The Perfect Sinner

Twins!

Twins ran through the genealogical history of the Crighton family. His own father was the younger one of one pair and his grandfather, Ben Crighton, the lone survivor of another.

Twins!

Max was eternally grateful to his parents for the fact that his life had not been overshadowed; that he had not been overshadowed by another half, another self, threatening his position of sole supremacy, and it was about the only thing he was grateful to them for.

As he glanced around the large room, Max was coolly amused to observe the way so many of his relatives failed to meet his gaze. They didn’t like him very much, but he didn’t care. Why should he? Having people like him had never been one of Max’s ambitions.

The brand new Bentley Turbo convertible car he was currently driving, his position as a partner in one of London’s most prestigious sets of legal chambers; they hadn’t been acquired because people liked him. To be one of London’s foremost barristers had been Max’s driving goal in life, ever since he had been old enough to learn from his grandfather just what the word barrister meant.

Max’s uncle David, his father’s twin brother, had once been destined for that same golden future, but Uncle David had failed to make it. There had been a time, too, when Max had feared that he also might fail, when despite all the promises he had made himself, all the promises he had made to his grandfather, he might, through no fault of his own, have the prize he so desperately wanted snatched from him at the last minute. But he had found a way to turn the situation to his own advantage, to show those who had tried to bring him down just how foolish they had been.

He glanced across the room to where his wife, Madeleine, was sitting with his mother and his grandfather’s sister, his great aunt Ruth.

While not one of his female cousins of his own generation, nor the wives of his male ones, could ever be said to be the kind of high-profile trophy wives that their partners could take satisfaction in flaunting beneath the envious eyes of other men, they were certainly attractive enough—very attractive indeed, in fact in the case of Luke’s wife Bobbie—to underline Madeleine’s dreary, boring plainness.

Max’s mouth curled cynically as his wife glanced up and saw that he was watching her, in her eyes the look of a rabbit momentarily trapped in the dazzle of a car’s headlights, before she quickly looked away from him.

Madeleine did, of course, have one redeeming feature as his wife. She was extremely wealthy and extremely well connected, or at least her family was.

‘What do you mean, you don’t want our baby,’ she had faltered in shocked disbelief when she had so humbly and so adoringly brought him the news that she was pregnant with their first child.

‘I mean, my oh-so-stupid wife, that I don’t want it,’ Max had told her callously. ‘The reason I married you was not to procreate another generation of little Crightons, my cousins can do that….’

‘No … then why … why did you marry me?’ Madeleine had asked him tearfully.

It had amused him to see the dread in her eyes, to feel the fear she was trying so hard to conceal.

‘I married you because it was the only way I could get into a decent set of chambers,’ Max had told her coldly and truthfully, and cruelly. ‘Why so shocked?’ he had taunted her. ‘Surely you must have guessed….’

‘You said you loved me,’ Madeleine had reminded him painfully.

Max had thrown back his head and laughed.

‘And you believed me…. Did you really, Maddy, or were you just so desperate to get a man, to get laid, to get married, that you chose to believe me?

‘Get rid of it,’ he had instructed her, his glance flicking dispassionately towards her small, round stomach.

But Maddy hadn’t done as he had demanded. Instead she had defied him, and now there were two noisy, squalling brats to disrupt his life—not that he allowed them to do so.

It had been a positive stroke of genius on his part to encourage his grandfather to become so dependent on Maddy that the old man had insisted that she was the only person he wanted around him.

Persuading Maddy to virtually live full-time in Haslewich, the Cheshire town where he had grown up and where his great-grandfather had first begun the legal practice that his own father now ran, had been even easier, a move that had left him free to pursue his own life virtually unhindered by the interference and responsibility of two turbulent children and a clinging wife.

Max felt not the least degree of compunction about the affairs he had enjoyed during his marriage, relationships that in the main, had been conducted with female clients for whom he was acting, on whose behalf he had been instructed by their solicitors to ensure that their divorces from their extremely wealthy husbands allowed them to continue living in the same financial comfort they had been accustomed to during their marriages.

It was not unusual for these women—rich, beautiful, spoiled and very often either bored or vulnerable—to feel that a relationship with the handsome young barrister who was going to make their husband part with as much of his fortune as he could was a justifiable perk of their divorce, as well as an additional small triumph against their soon-to-be ex-husbands.

It was not to be hoped, of course, that they would keep the details of such a delicious piece of vengeance a secret.

Confidences were shared and exchanged with ‘girlfriends,’ and Max had very quickly become known as the barrister to have if one was getting a divorce—and not just because of the wonderful amounts of money he managed to wrest from previously determinedly ungenerous husbands.

Even his marriage to Maddy, which initially he had intended should last no longer than the time it took to get himself established, had begun to be a bonus. After all, marriage to Maddy and the existence of two small dependent children meant that all his lovers had to appreciate right from the start of their affair that it could only ever be a temporary thing, that no matter how desirable, how enticing they might be, he as a man of honour could not put his own needs, his own desires, above the security of his children. For their sakes he had to stay married.

‘If only there were more men like you …’ more than one of his lovers had whispered. ‘Your wife is so lucky….’

Max totally agreed, Madeleine was lucky. If he hadn’t married her she could have been condemned to a life of being the unmarried daughter.

There was currently a whisper that her father was being considered for the soon-to-be-vacant post of Lord Chief Justice, and it would certainly do his own career no harm at all if that whisper should become a reality.

Max knew that Madeleine’s parents didn’t particularly care for him, but it didn’t worry him. Why should it? His own parents, his own family didn’t like him very much, either. And he didn’t particularly like them. The only member of his family he had ever felt any real degree of warmth for had been his uncle David, and even that had been tinged with envy because his grandfather doted on David. Max also felt contempt for David, because for all his grandfather’s talk and praise, David had, after all, still only been the senior partner in the family’s small-town legal practice.

Love, the emotion that united and bonded other people, was an alien concept to Max. He loved himself, of course, but his feelings for others veered from mild contempt through disinterest to outright resentment and deep hostility.

In Max’s eyes, it was not his fault that others didn’t like him, it was theirs. Their fault and their loss.

Max glanced at his watch. He’d give it another half an hour and then he’d leave. Louise had originally wanted to get married on Christmas Eve, but the wedding had actually taken place a little bit earlier, primarily because it was the turn of Great-aunt Ruth and her American husband, Grant, to fly to the States to spend Christmas with Ruth’s daughter and her husband.

Great-aunt Ruth’s granddaughter, Bobbie, and her husband, Luke, one of the Chester Crightons, were going with them, along with their young daughter.

* * *

Several yards away, Bobbie Crighton, who had observed the way Max had looked at poor Maddy, reflected grimly to herself that Max really was detestable. She had once heard his cousin Olivia remark very succinctly, ‘Max is the kind of man who, no matter how attractive the woman he’s speaking with is, will always be looking over her shoulder to see if he can spot someone even better….’

Poor Maddy, indeed. Bobbie didn’t know how she could bear to stay in her marriage, but then, of course, there were the children.

She patted her own still-flat stomach with a small, secret smile; her second pregnancy had been confirmed only the previous week.

‘I think this time it could be twins,’ she had confided to Luke, who had raised his dark eyebrows and asked her dryly, ‘Women’s intuition?’

‘Well, one of us has got to produce a set,’ Bobbie had pointed out to him, ‘and I’m the right age for it now. Mothers in their thirties are more likely to have twins….’

‘In their thirties? You are only just thirty,’ Luke had reminded her.

‘Mmm … I know, and I rather think that these two were conceived on the night of my thirtieth birthday,’ she had told him softly.

Luke was one of four children—two boys and two girls. His father, Henry Crighton, and his father’s brother, Laurence, were the senior partners, now retired, in the original solicitors’ practice in Chester. Over eighty years ago there had been a quarrel between the then youngest son, Josiah Crighton, and his family, and he had broken away from them and gone on to found the Haslewich branch of the Crighton firm and family.

While Luke’s brother and sisters and the other Chester cousins and their Haslewich peers were extremely good friends, Ben Crighton, the most senior member of the Crighton family in Haslewich, was still obsessed by the family tradition of competitiveness with the Chester members, even if it was now in spirit only.

It had been a burning ambition of Ben’s all his life that initially his eldest son and then, when that had not been possible, his eldest grandson, Max, should achieve the goal that had been withheld from him and be called to the bar.

All through his growing years, Max had been alternately bribed and coerced by his grandfather to fulfil this goal, his naturally competitive spirit sharpened and fed by his grandfather’s tales of the injustices suffered by their own branch of the family and the need to restore the family’s pride by proving to ‘that Chester lot’ that they weren’t the only ones who could boast of reaching the higher echelons of the legal profession.

When Max had announced to his grandfather that he was to join one of London’s most prestigious sets of chambers, he had made Ben Crighton’s dearest wish come true.

As Bobbie surveyed the Grosvenor’s ballroom now, she couldn’t help remembering the first time she had attended another family occasion—Louise and her twin Katie’s coming of age, an event to which she, as a stranger then to the family, had been invited by Joss, Louise and Katie’s younger brother.