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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...’
