Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

tripping over his words in his haste to get them out, Joss raced on, whilst Bobbie listened chin in hand and hid a small, rueful smile. He really was very young.

      ‘And it’s at a hotel in Chester, this party...?’

      ‘Yes, the Grosvenor, you’ll like it,’ Joss assured her. ‘It’s part owned by the Duke.’ His forehead suddenly furrowed. He had a vague awareness that a series of complex arrangements had been made to ferry all the guests to Chester and it struck him that it would hardly be gentlemanly or gallant to suggest that his guest make her way to the hotel on her own, but on the other hand... ‘Er...I don’t know where you’re staying,’ he began manfully.

      ‘That’s okay,’ Bobbie returned easily, immediately understanding his dilemma. ‘I know where the Grosvenor is and I can make my own way there.’ No need to tell him that she was actually staying in the hotel herself, even if the small deceit, so unfamiliar to her normal openness, did sit uncomfortably on her conscience.

      ‘Oh good, I could meet you in reception,’ Joss offered. ‘Mum wants us to be there early and the thing isn’t due to start until eight so I could meet you then if you like.’

      ‘Eight will be fine with me,’ Bobbie assured him.

      They had both finished their drinks. Joss checked furtively in his pocket; with luck he would just about have enough money to pay for them.

      ‘Until Saturday, then,’ Bobbie told him as they parted company outside the wine bar.

      ‘Until Saturday,’ Joss agreed and then flushed as he asked her anxiously, ‘You will be there, won’t you?’

      ‘You can bet on it,’ Bobbie promised him.

      Thoughtfully Bobbie made her way back to where she had parked her hire-car. Fate, it seemed, was on her side. Her walking pace increased as she glanced at her watch to check what time it would be back home; there was a phone call she had promised to make.

      

      ‘James, have you got a moment?’

      James looked up as his elder brother walked into his office. In anyone else’s company James would automatically have attracted the discreet attention and admiration of the women who saw him. Six foot two with the strong, broad-shouldered body of an ex-Rugby player, he was boyishly handsome in a way that was accentuated by the thick, soft brown hair that flopped over his forehead and the generous warmth of his smile. At thirty-two he looked younger; he was the kind of man who women knew instinctively would be kind to animals, children and old ladies, and inevitably they wanted to mother him.

      No woman in her right mind on the young side of forty, and a good many of those over it, felt in the least like mothering Luke.

      ‘I wonder why it is that whenever I think of Luke the word that most easily comes next to mind is lust?’ Olivia had once asked James ruefully.

      James had simply shaken his head.

      There was no doubt that with Luke being almost six foot four and having shoulders even more powerfully broad than his own, the classic Crighton profile with its strong nose and even stronger jaw (which had somehow passed him by), combined with very dark brown almost black hair and smoky grey eyes, had the kind of effect on women that could only be likened to unexpectedly swallowing a strong alcoholic drink. First came the shock of its unexpected power in the nervous system, followed by the lethal combination of dizziness and euphoria linked to a dangerous diminishment of logic and self-control.

      And the pity of it was that rather than enjoying the effect he had on the female sex, Luke, whilst not oblivious to it, was certainly dismissively contemptuous of it—and, it had to be said, of the women who reacted to it.

      ‘I wanted to have a word with you about the Marshall case before I leave for Brussels.’

      ‘You haven’t forgotten that we’ve got the Haslewich do on at the Grosvenor this weekend, have you?’ James asked him.

      Luke shook his head as he perched on the comer of his brother’s desk. Both of them were qualified barristers working from the same set of chambers as their father and uncle used to, but it was Luke who was the most senior, having been appointed a Queen’s Counsel the previous year, one of the youngest in the country, a fact about which his father had lost no time bragging to his cousin, Ben Crighton, in Haslewich.

      Henry and Ben were a generation removed from the original quarrel that had split the Crighton family, but they still continued the subtle interfamily rivalry their fathers had begun, much to Luke’s irritation.

      He had far more important things to worry about than outdoing his cousin, Max Crighton, and he had no wish to take up the baton of family competitiveness and run with it even if Max was showing signs of wishing to do so.

      ‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ he agreed, ‘although I can’t say that I’m particularly looking forward to it.’

      ‘Mmm...well, it certainly won’t be boring,’ James commented. ‘Max is coming up from London with his wife.’

      ‘Mmm...’ was Luke’s only comment.

      ‘He’s doing pretty well for himself by all accounts,’ James continued. ‘He’s got a good tenancy, though. You’d be hard put to find a better set of chambers, and—’

      ‘He’s got a good tenancy?’ Luke broke in dryly, emphasising the word ‘he’s’. ‘I rather thought his sudden advancement into the upper echelons of one of London’s most prestigious sets of chambers owed more to the efforts of his father-in-law than to Max himself.’

      ‘You’ve never really liked him, have you?’ James asked his brother.

      ‘No, I haven’t,’ Luke agreed, coldly adding, ‘it’s hard to think of him as Jon’s son. If David had been his father...’

      ‘That was an odd business, wasn’t it?’ James said. ‘The way David just upped and left like that after his heart attack, disappearing...’

      ‘Mmm...I dare say he had his reasons,’ Luke commented obliquely. He had heard certain rumours about David—none of them ever verified, but he had sensed that despite the strenuous and meticulous efforts that Jon had made to track down his twin brother, he was almost relieved not to have been able to find him.

      In Luke’s opinion Jon had always been the better one of the pair even if Jon’s own father had always shown a public and very marked preference for David. And now Jon and Jenny’s twin daughters were eighteen. God, that made him feel old. He was virtually twice their age, and as his great-aunt Alice had reminded him pugnaciously the last time he had seen her, fast approaching an age where, in her words, he ran the danger of no longer being seen as an eligible bachelor but rather an unpleasant misanthrope.

      He knew that he was commonly considered to be aloof and disdainful; that he had the reputation of being overly arrogant, too sure of himself and dismissive of women who made a play for him; that he was, in fact, immune to the vulnerability of falling in love.

      Not so. He had once been in love and very, very deeply, or so he had thought at the time, but she had married someone else and lived to regret it. She had told him this when she had come to see him, tears filling her eyes as she confessed that her marriage was over and that she needed his help to find a good divorce lawyer.

      ‘Have you thought long and hard about what you’ll be giving up,’ he had asked her seriously.

      ‘Of course I have,’ she had cried, pushing trembling fingers into her hair as she went on tearfully, ‘but do you really think that any of that matters. That his wealth, his title, that any of it means anything when I’m so unhappy...?’

      ‘You married him,’ he pointed out bluntly to her.

      ‘Yes,’ she had agreed, her mouth trembling as much as her hand had done earlier. ‘At eighteen I believed I loved him. At eighteen you can convince yourself of anything you want to believe. He seemed so...’

      ‘So