Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

When her mother called up that the phone was for her, her heart started to thud heavily. Caspar. It had to be! As she raced downstairs in her underwear, she was already repeating what she was going to say to him. Only it wasn’t Caspar; it was Saul.

‘Saul,’ she repeated mechanically, her voice dry and empty of enthusiasm.

‘You sound down,’ Saul sympathised. ‘Bad day at the office?’ he teased. ‘Fancy telling me all about it over dinner?’

‘Oh, Saul … it’s very kind of you, but I don’t think …’

‘Look, if what happened the other night is putting you off, don’t let it,’ he told her softly. ‘I meant what I said. I won’t …’

What he had said the other night? What was he talking about? Olivia wondered in confusion.

‘You needn’t worry that I’m going to come on to you, pressure you,’ Saul went on, ‘and besides, I’ve already fixed up a babysitter. Louise has offered to sit with the kids and Mum’s still here, as well.’

Saul thought her hesitation was because she was afraid he might try to flirt with her. Olivia didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She couldn’t hurt his feelings by telling him that she had all but forgotten that small brief incident by the river and she certainly could not tell him why.

‘Please …’

Olivia wavered. What was the point in staying at home in case Caspar rang? What was she going to do if he did? What was she going to say? Nothing could alter what she had seen.

‘I … yes … all right,’ she agreed.

‘You might at least try to sound more enthusiastic,’ Saul chided with a mock-aggrieved laugh, adding, ‘I’ll try to be round to pick you up in half an hour.’

‘Mum, where’s Dad?’

‘He’s had to go out,’ Jenny told Louise without turning to look at her. The kitchen smelt of baking, betraying, no doubt, that the mix she had just slid into the oven was Jon’s favourite upside-down apple cake. How silly of her to have made it. The girls wouldn’t eat it—Louise had loftily announced only the previous month that they were far too old now for the childish treat of scraping out the mixing bowl and neither of them had ever been great cake eaters anyway. Perhaps she could give some of it to Ben. Baking soothed her. She could well remember how busily she had baked in those months when her mother was dying and again when … She winced as she accidently burned her wrist on the hot door of the Aga.

‘I don’t suppose you could give me a lift round to Grandad, could you?’ Louise was wheedling. ‘Only I promised Saul I’d babysit and—’

‘You suppose quite rightly,’ Jenny retorted. ‘What’s wrong with using your bike?’ Tiredly she turned to her daughter, her eyes widening as she saw what Louise was wearing.

Surprisingly the Armani trouser suit was only just a little too large for her. She was already taller than Jenny anyway. Even more disconcerting, it looked good on her, which was more than could be said for the make-up she was wearing.

‘You aren’t planning to babysit wearing my suit, are you, Louise?’ Jenny asked with what she felt herself was commendable calm. But then, what was the potential loss of a designer trouser suit when you were faced with the more drastic loss of a husband?

Louise looked at her, opened her mouth to argue, then changed her mind. ‘I was just trying it on, seeing how it would look. After all, it’s wasted hanging there in your wardrobe, and you’ll never wear it, we both know that,’ she finished disparagingly.

‘Louise …’ Jenny began warningly.

‘Oh, all right, then,’ she conceded, sulking. ‘I’ll go and take it off.’

‘I think that would be a very good idea,’ Jenny agreed firmly. ‘Jeans and a T-shirt would be a much more sensible alternative.’

What on earth had motivated Louise to try to get away with going out wearing her trouser suit and not just any trouser suit, but the Armani, which Guy had told her—after she bought it—made her look incredibly sexy. That was nothing to the way it had looked on her daughter, who Jenny was nearly sure had been wearing the jacket with absolutely nothing underneath; there had certainly been more than just a suggestion of provocative thrust of taut, uplifted teenage nipple showing through the supple fabric.

For whose benefit? Surely not Saul’s. He was easily twice her age, and besides, improbable though the idea of Louise falling for Saul was, Jenny decided it would do no harm to discuss her suspicions with Jon—just as a precaution. Then chillingly she remembered that there would be no more long, cosy chats with her husband as she snuggled up in bed beside him and they talked over the joint and separate events of their day. That there would be no more anything with Jon.

Hastily she wiped her eyes. The last thing she wanted was for Louise to come back in the kitchen and find her crying.

‘Young Saul took Olivia out to dinner last night,’ Ben announced abruptly.

Ruth looked at her brother. Only Ben could refer to Saul as ‘young’ as though he were no more than a teenager and Olivia much the same.

Ann had already informed Ruth about the break-up of Saul’s marriage, and Ruth, guessing what was going through her brother’s mind, felt bound to point out to him, ‘Olivia considers herself fully committed to Caspar, Ben.’

‘Pooh, she’ll soon come to her senses. Americans, none of them can be trusted. You know that….’

Ruth could feel herself tensing. No matter how often she promised herself that this time she wouldn’t end up quarrelling with him, Ben almost always managed to provoke her into forgetting her vow and this occasion was no exception.

‘You really are the most ridiculously biased man,’ she told him forthrightly. ‘People are individuals, Ben, no matter where they come from. A hundred or so years ago you’d have been the sort of man who objected to his daughter marrying someone from outside the Cheshire border. Olivia loves Caspar and her relationship with him is a far different affair from mine … I … I made a mistake,’ she countered tautly, ‘but that doesn’t mean that all Americans are—’

‘Lying cheats,’ Ben supplied angrily for her. ‘What about Saul’s wife, then, going off like that and leaving three children? What kind of woman does a thing like that, deserting her own children?’

Ruth winced. ‘Sometimes a woman doesn’t have any option,’ she answered quietly. ‘And the fact that Hillary is American has no bearing whatsoever on her decision to leave Saul. He wanted to keep the children, as you well know. They were all born here, this is their home, and no doubt in leaving them here with Saul, Hillary is trying to put their own interests first.’

‘Rubbish,’ Ben snorted. ‘They’re all the same, the whole lot of them. Young Olivia will soon find out the truth … just like you did.’

‘I hope not,’ Ruth returned. She wouldn’t wish what had happened to her on anyone else, least of all someone like Olivia. ‘The fact that Grant lied to me when he pretended that he wasn’t married, that he was free to …’ She stopped and swallowed fiercely before forcing herself to continue. ‘The fact that he deceived me had nothing at all to do with his nationality. Any man, whether English, Welsh, Scots, French, Polish, Dutch, any man could have done the same. Grant just happened to be American.’

‘They were all the same,’ Ben argued angrily. ‘Coming over here, lying and cheating, seducing innocent young girls, turning their heads … Don’t think I don’t know.’

‘But you don’t know, Ben,’ Ruth contradicted him gently. ‘You see, originally I was the one who chased Grant, not the other way round.’ She smiled sadly as she saw his face. ‘Oh yes, it’s true. I know how much it offends that steely Crighton pride of yours to hear it, but I wanted Grant and I wanted him very badly. He was like a breath of fresh air, an irresistible magnetic force … he was just so different from anyone else I’d ever met….’

‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Ben remonstrated gruffly. ‘You were still grieving for Charles.’

‘No,’ Ruth told him firmly, shaking her head. ‘I did grieve for Charles, yes, but as a friend, not as a woman. Oh, I know we were engaged but that was just because it was the done thing. I was young and, I suppose, rather silly. I got caught up in the urgency of the whole war thing. Charles was going away into danger. He wanted the security of having someone to come back to, of reassuring himself that he would come back. I gave him the security, but that was all I gave him. I was sad when he was killed, of course, but I never mourned him as a lover. I never mourned him in the way I did Grant,’ she added under her breath.

‘He seduced you,’ Ben insisted fiercely.

‘No,’ Ruth corrected him with gentle determination. ‘If you must know the truth, Ben, I was the one who seduced him.’ Her mouth curved in a tender, reminiscent smile. ‘He was the one who was reluctant, responsible….’

And he was also the one who was committed to someone else, who was married and not just married but had a child, as well. He’d never told Ruth that, not then, when she had pushed him back into the sweet-smelling long grass of the water meadow and teased him with the soft shape of her breasts, breasts, which they both knew were bare beneath the flimsy covering of her frock, nor later when she had lain beneath him, crying out her joy at the feel of him inside her, surrendering herself to it and to him. No, he had not told her then, nor had he mentioned them at any other time.

It had been left to her father and brother to tell her the truth. For a long time she had thought that the pain of losing him would never leave her, but eventually it had, the sharp agony of her original grief softening to a dully monotonous ache, and that ache, over the years, fading to an occasional twinge of pain whenever she allowed herself the dangerous pleasure of thinking about him. And anyway, by then she had other pains to bear, other hurts to hide. Grant. She had no idea if he was even still alive, and she did not want to know, either, she told herself firmly.

She could see Ben massaging his bad leg. She knew how much David’s heart attack had upset and frightened him and she was filled with remorse for having argued with him. It was not his fault that he was the way he was. He reminded her sometimes of a great, lumbering, clumsy and anachronistic primeval beast on the edge of extinction, bewildered by the fact that he no longer had the power or strength he had taken for granted for so long. To Ben the Crighton name was sacrosanct, the upholding of it a sacred trust. Ruth smiled sadly to herself. He was so badly out of step with the times, it was almost laughable, but somehow she didn’t feel like laughing.

On her way home she intended to call round and see Jenny to find out if there was any real substance to Joss’s fears. Distasteful though the idea of prying into someone else’s private life was to her, she felt she owed it to her great-nephew to at least take his fears seriously enough to make some attempt to alleviate them. If they could be alleviated.

13 (#ufcc4f2fd-df2c-5918-87db-8cfc05f14296)

Madeleine Browne. A triumphant smile curled Max’s mouth in cynical satisfaction as he looked down at the name he had doodled. In the three relatively short weeks since he had first discovered her name, Max had found out rather a lot about her.

First and foremost, and the most serious hurdle, in his eyes at least, to his ousting her from the race to gain the chambers vacancy was the fact her grandfather on her mother’s side was one of the country’s most prominent Law Lords and her father was a senior High Court judge; moreover, she was not merely Madeleine Browne, but Madeleine Francomb-Browne, although apparently during her time at university she had decided to drop the first half of her double-barrelled surname.

She lived, very appropriately, in a small house in Chelsea down by the river, which belonged to her father and which she shared with a friend—a ‘girl’ friend, her circle of friends predictably in the main ‘girls’ she had been at school with. She was, in short, a typical product of an upper-middle-class background, the type of girl who thirty or even twenty-five years ago would never even have dreamt of having any kind of career other than the pursuit of a suitable husband and Max heartily wished that she had chosen that option now.

However, in the midst of all the unhelpful and predictable information he had gathered about her from various sources, there was one fact that glittered as brilliantly as a cut and polished diamond. And that was quite simply, God alone knew for what reason, that she had, during one summer’s vacation while she was studying, taken a part-time job, no doubt as some kind of general dogsbody, at the chambers headed by Luke Crighton in Chester. Max had no idea why on earth she had chosen to work there when, thanks to her family’s influence, she could have worked anywhere—if indeed she had needed to work, which seemed highly unlikely—but what he did know was that it was a golden nugget of good fortune, which he fully intended to turn into the maximum advantage for himself.