Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

‘Why was that?’ he pressed.

‘She had other commitments,’ Bobbie told him repressively, turning her head to look out of the window into the darkness as an added signal that she didn’t want him to keep interrogating her. So far as she was concerned, her sister was not a subject she wanted to discuss with him.

‘Other commitments. What does that mean? Is she married...does she have a family?’

‘No, she is not married and she does not have a family. If you must know, she is part way through her master’s and couldn’t take time off and that was why...’

Bobbie stopped.

‘That was why what?’ Luke asked suavely.

‘That was why I had to come on my own,’ Bobbie answered shakily, disturbed by how easily she had almost betrayed herself.

‘Had to,’ Luke repeated incisively. ‘Surely your trip could have been postponed until after her college work was finished or fitted in during her vacations.’

‘Maybe it could,’ Bobbie agreed, ‘but I wanted to come to Europe.’

‘Without your sister, your twin, even though you’ve just told me how close you are and how much you miss her? What exactly are you doing here in Haslewich, Bobbie, and why all the interest in my family?’

Bobbie drew in a sharp breath. ‘What is it exactly you’re trying to imply?’ she demanded. ‘I’m here in Haslewich because I’m working for Olivia, and as for my interest in your family...’ She paused.

‘Yes,’ Luke encouraged grimly.

‘I was just interested, that’s all,’ Bobbie fibbed weakly, giving a small shrug. ‘It’s not against the law, is it?’

To her relief they were almost in Haslewich; another ten minutes or so and she would safely be back at Olivia’s.

‘That all depends, doesn’t it,’ Luke answered as he turned into the road that led to the house, ‘on what it is you’re really doing here. I know you’re lying to me, Bobbie,’ he told her as he brought the car to a stop on the drive and turned to look at her. ‘What I don’t know as yet is why you’re lying and what it is you’re trying to conceal ... what it is you’re really doing here, but I promise you that I intend to find out...’

Bobbie climbed out of the car and shut the door firmly.

‘Wasn’t that Luke’s car?’ Olivia asked as she let Bobbie in.

‘Yes, I bumped into him in Chester and he brought me home,’ Bobbie told her.

‘Oh, why didn’t he come in?’ As she looked into Bobbie’s face, she asked gently, ‘Oh dear, you two haven’t had a fight, have you?’

To her own consternation, Bobbie suffered the indignity of feeling her eyes start to fill with tears. If there was one ultimate folly in a woman of six foot plus, it was surely crying in public.

‘Oh, Bobbie, don’t worry,’ Olivia soothed her as she gave her a quick, firm hug. ‘I’m sure the two of you will soon make it up.’

‘I don’t want to make it up,’ Bobbie declared defiantly, sniffing. ‘I hate him.’

‘Oh dear,’ Olivia commiserated. ‘That bad, was it?’

‘That’s right, take it out on the weeds,’ Bobbie heard Ruth’s amused voice telling her the next day as she tugged viciously at the weeds in Olivia’s herbaceous border whilst Amelia slept peacefully in her stroller nearby.

Hot and grubby, her face flushed and her hair tousled, Bobbie hadn’t heard Ruth arrive and now she turned round, her mouth forming a startled ‘Oh’ of surprise.

‘I used to do very much the same thing when my father or brother were being particularly chauvinistic and difficult,’ Ruth confided to Bobbie as she walked across the grass towards her, ‘and I’m afraid I even used to give vent to the most undaughterly and unsisterly feelings beneath my breath, which was a most unacceptable thing for one to do in those days.’

When she saw the way Bobbie was looking at her, she explained gently, ‘You see, I grew up in an era where one was obliged to accept that one did what one’s parents, especially one’s father, thought best. His word was law. My mother was very much the old-fashioned type of wife and my father rather steRN and autocratic, very decided in his views and opinions.’

Her face clouded a little. ‘In many ways our lives were over-restricted and limited, the brief taste of freedom we were given during the war when we were needed all too swiftly snatched away again once our usefulness was over, and yet I suspect there was a certain security in knowing what was expected of us.

‘Luke, I know, can seem rather autocratic and severe at times. Like all of us, Luke, too, has suffered from being a victim of this family’s overriding need to prove themselves worthy of being a Crighton. It’s a handicap that has been passed down from generation to generation, from father to son, as the virtues and achievements of past Crightons are extolled from babyhood almost and the growing child informed that it is his duty to prove himself worthy of following in the same footsteps.

‘Fortunately things are changing. Jon’s children, while they all are determined to take up the law as a career, are also resilient and have a sense of independence, of self-worth, a belief in themselves, which hopefully will free them from the expectations that controlled earlier generations’ lives. Apart from Max, who unfortunately is cast in a very different mold... Perhaps marriage to Madeleine will change him. I hope so for her sake.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Bobbie asked her uncertainly.

‘Why?’ Ruth tilted her head on one side and studied Bobbie for a moment. ‘Perhaps because I like you and I hate to see you looking so unhappy. Luke may not be perfect but I do believe that the handicaps that come with being a Crighton could be very much alleviated in him, given the right encouragement. It isn’t always easy to say why we should be so instantly drawn to one person and not to another,’ Ruth added gently.

‘In fact, for most of us, it’s very hard to accept, never mind admit, that we have such feelings, that we’re capable of such instant and illogical, emotional reactions. Why I should be so specifically drawn to you, Bobbie, I can’t say. All I can say is that I am, in much the same way that out of all my great-nieces and nephews, Joss and this young lady here have a special place in my heart. It doesn’t mean that I love the others any the less, merely that I love these two just that little bit more. How is your mother by the way?’

Bobbie’s hand jerked as she lost her grip on the weed she had been trying to work loose, glad that Ruth couldn’t see her face as she replied in a choked voice, ‘I...she’s still not very well. Her... her doctor has suggested that she should consider going into analysis,’ Bobbie elaborated reluctantly.

‘It isn’t analysis Mom needs,’ Samantha had denied passionately when she had been telling Bobbie this latest piece of family news. ‘It’s—’

‘I know what it is, Sam,’ she had responded, ‘but we can’t give it to her. No one can.’

‘Maybe not, but at least we can have the satisfaction of knowing they haven’t got away with what they’ve done, that they’re being punished, too.’

‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Sam,’ Bobbie had remonstrated gently to her sister, but Sam, as she had known she would, had refused to accept such a point of view.

Sam would never have got herself in the situation she had managed to get herself in, Bobbie acknowledged. She knew that Sam was expecting her to make use of the family gathering on Sunday to reveal her true identity, to speak out and make the denouncement they had planned, to shame the person responsible for her mother’s unhappiness by publicly revealing what they had done.

‘Amelia’s waking up,’ she told Ruth unnecessarily as they both heard the little girl start to gurgle. ‘I’d better take her in and get cleaned up. It’s almost time for her lunch.’

Ruth wasn’t Bobbie’s only unexpected visitor that day. Joss arrived later in the afternoon looking both pleased with himself and slightly self-conscious as he hugged the baby and then proceeded to tell Bobbie about the family of otters he had seen playing in the river as he cycled past.

‘Mum says that you’re going to Gramps’s on Sunday,’ he remarked.

‘Yes, that’s fight,’ Bobbie agreed neutrally.

‘You mustn’t mind if Gramps says anything to you about your being American,’ Joss told her earnestly. ‘He doesn’t mean... Well, he’s not... Mum says that a lot of his grumpiness is because of the pain in his hip.’

Bobbie tried to stop her mouth from twitching in wry amusement at Joss’s unguarded honesty.

He stayed for almost an hour drinking Bobbie’s homemade lemonade and eating the cookies she had baked earlier in the afternoon for Caspar, who had teased Olivia that at last he had found someone who could make him proper American cookies.

‘Do you know something, Bobbie?’ Joss confided to her as he got up to leave. ‘You really look like one of my cousins, only she’s got red hair—that’s Meg, Saul’s daughter. She’s only four, though, but Aunt Ruth noticed it, as well,’ he added informatively.

Bobbie was glad there was no one there but Joss to witness the shock his words had caused her and fortunately he was too engrossed in finishing off his last cookie to look directly at her. If he had...

Bobbie could remember Saul from the party. Tall, dark-haired, good-looking and very sexy. He had once been in love with Olivia, Caspar had told her. He was now in his mid-thirties, over a decade younger than her mother. How ironic that Joss should comment that while she and Saul’s child looked alike, she had red hair.

‘See you on Sunday,’ Joss called out to her as he rode off.

Oh yes, she would definitely see him, but Bobbie doubted that he would ever look so warmly on her again.

It had all seemed so simple when she and Sam had discussed it at home. So easy. So straightforward and right. Then she had expected that the hardest thing she would have to do would be to get close enough to the family to put their plan into action.

‘It’s no good just going for a one-to-one confrontation,’ Samantha had insisted when Bobbie had suggested this course.

‘Perhaps if I just explained how Mom feels, how it has affected her, how much she needs to know why she was so ruthlessly rejected.’

‘That won’t work,’ Samantha had told her. ‘There’s no point in appealing to someone’s finer feelings or their sense of compassion when it’s obvious that they don’t have any. No! What we have to do is to show them up for what they are, confront them in public in front of their family.’

It had never occurred to her then that once she actually met the family she would like them. Well, certain members of it at least, she amended hastily, dismissing the far too detailed and accurate mental portrait of Luke her memory had just supplied her with. People who had just been names to her at first were now so very much more.

What did a person do when the facts led in one direction and one’s emotions in another that was completely opposite? How did one make a decision—a judgement—like the one she had to make? She wasn’t used to playing God and it wasn’t a role that sat easily on her shoulders, but then...

‘Think of Mom...think of what she’s suffered...how she’s been hurt,’ Samantha had urged her, and Bobbie only had to picture her mother’s face when she talked about her past to be filled with the same aching, angry, but helpless feeling of furious resentment on her behalf that she had experienced when she had first heard what had happened.

‘We can’t alter what’s been done,’ her father had said gently once to Bobbie when, as a teenager, she had burst into an impassioned speech about the unhappiness in her mother’s past.

‘But it’s all so unfair,’ Bobbie had protested. ‘It nearly even stopped you and Mom getting married.’

‘I know. I know,’ her father agreed. ‘But fortunately your grandfather was able to make it a bit easier for us. He used that special brand of Southern charm he has to coax the family around.’ Her father chuckled. ‘It was certainly the first time I’ve ever seen Great-Aunt Emma actually flirting.’

‘Great-Aunt Emma flirted with Grandpa...?’ She stood wide-eyed.

‘She certainly did, and then, of course, when they realised that he was connected through his mother’s side to an influential and wealthy family...’

‘They still didn’t really want you to marry Mom, though, did they, Dad, even though Grandpa is very rich and Mom his only child...?’

‘No, they didn’t,’ her father affirmed honestly. ‘But I can tell you this, when you love someone as much as I love your mother, no power on earth can stop you from being together. The reason I wanted my family to accept and value her was because I knew it was what she wanted. As far as I was concerned, I’d have gladly turned my back on the whole pack of them rather than lose your mother.’

‘Even your parents?’ Bobbie asked him quietly.

‘Even my folks,’ her father agreed. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Bobbie. I loved them very much and I had a great deal of respect for them. I still do. But I love your mom more...much, much more. You see, honey, the kind of love you have for that one special person in your life is just so different from any other kind of love that once you’ve experienced it... Well, you just wait and see.’

‘I wouldn’t want to fall in love with someone you and Mom didn’t like,’ Bobbie had protested.

Prophetic words. She could just imagine how her parents, especially her mother, would feel if she were to announce that she had fallen in love with a Crighton. Fallen in love with? Bobbie tensed.

Restlessly she paced the room. She wasn’t in love with Luke....

She wasn’t silly enough to let herself fall in love with someone like Luke. She had far too much regard for her own emotional well-being, too strong a sense of self-esteem, too much awareness of the pain that lay ahead of her in loving a man who not only most assuredly did not return her feelings but who, even if he had, was quite simply someone she could never share her life with.

Yet, perversely, instead of looking forward to Sunday in the knowledge that once it was over, once she had carried out the task that had originally brought her to Cheshire, she would be free to leave and return home, safe from any more heart-searching over Luke who surely, with the Atlantic safely between them, would quickly become nothing more than a distant—a very distant—memory, Bobbie acknowledged that she was actually dreading it.

But of course, there was nothing that she could do to stop Sunday coming. Nothing at all!

CHAPTER SIX

QUEENSMEAD was very much as she had pictured it, Bobbie realised: a large, gracious house set in its own grounds reached via a traditional sweeping drive, its seventeenth-century stone façade draped in the soft tendrils of a huge wisteria.

Although ostensibly Bobbie was merely attending the family get-together as Amelia’s temporary nanny, virtually as soon as they had entered the house, Olivia had deftly removed Amelia from her arms and told Bobbie firmly that she was to make sure she enjoyed herself and that she was certainly going to enjoy showing her daughter off to her relatives.

Despite its generous proportions, the large drawing room was very crowded. Jon and Jenny, who had arrived ahead of them with the twins, Joss and Olivia’s younger brother, claimed her attention whilst Louise and Katie thanked her for the small antique brooches she had given them as their eighteenth-birthday presents.

‘I’ll have to take you over to introduce you to Gramps,’ Olivia told her as she handed Amelia over to an admiring Jenny.

‘Ben’s not in a very good mood, I’m afraid,’ Jenny warned them ruefully, adding quietly, ‘I think having Max here reminds him of your father, Olivia. I rather think he feels that Jon isn’t doing as much as he could to try to track David down.’

‘Dad won’t be found unless he wants to be found,’ Olivia responded tersely. ‘I just wish that Gramps could see that, but then he’s always had a blind spot where Dad is concerned. I wish sometimes I could tell him the truth,’ she declared fiercely.

‘I doubt that he would believe you if you did. He needs to cling on to his faith in David, his belief in him,’ Jenny told her wisely. ‘I’m sorry, Bobbie,’ Jenny apologised. ‘We’re being very rude, talking about family matters and ignoring you.’

‘Bobbie is almost a member of the family,’ Olivia insisted and then added slyly, ‘and very soon she might become one officially, as well.’

Whilst Bobbie protested, her cheeks burning hotly, Jenny gave her an interested look but didn’t press the matter, leaving it to Olivia to explain.

‘Luke’s pretty smitten with Bobbie,’ she elaborated whilst teasingly shaking her head as Bobbie tried to contradict what she was saying. ‘It’s no good,’ Olivia said, laughing. ‘The pair of you have given yourselves away too clearly to start denying it now.’

‘Hello there. I was hoping we might get to meet again.’

Bobbie turned thankfully towards Max as he strolled over to join them, his arrival a welcome interruption, although it was obvious that Olivia didn’t think so because almost immediately she announced, ‘I was just about to take Bobbie to introduce her to Gramps, Max, so I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us.’

‘You haven’t met my grandfather yet?’ Max asked Bobbie, pointedly ignoring his cousin as he turned his back to her, effectively blocking her out of the conversation. Instead, he concentrated on Bobbie, giving her the benefit of his heated crocodile smile and a look that slid slowly from the top of her head all the way down to her toes. It lingered appreciatively on her body in a manner that was both extremely practised and, so far as Bobbie was concerned, extremely unappealing, but she kept her thoughts to herself, waiting politely whilst Max reached out and tucked her hand through his arm as he told her, ‘Come with me, but let me warn you that he—’

‘Doesn’t like Americans,’ Bobbie supplied dryly for him. ‘Yes, so I’ve been told.’

‘It isn’t an aversion I share,’ Max assured her softly with another appreciative look. ‘Far from it.’

‘But your wife, I believe, is British,’ Bobbie pointed out sweetly, just ever so slightly emphasising the words ‘your wife’.

‘Very much so,’ Max agreed suavely, looking more amused than concerned that she should have reminded him that he was a married man, confirming her inward assessment of him when he continued, ‘My wife is also small, plump and, I’m afraid, rather plain and a brunette, while I, I must admit, have a penchant for long-legged blondes, especially when they’re as beautiful as you are.’

His audacity was unbelievable, Bobbie decided as she replied with cool firmness, ‘Really. Unfortunately I do not have a penchant for married men, especially those as unkind about the woman they’ve chosen to marry as you have just been. Please excuse me,’ she added as she detached herself from him and started to move away.

Only she didn’t get very far because as she turned round, to her consternation, she found her way blocked by Luke. When had he arrived and why was he looking at her like that?

‘Er...Luke,’ she faltered as guiltily as a child caught with her fingers in the cookie jar, as she later angrily told herself.

‘Luke,’ she heard Max drawling in a far more composed voice, ‘I was just taking Bobbie over to introduce her to Grandfather.’

‘Really. Via a rather long detour I can only presume,’ Luke returned coldly as Max looked innocently round the empty room he had brought her to and told him, ‘Your grandfather is in the library with your wife.’

‘Oh, is he? That’s obviously why we couldn’t find him, then,’ Max replied cheerfully, but he made no attempt to remain with them, Bobbie noticed, excusing himself with some vague comment about needing to speak with his father and leaving Bobbie on her own to face Luke’s obvious ire.

‘I might have known,’ Luke said grimly. ‘I imagine it must be a case of like to like, but let me warn you, if you’re hoping to get anything more than a very brief tumble in bed and the dubious pleasure of boosting Max’s ego out of him, you’re going to be very disappointed.’

‘There’s obviously not much to choose between you, then, is there?’ Bobbie quipped, using flippancy to cover the churning havoc his presence was creating in her body.

She knew she had gone too far, though, when Luke turned towards her, reaching for her wrists, his teeth baring in a feral smile of high-octane anger, but before he could say or do anything, mercifully Olivia popped her head round the door.

‘Not still quarrelling? I thought you’d have made it up by now, the pair of you. You should be kissing and making up, not fighting....’

She was gone before either one could say anything, responding to Caspar’s summons from the other side of the door, leaving Luke to demand savagely, ‘And just what the hell was that all about?’

‘Olivia thinks that you and I...that we’re...that we’re romantically involved,’ Bobbie informed him shakily.

‘She what?’

‘Don’t blame me. I’m not the one who dragged you into my hotel room and then left a note at the reception desk that anyone could have seen,’ Bobbie reminded him grittily. ‘You were keen enough to have Fenella think we were involved. It’s a pity that you didn’t think a little harder and realise that others might make the same mistake.’

‘I see, and you, of course, being the person you are, obviously haven’t thought it desirable to put Olivia right.’

The sarcastic contempt dripping from his words made Bobbie flinch, but she was determined not to let him see just how much he was hurting her.

‘Why should I do your dirty work for you?’ she challenged him spiritedly.

‘Why indeed,’ he returned unpleasantly, ‘especially when you could have some hidden agenda of your own that makes it an advantage for you to be publicly, at least, romantically attached to me?’

He had come perilously close, too close, to guessing the truth for Bobbie’s peace of mind, guilt and anxiety panicking her into reacting angrily. ‘There couldn’t be any advantage, public or private, that would make me want that—or you,’ she denied vehemently.

‘No!’ Luke contradicted her firmly. ‘That isn’t the way I remember certain events—far from it. In fact, while I hate to call you a liar,’ he drawled unkindly, ‘there have been at least two occasions I can call to mind when you evinced anything but reluctance to demonstrate just the opposite.’

Bobbie glared at him. ‘If you’re referring to the way you forced yourself on me ... the way you kissed me totally against my will...’ She stopped, her face flushing as she saw the way Luke was looking at her. ‘I...I’ve told you before,’ she started to protest defensively. ‘I was thinking about someone else.’

Wildly she started to head for the half-open door, knowing that she was on unsafe ground, very unsafe ground indeed, but she was still unable to resist one final act of defiance in the face of his accusations.

‘Under normal circumstances,’ she raged furiously, ‘there’s just no way I’d respond to you and anyway I wasn’t responding to you ... I was...’ She shook her head. What was the point in arguing with him? The sensible thing to do would be quite simply to walk away from him right now.

But unfortunately she had left it a little too late. Luke’s gaze was already mercilessly fixed on her and as she measured the distance between them and the narrow doorway he was blocking, he sprang into action, catching hold of her as she tried to run past him and imprisoning her easily in his arms despite her attempts to struggle free. Kicking the door shut and enclosing them both in the semi-darkness of the room, he pushed her back against the closed door.

‘You’re sure about that, are you?’ he demanded mockingly.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ Bobbie lied through gritted teeth. ‘And even if I wasn’t, I don’t get any kicks from...from physical violence,’ she told him bitingly.

She could feel Luke’s anger as he absorbed the impact of her angry remark, and her own body tensed in wary response. How much, after all, did she actually know about him? How much did she...?

‘Neither do I,’ she heard him telling her curtly and with so much distaste in his voice that she knew he was speaking the truth. ‘But I don’t like liars,’ he continued. ‘When I kissed you, you responded to me.’