Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

Her father …

‘Has he been under any unusual stress?’ the specialist had asked them and she had wondered guiltily then if she ought to mention her mother’s ‘problem’ but had decided not to do so since she was not sure whether her father was aware of it. The stress caused by that knowledge would have been bad enough, but this …

How on earth had he managed to live with himself, knowing what he had done not once, but regularly, consistently, over a period of five years? How could he have done it?

Abruptly, achingly, Olivia longed for Caspar. And not just for him, but the means of escape he could have provided from the appalling dilemma she now faced. If only she had never seen those statements, opened that file. If only she was now safely on her way to London with Caspar.

It shocked her that she, who had always privately thought of herself as strong and independent, should, the moment she was tested, become so mortally afraid and vulnerable, and even worse than that, a moral coward who, instead of facing up to what she had discovered, simply wanted to run and hide herself away from it, preferably in the safe sanctuary of Caspar’s arms.

Caspar. She looked at her watch. It still wasn’t too late for her to catch him before he left, she decided feverishly. If she drove straight to the airport, there was still time before his flight took off for London.

She couldn’t tell him about her father, of course. Caspar would never, never understand that kind of deceit and dishonesty—a violation rather than a straightforward theft—so much worse somehow coming from a person who was, after all, in such a great position of trust. But still, she needed him. Needed the loving warmth of his arms, the security he provided, and the escape …

She had already pulled on her jacket and picked up her handbag without being aware of doing so. As she hurried through the downstairs foyer, she told the receptionist quickly, ‘I’m … I’m just going to the airport to see a friend.’

Oh dear God, why had she looked at those statements? Why hadn’t she simply turned the other way? What was happening to her and to her life? Why did she have to discover these things about her parents that she would much rather have not had to know? Not even the silent threat of the police video cameras was enough to prevent her from speeding as she drove towards the airport, overtaking other vehicles with an uncharacteristic recklessness, terrified that she would somehow miss seeing Caspar. She had to see him … she had to …

The airport had changed since her last visit, expanded into a vast complex that had her gritting her teeth as she hunted frantically for a parking space and then abandoned her car half in and half out of it. She locked the door and started to run towards the departures lounge, praying that Caspar would not already have been called through for his flight.

The escalator taking her down into the departures lounge was packed and she fidgeted nervously as it progressed slowly, tortuously, into the hall itself. Suddenly she caught sight of Caspar’s familiar back and froze.

The urge to call out to him, even though she knew he wouldn’t hear, was so strong that she had to bite the inside of her mouth to stop from doing it. He was, she realised, talking to someone. He moved and she was able to see who it was.

Hillary.

The shock rocketed all the way through her body—the sudden sickening sensation of the blood draining from her head inducing a feeling of faintness, the nauseous lurch of her stomach, the weak shakiness of her legs.

Hillary. What was she doing with Caspar?

As Olivia watched them, Hillary reached up and whispered something in Caspar’s ear. He turned to smile at her and Olivia’s heart turned over inside her chest. Hillary moved her head and started to kiss Caspar, her body moving subtly closer to his. Caspar had his hand on her shoulder.

Olivia thought for a moment that she was actually going to faint. Disbelief, anguish and hot, furious anger all combined to produce a pain like nothing she had ever previously experienced.

Was this why he had ended their relationship? Not, as he had accused her, because he doubted the strength of her feelings but because his own for her had changed. Because he no longer loved her, wanted her. Because of Hillary. Hillary who, like him, was an American. Hillary who, like him, thought nothing of the ties and responsibilities of being part of a family, the duties … Hillary who could walk away from her children and her husband just as he could walk away from her. But if he thought that in Hillary he had found someone who would put him first, he was very, very wrong, Olivia decided savagely. Hillary was the kind of woman who would never put anyone other than herself first.

She was down in the departures lounge now but she didn’t waste any time in going over to Caspar. Instead she headed straight for the exit.

Caspar. Her lover. Her refuge … her sanctuary … She started to laugh bitterly.

‘… and you needn’t worry about work, David, because Olivia is going to stay on and help out at the office and—’

‘No!’

Tiggy looked nervously at Jon, appealing silently to him for help as David interrupted her. Jon had offered to wait outside whilst she went in to see her husband alone, but Tiggy had begged him to go with her.

She was uncomfortable and ill at ease when she was with David, Jon had noticed, but then he suspected that very few people would have not found the battery of technical equipment that had originally surrounded his brother when he was in the intensive care unit intimidating and they had been warned that David must not become upset or overexcited, which he quite plainly was now.

‘It’s all right, David,’ he soothed his brother as he discreetly rang for the nurse, mentally cursing himself for not having warned Tiggy not to mention the fact that Olivia was helping out at the practice.

Ten minutes later after the nurse had shown them out of David’s room, having first firmly reassured a tearful Tiggy that David was not about to suffer a second heart attack but that he did need to ‘rest’, Tiggy flung herself into Jon’s arms.

‘Oh, Jon, I’m so frightened,’ she wept. ‘They keep saying that David will soon be able to come home, but I’m afraid that if he does …’

‘Don’t upset yourself,’ Jon comforted her. ‘I’m sure the doctors won’t allow David to leave here until they’re sure he’s well enough to do so.’

‘He just doesn’t seem the same any more,’ Tiggy persisted weepily. ‘Why was he so angry about Olivia?’

‘He’s probably upset at the thought of her disrupting her own career plans,’ Jon fibbed. ‘Don’t let it upset you. That won’t do either you or David any good.’

‘Oh, Jon, you’re so understanding. Jenny is so lucky to have you,’ Tiggy sighed as she nestled close to him. ‘I used to tell David that he should watch his weight. You’re much much fitter….’ She lifted her head from his shoulder and reached up to touch his hair, telling him coyly, ‘Why don’t you try a different haircut, something more modern. It would suit you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Jon replied, laughing, recalling the hairstyles favoured by his younger son and his friends. Even so, it was flattering to receive Tiggy’s compliments and her interest. Jenny would certainly never have said anything like that to him, but then Jenny had never been the type to think of flattering a man.

‘Oh, Jon—’ Tiggy’s mouth trembled pitifully as she tried to smile ‘—will you think me very dreadful if I say that recently I’ve been feeling that I married the wrong brother?’

Jon had to swallow hard as he hugged her. She aroused in him the same kind of emotions he had felt on first holding each of his newborn children. Only with Tiggy there was an extra ingredient, a sensuality, a sexuality—a charge that left him feeling both elated and ashamed.

Jenny was his wife and Tiggy was David’s and what worse kind of betrayal could there be than for him to covet his twin’s wife?

‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ Tiggy was whispering to him. ‘Can’t we go somewhere …?’

‘I really ought to get back to the office …’ Jon began, but Tiggy clung tightly to his arm.

‘We could have lunch. Everyone has to have a lunch-hour. Please, Jon,’ she pleaded, ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’

As his plane started to climb into the surprisingly blue Manchester sky, Caspar stared bleakly through the window. Only now could he acknowledge that, illogical though it was, a part of him had gone on expecting, hoping, right until the last call for his flight to London, that Olivia would appear.

And yet so strong was the hold of the angry, jealous child within him that even knowing that, he had not been able to allow himself to walk over to a telephone and call her.

If she had loved him enough, then she would automatically have put him, his needs, his desires, his wishes, first; so rang the stubborn child’s voice within him.

Only she had not … did not. Think how you would feel in her shoes, how you would behave; how you would react, given that kind of ultimatum, the analytical adult voice of his grown-up self demanded. Would you give in to that kind of emotional blackmail?

Would you want a relationship with the kind of person who wielded it?

Tiredly he pushed his hand into his hair. It would probably never have worked anyway; Olivia would have needed to retrain to be able to work back home. Lawyers there did not command the same kind of respect from the community that they did in Britain. The whole system was different, more political, more hard-nosed, and Olivia, despite her academic intelligence and ability, had a certain feminine softness about her that he—and, he suspected, other men, too—found subconsciously alluring. Because men liked women to be vulnerable?

He moved irritably in his seat. She might be softhearted but she sure as hell could be stubborn, as well. Yet in her shoes wouldn’t he want to prove the doubting Thomases amongst her own family wrong, to prove that she could do the job as well and indeed better than any of them? Wouldn’t that have been a challenge he’d have found impossible to resist? So why expect Olivia to resist it?

She had caught him off guard last night. He had never had any intention of having dinner with Hillary. It had been obvious virtually from the first moment they had met that she was looking for a way to justify leaving her marriage and someone to support her in that decision. As a fellow American and someone like her who was outside the family, it was only natural that she should turn to him, but in listening to her, there was no doubt that he had placed himself in a highly invidious position. Olivia had already made it plain that she supported Saul, but by the time he had run into Hillary last night, he had been almost glad of an opportunity to widen the rift between Olivia and himself. Well, he had certainly found it and meeting Hillary by chance at the airport this morning had not been particularly welcome.

It was just as well that her family lived out on the West Coast, making any future contact between them highly unlikely. He still had a few days before he actually left the country, he comforted himself as his plane started to circle Heathrow. Time enough yet for Olivia to contact him … or for him to contact her.

There was no going back now, Olivia acknowledged, no, not even if she wanted to. What she had seen at the airport had convinced her of that. Their quarrel, the reasons for it, the events leading up to it, she could understand if she divorced herself from her own emotions and studied the situation dispassionately. This didn’t mean to say that she felt she was in any way in the wrong, simply that there were realistically strong arguments for both Caspar and herself to feel aggrieved and angry, but the speed with which Caspar had quite obviously replaced her in his life—and in his bed, too, judging from the way Hillary had been draping herself all over him—no, that could not be forgiven or understood. That was treachery, betrayal on a grand scale. As a family, they seemed destined to suffer badly from it, both as the betrayed and the betrayer, she reflected soberly as she drove back to the office.

Well, she knew what she had to do. There was no avoiding the issue now, no escape, no cowardly walking away…. And the first person she’d have to tackle had to be her uncle Jon, and after that … Her hands were shaking as she locked the door of her car.

Haslewich was a small town and her grandfather a very upright and proud man. She dared not think what it would do to him when word got round about what her father had done. The whole family would be affected by it, each and every one of them tainted by it. The bile rose in her throat, sour tasting and heavy.