but some women just don’t have any option.’
‘No, I realise that,’ Jenny agreed sombrely, catching the faint note of criticism in Ruth’s voice.
She had been lucky both in her marriage and more importantly in her husband, Jenny acknowledged as she replaced the receiver, very lucky.
‘You’re looking very pensive,’ Jon commented as he came into the bedroom where Jenny had just been finishing packing their overnight cases when the phone rang. ‘Not more problems?’
‘Not exactly. Ruth just rang. She isn’t going to be able to make it. She’s offered to babysit for Olivia and Caspar. Apparently their original babysitter has let them down. I rather annoyed her, I think.’
‘You?’ Jon gave his wife an affectionate look as he took her in his arms. ‘I doubt that, my love. You’re far too kind-natured to annoy anyone.’
‘Mmm... I did make rather a sweeping generalisation, I suppose,’ she told him, explaining what had happened.
‘Ah well, you know how hard Aunt Ruth has campaigned to raise funds for the town’s special new mother and baby home.’
‘Yes,’ Jenny agreed. ‘It’s a very innovative idea. Ruth is determined that it won’t be anything like the old unmarried mother and baby homes where girls used to be banished in disgrace if they were pregnant, and where the staff tried to persuade them to give their babies up for adoption.’
‘To be fair, in those days it was generally believed that such children were better off being adopted,’ Jon reminded her fair-mindedly.
‘Mmm ... I realise that. I suppose I just can’t help thinking that if you hadn’t married me when you did...’
‘I know,’ Jon told her gently, holding her tighter, ‘and I know, as well, that you are as dedicated to raising money for this home as Ruth is. I ought to—you’ve persuaded me to part with enough money to help fund it.’
‘Well, it is a good cause,’ Jenny protested. ‘We’ve bought the house and the land, and once it’s been converted into small, private bedsitting rooms, we can give both the girls and their babies a protected environment.’
‘Shall I take these cases down?’ Jon asked, reminding her. ‘You said you wanted to be at the Grosvenor early.’
‘Yes, I know.’ She glanced uncertainly at the telephone. ‘I haven’t rung Queensmead today, and—’
‘Dad will be fine,’ Jon assured her firmly. ‘He’s got Max and Madeleine with him, remember?’
‘I know,’ Jenny replied worriedly, ‘but you know how impatient Max can be.’
‘Yes, I do, but Madeleine will make sure that Dad’s all right. You know how fond of him she is.’
‘And him of her. It’s ironic, really, isn’t it, that the only woman he really approves of is one who isn’t related to him by blood?’
‘That’s because Madeleine is the perfect stereotype of what Dad believes a woman should be,’ Jon told her dryly.
‘She’s a lovely person,’ Jenny countered. ‘Kind, gentle, generous and...’
‘Vulnerable?’ Jon suggested.
They looked at one another in silence.
‘I must admit I was surprised when we first met her after Max announced they were getting married.’
‘Mmm...me, too. I wonder if he’d have been as keen to marry her if her father hadn’t been who he is,’ Jon speculated cynically.
‘Oh, Jon, don’t say that,’ Jenny protested. ‘She loves him so much.’
‘Too much, perhaps?’ Jon asked her.
‘She seems so happy.’
‘She’s happy because Max is happy and Max is happy because at the moment he’s getting what he wanted. Whether or not he’ll continue to be happy is another matter.’
Again they exchanged looks. Max might be their son but in temperament and outlook he was much closer and always had been to his uncle David than to either of them, although it hurt them both to admit it. Jenny knew that Max was a selfish and egotistical man who was ruthlessly determined in whatever he did.
Half past seven. Bobbie glanced up from her secluded position in the hotel lobby. She had tucked herself away in a shadowy corner so that she could see everyone who came into the hotel without being noticed herself—not an easy feat given her height and the colour and luxurious vibrancy of her hair.
She had already seen Joss arrive with another slightly older boy and a couple who must be his parents. Joss’s hair was slicked back and the formality of his clothes made him look younger rather than older. She had hidden a smile.
Now the early arrivals for the party were beginning to gather in the lobby—a cheerful, happy crowd spanning the generations, who quite plainly all seemed to know one another from the greetings they were exchanging.
Joss’s parents arrived back downstairs, his mother looking elegant in a dress that Bobbie’s judicious and expert inspection informed her was very probably an Armani. Nice, very nice, she acknowledged as she watched the way the cream crêpe moved elegantly with Jenny’s body.
The diamonds in her ears and around her neck were quite obviously real, and to judge both from the venue they had chosen for their twin daughters’ birthday celebration and the appearance of their guests, financial hardship was not a problem that afflicted the Crighton family. But then, she had already known that, hadn’t she? Already known all about their pride and arrogance, their belief that they were somehow better than anyone else and most certainly better than... She frowned as a fresh batch of guests arrived, her attention caught, oddly enough, not by the imposing height of the man walking so purposefully into the hotel, but rather the air, the aura of tautly controlled energy and impatience he seemed to bring with him.
‘Luke,’ she heard Joss’s father exclaiming as he went forward to welcome him with a smile and a handshake, ‘and James,’ he added warmly as he turned to the man following behind him.
Luke and James. She had known who he was immediately, of course, Bobbie acknowledged, unaware of the dangerous allocation and use of the word ‘he’ in the singular rather than ‘they’ in the plural.
He was every bit as tall as Joss had told her, she admitted, and as for the rest...certainly he was an extremely physically powerful-looking and charismatically masculine-looking man, but she detected a certain hardness and hauteur...a coldness about him that in her view more than outweighed the appeal of his really too stunning good looks. There was, after all, such a thing as overkill, and rather like a strong perfume the effect of his physical magnetism was too overpowering to be attractive, a turn-off rather than a turn-on, she decided disparagingly.
The tiny, fragile-looking little blonde clinging to his arm obviously didn’t share her view, though. She was gazing up at him adoringly and extremely possessively, Bobbie noticed as Luke turned to introduce her to Joss’s parents, and on closer inspection she was not quite so young as her girlishly feminine silk dress seemed to proclaim. In her thirties rather than her twenties, Bobbie guessed, and very adept at using her delicacy to create the impression of being somewhat younger. He would, of course, go for that type. Bobbie’s contempt for him grew.
Luke was having a hard time keeping the impatience out of his voice as he introduced Fenella to Jon and Jenny. He was still infuriated at the way she’d managed to inveigle herself into being included in their party, tricking James into agreeing to pick her up by giving him the impression, deliberately so, Luke knew, that he had invited her as his partner, when in fact...
‘What is she doing here?’ he had demanded half an hour earlier when, as arranged, James had called round to collect him and he had seen Fenella sitting demurely in the back of James’s car.
‘She rang me up and asked me to collect her,’ James had informed him, looking both upset and uncomfortable when Luke had told him pithily that he had been deceived and that there was no way he had ever intended asking Fenella.
‘Oh, but she said—’ he began, but Luke cut him short.
‘I don’t give a damn what she said, James,’ he snapped testily. ‘I am telling you that she tricked you and that I most certainly did not invite her to come with us. God knows how she even knew about tonight in the first place.’
‘Oh, I think that’s probably my fault,’ James confessed. ‘I bumped into her in town while you were in Brussels and we got talking and I mentioned the party. She said she knew all about it and that you were taking her and...’ James looked uncomfortable. ‘I know that you and she...and I thought... well...’
‘You know that she and I what?’ Luke demanded grimly, answering his own question by continuing, ‘We dated for a while a long time ago, yes, a long time ago,’ he underlined. ‘She approached me for advice about her divorce and that is the only kind of contact I have had with her since her marriage, and that’s the only kind of contact I intend to have with her. She’s poison, James,’ Luke warned his younger brother. ‘Take my word for it.’
Poison she indeed was, and infuriated though he might be by the way she was clinging to him like a piece of ivy, good manners and a very male disinclination to cause a scene prevented Luke from disengaging her arm from his and walking off and disowning her.
‘Fenella...what’s it,’ Jon commented quietly to Jenny after they had disappeared to remove their coats. ‘Isn’t she the one that Luke used to...?’
‘Mmm...I think so,’ Jenny agreed.
‘I thought she was married to Sir Peter Longton,’ Jon remarked.
‘She is,’ Jenny confirmed. ‘Or rather she was. Apparently they’re going to divorce.’
‘Well...I doubt that will please Luke!’
Jenny shot her husband a questioning look. ‘Won’t it? They are here together.’
‘They are certainly both here but, reading Luke’s body language, they are not, definitely not, together,’ Jon informed her. ‘And if she is hoping that Luke will prove as malleable as a man as he was as a boy, I suspect she’s going to be doomed to disappointment.’
As Jon and Jenny gently swept their guests towards the private suite they had reserved for the party, Joss started to search the foyer anxiously. It was eight o’clock.
‘Joss,’ Jenny called out as she saw her youngest child hovering by the entrance.
‘I won’t be a moment,’ Joss told her, excitement giving way to disappointment and anxiety as he searched the foyer a second time for his new friend.
Jenny frowned. She had almost forgotten that Joss had told her that he wanted to invite a friend.
‘Come on, Mum,’ Louise demanded.
Jenny gave Joss an uncertain look. He was, after all, only ten years old, but the lobby of the Grosvenor was surely a safe enough place for him to be allowed to wait for his friend on his own for a few minutes whilst she checked that everything was in order in their private suite.
Bobbie waited until Jon and Jenny had disappeared before standing up and quietly making her way across to where Joss stood anxiously staring towards the main hotel doors. She touched him lightly on the arm, causing him to jump and then turn round, his anxious expression giving way to one of beaming delight as he saw her.
‘You’re here. I thought you must have changed your mind.’
‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ Bobbie assured him.
He was so kind and open, so ... so young and vulnerable; the lessons life taught him now would be indelibly etched on his personality. Did she really want it on her conscience that she...?
‘Come on,’ Joss was urging her. ‘It’s this way.’
It was not her job to take on the responsibility for Joss’s emotions, she reminded herself sternly as she turned to follow him. She was here for a different purpose, a very different purpose, which reminded her...
As Joss pushed open the double doors and stood back for her to precede him into the large, well-packed room, she turned to him and commented, ‘My, that sure is a lot of people. I guess all your family must be here.’
‘Almost,’ Joss agreed, his eyes clouding a little as he informed her, ‘Great-Aunt Ruth isn’t here, though.’
‘Great-Aunt Ruth,’ Bobbie marvelled after a second’s pause during which she kept her eyes firmly on the elegantly decorated room with its artistic and impressive swags and garlands of natural greenery and flowers. She had a small gift in that direction herself and because of it was well aware of the time and skill that must have gone into first conceiving the idea for the decorations and then putting it into practical use in order to achieve such an apparently artless and ‘natural’ effect. ‘She sounds very formidable. I guess she’s not a party person....’
‘She was going to come.’ Joss informed her, ‘but she’s babysitting for Olivia and Caspar instead. That’s them over there,’ he told Bobbie helpfully, indicating a couple who stood talking to Joss’s parents.
The woman was about her own age, Bobbie guessed, in her mid- to late twenties, the man with her a little older. She was stylishly dressed, her hair cut in an immaculate shiny bob, and Bobbie studied her carefully before turning back to Joss.
‘I do wish Aunt Ruth were here,’ Joss was telling her. ‘I wanted you to meet her.’
Once again Bobbie found it easier to study her surroundings rather than meet Joss’s eyes. ‘Well, I’d like to meet her, too,’ she returned lightly. ‘I guess we’ll have to try to fix something up before I move on.
‘Oh my,’ she exclaimed, her attention suddenly caught by the man leaning casually against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Handsome simply wasn’t the word to describe him, she acknowledged; if a man could be described as ‘beautiful’ without in any way detracting from the sheer male animal magnetism of him, then this man was.
From the top of his shiny, well-groomed dark hair to the tip of his evening shoes, he epitomised everything that was masculine and good-looking. He would have made a perfect movie star, Bobbie thought, a heartthrob in the true, old-fashioned sense of the word.
‘Who is that?’
‘That’s Max,’ Joss told her in an oddly flat voice, adding reluctantly, ‘He’s my brother.’
His brother. Now Bobbie was surprised and, as she turned from watching Joss’s face close up and his eyes become slightly shadowed to study the handsome six-footer leaning so slouchily against the wall, she asked him ruefully, ‘So why wasn’t he mentioned when you were cataloguing your family’s available males?’
‘Because he isn’t...available, that is,’ Joss answered in that same flat voice. ‘Max is married.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Vainly Bobbie searched the room looking for the woman who would be the kind of mate such a man would undoubtedly choose—the female equivalent of himself. Stunning, almost theatrically good-looking and possessed of that same head-turning charismatic appeal he patently had in such abundance.
‘That’s Madeleine, his wife, over there,’ Joss told her, obviously guessing what she was doing and then adding quickly and almost defensively as Bobbie studied the woman he had indicated, ‘She’s nice. I like her.’
‘I’m sure she is,’ Bobbie agreed gravely as she took in Madeleine’s plain face and slightly dumpy figure, acknowledging two things. One, that Max must either be completely and utterly head over heels in love with her, or two, he must have some other equally powerful and compelling reason for marrying her. Bobbie suspected she knew which.
‘Why don’t we hire someone to make enquiries for us before we do anything?’ Bobbie had suggested when they had first discussed the matter, a little queasily aware of how uncomfortable she would feel prying into other people’s private business, but Samantha had shaken her head forcefully.
‘We can’t ... take the risk of involving anyone else,’ she reminded her sister. ‘We’re going to have to do it ourselves.’
‘You mean I’m going to have to do it,’ Bobbie retorted feelingly. ‘After all, you can’t just take off for Europe. Not now you’re halfway through your master’s.’
‘No, I can’t,’ Samantha agreed cheerfully, then added teasingly, ‘You should have come with me when I took that couple of years out and travelled. We have to go through with this, Bobbie,’ she went on to say more seriously. ‘Remember all those years ago how we said we would?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ Bobbie had agreed. How could she have forgotten the childhood vow she and Sam had made? ‘I just hate the feeling that we’re doing anything underhand...spying...’
‘Us do anything underhand?’ Sam had shouted bitterly.
Silently Bobbie looked down now at Joss.
‘Where are your sisters?’ she asked him conversationally.
‘Over there,’ he replied, indicating the pair of identical twins who stood chatting with what was obviously a large group of shared friends. They were, Bobbie was pleased to note, wearing completely different outfits and had completely different hairstyles, but there was still no mistaking those shared inherited features.
‘My goodness, who on earth is that with Joss?’ Jenny exclaimed, having caught sight of her youngest child for the first time since he had entered the room.
‘She’s certainly not someone you could fail to notice, is she?’ Olivia laughed as she, too, studied the endearingly odd combination of a very youthful Joss and the magnificently eye-catching young woman who was with him.
‘She reminds me of a lioness,’ Jenny murmured, ‘all golden grace and power. I wonder where Joss met her?’
‘I think I know,’ Jon informed them, having turned round to see what was occupying his wife’s attention. ‘Minnie Cooke at the wine bar mentioned that Joss had been in the other day with a tall blonde American.’
‘American, eh... I think I’d just better go over and say hello ... a fellow countrywoman and all that.’
‘Caspar,’ Olivia warned, adding firmly, ‘We’ll both go over.’
As families went, this one certainly liked to give the impression that it was protective of its own. Bobbie reflected cynically as she registered the interest she was beginning to excite amongst certain adult members of Joss’s family.
Max had already prised his shoulders off their resting place on the wall to give her a lazy once-over. Luke, peering past the head of his blonde companion, had sent a look of frowning scrutiny in her direction. Jenny appeared frankly astonished and now here was Olivia with Caspar in tow bearing down on them.
Bobbie held her breath and then counted to ten before easing herself into her chosen role.
‘Hello there.’ Olivia smiled warmly, extending her hand towards Bobbie. ‘You must be Joss’s friend.’
‘I hope so,’ Bobbie responded with equal warmth, shaking Olivia’s hand firmly as she introduced herself. ‘Bobbie Miller. Bobbie being short for Roberta.’
‘I’m Olivia Johnson, Joss’s cousin, and this is Caspar, my husband.’
By the time Caspar had returned with the drinks that Olivia had dispatched him to fetch for them, she had elicited the information that Bobbie, having finished her studies, was taking time out to ‘do’ Europe before returning home to work in her father’s law firm.
‘So your father’s a lawyer... what a coincidence. Our family, the Crightons, are nearly all involved in the law in one form or another.’
‘Dad was an attorney,’ Bobbie informed her carefully. ‘Right now he’s in Congress.’
‘So what exactly brought you to Haslewich?’ Caspar asked cheerfully, handing Bobbie her drink. ‘It’s not exactly on the normal tourist route.’
‘No,’ Bobbie agreed. ‘I guess I just got kinda interested in the place when I overheard someone talking about it in Chester, so I thought I’d drive out and take a look around. That’s when I met Joss.’
‘She was in the churchyard,’ Joss informed them.
‘It feels rather scary to see those headstones with dates going back so far,’ Bobbie cut in... ‘I guess your family must have been in the town for centuries.’
‘Not really,’ Olivia responded. ‘The Crightons came originally from Chester, but our branch of it broke away at the beginning of this century. So far as putting down our roots in Haslewich goes, we’re relative newcomers.’ Then conversationally she asked, ‘Are you planning to stay in the area long?’
‘I wasn’t going to, but I’d booked myself into the Grosvenor as a small treat before I realised how expensive it was and I guess I’m going to have to look around for some kind of temporary work so that I can earn a little money before I move on.’
Olivia listened speculatively as she saw Bobbie’s rueful expression and then frowned as she glanced at her watch and told Caspar, ‘I’d better go and ring Aunt Ruth and check that everything’s okay. Our nanny left us unexpectedly—her mother isn’t very well and since I’m now back at work in the family law practice and Caspar goes back to university next week, we’re desperately trying to find a replacement. I don’t suppose you know anything about child care...?’ Olivia half joked.
Bobbie took a deep breath. ‘Well now, it just so happens that I do,’ she returned lightly. ‘I spent the last year of high school and nearly all of my college vacations helping out at a...at a special local crèche...’
‘Really.’ Olivia gave her a searching glance and asked her, ‘If you were serious about looking for a job, perhaps we could get together and have a chat?’
‘Sure,’ Bobbie agreed warmly.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Olivia promised her as she hurried off to make her telephone call.
‘Wow, that would be great if you did stay on,’ Joss enthused.
‘Well, that’s up to Olivia to decide,’ Bobbie warned him. ‘I’m not a qualified nanny and—’
‘But I could tell that she really liked you and so did Caspar,’ Joss interrupted her enthusiastically.
‘Well, I kinda liked them, as well,’ Bobbie agreed—and meant it—but her conscience was beginning to trouble her a little.
Back home, the plans she and Sam had made had seemed perfectly logical, but now... She had liked Olivia and Caspar, and as for Joss... She frowned as she looked down and saw that he was scowling. A quick glance across the room told her why; Max was walking purposefully towards them.
‘Well now, young Joss, and who exactly is this?’
Bobbie sympathised with Joss as she watched the tip of his ears burning a furious red at his brother’s deliberately condescending manner towards him.
‘Hi, I’m Bobbie,’ Bobbie introduced herself calmly.
The dark eyebrows lifted. ‘An American... Oh dear, Joss, you will be popular with the old man. Our grandfather, I’m afraid to say, has an aversion to Americans,’ he told Bobbie.
Joss, Bobbie could see, was looking miserably embarrassed.
‘That’s okay,’ she responded easily. ‘My grandfather feels exactly the same way about you British.’
Max gave her a narrow-eyed look. ‘Hopefully not an aberration you’ve inherited,’ he suggested softly.
‘Who says it’s an aberration?’ Bobbie replied and had the satisfaction of seeing the extraordinary effect of his amazing physical good looks dimmed by the unpleasant expression in his eyes.
No wonder Joss was so wary around him.
‘Oh, Max, there you are. I—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Maddie, must you follow me around like an idiotic sheepdog?’ Max demanded irritably as he turned towards his wife.
Bobbie felt for her as the other woman’s face burned a painful dark red. Joss was chewing the side of his cheek and Bobbie herself had to suppress an urge to tell Max exactly what she thought of his arrogance and cruelty.
‘Your husband and I were just discussing our respective grandfathers,’ Bobbie informed Madeleine with a genuinely friendly smile.
‘Oh, I see.’ She had a shy, hesitant voice and a very uncertain manner, Bobbie noticed as Madeleine went on to tell her, ‘It’s a shame that Ben can’t be here tonight. He had a fall some years ago and it’s left him with a very painful and rheumaticky hip joint that the doctors say he should have replaced.’
Relief wiped the tense anxiety from Madeleine’s face. Poor soul, she obviously lived in fear and dread of losing her husband. She need not, Bobbie decided. Like the fancy icing on an otherwise repulsively unappealing cake, those good looks were all that there was to him.
She didn’t want to totally alienate Max, though, she acknowledged. He could prove to be a valuable source of information.
So his grandfather had an aversion to Americans, did he? He wasn’t the only member of the Crighton family who felt like that as she had good cause to know.
CHAPTER THREE (#u888e2c95-fc47-5720-9f2b-4bf303d3aa26)
TWO hours later, Bobbie broke off in mid-banter with Saul to whom she had been comfortably chatting very happily for the past twenty minutes or so, recognising guiltily that not only was it over half an hour since she had last seen Joss, but that she was also actually enjoying herself.
It had been Olivia who had introduced her to Saul and Saul himself who had explained ruefully to her that he was currently in Louise’s bad books. ‘She wanted me to partner her this evening, but as I told her, as a divorced man in my mid-thirties and her cousin to boot, I’m hardly the right partner for her.’
‘Which naturally makes you all the more attractive to her,’ Bobbie had agreed mock-gravely. ‘Come on, admit it,’ she had coaxed him humorously. ‘It must be quite some ego boost to have as stunningly pretty an eighteen-year-old as Louise crazily in love with you.’
‘Just occasionally, yes, it is,’ Saul had agreed openly, ‘but the rest of the time quite frankly it’s rather terrifying, which just goes to show how old I actually am getting.’
‘I really ought to go and find Joss,’ Bobbie now told Saul.
It was so frustrating having the opportunity to meet and mix with the family at such close hand and yet at the same time feeling restrained from asking what she really wanted to know just in case they should guess what she was up to.
‘The last time I saw him he was talking with Luke.’ He paused when he saw Bobbie’s expression. ‘You don’t like Luke? You’re in a minority,’ he assured her. ‘Most of your sex appear to find him extremely attractive.’
‘But I am not most women,’ Bobbie informed him firmly.
‘No, you aren’t, are you?’ Saul agreed softly.
Smiling at him, Bobbie shook her head and turned away. She had spotted Joss on the other side of the room, and as Saul had said, he was talking to Luke. Bobbie started to make her way towards them.
The evening had done nothing to improve Luke’s mood. Fenella had proved to be every bit as clingy and possessive as he had feared, subtly managing to create the impression amongst his family that they were something of an ‘item’ and making it impossible for him to refute her allusions without causing a public scene.
He had no intention of letting her get away with it, though. Before they parted company tonight, she was going to be left in no doubt whatsoever that the past was quite definitely over and there was no place for her in his present or his future, in any shape or form.
‘Oh, I’m staying at the Grosvenor,’ he heard her saying softly now to one of his aunts, giving him an adoring sideways look as she confided, ‘Luke thought it best in the circumstances. After all, officially I’m still married.’ She paused delicately whilst Luke watched his aunt’s head nodding sagely.
Ignoring Fenella, he turned towards Joss and joked, ‘So where did you find the quarterback, Joss?’
Bobbie, who was just within earshot, ground her teeth in silent outrage. She was used to comments about her height, of course, but there was nothing remotely unfeminine or gross about her—quite the opposite.
As he saw the look on Joss’s face, Luke cursed himself under his breath. It wasn’t fair of him to vent his irritation and fire at Fenella’s manipulative behaviour on Joss, even if there was something about the stately, almost queenly stunning beauty of the unknown woman he had brought into their midst that brought the tiny hairs on the back of his neck to prickle with atavistic awareness. Perhaps it was something about that thick, honey-coloured mass of glorious hair, or perhaps it was the way she carried her impressive height and her even more impressive body. Perhaps it was just something about her manner, or perhaps the reason lay much closer to home, within his own emotional consciousness that he couldn’t somehow dismiss.
She might not be the type to actively go looking for a fight, but she certainly wasn’t going to run from this particular one, Bobbie decided as she ignored the temptation in the face of Luke’s taunting overheard comment to pretend she hadn’t heard and simply walk away. Instead she stalked purposefully to where he and Joss were standing, bestowing on Joss the beneficence of a multi-watt smile whilst cleverly managing to angle her body so that she could also look Luke Crighton straight in the eye ... well, almost straight in the eye. Joss had not lied about his height and it was oddly disconcerting to be forced to tilt her chin upwards to meet his dispassionate gaze.
‘You must be Luke,’ Bobbie announced, taking the initiative before Joss could introduce them.
‘Must I?’ Luke asked her dryly. ‘Now why, I wonder, should you assume that?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t an assumption,’ Bobbie told him breezily. ‘I recognised you from Joss’s description...or rather his description of your addiction to a certain type of female accessory. I shouldn’t worry too much about it,’ she told him with a kind voice. ‘They do say it’s a phase that most men grow out of once they mature.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Bobbie could see Joss looking worriedly from Luke to herself. It wasn’t really fair of her to involve him, she acknowledged.
‘Come on, Joss,’ she invited him mischievously. ‘It looks like they’re serving the buffet and a girl my size needs one heck of a lot of feeding.’
Joss looked relieved as he heard the note of humour in her voice, but one glance at Luke’s steRN face warned Bobbie that he wasn’t deceived and that he certainly wasn’t about to overlook or ignore her comment about his girlfriend.
‘Well, I guess we can scratch Luke off our list,’ Bobbie told Joss ruefully as they headed for the buffet.
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