The Perfect Seduction

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 Perfect Sinner 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

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

Table of Contents

Cover Excerpt About the Author The Crightons Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT EPILOGUE Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

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.’