Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

‘No. My grandfather’s too old-fashioned and chauvinistic to change now and Max has always been his favourite.’

‘Mmm … Well, things will be different in America,’ Caspar promised her. When Olivia made no immediate response, he gave her a thoughtful look. ‘You’re not having second thoughts about our plans, are you?’ he prodded, then added, ‘You still haven’t told your family?’

‘How could I have second thoughts?’ Olivia challenged him lovingly. ‘You know how much you mean to me … how much our future together means to me,’ she amended.

She laughed as he warned her softly, ‘Just watch it. I don’t know what your laws are over here about stopping on the freeway to—’

‘This isn’t a freeway,’ Olivia interjected mock-severely. ‘It’s a quiet country road and if you want to stop …’ She glanced at him provocatively, laughing again when Caspar shook his head at her.

The months they’d spent together had been the happiest of her life and when Caspar had told her that he was due to return to the States at the end of the summer, she had thought at first that he was trying to tell her that their relationship was not one he viewed as potentially permanent.

She had tried not to show her feelings, to reveal to him how devastated she felt, but something must have betrayed her because he had immediately taken her in his arms and held her tight, rocking her protectively.

‘No. No,’ he told her huskily, ‘I don’t mean to end our relationship. How could you think it? I love you, Olivia … I want you with me. I want you to come with me … it’s just … well, you’ve worked so damned hard for your promotion and …’

‘It’s just a job,’ Olivia had replied tremulously, and in the emotion of the moment she had meant it. ‘You are far, far more important.’ She had meant that, too.

Still meant it, even if sometimes she found somewhat daunting the fact that she would virtually have to retrain in the States if she wanted to achieve the same professional status there that she had been well on her way to achieving here at home.

Caspar would never ask or expect her to give up her career for him. She knew that. But he had made it equally plain that there was no way that he envisaged his professional future as lying anywhere other than in the United States.

‘We could always commute,’ he had whispered to her one night as they lay entwined in one another’s arms.

Commute. As Olivia contemplated the emptiness, the loneliness, the bleakness of all the nights they would have to spend apart if they did so, she had known that the option wasn’t one she could happily contemplate.

And so the decision had been made. Her notice was already handed in and worked through and she had intended to break the news about her plans for her future to her family at some stage during the weekend. She had not foreseen any problems. Why should there be?

She loved her parents, her family, of course, but they had their lives and she had hers. The old childhood and teenage envy she had felt for Max had long since faded away.

But what about the scene in her parents’ bedroom this morning? She bit down hard on her bottom lip. How long had the problem been going on? Did anyone else know? Her father? Surely he must have some inkling. And what about her? She simply couldn’t pretend or ignore what she had witnessed despite the pleading look she had seen in her mother’s eyes.

Caspar realised that something still troubled Olivia. It was just as well they were only here for the weekend, he acknowledged as he drove back towards Olivia’s parents’ home. Family gatherings of any kind tended to make him feel claustrophobic, to bring back memories and fears of which, to say the least, he wasn’t particularly proud. He could still vividly remember how he had disgraced himself at his father’s second wedding.

He’d been taken there by his mother, who had spent the entire previous day patiently explaining to him that her divorce from his father and their consequent relationships with new partners had absolutely no bearing on their shared love for him. He was still their very much loved child.

As a paediatrician, his mother had, of course, been well versed in the kind of trauma experienced by children when their parents’ relationship broke down, and not only had Caspar been carefully prepared for the break-up of his parents’ marriage and their subsequent divorce, he had also been equally carefully and slowly introduced to their new partners.

In his mother’s case, it was an old colleague and friend whom she had known before she married his father. Divorced now himself, he had two teenage children—a son and a daughter—both of whom had been politely distant with Caspar and his mother. His father’s inamorata was a younger ex-student who had been tireless in her determination to show Caspar and his father how much she acknowledged the importance of their relationship. Caspar had disgraced both himself and his parents by throwing up all over the bride.

Given his parents’ affiliations and careers, the result was perhaps not unexpected. His mother’s reaction was to have him and herself undergo months of ‘analysis’ during which Caspar came close to disliking his mother almost as much as he disliked his analyst. His father chose to proceed with an expensive lawsuit to have his mother proved unfit to have sole charge of him and guilty of poisoning their son against him.

Neither of them had believed him when he told them that his sickness was the result of too much ice cream and a bad case of nerves, and when eventually his father’s new wife produced the first of Caspar’s half siblings, Caspar was forbidden to go anywhere near the baby, a little girl, just in case his nervous stomach got the better of him.

Caspar was not deceived. His stepmother didn’t like him and he didn’t think he liked her very much, either.

It was not that Caspar was against families and family life; it was just that as yet he had not seen an example of it that made him feel it was a way of life he wanted for himself. Why, after all, make a liar out of yourself by publicly making promises that were more likely to be broken than kept?

He didn’t particularly want to share Olivia with her family; he wanted her all to himself and he freely admitted it. He hadn’t had a particularly high opinion of Olivia’s father or grandfather before he had met them and now that he had …

How could they value someone as obviously second-rate and unworthy as Max above Olivia? How nature must be laughing at them, mocking them, for their hypocrisy and chauvinism by gifting Olivia above Max.

The two of them hadn’t made any firm plans to marry as yet, but ultimately Caspar knew that they would. He had never expected to fall in love so deeply, to want to make the kind of commitment he wanted to make to Olivia, but now that he had …

He didn’t want to lose her, he admitted, and part of the reason he had been wary of meeting her family was because he had been concerned that they might oppose her decision to make her home and her life with him in the US.

As Caspar well knew from his own childhood, loving someone made you overly vulnerable, which was why he had initially been so reluctant to acknowledge his feelings for Olivia. He would be glad when this weekend was over and they were free to embark on the next stage of their own lives.

As he turned into the drive to her parents’ home, he studied Olivia’s profile. Something was clearly bothering her despite her refusal to admit it. He wondered what it was and, more importantly, why she hadn’t told him.

‘All women are liars and devious,’ his father had once said to him. He had been in between marriages at the time and complaining about the amount of alimony his second wife was claiming from him. ‘Don’t trust any of them, Caspar. Don’t make the same mistakes that I’ve made. They’ll tell you they love you with one breath and then with the next …’

Olivia could feel her body starting to tense as Caspar stopped the car. Was her mother at home?

Olivia couldn’t see her car. She hated herself for the sense of relief that brought.

Why had she been the one to find out? she asked herself, feeling a defensive, angry resentment that made her ache with shame as her initial shock began to wane. Why hadn’t someone else … her father for instance …?

‘Olivia?’

She realised that Caspar had said something to her and was waiting for her to reply. Giving him an apologetic smile, she tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

By rights she ought to be confiding in Caspar, telling him what she had seen, but how could she betray her mother when she herself wasn’t totally sure … when no one else seemed to know …?

Not sure. Of course you’re sure, an inner voice scorned her. You just don’t want to accept it, that’s all. You just don’t want to face up to the truth.

What truth? She only had to close her eyes to be back in her parents’ bedroom, to see the disarray, clothes everywhere, that smell … Her stomach started to heave.

‘What is it?’ Caspar demanded anxiously as she quickly turned to get out of the car.

‘Nothing,’ she denied.

When David heard his brother’s footsteps outside his office door, he reached for the file he had been studying and quickly pushed it out of sight beneath the leather blotter on his desk.

As Jonathon walked in, out of the corner of his eye David could see his bank statement next to the telephone.

Trying to be unobtrusive, he angled his arm across it. He could feel the heavy, uneven thud of his heartbeat.

‘I was looking for the Siddington Trust file,’ Jonathon said, smiling. ‘There’s a query from the accountants and—’

‘Oh, I must have left it at home. I was doing some work on it the other night. I’ll bring it in on Monday.’

‘You took it home, but—’

‘It looks like young Max is going to get his tenancy,’ David broke in, overriding his brother.

‘Yes … yes … it does,’ Jonathon agreed. ‘Although, of course, it isn’t always wise to take these things for granted.’

‘I’ll bet Dad can’t wait to start bragging to Hugh about it,’ David declared, ignoring Jonathon’s concern. ‘There’s always been a bit of rivalry between them on that score, at least in Dad’s eyes.’