Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

‘Amelia’s waking up,’ she told Ruth unnecessarily as they both heard the little girl start to gurgle. ‘I’d better take her in and get cleaned up. It’s almost time for her lunch.’

Ruth wasn’t Bobbie’s only unexpected visitor that day. Joss arrived later in the afternoon looking both pleased with himself and slightly self-conscious as he hugged the baby and then proceeded to tell Bobbie about the family of otters he had seen playing in the river as he cycled past.

‘Mum says that you’re going to Gramps’s on Sunday,’ he remarked.

‘Yes, that’s fight,’ Bobbie agreed neutrally.

‘You mustn’t mind if Gramps says anything to you about your being American,’ Joss told her earnestly. ‘He doesn’t mean... Well, he’s not... Mum says that a lot of his grumpiness is because of the pain in his hip.’

Bobbie tried to stop her mouth from twitching in wry amusement at Joss’s unguarded honesty.

He stayed for almost an hour drinking Bobbie’s homemade lemonade and eating the cookies she had baked earlier in the afternoon for Caspar, who had teased Olivia that at last he had found someone who could make him proper American cookies.

‘Do you know something, Bobbie?’ Joss confided to her as he got up to leave. ‘You really look like one of my cousins, only she’s got red hair—that’s Meg, Saul’s daughter. She’s only four, though, but Aunt Ruth noticed it, as well,’ he added informatively.

Bobbie was glad there was no one there but Joss to witness the shock his words had caused her and fortunately he was too engrossed in finishing off his last cookie to look directly at her. If he had...

Bobbie could remember Saul from the party. Tall, dark-haired, good-looking and very sexy. He had once been in love with Olivia, Caspar had told her. He was now in his mid-thirties, over a decade younger than her mother. How ironic that Joss should comment that while she and Saul’s child looked alike, she had red hair.

‘See you on Sunday,’ Joss called out to her as he rode off.

Oh yes, she would definitely see him, but Bobbie doubted that he would ever look so warmly on her again.

It had all seemed so simple when she and Sam had discussed it at home. So easy. So straightforward and right. Then she had expected that the hardest thing she would have to do would be to get close enough to the family to put their plan into action.

‘It’s no good just going for a one-to-one confrontation,’ Samantha had insisted when Bobbie had suggested this course.

‘Perhaps if I just explained how Mom feels, how it has affected her, how much she needs to know why she was so ruthlessly rejected.’

‘That won’t work,’ Samantha had told her. ‘There’s no point in appealing to someone’s finer feelings or their sense of compassion when it’s obvious that they don’t have any. No! What we have to do is to show them up for what they are, confront them in public in front of their family.’

It had never occurred to her then that once she actually met the family she would like them. Well, certain members of it at least, she amended hastily, dismissing the far too detailed and accurate mental portrait of Luke her memory had just supplied her with. People who had just been names to her at first were now so very much more.

What did a person do when the facts led in one direction and one’s emotions in another that was completely opposite? How did one make a decision—a judgement—like the one she had to make? She wasn’t used to playing God and it wasn’t a role that sat easily on her shoulders, but then...

‘Think of Mom...think of what she’s suffered...how she’s been hurt,’ Samantha had urged her, and Bobbie only had to picture her mother’s face when she talked about her past to be filled with the same aching, angry, but helpless feeling of furious resentment on her behalf that she had experienced when she had first heard what had happened.

‘We can’t alter what’s been done,’ her father had said gently once to Bobbie when, as a teenager, she had burst into an impassioned speech about the unhappiness in her mother’s past.

‘But it’s all so unfair,’ Bobbie had protested. ‘It nearly even stopped you and Mom getting married.’

‘I know. I know,’ her father agreed. ‘But fortunately your grandfather was able to make it a bit easier for us. He used that special brand of Southern charm he has to coax the family around.’ Her father chuckled. ‘It was certainly the first time I’ve ever seen Great-Aunt Emma actually flirting.’

‘Great-Aunt Emma flirted with Grandpa...?’ She stood wide-eyed.

‘She certainly did, and then, of course, when they realised that he was connected through his mother’s side to an influential and wealthy family...’

‘They still didn’t really want you to marry Mom, though, did they, Dad, even though Grandpa is very rich and Mom his only child...?’

‘No, they didn’t,’ her father affirmed honestly. ‘But I can tell you this, when you love someone as much as I love your mother, no power on earth can stop you from being together. The reason I wanted my family to accept and value her was because I knew it was what she wanted. As far as I was concerned, I’d have gladly turned my back on the whole pack of them rather than lose your mother.’

‘Even your parents?’ Bobbie asked him quietly.

‘Even my folks,’ her father agreed. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Bobbie. I loved them very much and I had a great deal of respect for them. I still do. But I love your mom more...much, much more. You see, honey, the kind of love you have for that one special person in your life is just so different from any other kind of love that once you’ve experienced it... Well, you just wait and see.’

‘I wouldn’t want to fall in love with someone you and Mom didn’t like,’ Bobbie had protested.

Prophetic words. She could just imagine how her parents, especially her mother, would feel if she were to announce that she had fallen in love with a Crighton. Fallen in love with? Bobbie tensed.

Restlessly she paced the room. She wasn’t in love with Luke....

She wasn’t silly enough to let herself fall in love with someone like Luke. She had far too much regard for her own emotional well-being, too strong a sense of self-esteem, too much awareness of the pain that lay ahead of her in loving a man who not only most assuredly did not return her feelings but who, even if he had, was quite simply someone she could never share her life with.

Yet, perversely, instead of looking forward to Sunday in the knowledge that once it was over, once she had carried out the task that had originally brought her to Cheshire, she would be free to leave and return home, safe from any more heart-searching over Luke who surely, with the Atlantic safely between them, would quickly become nothing more than a distant—a very distant—memory, Bobbie acknowledged that she was actually dreading it.

But of course, there was nothing that she could do to stop Sunday coming. Nothing at all!

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_5b9872ca-fd93-59a1-8cac-71cbde9bd693)

QUEENSMEAD was very much as she had pictured it, Bobbie realised: a large, gracious house set in its own grounds reached via a traditional sweeping drive, its seventeenth-century stone façade draped in the soft tendrils of a huge wisteria.

Although ostensibly Bobbie was merely attending the family get-together as Amelia’s temporary nanny, virtually as soon as they had entered the house, Olivia had deftly removed Amelia from her arms and told Bobbie firmly that she was to make sure she enjoyed herself and that she was certainly going to enjoy showing her daughter off to her relatives.

Despite its generous proportions, the large drawing room was very crowded. Jon and Jenny, who had arrived ahead of them with the twins, Joss and Olivia’s younger brother, claimed her attention whilst Louise and Katie thanked her for the small antique brooches she had given them as their eighteenth-birthday presents.

‘I’ll have to take you over to introduce you to Gramps,’ Olivia told her as she handed Amelia over to an admiring Jenny.

‘Ben’s not in a very good mood, I’m afraid,’ Jenny warned them ruefully, adding quietly, ‘I think having Max here reminds him of your father, Olivia. I rather think he feels that Jon isn’t doing as much as he could to try to track David down.’

‘Dad won’t be found unless he wants to be found,’ Olivia responded tersely. ‘I just wish that Gramps could see that, but then he’s always had a blind spot where Dad is concerned. I wish sometimes I could tell him the truth,’ she declared fiercely.

‘I doubt that he would believe you if you did. He needs to cling on to his faith in David, his belief in him,’ Jenny told her wisely. ‘I’m sorry, Bobbie,’ Jenny apologised. ‘We’re being very rude, talking about family matters and ignoring you.’

‘Bobbie is almost a member of the family,’ Olivia insisted and then added slyly, ‘and very soon she might become one officially, as well.’

Whilst Bobbie protested, her cheeks burning hotly, Jenny gave her an interested look but didn’t press the matter, leaving it to Olivia to explain.

‘Luke’s pretty smitten with Bobbie,’ she elaborated whilst teasingly shaking her head as Bobbie tried to contradict what she was saying. ‘It’s no good,’ Olivia said, laughing. ‘The pair of you have given yourselves away too clearly to start denying it now.’

‘Hello there. I was hoping we might get to meet again.’

Bobbie turned thankfully towards Max as he strolled over to join them, his arrival a welcome interruption, although it was obvious that Olivia didn’t think so because almost immediately she announced, ‘I was just about to take Bobbie to introduce her to Gramps, Max, so I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us.’

‘You haven’t met my grandfather yet?’ Max asked Bobbie, pointedly ignoring his cousin as he turned his back to her, effectively blocking her out of the conversation. Instead, he concentrated on Bobbie, giving her the benefit of his heated crocodile smile and a look that slid slowly from the top of her head all the way down to her toes. It lingered appreciatively on her body in a manner that was both extremely practised and, so far as Bobbie was concerned, extremely unappealing, but she kept her thoughts to herself, waiting politely whilst Max reached out and tucked her hand through his arm as he told her, ‘Come with me, but let me warn you that he—’

‘Doesn’t like Americans,’ Bobbie supplied dryly for him. ‘Yes, so I’ve been told.’

‘It isn’t an aversion I share,’ Max assured her softly with another appreciative look. ‘Far from it.’