Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

Instinctively Bobbie tried to free herself, twisting her body against the dual constraint of his hard-packed muscular body and the tight grip of his hand on her wrists and at the same time trying to lever her leg free to bring her knee up against the most vulnerable part of his body.

It didn’t work; he let her work her leg free all right, but only so that he could take advantage of her accommodating movement by imprisoning her leg between both of his as he pushed her back against the wall of the corridor and bent his head purposefully towards her.

‘Don’t you dare... Oh, don’t you dare,’ Bobbie gasped indignantly, her own eyes blinking with fury as she saw the amused glint in his.

‘No?’ he mocked her, whispering the word against her mouth. ‘What are you going to do to stop me?’

‘This,’ she grated fiercely, baring her teeth as she prepared to take a sharp bite at the male mouth hovering so predatorily close to her own, but instead of the look of cold distaste she had expected to see in Luke’s eyes, he actually appeared to be laughing.

Bobbie glowered at him in indignation, but the furious tirade she had been about to deliver became a muffled choke of shocked astonishment as she saw him lift his hand, the one resting on the wall alongside her, towards her face and then slowly stroke her half-parted lips with the hard pad of his thumb before sliding one finger between her teeth until the tip of it made contact with her tongue.

His flesh tasted slightly salty—and wholly male. She shivered once in mute shock and then again in... in what? she tried to ask herself in the confusion that flooded her brain and her senses.

‘Suck it,’ she heard Luke whispering softly to her. ‘It’s sexy....’

‘Luke...’

Bobbie thought she recognised that high-pitched feminine whine, but as she tried to turn her head to look down the corridor, Luke stopped her, blocking out her view as he covered her mouth with his.

‘Luke.’

The voice was closer now and sharper. It was definitely Fenella’s. Bobbie tried again to jerk her body away from Luke’s.

He certainly knew how to kiss, she acknowledged dizzily. She hadn’t been so instantly and gloriously affected by a mere kiss since she had dated her first crush in high school...and maybe not even then, she admitted to herself.

‘Luke, how could you do this to me?’ Fenella was screeching at what felt like only inches away from Bobbie’s left ear. ‘You know how much I love you....’

‘I know nothing of the sort,’ Luke returned dauntingly, having finally lifted his mouth from Bobbie’s and turned his attention from her towards Fenella.

He still hadn’t released her, though, Bobbie realised, and if she was honest with herself, she wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to force herself away from him right now; her legs had become disconcertingly unsteady. And as for that look she had seen in Luke’s eyes when he had finally lifted his mouth from hers... Bobbie felt her stomach start to quiver.

‘You can’t possibly prefer her to me,’ Fenella protested in outrage.

‘I not only can...I do,’ Luke returned. Then ignoring Fenella, he turned back to Bobbie and said quite audibly in an amused voice, ‘I know you have this fantasy about making love somewhere public, but I do think we would be rather more comfortable in your room...in private....’

And before Bobbie could stop him, he had pushed open her door and whisked them both inside. He proceeded to close it firmly behind him and then lock it almost before Bobbie could find time to draw breath.

When she did she was so angry that she could hardly find the words. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded as she pulled herself free from his arms and faced him, praying that he would put the visible trembling of her body down to her anger and not the after-affects of his kiss.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he asked her with clinical detachment.

‘You used me to help you get rid of Fenella,’ Bobbie accused. She shook her head and then pushed the heavy weight of her hair off her face. ‘Why not simply tell her you didn’t want her if you don’t...? My God, what kind of man are you to deliberately come up here and use me, manipulate me, plan—’

‘I didn’t deliberately plan anything,’ Luke interrupted her suavely. ‘I simply seized the moment and took advantage of the opportunity the circumstances offered me when I saw Fenella coming down the corridor towards us.’

‘You decided to make a grab for me and make out like the two of us were involved in some kind of passionate clinch ... that we were... The moment wasn’t the only thing you seized,’ she berated him furiously, ‘and if you think—’

‘Calm down,’ he advised her.

‘Calm down! You grab hold of me, manhandle me...force me into my room and then you—’

‘You’re perfectly safe,’ he interrupted in an unruffled voice, adding almost disparagingly, ‘For a start, you’re not my type.’

Not his type! Bobbie’s eyes flashed warning signs of an impending major storm.

‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ she told him through gritted teeth, finishing trenchantly, ‘because you most certainly are not mine.’

‘You’re overreacting,’ she heard Luke saying as he shrugged his shoulders dismissively.

Overreacting? Bobbie could hardly believe her ears.

‘You kissed me,’ she hissed.

To her chagrin, he actually laughed. ‘Oh, come on.’ he drawled when he had finished laughing. ‘I can’t possibly be the first to do that.’

‘No,’ Bobbie agreed crossly. She just did not believe this; his arrogance almost took her breath away. ‘But you’re certainly the first who’s done so against my will—and the last,’ she declared forcefully. For good measure, the memory of his amused laughter driving her on to open retaliation, she added, ‘I don’t enjoy being kissed by a man I don’t like.’

For a moment she finally thought she had got the upper hand, and at six foot plus, Bobbie had to acknowledge that not having it was something of a new experience for her and not one she suspected she could become particularly fond of, but then to her disbelief she heard him drawl, ‘No? You could have fooled me. So by whom would you have preferred to be kissed?’ he asked before she could react to the enormity of his deliberate insult. ‘Or can I guess?’ he asked her silkily. ‘I saw you watching Max earlier. He’s married, you know.’

‘Yes, I do know, thank you very much,’ Bobbie responded, not bothering to waste time denying his allegations, asking with acid sweetness instead, ‘Why, I wonder, is everyone so anxious for me to know that Max is married?’

‘You know perfectly well why,’ he told her brutally. ‘Max is an extremely predatory and highly sexed man, married to a woman who bores him and whom he quite obviously married for reasons that have nothing to do with any urgent need on his part to take her to bed.

‘You, on the other hand, possess that peculiar quality that quite obviously does incline Max to want to bed you, but bedding you is all he will do unless, of course, you happen to have a parcel of top-ranking judges, plus a peer and a couple of millionaires tucked away in your family tree.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Bobbie responded shortly, amending mentally for her own benefit, Well, at least I don’t have the hereditary peer, but she firmly resisted the temptation to give voice to such words. ‘I want you to leave,’ she told him quickly instead, looking pointedly towards the door.

‘Not yet,’ he returned mildly.

Bobbie was completely nonplussed. ‘I could ring down to reception and ask them to remove you—forcibly if necessary,’ she told him.

Once again he laughed. ‘I rather think that in this particular town and this particular hotel, my credit and reputation stand rather higher than yours.’ One dark brow rose. ‘What does anyone know about you after all, other than you appear to have made a rather unlikely friend in Joss?’

‘Fenella must be crazy to want to get involved with you,’ Bobbie breathed, unwittingly betraying the fact that his past history had been the subject of some of her conversation earlier in the evening. ‘And if she’s so desperate to get you,’ she said bluntly, ‘seeing you kissing me isn’t going to put her off.’

‘No,’ he agreed smoothly, ‘but hopefully hearing that I’ve spent the night with you will.’

Spent the night with her? Bobbie’s mouth opened and then closed again as she gulped in air and stared at him in a mixture of fury and fascination whilst he watched her back away, one of his eyebrows lifted ironically as though ... as though he was almost waiting ... enjoying the prospect of having her challenge him. Well, he wasn’t going to be disappointed.

‘You are not staying the night in this room, my room,’ she emphasised, spacing her words with care.

‘No? Then evict me,’ Luke responded with a bored shrug.

Evict him. She might be tall, but as she visually measured not just the length of his body, but compared it muscle for muscle, strength for strength, with her own, Bobbie knew that any attempt on her part to use force to remove him from the room would inevitably result in a humiliating failure on her part.

‘Very well, then,’ Bobbie answered coolly, changing tack. ‘If you won’t leave, then I shall simply book myself into another room.’

‘Impossible, I’m afraid,’ Luke told her, shaking his head. ‘The hotel is fully booked as I discovered when Fenella announced that she had booked us a double room, but by all means if you want to try...’

Bobbie thought quickly. She was well aware of the curiosity and interest it would arouse if she were to try to change her room, especially with Luke so very much in evidence in her present one.

‘This is ridiculous,’ she snapped finally. ‘If Fenella isn’t going to be put off by seeing you kiss me, then what makes you think she will be just because you’ve spent the night with me? After all, if she’s prepared to take on a man who kisses another woman in public, she would more than likely be prepared to take on one who...who’s been more intimate with...with her.’

Irritated with herself as she floundered a little, she had no idea why on earth she should feel so self-conscious about using the word ‘sex’ instead of the more coy and euphemistic ‘intimate’ in front of a man like Luke Crighton, a man she didn’t so much merely not like, but increasingly actively disliked.

‘Because,’ Luke explained patiently, ‘although she might be prepared to do so, she knows perfectly well that I’m not.’ When Bobbie looked perplexed, he explained matter-of-factly, ‘I do not sleep around, and as Fenella already knows, I do not and never have been “intimate”—’ he underlined the word, her word, mockingly ‘—with a woman with whom I am not either already involved or intending to become involved in a very serious relationship. In other words, my American friend, Fenella knows that if I spend the night with you, it is because I want to make you a serious and permanent part of my life.’

Bobbie swallowed hard as she stared at him. It wasn’t often that anyone caught her wrong-footed or off guard; that anything a member of the male sex said surprised her. But this time...this one...why...why in heaven’s name did he have to be the first, the only man she had ever met to echo her own views of the importance of respecting sexual intimacy, to want it to be part of a truly committed relationship?

She gave him a quick glance, half-inclined to suspect him of making fun of her, but one look at his face convinced her that he was totally serious.

‘I hope you aren’t trying to suggest that because you’ve forced your way into my room and declared your intention to spend the night with me that that means in the morning you’re going to expect me to make an honest man of you,’ she joked flippantly to cover what she was feeling.

‘Don’t you believe in marriage?’ he asked her unexpectedly. ‘Are you one of these modern young women who likes to think that men are superfluous to her requirements, even to the extent of forgoing the pleasure and the intimacy that creating a child together should bring in favour of a far more clinical and detached method of conception?’

There must be something wrong with her. She must be coming down with some kind of bug, Bobbie decided. There could be no other reason for the sudden flood of heat pouring through her body, the unnerving sensation of weakness and the spine-tingling thrill of shock that had just run through her.

‘My plans for the method of conception of my future children is none of your business,’ she managed to retort loftily as she fought to control her dizzying light-headedness. She had to get him out of her room and fast, she determined feverishly, but could think of nothing more compelling to say to him other than a decidedly panicky ‘You can’t sleep here.’

‘No,’ he agreed unexpectedly as he looked at the bed. ‘I can’t, and neither, I imagine, can you.’ He gave the standard-size hotel bed a disparaging glance. ‘If I had to sleep in that toy-box version of what a proper bed should be, I’d wake up with cramp and backache to say the least.’

Bobbie knew exactly what he meant. Back home they had proper beds, big wide long beds in which a person could stretch out luxuriously and still have plenty of room left over for...

A startled glance seized her face, widening her eyes as she absorbed the mental image that had materialised so dangerously out of nowhere—two bodies tangled lovingly together in the comfort of her generously proportioned bed, the fine cotton sheets she favoured wrapped loosely around them, her body snugly protected by the larger, heavier, bulkier form of the man who lay next to her on his side and half across her, one leg flung possessively over her, one arm wrapped securely around her. Little could be seen of his features, but she could visualize the broad, tanned sweep of his well-muscled back and just the beginning of the sensual curve where its line ran into his butt, the dark sleekness of the back of his head, but she knew totally, of course, just what his face looked like, just as she knew, too, how he felt, how he smelled and how he tasted...before love and after it...

She definitely must be ill, Bobbie decided as she finally managed to close her eyes and blink the awesomely realistic vision away. Why else would she be picturing herself in bed with Luke Crighton? And not just any bed, if you please, but her very own bed back home in her small, pretty clapboard house tucked away on one of the quieter streets of their little New England town.

‘You can’t stay here,’ she repeated. Her body trembled as she heard the rusty note of shock in her voice.

‘No, I don’t think I can,’ she heard Luke agreeing. There was an odd note in his voice, as well, but when she looked at him he was focusing on the bed. To her relief he started to walk towards the door, but before he opened it he stopped and turned round saying, ‘By the way, exactly how did you come to meet young Joss?’

‘I bumped into him by accident in Haslewich,’ Bobbie told him truthfully.

‘Mmm, so he said,’ Luke commented. ‘In the churchyard apparently. He said you were looking at the gravestones...?’

Bobbie could feel her heartbeat increasing, the adrenalin starting to pump through her veins as she reacted to her awareness of danger. ‘Yes, I was,’ she agreed carefully.

‘Looking for one in particular?’ Luke questioned.

‘Just looking,’ Bobbie answered. ‘As an American I find it’s still something of a novelty for me to see gravestones with such old dates on them.’

‘You were in the modeRN part of the graveyard when he saw you, according to Joss.’

‘Was I? I can’t remember,’ Bobbie lied disinterestedly, dropping her head so that her hair swung forward to conceal and protect her expression from him. ‘Have you finished your cross-examination?’ she asked him with acid sweetness. ‘I would like to get some sleep....’

‘In order for me to need to cross-question you, you would either have to be guilty of or a witness to some sort of crime,’ Luke told her silkily. ‘Which, I wonder, did you have in mind when you made that rather betraying statement, and why?’

‘Neither,’ Bobbie fibbed fiercely as he opened the door and walked through it, but despite the conviction she had injected into her denial, she somehow had the uncomfortable feeling that he didn’t believe her.

Oh, damn the man, he was the last complication she needed to have around now, the very last.

CHAPTER FOUR

BOBBIE woke up with a start to realise that someone was knocking discreetly on her door. Whoever it was, it thankfully could not possibly be Luke Crighton; discretion and that man could never be said to go hand in hand.

The waiter standing outside with a table fully set for a breakfast for two, which included freshly made Buck’s Fizz, refused to listen to her insistence that she had most certainly not ordered such a lavish and highly obvious ‘the morning after the night before’ breakfast.

‘This breakfast was most definitely ordered for this room,’ he informed her.

‘It can’t possibly have been...’ Bobbie began to deny and then changed her mind, an ominous thought occurring to her as she demanded warily, ‘Ordered by whom?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ the waiter apologised, but Bobbie suspected that she did.

No doubt this was another of Luke Crighton’s little tricks to convince Fenella that he had spent the night here with her, although how on earth he expected the other woman to discover that he had ordered breakfast for two for Bobbie’s room, she had no idea, unless Fenella was the type who made a habit of checking up on that kind of thing. Perhaps she did. Bobbie made a small moue of distaste before surveying the feast she had been left with. Buck’s Fizz... Strong coffee was her normal breakfast indulgence. Somehow she had never seen herself as the kind of woman who drank Buck’s Fizz for breakfast and neither, she suspected, did Luke Crighton, not for a moment.

Recklessly she reached for a glass and took a sip. The orange juice was freshly squeezed and deliciously tangy, the champagne icy cold, making her taste buds shiver in pleasure.

If she had been sharing this treat with a lover, she doubted that it would have done anything to encourage her to leave the warmth of her bed—or him—rather the opposite.

Disconcertingly, just as she raised the glass to her lips to take a second rebellious sip, she was revisited by the same disturbing mental image of Luke she had had the previous evening.

The bubbles in the champagne made her splutter slightly, which just went to show how highly dangerous it could be to consume alcohol first thing in the morning, she told herself sternly, firmly replacing the glass.

An hour later, having consumed two cups of strong coffee and eaten some wholemeal toast, she was downstairs in the hotel lobby comfortably dressed in a pair of soft, cream trousers and a soft, silky knit top.

She wasn’t here in England to waste time lying in bed and drinking champagne, she reminded herself firmly, and she certainly wasn’t here to indulge in crazy mental images of disconcerting and recklessly intimate scenarios between her and a man who she had good reason to know was never likely to partner her in the kind of highly sensual and erotic love play their tangled bodies had indicated. She walked determinedly across to the reception desk and asked the clerk behind the counter if there were any messages for her.

Smilingly he handed her a couple of sealed notes. Frowning a little since she didn’t recognise the handwriting on either of them, Bobbie opened the top one and then dropped it on the desk as though it had burned her fingertips when she read the message contained inside.

‘Thank you for last night, you were wonderful. I can’t wait until tonight, Luke.’ As the clerk picked up the note and discreetly handed it back to her, Bobbie realised that she was now not the only one to have seen his outrageous message.

He certainly believed in acting out the part, she acknowledged wrathfully as she stuffed the note into her pocket and started to walk away from the reception desk. She opened the other envelope. Its contents, too, were unexpected, but in a very different way from the message contained in Luke’s.

It was signed by Olivia and read:

I tried to catch you before we left, but unfortunately we missed you. There is something I would like to discuss with you following our chat last night and I wonder if you are likely to be free to have lunch with me today? If so, could we meet at the Brasserie here at one o’clock?

Olivia

Pensive, Bobbie worried at her bottom lip. She knew, of course, what it was Olivia wanted to discuss; she knew, too, how Sam would feel if she turned down such a golden opportunity. Working for Olivia would give her a good chance to put their plan, or rather Sam’s plan, into action. There was no doubt that Olivia would be a valuable contact, but she had liked her so much last night...enjoyed her company and that of her husband so much that she...

She had nothing to lose by at least listening to Olivia, she reminded herself, and potentially an awful lot to gain and not just a free lunch! No, not if she discounted her own sense of honesty and, of course, Olivia’s respect and burgeoning friendship....

‘Will you be in for lunch?’ the receptionist asked her when Bobbie handed in her room key.

‘I...yes, I’m lunching with ... a friend in the Brasserie at one,’ Bobbie told her. There, she had made her decision, committed herself.

As she walked out of the hotel and into the bright sunshine, she wondered if Joss and his family were already on their way back home to Haslewich.

Joss... It was odd to think of him and Max being brothers.

She spent an hour wandering around the town, pausing every now and again to consult her guidebook and admire the city’s ancient buildings. Outside the castle she stopped a little longer than she had done anywhere else and even longer outside the building facing onto the river that had a discreet brass plate by the door bearing the legend, ‘Crighton, Crighton and Crighton’.

A flutter of movement at an upstairs window made her glance around uneasily and then walk past. Surely there was no one actually working in the offices on a Sunday.

It was half an hour, spent lazily and apparently purposelessly meandering through the narrow streets on a route she had planned earlier, before she arrived at her real destination.

Chester’s cathedral had originally and uniquely been a monastery, only later being converted into a church, but fascinating though the history of the building was, Bobbie didn’t have time to follow the other tourists in the direction of the ancient arched crypts but instead hurried eagerly in the direction of the graveyard.

It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for. In Chester the Crightons had been men of substance and law for many, many generations as the large mausoleum in which they had chosen to bury their dead testified.

Bobbie gazed at it with mixed feelings. Some of the names inscribed on the marble tablet affixed to one end were so faded it was almost impossible to read them; others were much brighter, much newer. Unsteadily she reached out and traced one of the names.

‘He was my great-grandfather,’ a familiarly unwelcome voice said from behind her.

I know, Bobbie wanted to say, and it was his disapproval of his youngest son’s marriage that led to the latter leaving home to establish the Haslewich branch of the family with his new wife, but, of course, she said no such thing. She didn’t even turn round.

Instead she simply said as levelly and as calmly as she could, ‘Luke, what are you doing here?’

‘I rather think that question would be more appropriate coming from me to you,’ he responded dryly. ‘For such a young woman you seem to have developed a rather morbid penchant for visiting graveyards, first in Haslewich and now here in Chester.’

‘It’s an interesting way of discovering more about the families who lived in the area,’ Bobbie returned neutrally, adding more challengingly, ‘and it certainly isn’t a crime.’