Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

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

      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.

      He had done all his homework, checked and double-checked all his information, plotted his strategy carefully and meticulously, and now it was time to put his plan into action.

      He left work at his normal time, went home, showered and changed, and then set out for Chelsea. It didn’t take her long to answer the door to his knock. She might have all the social advantages, Max decided chivalrously as he studied her, but she was certainly nothing very remarkable to look at.

      Plain brown hair cut into a neat bob, brown eyes, a small round face to go with her equally small and gently rounded body. As she saw him studying her, she flushed deep pink and looked shyly self-conscious.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised, giving her his most charming and winning smile, the one that revealed the delicious dimple in his chin and made him look even more raffishly attractive than he had any right to be, as an adoring ex-girlfriend had once told him. ‘Luke told me that you were only a tiny little thing, but I hadn’t thought …’

      ‘Luke?’ she questioned, looking both flustered and curious, and reacting to his