The Perfect Lover

They were saying goodbye at the airport, their mother having dropped them off on her way to a meeting of the charity she and their great-aunt Ruth had set up in their home town some years earlier.

‘Sorry I can’t see you off properly,’ she had apologised as they climbed out of her small car.

‘Don’t worry about it, Mum; we understand,’ Louise had consoled her.

‘You could always come over to Brussels to see me, you know,’ Louise told her twin abruptly now. ‘I’ll pay for the ticket, if that would help.’

Katie gave her a brief hug. She knew how difficult it was for her sister to admit that there were any chinks in her emotional armour, even to her twin. To the world at large, Louise always came across as the more independent one of the two of them, the leader. But in reality Katie believed that she was the one with the less sensitively acute emotions, even though she knew that Louise would have sharply denied such an allegation. Louise had always taken upon herself the role of the bigger, braver sister, but Katie knew that inside Louise was nowhere near as confident or as determinedly independent as others seemed to think.

Even their parents seemed to have been deceived by Louise’s outward assumption of sturdy bravado, and consequently she was the one who was always treated that little bit more gently, the one for whom extra allowances were always made, Katie acknowledged. A fact which made her oddly protective of her sister.

‘Oh, by the way, did you know that Professor Simmonds has been seconded to Brussels? Apparently he’s been asked to head some committee on fishing rights in the North Sea,’ Katie told her vaguely.

‘What? No, I didn’t know,’ Louise responded, her face paling.

‘No? I thought that perhaps you may have bumped into him,’ Katie told her innocently.

‘No, I haven’t!’ But if what Katie had just told her was true, Louise suspected that she was certainly going to do so. The committee Katie was talking about had to be the same one that Louise’s boss had just been co-opted onto. Of all the unwanted coincidences!

Louise’s thoughts rioted frantically, her stomach churning, but she dared not let Katie see how shocked and disturbed she was.

‘I know you don’t like him,’ Katie was saying quietly.

‘No. I don’t,’ Louise agreed curtly. ‘After all, he cost me my first, and—’

‘Louise, that’s not fair,’ Katie objected gently.

Louise looked away from her. There was so much that Katie didn’t know, that she couldn’t tell her.

Gareth Simmonds had been her tutor at Oxford at a particularly traumatic time in her life, and he had been a witness not just to that trauma, and the way she had made a complete and utter fool of herself, but he had also...

Louise bit her lip. The feeling of panic churning her stomach was increasing instead of easing.

‘That’s the final call for my flight,’ she told Katie thankfully, giving her twin a swift hug before grabbing hold of her flight bag and heading for her gateway.

Gareth Simmonds in Brussels!

That was all she needed!

CHAPTER TWO (#u381fcbe0-7bda-5480-af65-1821a20c5502)

GARETH SIMMONDS in Brussels! Louise gave a small groan and closed her eyes, shaking her head in refusal of the stewardess’s offer of a drink.

Trust Katie to wait to drop that bombshell on her until the last minute. Still, at least she had warned her, and forewarned was, as they say, forearmed.

Gareth Simmonds. She ground her teeth in impotent fury. She had been halfway through her first year when he had stepped into the shoes of her previous tutor, who’d had to retire unexpectedly on the grounds of ill health, and he and Louise had clashed right from the start.

She had resented the far more pro-active role he had made it plain he intended to play as her tutor. She had been used to his elderly and ailing predecessor, who had, in the main, been content to leave her to her own devices—something which had suited Louise down to the ground, giving her, as it had, ample opportunity to give the minimum amount of attention to her studies whilst she concentrated on what had become the far more important matter of making Saul fall in love with her.

The situation would have been bad enough if Gareth Simmonds had merely concerned himself with his official role as her tutor, but, no, that hadn’t been enough for him. He had had the gall...the cheek... the... the effrontery to take it upon himself to interfere in her personal life as well.

Louise’s tense shoulders twitched angrily. The last thing she needed right now—just when she was beginning to feel she was getting her life back on an even keel again, just when the events of the weekend had made her feel that at last, finally, she had begun to reclaim her sense of self-respect—was to have the whole ugly mess of her past dragged up again in the person of Gareth Simmonds.

He was going to Brussels to head a committee, Katie had said, when repeating to her the information she had garnered at an informal reunion of her old university classmates, and not just any committee either. Louise could feel her body starting to tense defensively. The thought that she might have to have any kind of contact with Gareth Simmonds was unacceptable, untenable. Anger, pride and panic started to well up inside her, causing her throat to tighten as though her own despairing emotions were threatening to choke her.

Gareth Simmonds. They had clashed straight away, something about him sending sharp, prickling, atavistic feelings of dislike and apprehension quivering through her body, and that had been before that disastrous confrontation between them at the end of her first year at Oxford, when he had sent for her and warned her of the potentially dire consequences of her not giving more time and attention to her work.

She had been far more headstrong and self-willed in those days, and the fact that he had had the gall to challenge her over anything, never mind the torment of her love for Saul, had driven her to retaliate. But he had been too quick for her, too subtle...too...

She had hated him with much the same intensity with which she had loved Saul, and with just as little effect, and the last thing she wanted or needed at this stage in her life was to be confronted with the physical evidence of her own youthful stupidity.

She could still remember...

There had been a good deal of giggling and gossip when he had first arrived at Oxford—the youngest Chair they had ever had, and the sexiest, according to his female students. Louise had shrugged her shoulders in disdain. However sexy others might find him, she was not interested. In her eyes he could never match up to Saul. No man could.

True, he might be over six feet with the kind of Celtic colouring that produced a lethal combination of thick dark hair and incredibly brilliant dark blue eyes, but for all Louise cared he could have modelled for the hunchback of Notre Dame.

‘Have you heard his voice,’ one besotted student had breathed, wild-eyed. ‘I could orgasm just listening to him.’

Louise had looked witheringly at her. Saul’s voice made her go weak at the knees, and Gareth Simmonds sounded nothing like him. In fact, the only things they did have in common were that they were both in their thirties—although Gareth Simmonds was a good seven years younger than Saul—and they could both display a decidedly brutal verbal toughness when they so chose. From Saul, the merest hint of a sharp word could reduce her to choking black misery. From Gareth Simmonds it tended to provoke a fierce desire to retaliate in kind.

He might have been her tutor, but that hadn’t given him the right to interfere in her life in the way he had done—and besides... But, no, she must not think about that—not now.

Abruptly Louise realised that the plane had landed.

Automatically she stood up and reached to retrieve her bag from the overhead locker, and then froze as the man occupying the seat behind her also stood up to do the same thing.

‘You!’ she whispered as she came face to face with the very man who had just been occupying her thoughts and exercising her temper.

‘Hello, Louise.’ Gareth Simmonds acknowledged her calmly. Shakily Louise grabbed her bag and turned her back on him. What an appalling coincidence that he should be on the same flight as her!

Determinedly keeping her back towards him, Louise edged her way into the aisle and headed for the exit.

A sharp wind whipped across the tarmac as they left the plane, and as she hurried towards the arrivals lounge Louise reassured herself that her quickened pace was caused by the chilly evening air, and certainly not by any fear of coming face to face with Gareth Simmonds a second time.

Once through Customs Louise headed for the taxi rank, giving the cab driver her address at the large block of apartments where she lived. The apartment she rented was small, and fearsomely expensive, but at least she lived on her own, she comforted herself as she paid off the taxi driver and walked into the apartment block foyer.

While she filled the kettle, Louise ran her answering machine tape. A small rueful smile curled her mouth as she heard Jean Claude’s familiar, sexy, smoky French accent. She had dated the Frenchman casually a few times, but was well aware of his reputation as an incorrigible flirt.

He was telephoning to ask if she was free for dinner during the week. Louise went to pick up and open her diary. She was due to accompany her boss to an inaugural meeting of the new committee in the morning. She suspected it might possibly run on until after lunch, and then at night there was an official dinner.

‘The French contingent especially are going to be asking some tricky questions,’ Pam Carlisle had warned Louise. ‘They’re none too happy about the fact that the Chair appointed is British. It’s only the fact that he’s known to be pro-European that’s persuaded them to give their grudging acceptance of his appointment. The disputed waters are, after all, still officially British.’

‘But they want to change that...’ Louise had guessed.

‘Well, they certainly want to get their own legal right to fish the waters.’

They had gone on to discuss the legal ramifications of the situation, and Louise had never thought to ask her boss the identity of the committee’s Chair. Why should she have done? It had never even crossed her mind that the new appointee could possibly be her ex-tutor and protagonist Gareth Simmonds. Hadn’t his prestigious lectureship coupled with the doting adoration of half the female student population been enough for him? Louise wondered bitterly.