Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

the opportunity the circumstances offered me when I saw Fenella coming down the corridor towards us.’

      ‘You decided to make a grab for me and make out like the two of us were involved in some kind of passionate clinch ... that we were... The moment wasn’t the only thing you seized,’ she berated him furiously, ‘and if you think—’

      ‘Calm down,’ he advised her.

      ‘Calm down! You grab hold of me, manhandle me...force me into my room and then you—’

      ‘You’re perfectly safe,’ he interrupted in an unruffled voice, adding almost disparagingly, ‘For a start, you’re not my type.’

      Not his type! Bobbie’s eyes flashed warning signs of an impending major storm.

      ‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ she told him through gritted teeth, finishing trenchantly, ‘because you most certainly are not mine.’

      ‘You’re overreacting,’ she heard Luke saying as he shrugged his shoulders dismissively.

      Overreacting? Bobbie could hardly believe her ears.

      ‘You kissed me,’ she hissed.

      To her chagrin, he actually laughed. ‘Oh, come on.’ he drawled when he had finished laughing. ‘I can’t possibly be the first to do that.’

      ‘No,’ Bobbie agreed crossly. She just did not believe this; his arrogance almost took her breath away. ‘But you’re certainly the first who’s done so against my will—and the last,’ she declared forcefully. For good measure, the memory of his amused laughter driving her on to open retaliation, she added, ‘I don’t enjoy being kissed by a man I don’t like.’

      For a moment she finally thought she had got the upper hand, and at six foot plus, Bobbie had to acknowledge that not having it was something of a new experience for her and not one she suspected she could become particularly fond of, but then to her disbelief she heard him drawl, ‘No? You could have fooled me. So by whom would you have preferred to be kissed?’ he asked before she could react to the enormity of his deliberate insult. ‘Or can I guess?’ he asked her silkily. ‘I saw you watching Max earlier. He’s married, you know.’

      ‘Yes, I do know, thank you very much,’ Bobbie responded, not bothering to waste time denying his allegations, asking with acid sweetness instead, ‘Why, I wonder, is everyone so anxious for me to know that Max is married?’

      ‘You know perfectly well why,’ he told her brutally. ‘Max is an extremely predatory and highly sexed man, married to a woman who bores him and whom he quite obviously married for reasons that have nothing to do with any urgent need on his part to take her to bed.

      ‘You, on the other hand, possess that peculiar quality that quite obviously does incline Max to want to bed you, but bedding you is all he will do unless, of course, you happen to have a parcel of top-ranking judges, plus a peer and a couple of millionaires tucked away in your family tree.’

      ‘No, I don’t,’ Bobbie responded shortly, amending mentally for her own benefit, Well, at least I don’t have the hereditary peer, but she firmly resisted the temptation to give voice to such words. ‘I want you to leave,’ she told him quickly instead, looking pointedly towards the door.

      ‘Not yet,’ he returned mildly.

      Bobbie was completely nonplussed. ‘I could ring down to reception and ask them to remove you—forcibly if necessary,’ she told him.

      Once again he laughed. ‘I rather think that in this particular town and this particular hotel, my credit and reputation stand rather higher than yours.’ One dark brow rose. ‘What does anyone know about you after all, other than you appear to have made a rather unlikely friend in Joss?’

      ‘Fenella must be crazy to want to get involved with you,’ Bobbie breathed, unwittingly betraying the fact that his past history had been the subject of some of her conversation earlier in the evening. ‘And if she’s so desperate to get you,’ she said bluntly, ‘seeing you kissing me isn’t going to put her off.’

      ‘No,’ he agreed smoothly, ‘but hopefully hearing that I’ve spent the night with you will.’

      Spent the night with her? Bobbie’s mouth opened and then closed again as she gulped in air and stared at him in a mixture of fury and fascination whilst he watched her back away, one of his eyebrows lifted ironically as though ... as though he was almost waiting ... enjoying the prospect of having her challenge him. Well, he wasn’t going to be disappointed.

      ‘You are not staying the night in this room, my room,’ she emphasised, spacing her words with care.

      ‘No? Then evict me,’ Luke responded with a bored shrug.

      Evict him. She might be tall, but as she visually measured not just the length of his body, but compared it muscle for muscle, strength for strength, with her own, Bobbie knew that any attempt on her part to use force to remove him from the room would inevitably result in a humiliating failure on her part.

      ‘Very well, then,’ Bobbie answered coolly, changing tack. ‘If you won’t leave, then I shall simply book myself into another room.’

      ‘Impossible, I’m afraid,’ Luke told her, shaking his head. ‘The hotel is fully booked as I discovered when Fenella announced that she had booked us a double room, but by all means if you want to try...’

      Bobbie thought quickly. She was well aware of the curiosity and interest it would arouse if she were to try to change her room, especially with Luke so very much in evidence in her present one.

      ‘This is ridiculous,’ she snapped finally. ‘If Fenella isn’t going to be put off by seeing you kiss me, then what makes you think she will be just because you’ve spent the night with me? After all, if she’s prepared to take on a man who kisses another woman in public, she would more than likely be prepared to take on one who...who’s been more intimate with...with her.’

      Irritated with herself as she floundered a little, she had no idea why on earth she should feel so self-conscious about using the word ‘sex’ instead of the more coy and euphemistic ‘intimate’ in front of a man like Luke Crighton, a man she didn’t so much merely not like, but increasingly actively disliked.

      ‘Because,’ Luke explained patiently, ‘although she might be prepared to do so, she knows perfectly well that I’m not.’ When Bobbie looked perplexed, he explained matter-of-factly, ‘I do not sleep around, and as Fenella already knows, I do not and never have been “intimate”—’ he underlined the word, her word, mockingly ‘—with a woman with whom I am not either already involved or intending to become involved in a very serious relationship. In other words, my American friend, Fenella knows that if I spend the night with you, it is because I want to make you a serious and permanent part of my life.’

      Bobbie swallowed hard as she stared at him. It wasn’t often that anyone caught her wrong-footed or off guard; that anything a member of the male sex said surprised her. But this time...this one...why...why in heaven’s name did he have to be the first, the only man she had ever met to echo her own views of the importance of respecting sexual intimacy, to want it to be part of a truly committed relationship?

      She gave him a quick glance, half-inclined to suspect him of making fun of her, but one look at his face convinced her that he was totally serious.

      ‘I hope you aren’t trying to suggest that because you’ve forced your way into my room and declared your intention to spend the night with me that that means in the morning you’re going to expect me to make an honest man of you,’ she joked flippantly to cover what she was feeling.

      ‘Don’t you believe in marriage?’ he asked her unexpectedly. ‘Are you one of these modern young women who likes to think that men are superfluous to her requirements, even to the extent of forgoing the pleasure and the intimacy that creating a child together should bring in favour of a far more clinical and detached method of conception?’

      There must be