Читать книгу A Perfect Night - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 7

AS SEB drove past the sign that read, Haslewich—Please Drive Carefully, he was aware of a dispiriting grey cloud of self-criticism and disappointment dulling what, if life mirrored fiction, by rights should be his triumphal return to the place of his birth.

He was thirty-eight years old, virtually at the top of his career ladder having just been headhunted by the international drug company Aarlston-Becker to head their research team. No small feat surely for man who, as a boy, had been sneeringly dismissed by one of his teachers as ‘just another hopeless by-product of the Cooke clan.’

He had money in the bank accumulated by hard work and shrewd investment, a family who even if he hadn’t seen much of them in recent years were by all accounts more than willing to do the modern equivalent of roasting a fatted calf to welcome him home, and he was about to take a kind of professional post that many among his colleagues would have given their eye-teeth for; all of which surely must be pretty heavyweight pluses on anyone’s balance sheet of life.

But then he needed some heavyweight assets to balance out the equally, to him at least, heavyweight negative aspects of his life.

‘What negative aspects?’ his second or was it third cousin Guy Cooke had asked him drily when they had been discussing the subject of his impending return.

‘How about an ill-judged early marriage followed predictably, I suppose, by a divorce.’

Guy’s eyebrows had lifted as he shrugged dismissively, ‘Divorce isn’t exactly a social sin any longer Seb, and from what you’ve told us your ex-wife has remarried very happily and the two of you are on relatively comfortable terms.’

‘Oh yes, from Sandra’s and my own point of view the divorce was the best thing we could have done other than not to have married in the first place.

‘No, it’s not the fact that we married far too young and for all the wrong reasons that I feel bad. It’s…’ He had paused, grimacing before continuing, ‘Sandy always used to complain that I was a selfish bastard not really fit to be either a husband or a father, too wrapped up in my career and my own professional goals. I thought at the time that she was being ridiculous. After all, I was working to provide a decent standard of living for her, or so I used to tell her and myself, but of course that was just the excuse I used to conceal the fact that she was right that I was being selfish, and that the rush I got from knowing I was right in there at the cutting edge of discovering new drugs that were going to provide the kind of breakthrough that would change the world was far more important to me, far more compelling and addictive than any pleasure I got from being with her.’

Guy and Chrissie, his wife, had exchanged ruefully happily married looks while Chrissie had lifted their son Anthony up off the floor to give him a hug, and although they had both made the right kind of protestingly reassuring noises Seb hadn’t been deceived. Of course privately they must both have thought that he had been selfish. How could they think otherwise? Seb had seen the loving commitment Guy was making to his own family, had witnessed at first hand during his stay with them when he had attended his initial interview the ‘hands on’ fathering that Guy was giving his son.

‘But at least you and Charlotte have formed a proper father and daughter bond now,’ Chrissie had reminded him gently.

‘Yes, more thanks to Charlotte’s maturity than any good parenting on my part,’ Seb had returned, adding, ‘After all she could very easily have refused to see me when I wrote and asked her if she would consider allowing me back into her life. George, Sandra’s second husband has been far more of a proper father to her than I have.’

‘Maybe so from a practical point of view,’ Guy had agreed, ‘But biologically you are her father and you only have to see the two of you together to see that.’

‘Oh yes, she’s got my genes when it comes to her physical looks,’ he agreed.

‘And she’s got your brains by all accounts too,’ Chrissie had laughed.

‘Well, Sandra and I met originally at university so I suppose that aspect of her nature is down to both of us, but I admit that I was surprised when she told me that she intends to follow much the same career path as I’ve chosen.’

‘And since she’s going to be studying for her A levels at a private sixth-form college near Manchester, you’re bound to be able to see a lot more of her.’

‘I hope so,’ Seb had agreed. ‘Although at sixteen she’s almost an adult now with her own life and her own friends. Sandra did say though that she was relieved to know that I would be on hand for her at the weekends especially now that Sandra and George are likely to be based abroad for the foreseeable future.’

‘Well we certainly loved meeting Charlotte,’ Chrissie had told him warmly. ‘Although I suspect she felt a little bit overwhelmed by the massed ranks and fervent curiosity of the Cooke clan in force.’

The Cooke clan. How he had hated and chafed under the burdensome weight of his family’s reputation when he had been growing up, Seb reflected now. Of course he hadn’t known then that he wasn’t on his own and that Guy, too, had suffered his own personal war between his inner needs and the town’s expectations. But then Guy had met Chrissie and in helping her to make peace with her family history Guy had come to terms with his own unhappy childhood memories.

Seb knew that without the incentive of having Charlotte at college in nearby Manchester there was no way he would have come back to his birthplace in the small historical Cheshire town where, or so the story went, his family line had come into being following the seduction of a local girl by a member of a notorious band of Romany travellers who visited the town every year.

The children—the clan—that union had given birth to down through the centuries, whether rightly or wrongly, had garnered a notorious reputation in the town for not always walking on the right side of the law, and of course predictably it had often been a case of ‘give a dog a bad name…’ Certainly it seemed that historically, their family had been a convenient peg for the townspeople to hang all their local crimes of theft and unlawfulness on.

Now, of course, those days were gone and his relatives so far as Seb knew were, in the main, sturdy and worthy citizens, and so intermarried and interwoven with the families and fabric of the area that they could not in all fairness any longer be considered to be a separate and dangerously untrustworthy clan of outsiders.

Even so the lusty lifestyle of the original ancestors had left its mark on the collective conscience of the other families in the town. Cooke men had a reputation for fathering sturdy sons whose dark eyes tended to hold the kind of gleam that mothers and young impressionable girls quite rightly found dangerous.

Seb had known from an early age that he wanted to escape from the restrictions of living in a small-town community where everyone knew everyone else. He had wanted to break through the glass ceiling imposed on him by the expectations and reservations of those around him simply because of the surname he carried. It had been his interest, cultivated and encouraged by his grandfather and a fascination with the problems that manifested themselves in the plants his grandfather grew because of their genetic make up which had initially led to his choice of career.

University might have freed him from the restrictions imposed on him by his small-town upbringing but in order to get there he had had to focus on the more self-absorbed, self-interested side of his personality and that ultimately had created a blinkered concentration on his career to the detriment of his personal relationships.

It had taken a comment he had overheard from a female colleague to make him realise the error of his ways. She had been talking with another co-worker unaware that he was in an adjacent room and could hear them.

‘He actually hasn’t seen his daughter in over ten years. Can you believe that?’

‘It happens,’ the other woman had pointed out. ‘Divorced men do lose touch with their children.’

‘Yes, I know, but he just doesn’t seem to care. Doesn’t he have any human feelings?’

That night at home alone in his empty executive apartment Seb had replayed the overheard conversation in his head and he had asked himself the same question.

The answer had shocked him.

Yes, he did care, more than he had known, and he had cared even more after that first fateful reunion with Charlotte when he had recognised not just in her face, her physical features, but in her personality as well, such a strong resemblance to him that he had felt as though someone, something, some emotion, was cracking his heart in a vise.

It had not been an easy task building bridges that would allow them, allow her, to lower the guard she had quite naturally put up against him. She’d been outwardly pleasant and friendly, but he had nevertheless known that inwardly she was extremely wary of him. And who could blame her? But that had been three years ago, and now he was very much a part of her life. But he was still aware that nothing, no amount of remorse, or regret could totally eradicate the past.

Sandra, his ex-wife, had gone on to have two more children, both boys, with her second husband George and Charlotte was very much a part of that happy close-knit family, but she was also his daughter and, like him, a Cooke.

‘All these relatives,’ she had marvelled laughingly when she had visited the town with him. ‘I can’t believe it. We seem to be related to half the population.’

‘At least,’ Seb had agreed drily, but unlike him Charlotte seemed to delight in her heritage.

‘Things have changed,’ Guy had told him. ‘There’s been a large influx of new people into the town, opening it up, broadening both its boundaries and its outlook.

‘The women of the Cooke family have always had a special strong grittiness and that’s really showing itself now. There are Cooke women on the town council, running their own businesses, teaching their children that their inheritance is one to be proud of. Yes, of course, a proportion of the babies at Ruth Crighton’s mother and baby home are Cookes but on their fathers’ side and not their mothers’. Cooke girls are hard-working and determined, university and self-fulfilment is their goal…’

Seb knew all about the Crightons. Who living in Haslewich didn’t? Like the Cooke’s, the Crighton name was synonymous with the town even though they were relative newcomers to it having only arrived there at the turn of the century.

Chrissie was in part a Crighton although that fact hadn’t been realised even by Chrissie’s own parents until she’d become involved with Guy.

Jon Crighton was the senior partner in the family’s law firm. Olivia, his niece, the daughter of his twin brother David, was also a partner. David himself was someone who was surrounded by mystery, having left the town, some said under highly dubious circumstances. Jon and David’s father lived in a large Elizabethan house outside the town along with Max Crighton, Jon and Jenny’s eldest son, and his wife and children.

Max was the apple of his grandfather’s eye and, to Ben Crighton’s pride, was no mere solicitor but a barrister, working from chambers in Chester alongside Luke and James Crighton, sons of Ben’s cousin Henry.

The Crighton family had originated from Chester, but a family quarrel had led Josiah Crighton, Ben’s father, to move away from Chester and set up his own legal practice in Haslewich, and until relatively recently a certain degree of rivalry had existed between the two branches of the family.

Jenny Crighton, Jon’s wife had once owned and run an antiques business in Haslewich in which Seb’s cousin Guy had been a partner, but the pressure of her own family commitments had led to her giving up her share in the business, which Guy had kept on as a sideline.

Guy had, in fact, recommended Jon Crighton to Seb as someone to deal with the legal conveyancing side of his house purchase when he moved back into the area.

As yet Seb hadn’t found a property he wanted to buy and so instead he was renting somewhere.

‘Local property prices are high,’ Guy had warned him, ‘Thanks to Aarlston-Becker. Not that we can complain, they’ve brought prosperity to the area even though there are those who claim that their presence threatens the town.’

Seb changed gear as the traffic slowed to a crawl as he entered the town proper. He had thought that in rebuilding his relationship with Charlotte he had laid to rest the guilt he had felt at his shortcomings as a father, but returning to Haslewich had brought back some painful memories.

‘What you need Dad, is to fall in love,’ Charlotte had told him several months earlier, and even though she had laughed Seb had seen in her eyes that she had been semiserious.

‘Falling in love is for people of your age,’ he had told her drily.

‘Why have you never married again?’ she had asked him quietly.

‘Do you really need to ask?’ Seb had returned sardonically. ‘After all, you’ve had first-hand experience of the mess I made of it the first time. No Lottie,’ he had shaken his head, ‘I’m too selfish, too set in my ways. Falling in love isn’t for me.’

‘No you’re not, you just think you are,’ Charlotte had told him, adding with surprising maturity, ‘You’re just punishing yourself, Dad, because you feel guilty about me. Well, you needn’t. I wasn’t even two when you and Mum split up, and she and George were together by the time I was three. At least I never experienced the trauma of being torn between you and Mum, and she told me that that was thanks to you agreeing to let George bring me up.’

‘So what are you saying…that I did you a favour by turning my back on my responsibility towards you,’ Seb had asked her grimly. ‘That my selfishness was almost praiseworthy…’

‘No, of course not, but at least you did come to feel ultimately that as father and daughter we should be part of one another’s lives. At least I do know that you love me,’ she had added in a soft whisper.

Love her. Yes he did—now—but if he was honest with himself there had been years of her life when he had scarcely allowed himself to remember that she existed and he would carry the burden of that guilt for the rest of his life. Marry again? Fall in love? He cursed abruptly as just in front of him a young woman started across the road without looking causing him to stamp his foot down hard on the brakes. As his car screeched to a halt in front of her she froze in fear, her face turned towards him.

Seb had a momentary impression of her shocked expression, wide eyes set in a piquantly-shaped delicately feminine face, her hair tousled by the light breeze. Small and slender she was wearing a soft, brown linen wrap-around skirt, the pale colour of the cream silk top tucked into it complementing both the warmth of the skirt and the even more alluring light tan of her bare arms—and legs. But as his brain mentally digested these peripheral visual facts, the feeling, the emotion uppermost in Seb’s mind was one of anxiety fuelled by anger.

What on earth had possessed her to step right out in front of him like that? Didn’t she realise how close she had come to causing an accident. The narrow town street was busy with shoppers and if his brakes had failed to work so swiftly or if he had skidded…or not been able to stop…And yet as the shock faded from her eyes, it wasn’t guilt or gratitude he could see replacing it, but rather a sharply condemnatory anger, as though he were the one to blame for what was quite patently her foolishness. Indeed, for a second it almost seemed as though she was about to walk right up to his car instead of finishing her journey across the busy street, but then the car driver behind him, growing impatient with the delay, tooted his horn and she hesitated and then turned aside, shooting him a searing look before marching stiffly away from him.

Just as equally infuriated by her behaviour as she seemed to have been by his, Seb shot her departing back a fulminating look of male contempt for her female foolishness before slipping the car back into gear and continuing with his journey.

As Katie walked through Haslewich’s busy main thoroughfare she was aware of a heavy weight of unhappiness dulling what, by rights, should have been a joyous and hopefully positive return to the bosom of her family.

She was twenty-four years of age, in excellent health, a fully qualified solicitor who had been not just asked, but beseeched by her father and her cousin to join them in the family partnership in their home town. Indeed she had even had the satisfaction of having her elder brother no less, add his persuasive arguments to those of the other members of the family.

‘Dad needs you Katie,’ Max had told her. ‘They’re absolutely inundated with work, and we all know how grandfather would react if Dad were to suggest taking on a non-Crighton partner, just as we all know that no solicitor worth his or her salt would join the partnership without the expectation of being offered their own partnership. For you to come home and join Dad and Olivia would be the ideal solution to the problem. You’re young in terms of legal experience at the moment, but a partnership in the not too distant future is assured.’

‘Yes, I daresay it is,’ Katie had agreed quietly. ‘But you seem to forget Max that I already have a job.’

‘I know you do,’ Max had agreed, ‘but I’m not completely blind Katie, something’s gone wrong in your life. Look, I’m not going to pry or ask questions, God knows I don’t have the right to act the big brother with you now, after all I was hardly a caring one to you when you and Louise were growing up. What I will say to you, though, is that some people need to seek solitude, to lick their wounds and heal themselves, and others need the care and comfort of their close family, and we both know which camp you fall into.’

It was true, Louise, Katie’s twin sister was more the type to seek the solitude Max had just described than her, but then Louise was hardly likely to need to do so. Louise after all was blissfully in love with and loved by Gareth.

Louise and Gareth.

Katie had closed her eyes thankful that no one had guessed her shameful poisonous secret. It made no difference that she had loved Gareth quietly and sedately and from a distance a long time before Louise had realised the exact nature of her feelings for him. And the reason it made no difference was not just because Louise was her other half, her dearly beloved if sometimes somewhat headstrong and exasperating twin, but because Gareth himself did not love her…Gareth loved Louise.

Stoically Katie had accepted the agonising searing burn of her own pain, claiming pressure of work for her increasingly infrequent visits home and her even more infrequent get-togethers with her twin, but then as though fate had not done enough she discovered that it had another blow in store for her.

Her boss, for whom she had worked ever since she had joined the legal department of the charity to do her articles after leaving university, had resigned, and the man who had taken his place…

Katie closed her eyes in midstep. Jeremy Stafford had at first seemed so charming, so very much on her own wavelength that even now she couldn’t properly come to terms with what had happened.

When he had started asking her to work late, she had done so willingly, enjoying not just the rapport between them but the knowledge that the work they were doing was ultimately benefiting people who were so very desperately in need of help.

The first time Jeremy had suggested dinner as a “reward” to them both for their hard work, she had felt nothing but pleasure, no sense of wariness or suspicion had clouded her happy acceptance of his suggestion. How naive she had been, but then from the way that Jeremy had always talked about his wife and small children she had assumed that he was so happily married that any kind of betrayal of his wife and their marriage vows—well, it had simply never crossed her mind that it might have crossed his…But she had been wrong…not only had it crossed his, it had lingered there and quite unequivocally taken up a very lustful and leering residence as she had so unpleasantly discovered.

At first when he had started to compliment her on her face and then her figure she had simply assumed that he was being pleasant, but then had come the night when he had put his arm around her when they were leaving the restaurant and then attempted to kiss her.

She had fobbed him off immediately, but to her consternation instead of apologising as she had expected him to do he had turned on her claiming that she had led him on; that she was a tease and worse, oh yes, much much worse. Of course after that there had been no more intimate dinners and no evenings working late, instead there had been hostility and even victimisation: accusations about missing reports which she knew she had filed, mistakes which she knew she had not made, errors which she knew were simply not hers.

Not that she had any intention of telling Max any of that. The change her elder brother had undergone following the attack he had suffered on a Jamaican beach while he was in that country trying to trace their father’s missing twin brother, David Crighton, had not merely converted him into a passionately devoted husband and father, it had also turned him into a surprisingly caring and concerned brother and son. If Max guessed for one moment what was going on, Katie knew that he would lose no time in seeking out Jeremy Stafford and demanding retribution for his behaviour.

Had they been children still involved in playground jealousies and quarrels that might just have been acceptable, but they were adults. She was supposed to be in charge of her own life. As a modern independent woman she was expected to be able to deal with her own problems. The sadness was, she loved her work, loved knowing that what she was doing no matter how small, was a benefit to other people.

The Crighton women carried a strong gene of responsibility and duty towards their fellow men and women. In her great-aunt, Ruth Crighton, it had manifested itself in the establishment of an enclave of charitably run accommodation units for single parents and their children. In her mother, Jenny, it showed in the way she gave so much of her time and energy to others. Katie’s sister had become involved in a programme to help young drug addicts in Brussels where she and Gareth lived and worked.

Katie froze as the sudden sharp screech of a car’s brakes brought her back to reality.

Without realising what she was doing she had started across the road without looking properly, but that in no way excused the manic dangerousness of the speed at which the driver of the car, now stopped in front of her, had to have been driving to have been forced to halt with such a screech. Katie knew nothing about cars and the fact that the very powerful engine of the Mercedes the man was driving was responsible for the intensity of his braking rather than his speed was therefore completely lost on her. Instead what she was aware of was the look of totally unwarranted fury in his eyes as he glowered ferociously out of the car at her.

As her own shock held her motionless she was distantly aware of the fact that he was outrageously good-looking with thick, virtually jet-black, well-groomed hair, chillingly icy grey eyes and a mouth that even when clamped grimly closed still betrayed the fact that he had a disturbingly full and sexy bottom lip.

But none of that compensated for the fact that he had nearly run her over. Determinedly Katie took a step towards the car and then stopped as the driver behind him hooted impatiently. Much as she longed to give Mr Sexy Mouth a piece of her mind, she really didn’t have time. She was due at the office ten minutes ago, hardly a good start to her first official working day with her father and Olivia.

It had been a wrench leaving her job, despite the problem she had suffered with Jeremy and she still wasn’t sure she had made the right decision in agreeing to join the family practice. Both her father and Olivia had held out the inducement, as Max had already indicated, that in time she could expect to become a full partner, even if right now she was simply being retained by them as a salaried employee. Money had never motivated Katie, but then to be fair she knew that it didn’t motivate either her father or Olivia either.

She was to start by taking over the conveyancing side of the business, the legal work attached to the buying and selling of properties. She had pulled a small face when her father had told her this.

‘Well at least I should have some practice by the time it comes to my buying my own home,’ she had told him ruefully.

Although her parents had offered her back her childhood room permanently, after several years of living independently at the University and then in London, she had felt that it would be more sensible to find her own separate accommodation. In London she had rented and while she waited for the right property to buy to present itself to her at home, she had, just temporarily she had told them, moved back in with her parents.

It had felt distinctly odd to be back in her old room—without her twin.

Louise had been more excited about Katie’s decision to return to Haslewich than she had herself; trying to cajole her into a flying visit to Brussels to spend the week with them before Katie took up her new duties.

‘Why don’t you go?’ her father had asked her when he had learned via Jenny of her decision to turn down Louise’s invitation.

There wasn’t any logical explanation she could give and she had been grateful to her younger brother Joss and her cousin Jack for creating a small diversion as they both pleaded with Jon to be allowed to take up Louise’s offer in her stead.

Since it was Joss’s all important GCSE year Katie had well been able to understand her father’s refusal to agree until after his exams were over and loyally Jack, who was two years older than his cousin, had announced that he didn’t want to go until they could both go together.

The pair of them were almost as close as the pairs of twins the Crighton family produced with such regularity, Jack having made his home with Katie’s parents after the break-up of his own parents’ marriage and the disappearance of his father David.

Ten minutes later, as Katie walked into her father’s office after a brief knock on the door, she apologised.

‘Sorry I’m late…I’d forgotten how busy the town is and I couldn’t find a close by parking spot…’

‘Mmm…if you think this morning is busy just wait until market day,’ her father warned her good-humouredly.

‘Olivia won’t be here until ten,’ he added. ‘During term time she does the morning school and nursery run. Caspar picks the children up in the afternoon.’

Caspar, Olivia’s American husband, held a Chair at a nearby university where he lectured in corporate law and it had been while she was on a course that Olivia had met and fallen in love with him.

‘It can’t be easy for her, working full-time with two young children,’ Katie commented.

‘No, it isn’t,’ her father agreed, adding briskly, ‘We’ve cleared out a room for you to use and I’ve organised some preliminary file reading for you. We’ll start you off on some straightforward conveyancing…’

‘That’s fine,’ Katie responded absently.

‘Is something wrong?’ he asked, sensing her preoccupation.

‘Not really…not unless you count nearly being run down by some speed-crazed driver,’ Katie told him, briefly explaining what had happened.

‘Mmm…it has been mooted that the town be made a no traffic area, but…’

‘But…’ Katie raised her eyebrows. The town had been there before the Romans, its surrounding salt making it a highly prized asset. The Normans had built a castle which the Roundheads virtually destroyed during the Civil War, and the town’s streets dated in the main from the Middle Ages and were consequently narrow and tortuous and certainly not designed for the volume of modern-day traffic that used them.

‘Well in order to make that a viable proposition, a new ring road would have to be built, and you can just imagine the cost of it…’

‘Mmm…but if it keeps drivers like Mr Sexy Mouth off the road…’

‘Like who?’ her father questioned.

Katie flushed a little. Now what on earth had prompted her to use that particular description of him out loud?

‘Er…Nothing,’ she denied hastily, quickly turning her attention to the files her father was showing her.