by Penny Jordan
THE PERFECT LOVER
Penny Jordan
Book 5 - The Crightons
THE CRIGHTONS
The breathtaking saga The Perfect Family continues.
She had found passion in Gareth Simmonds's arms. For one brief moment, in sun-drenched Italy, Louise Crighton had been able to forget her hurt at seeing the man she thought she loved fall for someone else.
Ashamed at her unexpected--and uninhibited--response to Gareth, she had gone out of her way to avoid seeing him again. But now Gareth is back, as attractive as ever. One question burns in Louise's mind: Does Gareth still suspect that she'd used him as a substitute for another man?
The Crighton Family
BEN CRIGHTON: Proud patriarch of the family, a strong- minded character in his eighties, determined to see his dynasty thrive and prosper.
RUTH REYNOLDS: Ben's sister, a vibrant woman now happily reunited with Grant, the man from whom she was tragically separated during the war years—and also with the daughter she gave up for adoption. Ruth is a caring, perceptive woman and she holds the Crighton family together.
JON AND JENNY CRIGHTON: Steady, family-orientated couple. Jon keeps the Crighton law firm running smoothly, and Jenny is a partner in a local antiques business.
MAX CRIGHTON: Son of Jon and Jerry, a self-assured, sexy, ruthlessly ambitious lawyer who married his wife Madeleine, a gentle woman and daughter of a High Court judge, to advance his career. While Max spends the week in London, Maddy and the two children make their home with Ben in Haslewich. The whole family is concerned about the stability of their marriage.
LOUISE AND KATE: Twin daughters of Jon and Jerry. A year out of university and their careers have pulled them in different directions. Louise is finally over her adolescent crush on her cousin Saul, but still has reason to be embarrassed over her past actions.
SAUL CRIGHTON: After a painful first marriage, he is now happily wed to Tullah and they have a baby son to join his other three young children. He is aware that he needs to tread carefully to close the emotional gap between himself and Louise.
JOSS: Sensitive and caring fourteen-year-old son of Jon and Jenny.
JACK: Two years older than Joss, he is Jon and Jenny's nephew. They have brought him up like their own son since his father, David, mysteriously disappeared and his mother moved away to start a new life.
GARETH SIMMONDS: One of Louise's tutors while she was at university. She found temporary comfort in his arms, but he suspected she'd only turned to him as a substitute for Saul. As their paths cross again, Gareth knows they have some issues from the past they need to resolve.
CHAPTER ONE
'MY GOODNESS, we are honoured, aren't we? It isn't very often these days that you manage to tear yourself away from the bureaucratic delights of Brussels.'
Louise tensed as she heard the sarcastic voice of her elder brother, Max. They had never got on particularly well, even as children, and in her view maturity had done nothing to improve either their relationship or her brother.
'It was commented at Christmas that you weren't around,' Max continued jibingly. 'But, of course, we all know Saul was really the reason for that, don't we?'
Louise gave him an angry look before retorting, 'Perhaps if you spent more time thinking about your own relationships and less talking about other people's you might learn something genuinely worthwhile, but then you never were much good at appreciating what's really of value in this life, were you, Max?'
Without giving him any opportunity to retaliate, Louise turned on her heel and walked quickly away from him.
She had promised herself that on this, her first visit home since she had started working in Brussels over twelve months ago, she would prove to her family just how much she had changed, .matured...and just how different, distant almost, she was from the girl who...
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Saul, her father's cousin, who was standing with his wife, Tullah, and the three children from his first marriage. Tullah had her arm around Megan, Saul's daughter, while Saul held the little boy they had had together.
The large drawing room of her grandfather's house seemed to be filled by the presence of her peers, proudly showing off their growing families.
Clustered around the fireplace were her cousin Olivia, with her husband and their two children, talking animatedly with Luke, from the Chester branch of the family, and his American wife Bobbie and their little girl, while Maddy, her brother Max's wife, kept a discreet eye on Gramps, who was becoming increasingly irascible.
According to her mother, Maddy was close to a saint for humouring him the way she did. When Jenny Crighton had made this comment this morning, over breakfast, Louise had immediately pointed out that if Maddy could put up with being married to Max, then her grandfather must come as a form of light relief.
'Louise,' her mother had protested, but Louise had remained unrepentant.
It was no secret in the family that Max was not a good or kind husband to Maddy, and privately Louise couldn't understand why on earth Maddy stayed with him.
'You're looking very cross.'
Louise grimaced as she saw her twin sister. Twins were a feature of the Crighton family, in the same way that poppies were a feature of a field of corn— they sprang up all over the place, although as yet there were no sets in the current new generation.
'They'll come,' her father's aunt Ruth had predicted.
'I've just been receiving the benefit of Max's brotherly conversation,' Louise informed her grimly. 'He doesn't change...'
'No...' Katie looked at her twin. 'You know, in a lot of ways I feel quite sorry for him. He—'
'Sorry for Max!' Louise exploded. 'What on earth for? He's got everything he's ever wanted—a cushy place in one of the country's leading sets of chambers, with his pick of all the best briefs—and all he's had to do to get it is to persuade poor Maddy to marry him.'
'Yes, I know what he's got in the material sense, Lou, but is he happy?' Katie persisted. 'I think he feels what happened with Uncle David far, far more than he's ever shown. After all, they—'
'They were both made in the same mould. Yes, I know,' Louise cut in. 'If you want my opinion, it would be a good thing for this family if Uncle David never surfaced again. Olivia as good as told me that her father had been guilty of serious malpractice when he and Dad were partners, and that if he hadn't disappeared when he did...'
Both of them were silent for a moment as they remembered David Crighton, their father's twin brother and Olivia's father, and the near disaster he had plunged the family into prior to his disappearance some years earlier.
'That's all in the past now,' Katie reminded her gently. 'Dad and Olivia have managed to sort out all the problems they had been having with the practice—and in fact they've built up the business so much that they've decided they need to think abouttaking on an extra qualified solicitor to cope with the increased workload. But Gramps still misses David, you know. He was always—'
'The favourite. Yes, I know. Poor Gramps. He never has had very good judgement, has he? First he makes David the favourite, ahead of Dad, and now it's Max.'
'Mum's really glad that you were able to make it home for Gramps's birthday,' Katie told her sister quietly. 'She was...upset at Christmas when you didn't come home...'
'When I couldn't come home,' Louise corrected her sharply. 'I told you at the time. My boss put me under pressure to put together a report on the legal aspects of a new community law she thought might be passed, and I had no option but to agree. It wouldn't have been worth coming home for what would have amounted to just about forty-eight hours, even if I could have got the flights.'
Three months after leaving university, and not wanting to take the next
stage in her training to become a barrister immediately, Louise had taken a temporary post working for a newly appointed Euro MP who'd wanted someone to work for her as a legal researcher.
Six months ago the temporary post had become a permanent one, and while the hours were long and the work extraordinarily demanding, Louise had thrown herself into it with determination, knowing that the contacts she was making in Brussels would ultimately equip her to make a change of career should she want to do so.
Their choice of careers couldn't have been more different, Katie acknowledged as she silently and sympathetically studied her twin. While Louise, true to her nature, had chosen to fling herself head-first into the maelstrom of politics and intrigues in the hothouse melting-pot atmosphere of Europe's bureaucratic capital, she had opted to join a still very youthful and emergent new charity which had been set up to help young children across the world who had been made orphans and refugees by war.
'Have you spoken to Saul and Tullah yet?' Kate asked her sister softly.
Louise reacted sharply to her question, tensing and almost physically backing off from her as she replied angrily, 'No, I haven't...Why should I? For God's sake, when is everyone in this wretched family going to stop behaving as though...?' She stopped, and took a deep breath.
'Look, for the last time, Saul means nothing to me now. I had a silly, stupid crush on him, yes. I made a total and complete fool of myself over him, yes. But...' She stopped again, and shook her head.
'It's over, Katie. Over.'
'Mum thought when you didn't come home at Christmas—' Katie began.
Louise wouldn't let her finish, breaking in bitterly, 'That what? That I couldn't bear the thought of seeing Saul? Or, worse, that I might—'
'She thought that perhaps you'd met someone in Brussels.' Katie overrode her with quiet insistence. 'And that you weren't coming home because you wanted to be with him...'
Interestingly, a soft tide of warm colour started to tinge her sister's skin, and, even more interestingly, for once in her life she seemed almost lost for words as she turned her head and looked down at the carpet before saying quickly, 'No. No, there isn't anyone. ..at least not like that. I...'
It wasn't totally true—there was someone, of sorts—but she knew perfectly well that the relationship Jean Claude wanted with her was one based on sex only.
Jean Claude was twelve years older than her, and moved in the higher echelons of Brussels' diplomatic circles. He was, as he himself had told Louise, a career diplomat, who currently held a post connected with the French fishing industry.
Louise wasn't quite sure as yet how she felt about him. He had a suave, dry sense of humour, and the kind of Gallic good looks that fell just short enough of outrageously handsome to ensure that he was very attractive to the female sex. Politics and the law, as Jean Claude had already teasingly commented to her, could make very exciting bedfellows.
'Brazen, I think you mean,' Louise had corrected him firmly.
'Be careful if you're looking for commitment,' a colleague had already warned Louise. 'He's got a reputation for liking variety.'
Louise had shrugged away the other woman's comments. Commitment was the last thing on her mind at the moment, and would be for a very long time to come. She might be over Saul in the sense that she was no longer suffering from the massive crush which had caused her to make such an idiotic fool of herself, but she was certainly far from over the feelings of humiliation and searing self-disgust—self-dislike— which had resulted from the sharp realisation of just how dangerously and potentially destructively out of control her feelings for Saul had threatened to become.
She would certainly never make that mistake again. Never allow herself to become such a victim, such a slave to her emotions ever again—she didn't really understand how it had happened in the first place. Right from her early teens she had set her sights firmly on aiming for a career. Marriage, babies, emotions, although she'd once have openly welcomed them with Saul, were more Katie's forte than her own. The terrifying force of her feelings for Saul had been an aberration, and the behaviour they had resulted in so totally abhorrent and repugnant to her that even now, nearly three years later, she could scarcely bear to think about it.
Yes, it was possible now for her to look at Saul with Tullah and the children without suffering even the smallest flicker of the emotion which had torn her apart and threatened every aspect of her normal life during those months when it had held its strangulating, choking grip on her life. But what wasn't possible, what she suspected might never be possible, was for her to forget just how traumatic that time, those feelings had been.
Louise frowned, her thoughts switching from the past to the present as she recognised the suspiciously furtive way her younger brother Joss and their cousin Jack were edging their way towards the French windows.
Discreetly following them, she waited until Joss was on the point of unlatching the door before demanding sternly, 'And just where do the pair of you think you are going?'
'Lou...'Considerably startled, her brother released his hold on the door handle and spun round to face her.
'We were just going down to the greenhouse,' Jack told her with virtuous innocence. ' Aunt Ruth is growing some special seeds there and...'
'The greenhouse?' Louise questioned loftily. 'This compelling expedition to view Aunt Ruth's seedlings wouldn't have been taken via the TV room, would it?'
The look of contrived injured innocence her brother gave her made Louise's lips twitch slightly, but Jack wasn't quite such a good actor, and his fair skin was already starting to flush with guilt. Both boys were ardent rugby fans, and Louise had overheard them pleading with her mother, without success, earlier in the day to be allowed to sneak away from the family party in order to watch their favourite game.
'The All Blacks are playing,' Joss told her pleadingly.
'You'll be all black, or rather your good behaviour record will be, if Mum catches on to what you're up to,' Louise warned him.
'If we go now, we can just about catch the last half,' Joss told her winningly. 'And Mum won't even notice. We'll be back before she knows we're gone.'
'I don't think...' Louise began, but Joss was already reaching up to give her a fervent hug.
'Thanks Lou, you're the best,' he announced. 'And if Mum should ask...'
Louise shook her head firmly.
'….no...don't drag me in. If you get found out, you're on your own, the pair of you.' But she was smiling affectionately as she returned her brother's warm hug. After all, it wasn't such a very long time ago that she herself had found such family gatherings rather dull, and had, like Joss and Jack, made her escape from them just as quickly as she could.
'Bet you wish you could come with us,' Joss whispered to her with an engaging grin before quickly sliding through the French window.
'To watch the All Blacks? No, thanks,' Louise retorted with a small female shudder, but she was smiling as she discreetly closed the French windows behind the two boys.
On the other side of the room Tullah, who had been watching the scene, touched Saul on the arm.
As he turned to look at her she took their son out of his arms and told him, 'I'm just going to have a word with Louise.'
Frowning slightly, Saul watched her. She had totally transformed his life, and the lives of his three children from his first marriage.
Louise stiffened as she saw Tullah making her way towards her. She looked quickly over her shoulder, but the door from the drawing room was blocked by her father and Aunt Ruth, who were deep in conversation. Katie, whom she might have expected to be her ally, had somehow or other managed to melt away, and now there was no escape for her. Tullah was already at her side.
'Hello, Louise...'
'Tullah.'
'You've had your hair cut. I like it. It suits you...'
'Thank you.'
Automatically Louise touched one of the short feathery curls of her newly shorn hair. She had had her hair cut on
impulse the day before she had flown home, and the feminine cut showed off the delicacy of her bone structure and emphasised the shape and colour of her dark eyes. The weight she had lost while away at university had never totally been replaced. She looked, Tullah acknowledged inwardly, almost a little too fine-boned and fragile, and she could well understand, as a mother herself, why Jenny should be a little bit anxious over her well-being.
As the silence between them stretched Louise was acutely conscious of the fact that virtually everyone else in the room was probably watching them and remembering...
As she turned to move away from Tullah, baby Scott reached out and, grinning winsomely at Louise, patted her cheek with one fat baby hand, pronouncing solemnly, 'Pretty.'
Over his downy head Tullah's sympathetic eyes met Louise's wary, startled ones.
'Oh, dear. I think I'm going to sneeze.' Tullah told Louise. 'Could you take him for me?'
Before Louise could protest she found herself holding a solid armful of gurgling, beaming baby, whilst Tullah dived into her jacket pocket for a tissue.
'No. No, it's gone...' Tullah announced when the threatened sneeze was not forthcoming, but she made no attempt to take her son back from Louise as she commented, 'It's so nice to see virtually all the family here. I know your grandfather isn't always the easiest person to get along with...'
'You can say that again,' Louise agreed wryly, gently detaching the baby's clutching fingers from the gold chain she was wearing around her neck. 'He's got your colouring but Saul's eyes,' she told Tullah. 'How have the other three...?'
'So far, so good,' Tullah told her, showing her her crossed fingers. 'It's probably been easier for them, and for us in one way, because they live with us full time. So there's no question of them feeling that Scott, here, gets to see more of their father than they do.'
Scott, for some reason, had quite obviously taken an immediate liking to Louise, and much to her own astonishment, and Tullah's patent amusement, he started to press loud juicy kisses against her face.
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