Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

‘Well, I kinda liked them, as well,’ Bobbie agreed—and meant it—but her conscience was beginning to trouble her a little.

Back home, the plans she and Sam had made had seemed perfectly logical, but now... She had liked Olivia and Caspar, and as for Joss... She frowned as she looked down and saw that he was scowling. A quick glance across the room told her why; Max was walking purposefully towards them.

‘Well now, young Joss, and who exactly is this?’

Bobbie sympathised with Joss as she watched the tip of his ears burning a furious red at his brother’s deliberately condescending manner towards him.

‘Hi, I’m Bobbie,’ Bobbie introduced herself calmly.

The dark eyebrows lifted. ‘An American... Oh dear, Joss, you will be popular with the old man. Our grandfather, I’m afraid to say, has an aversion to Americans,’ he told Bobbie.

Joss, Bobbie could see, was looking miserably embarrassed.

‘That’s okay,’ she responded easily. ‘My grandfather feels exactly the same way about you British.’

Max gave her a narrow-eyed look. ‘Hopefully not an aberration you’ve inherited,’ he suggested softly.

‘Who says it’s an aberration?’ Bobbie replied and had the satisfaction of seeing the extraordinary effect of his amazing physical good looks dimmed by the unpleasant expression in his eyes.

No wonder Joss was so wary around him.

‘Oh, Max, there you are. I—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Maddie, must you follow me around like an idiotic sheepdog?’ Max demanded irritably as he turned towards his wife.

Bobbie felt for her as the other woman’s face burned a painful dark red. Joss was chewing the side of his cheek and Bobbie herself had to suppress an urge to tell Max exactly what she thought of his arrogance and cruelty.

‘Your husband and I were just discussing our respective grandfathers,’ Bobbie informed Madeleine with a genuinely friendly smile.

‘Oh, I see.’ She had a shy, hesitant voice and a very uncertain manner, Bobbie noticed as Madeleine went on to tell her, ‘It’s a shame that Ben can’t be here tonight. He had a fall some years ago and it’s left him with a very painful and rheumaticky hip joint that the doctors say he should have replaced.’

Relief wiped the tense anxiety from Madeleine’s face. Poor soul, she obviously lived in fear and dread of losing her husband. She need not, Bobbie decided. Like the fancy icing on an otherwise repulsively unappealing cake, those good looks were all that there was to him.

She didn’t want to totally alienate Max, though, she acknowledged. He could prove to be a valuable source of information.

So his grandfather had an aversion to Americans, did he? He wasn’t the only member of the Crighton family who felt like that as she had good cause to know.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_cceafdcb-6b08-5198-aed1-dea9b5765334)

TWO hours later, Bobbie broke off in mid-banter with Saul to whom she had been comfortably chatting very happily for the past twenty minutes or so, recognising guiltily that not only was it over half an hour since she had last seen Joss, but that she was also actually enjoying herself.

It had been Olivia who had introduced her to Saul and Saul himself who had explained ruefully to her that he was currently in Louise’s bad books. ‘She wanted me to partner her this evening, but as I told her, as a divorced man in my mid-thirties and her cousin to boot, I’m hardly the right partner for her.’

‘Which naturally makes you all the more attractive to her,’ Bobbie had agreed mock-gravely. ‘Come on, admit it,’ she had coaxed him humorously. ‘It must be quite some ego boost to have as stunningly pretty an eighteen-year-old as Louise crazily in love with you.’

‘Just occasionally, yes, it is,’ Saul had agreed openly, ‘but the rest of the time quite frankly it’s rather terrifying, which just goes to show how old I actually am getting.’

‘I really ought to go and find Joss,’ Bobbie now told Saul.

It was so frustrating having the opportunity to meet and mix with the family at such close hand and yet at the same time feeling restrained from asking what she really wanted to know just in case they should guess what she was up to.

‘The last time I saw him he was talking with Luke.’ He paused when he saw Bobbie’s expression. ‘You don’t like Luke? You’re in a minority,’ he assured her. ‘Most of your sex appear to find him extremely attractive.’

‘But I am not most women,’ Bobbie informed him firmly.

‘No, you aren’t, are you?’ Saul agreed softly.

Smiling at him, Bobbie shook her head and turned away. She had spotted Joss on the other side of the room, and as Saul had said, he was talking to Luke. Bobbie started to make her way towards them.

The evening had done nothing to improve Luke’s mood. Fenella had proved to be every bit as clingy and possessive as he had feared, subtly managing to create the impression amongst his family that they were something of an ‘item’ and making it impossible for him to refute her allusions without causing a public scene.

He had no intention of letting her get away with it, though. Before they parted company tonight, she was going to be left in no doubt whatsoever that the past was quite definitely over and there was no place for her in his present or his future, in any shape or form.

‘Oh, I’m staying at the Grosvenor,’ he heard her saying softly now to one of his aunts, giving him an adoring sideways look as she confided, ‘Luke thought it best in the circumstances. After all, officially I’m still married.’ She paused delicately whilst Luke watched his aunt’s head nodding sagely.

Ignoring Fenella, he turned towards Joss and joked, ‘So where did you find the quarterback, Joss?’

Bobbie, who was just within earshot, ground her teeth in silent outrage. She was used to comments about her height, of course, but there was nothing remotely unfeminine or gross about her—quite the opposite.

As he saw the look on Joss’s face, Luke cursed himself under his breath. It wasn’t fair of him to vent his irritation and fire at Fenella’s manipulative behaviour on Joss, even if there was something about the stately, almost queenly stunning beauty of the unknown woman he had brought into their midst that brought the tiny hairs on the back of his neck to prickle with atavistic awareness. Perhaps it was something about that thick, honey-coloured mass of glorious hair, or perhaps it was the way she carried her impressive height and her even more impressive body. Perhaps it was just something about her manner, or perhaps the reason lay much closer to home, within his own emotional consciousness that he couldn’t somehow dismiss.

She might not be the type to actively go looking for a fight, but she certainly wasn’t going to run from this particular one, Bobbie decided as she ignored the temptation in the face of Luke’s taunting overheard comment to pretend she hadn’t heard and simply walk away. Instead she stalked purposefully to where he and Joss were standing, bestowing on Joss the beneficence of a multi-watt smile whilst cleverly managing to angle her body so that she could also look Luke Crighton straight in the eye ... well, almost straight in the eye. Joss had not lied about his height and it was oddly disconcerting to be forced to tilt her chin upwards to meet his dispassionate gaze.

‘You must be Luke,’ Bobbie announced, taking the initiative before Joss could introduce them.

‘Must I?’ Luke asked her dryly. ‘Now why, I wonder, should you assume that?’

‘Oh, it wasn’t an assumption,’ Bobbie told him breezily. ‘I recognised you from Joss’s description...or rather his description of your addiction to a certain type of female accessory. I shouldn’t worry too much about it,’ she told him with a kind voice. ‘They do say it’s a phase that most men grow out of once they mature.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Bobbie could see Joss looking worriedly from Luke to herself. It wasn’t really fair of her to involve him, she acknowledged.

‘Come on, Joss,’ she invited him mischievously. ‘It looks like they’re serving the buffet and a girl my size needs one heck of a lot of feeding.’

Joss looked relieved as he heard the note of humour in her voice, but one glance at Luke’s steRN face warned Bobbie that he wasn’t deceived and that he certainly wasn’t about to overlook or ignore her comment about his girlfriend.

‘Well, I guess we can scratch Luke off our list,’ Bobbie told Joss ruefully as they headed for the buffet.

‘Fenella isn’t really his girlfriend,’ Joss informed her eagerly. ‘I heard James telling Dad that Luke was angry with him for letting Fenella trick him into bringing her. She and Luke used to go out with one another a long time ago, but she’s married to someone else now, although James says that she’s going to divorce him.’

Which would explain why Luke was so anxious to distance himself publicly from any kind of intimate relationship with her, at least until such time as the divorce was final, Bobbie realised. A man in his position would not want to have any hint, any breath of scandal affecting his reputation.

It had been immediately obvious to her that Luke had that particular brand of prideful male arrogance that she had always found aggravating and unappealing. Dominant Alpha-type men had never held any kind of attraction for her. She preferred men like those she had grown up closest to, gentle men whose strength lay in their ability to be kind and compassionate—to have emotions.

Katie and Louise had opted for an informal arrangement of round tables for eight for the buffet meal without any set table plan, and Joss and Bobbie had just settled themselves down at one of these, their plates satisfyingly heaped with a generous selection from the mouth-watering dishes being served, when they were joined by Olivia and Caspar.

Bobbie, who had been watching with amusement a small piece of byplay between Saul and Louise and mentally concluding that Saul was deceiving himself if he thought that Louise was going to give up on her determined pursuit of him, smiled warmly at them as they sat down.

Unlike Luke, these were two of Joss’s relatives she actively liked.