Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

Because men liked women to be vulnerable?

      He moved irritably in his seat. She might be softhearted but she sure as hell could be stubborn, as well. Yet in her shoes wouldn’t he want to prove the doubting Thomases amongst her own family wrong, to prove that she could do the job as well and indeed better than any of them? Wouldn’t that have been a challenge he’d have found impossible to resist? So why expect Olivia to resist it?

      She had caught him off guard last night. He had never had any intention of having dinner with Hillary. It had been obvious virtually from the first moment they had met that she was looking for a way to justify leaving her marriage and someone to support her in that decision. As a fellow American and someone like her who was outside the family, it was only natural that she should turn to him, but in listening to her, there was no doubt that he had placed himself in a highly invidious position. Olivia had already made it plain that she supported Saul, but by the time he had run into Hillary last night, he had been almost glad of an opportunity to widen the rift between Olivia and himself. Well, he had certainly found it and meeting Hillary by chance at the airport this morning had not been particularly welcome.

      It was just as well that her family lived out on the West Coast, making any future contact between them highly unlikely. He still had a few days before he actually left the country, he comforted himself as his plane started to circle Heathrow. Time enough yet for Olivia to contact him … or for him to contact her.

      There was no going back now, Olivia acknowledged, no, not even if she wanted to. What she had seen at the airport had convinced her of that. Their quarrel, the reasons for it, the events leading up to it, she could understand if she divorced herself from her own emotions and studied the situation dispassionately. This didn’t mean to say that she felt she was in any way in the wrong, simply that there were realistically strong arguments for both Caspar and herself to feel aggrieved and angry, but the speed with which Caspar had quite obviously replaced her in his life—and in his bed, too, judging from the way Hillary had been draping herself all over him—no, that could not be forgiven or understood. That was treachery, betrayal on a grand scale. As a family, they seemed destined to suffer badly from it, both as the betrayed and the betrayer, she reflected soberly as she drove back to the office.

      Well, she knew what she had to do. There was no avoiding the issue now, no escape, no cowardly walking away…. And the first person she’d have to tackle had to be her uncle Jon, and after that … Her hands were shaking as she locked the door of her car.

      Haslewich was a small town and her grandfather a very upright and proud man. She dared not think what it would do to him when word got round about what her father had done. The whole family would be affected by it, each and every one of them tainted by it. The bile rose in her throat, sour tasting and heavy.

      Jon was in his office when Olivia walked in. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said without preamble.

      ‘What is it?’ he asked her after he had waved her into a chair. ‘Have you changed your mind, decided to go to America with Caspar after all? If you have, don’t worry—’

      ‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ Olivia interrupted him quietly. ‘I wanted to, but I discovered that I’d left it too late.’

      When she didn’t elaborate Jon shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

      ‘It’s all right, Uncle Jon,’ Olivia told him gently, ‘I know now why you didn’t want me working here.’

      She could see Jon physically stiffening as she spoke and she could see, as well, the way his glance strayed betrayingly to the place on his desk where he had left those incriminating bank statements. He had put them away now as well as the file.

      ‘I know what Dad’s been doing,’ Olivia pressed on firmly. ‘About the money he’s taken, stolen from Jemima Harding’s trust fund. When did you find out what was going on?’

      For a moment she thought that he was going to attempt to deny the whole thing. He took a deep breath, paused and then walked over to the window before saying tiredly, ‘I’ve been suspicious for a while, but stupidly, I suppose, with hindsight … I didn’t want to … I thought that perhaps … You mustn’t judge your father too harshly, Olivia,’ he told her. ‘God knows what kind of pressure he must have been under. I only wish …’ He stopped and shook his head.

      ‘Oh, Uncle Jon, how could he?’ Olivia demanded, suddenly giving way to her emotions, too wound up to keep still she started to pace the floor. ‘How could he do something like that …?’

      ‘I don’t think he ever meant things to go so far,’ Jon tried to comfort her. ‘I imagine that he just meant to borrow the money at first, that he fully intended to pay it back, but as things stood—’

      ‘He couldn’t do it and so instead he just borrowed more,’ Olivia interrupted bitterly. ‘Only he wasn’t borrowing it at all, was he, Uncle Jon? He was stealing it,’ she retorted sharply. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

      Jon winced as he listened to her. He felt so guilty—as much to blame as David himself. He should never have allowed David to have so much control over such a vulnerable client, especially not when he knew … But that was all in the past and he had sworn as David’s brother, his twin, sworn on the Bible to his father that the one unfortunate mistake of David’s—that small silly bit of foolishness when David was in London—was something that would never again be mentioned between them. David had escaped a formal charge then because no one, least of all the important client he had been involved with, wanted it to become public knowledge that a junior, as yet unqualified barrister, had almost got away with swindling him out of a considerable sum of money.

      Instead the whole affair had been hushed up. David hadn’t actually spent any of the money; that had been repaid. He had been dismissed from chambers and David himself had sworn tearfully to both his father and to Jon himself that he would never be tempted to do such an idiotic thing again. It had simply been the pressure of the way he was living, the crowd he was running with, the fact that Tiggy was pregnant, that had led him into such temptation in the first place. He had never really intended to steal the money, simply to use it, borrow it, until his allowance came through, that was all.

      Ben, of course, had to believe him, accept his excuses and his remorse, because to do otherwise would have meant that he had to accept that David was not what he had always so proudly believed him to be. And Jon had accepted the vow of silence imposed on him by Ben because, well, because David was his brother and he had grown used to always shielding and protecting him, helping to maintain the fiction that he was the character their father had established for his favourite son. Who was really to blame if David found maintaining the burden of that character too difficult? David or Ben? And who, after all, was he to sit in judgement on the brother he had been brought up to revere?

      Over the years he had done his best to be careful about exposing David to any kind of temptation, but then he had perhaps started to become overconfident, to relax a little too much. He had avoided seeing what was happening because he hadn’t wanted to see it, and because of that laxness …

      The burden of the way he had turned his back on his responsibility, the way he had let not just David but Ben, as well, and yes, Olivia and all the others down, too, weighed unbearably heavily on his shoulders.

      David had, of course, escaped from his burden of responsibility just as he always escaped or downright avoided it; after all, Jon wasn’t going to take the risk of accusing him now with fraud when to do so could bring on a second and potentially fatal heart attack. But Jon did not like admitting to such thoughts and so he quickly pushed them to the back of his mind. They were not the kind of thoughts he had been brought up to harbour about his brother.

      ‘Uncle Jon, what are we going to do?’ Olivia asked him huskily. ‘There’s no way that the money can be repaid and even if it could …’ She spread her hands helplessly. ‘He’s guilty of theft … and fraud … and of professional misconduct of the worst possible kind.’

      As he listened to his niece and heard the anguish in her voice, Jon forbore to remind her that