The Perfect Seduction

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.