The Perfect Match?

‘Don’t get upset,’ Chrissie urged her mother, going over to put her arm round her and kiss her.

Facially they were very similar, with wide-set, almond-shaped eyes and high cheek-bones in a delicately feminine face, but where her mother was small, barely five foot two and softly rounded, Chrissie had inherited her father’s height and leaner body frame.

She also had, quite mysteriously since both her parents were dark-haired, hair the colour of richly polished chestnuts, thick and straight and healthily glossy.

At twenty-seven going on twenty-eight, she considered herself mature enough to be above being flattered by those men who did a double take when they saw her for the first time, plainly expecting her to feel complimented by their admiration of her face and body without having bothered to take the time to learn anything about her, the person. Physical attractiveness was not, in her opinion, the prime factor in motivating a new relationship. For her there had to be something far more compelling than that. For her there had to be a sense of being instinctively drawn to the other person, ‘knowing’ that the magnetic pull between the two of them was too overwhelming, too powerful, to be ignored. She was, in short, a true romantic, although she was very loath to admit it.

‘It’s not fair,’ one of her friends had told her mockcrossly the previous summer.

‘If I had your looks I know I’d make much better use of them than you do. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

‘True beauty comes from within,’ Chrissie had told her gently—and meant it.

Whilst she had been at university, she had been approached by a talent scout for a modelling agency but had refused to take them seriously.

There were those who had wondered if her irrepressible sense of humour was quite the thing one wanted in a schoolteacher, but Chrissie had proved that the ability to see and laugh at the humorous side of life was no bar to being able to teach—and to teach well.

‘I’m still not entirely happy about the idea of your staying in Charles’s house,’ her mother repeated.

Chrissie sat down opposite her.

‘Mum...we’ve already been through all this,’ she reminded her. ‘The whole point of my going to Haslewich is to prepare the house for sale and the best way I can do that is if I’m living there.’

‘Yes, you’re right, of course. But knowing how Charles lived...’ Her mother gave a small shudder.

She was a meticulous housewife, a wonderful cook, the true daughter of ancestors who had spent their lives scrubbing dairies and stone floors, polishing, washing and waging war on dirt in all its many forms.

‘I’ve got my own bedding and my own towels and utensils,’ Chrissie reminded her mother.

‘I should be doing this,’ Rose Oldham protested. ‘Charles is... was my brother....’

‘And my uncle,’ Chrissie pointed out, adding, ‘And besides, you can’t You don’t have the time right now and I do.’

Although she wasn’t going to say as much to her mother who she knew, despite her modern outlook on life, was still eagerly waiting for the day when Chrissie became a wife and mother, she had been rather glad of the excuse of having to go to Haslewich. It had enabled her to turn down an invitation from a fellow teacher who had been pursuing her all term to join him and a group of friends in Provence for the summer.

Provence had been very tempting, but the teacher had not. Privately, Chrissie had always been a little wary of her weakness for men of a distinctly swashbuckling and impetuous nature and more suited to the pages of an historical romance than modern -day society and it was one she very firmly squashed whenever she felt it stirring.

The fellow teacher had not come anywhere near creating any kind of stir within her and would, no doubt, have made excellent husband and father material, but he certainly wouldn’t have done anything to satisfy that quirky and rather regrettable feminine desire she knew she had for a man who would excite and entice her, a man who would challenge her, match her, a man with a capital M.

Well, one thing was for sure, she certainly wasn’t likely to find him in Haslewich, which by all her reckoning was a sleepy little market town, a quiet backwater where nothing much ever happened.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I TAKE it they still haven’t caught whoever broke into Queensmead?’ Guy Cooke asked Jenny Crighton as she came into the small antiques shop in which they were co-partners.

‘No,’ Jenny told him, shaking her head as she responded to his enquiry about the recent theft and break-in at her father-in-law’s home.

She smiled warmly at Guy as she spoke. He really was the most extraordinarily good-looking man and if she wasn’t so firmly and happily married to her own husband she had to admit that it could have been all too easy to join the long queue of women who sighed dreamily over Guy’s very masculine blend of a virilely powerful and tautly muscled male body—the kind of body that would have allowed him to pose for a trendily provocative jeans advert any day of the week—allied to enigmatically hooded eyes set above high cheek-bones and a certain way of looking at you that was completely irresistible, virtually resulting in a complete meltdown. Add to that highly sensual cocktail the intensely masculine genes he had inherited from his Gypsy forebears and the reputation that went with them and it was easy to understand why the word ‘sexy’ accompanied by a longing look was the way most of her sex would quite freely have described him.

Not that Jenny was totally immune to Guy’s looks or the unexpected and even more dangerous generosity and warmth of character that went with them, but she loved Jon and she thought it was very sad that with all he had to offer a woman, Guy had not yet found the right one for him.

‘At least they didn’t harm Ben,’ she added. ‘But it has shaken him. You know how stubborn he can be normally and how hard Jon and I have found it to try to persuade him to have someone to live in.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Guy invited. ‘When I went up there to do a valuation on the antiques for his insurance company, he practically hit the roof when I told him that he was going to need to have an alarm system installed. I take it he never did?’

‘Well, you know Ben,’ Jenny sighed. ‘Luckily they didn’t take very much and the police think they must have been disturbed either by the phone ringing or by someone arriving at the house.’

‘It’s so hard to contemplate that someone would actually break in in broad daylight and calmly proceed to remove not just small items but actual pieces of furniture, as well.’

‘The police did warn us that there’s very little chance of our getting anything back. Apparently there’s been a spate of these kinds of robberies recently and they think it’s gangs coming out from the city wanting to make money to buy drugs. The new motorways, of course, facilitate a quick getaway and make them and the stolen property so much harder to trace.’

‘But you’ve managed to persuade the old boy to have someone living in?’ Guy questioned her as he started to check through the contents of a large packing case that contained goods from a house clearance. Junk in the main, he suspected, but you never knew....

‘Well, unfortunately, no,’ Jenny replied. ‘But Maddy is due to arrive at the end of the week. You know she always comes up from London to spend a few weeks here in the summer.’

‘Will Max be coming with her?’ Guy asked, referring to Jon and Jenny’s elder son and Maddy’s husband.

Jenny bit her lip. ‘No...no, he won’t. It seems he’s heavily involved on a case at the moment and he’s going to have to fly out to Spain to see his client. She’s got a yacht that’s apparently in a marina out there.’

Max was a barrister working from a prestigious set of chambers in London. He specialised in divorce work and it hadn’t escaped Guy’s notice that most of his clients were women. Max liked women, or rather he liked the boost to his ego that deceiving them gave him.

Guy did not have a very high opinion of Max but he cared far too much for Jenny to let her know it.

Life hadn’t always been easy for Jenny and although she and her husband, Jon, were happy together now...

Unlike Max, Guy genuinely did like women, all women, but some women especially so. Women like Jenny—warm, gentle, womanly women with quiet, understated beauty. Their more flashy, visually eyecatching counterparts held very little allure for Guy. He was a physically good-looking man himself and well knew how worthless mere good looks could be. A warm, loving, caring nature, though, now that was something that time could never erode, something enduring and worthy of loving, cherishing...

But he had long ago come to accept that Jenny was not for him; that she loved her husband and would never see him as anything more than a friend. ‘A much younger friend’ as she had once stressed to him, reminding him of the age gap between them. At thirty-nine Guy no longer considered himself to be particularly ‘young’.

‘Apart from the shock of the burglary itself, the thing that’s upset Ben the most,’ Jenny was saying, ‘is losing the little yew desk. His father apparently had it copied from the French original that belonged to his grandmother. It was a very pretty little piece, but being a copy, not really of any great financial value.’

‘But a good deal of sentimental value,’ Guy suggested.

‘Very much so,’ Jenny concurred. ‘When I was talking to Luke about it the other day, he told me that the Chester side of the family owned a matching pair of the original from which Ben’s desk was copied and that they had been gifts brought back from France for the twin daughters of the Crighton who bought them. His father now has one of them and his uncle the other.’

‘Mmm...well, perhaps the thief or thieves didn’t realise Ben’s was a copy.’

‘Maybe not, although the police seem to think they probably took it because it was in the hallway and easy to move like the silver and jewellery they took.

‘Ruth and I had to spend virtually a whole day checking over the house and listing what was missing. Ben certainly wasn’t in any fit state to help and although, of course, I had some knowledge of what should have been there, Ruth, as Ben’s sister, was naturally much more accurate.’

‘She’s back from the States, then?’

‘Yes, she and Grant flew in on Saturday.’ Jenny laughed. ‘I think it’s wonderful how the two of them have stuck to their agreement to spend alternate three months in one another’s countries.’

‘It’s lovely to see them together. They’re so much in love, even now.’

‘Well, I imagine all that they’ve been through must make the time they’re having together now all the more precious.’