Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

she saw the way Bobbie was looking at her, she explained gently, ‘You see, I grew up in an era where one was obliged to accept that one did what one’s parents, especially one’s father, thought best. His word was law. My mother was very much the old-fashioned type of wife and my father rather steRN and autocratic, very decided in his views and opinions.’

      Her face clouded a little. ‘In many ways our lives were over-restricted and limited, the brief taste of freedom we were given during the war when we were needed all too swiftly snatched away again once our usefulness was over, and yet I suspect there was a certain security in knowing what was expected of us.

      ‘Luke, I know, can seem rather autocratic and severe at times. Like all of us, Luke, too, has suffered from being a victim of this family’s overriding need to prove themselves worthy of being a Crighton. It’s a handicap that has been passed down from generation to generation, from father to son, as the virtues and achievements of past Crightons are extolled from babyhood almost and the growing child informed that it is his duty to prove himself worthy of following in the same footsteps.

      ‘Fortunately things are changing. Jon’s children, while they all are determined to take up the law as a career, are also resilient and have a sense of independence, of self-worth, a belief in themselves, which hopefully will free them from the expectations that controlled earlier generations’ lives. Apart from Max, who unfortunately is cast in a very different mold... Perhaps marriage to Madeleine will change him. I hope so for her sake.’

      ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Bobbie asked her uncertainly.

      ‘Why?’ Ruth tilted her head on one side and studied Bobbie for a moment. ‘Perhaps because I like you and I hate to see you looking so unhappy. Luke may not be perfect but I do believe that the handicaps that come with being a Crighton could be very much alleviated in him, given the right encouragement. It isn’t always easy to say why we should be so instantly drawn to one person and not to another,’ Ruth added gently.

      ‘In fact, for most of us, it’s very hard to accept, never mind admit, that we have such feelings, that we’re capable of such instant and illogical, emotional reactions. Why I should be so specifically drawn to you, Bobbie, I can’t say. All I can say is that I am, in much the same way that out of all my great-nieces and nephews, Joss and this young lady here have a special place in my heart. It doesn’t mean that I love the others any the less, merely that I love these two just that little bit more. How is your mother by the way?’

      Bobbie’s hand jerked as she lost her grip on the weed she had been trying to work loose, glad that Ruth couldn’t see her face as she replied in a choked voice, ‘I...she’s still not very well. Her... her doctor has suggested that she should consider going into analysis,’ Bobbie elaborated reluctantly.

      ‘It isn’t analysis Mom needs,’ Samantha had denied passionately when she had been telling Bobbie this latest piece of family news. ‘It’s—’

      ‘I know what it is, Sam,’ she had responded, ‘but we can’t give it to her. No one can.’

      ‘Maybe not, but at least we can have the satisfaction of knowing they haven’t got away with what they’ve done, that they’re being punished, too.’

      ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Sam,’ Bobbie had remonstrated gently to her sister, but Sam, as she had known she would, had refused to accept such a point of view.

      Sam would never have got herself in the situation she had managed to get herself in, Bobbie acknowledged. She knew that Sam was expecting her to make use of the family gathering on Sunday to reveal her true identity, to speak out and make the denouncement they had planned, to shame the person responsible for her mother’s unhappiness by publicly revealing what they had done.

      ‘Amelia’s waking up,’ she told Ruth unnecessarily as they both heard the little girl start to gurgle. ‘I’d better take her in and get cleaned up. It’s almost time for her lunch.’

      

      Ruth wasn’t Bobbie’s only unexpected visitor that day. Joss arrived later in the afternoon looking both pleased with himself and slightly self-conscious as he hugged the baby and then proceeded to tell Bobbie about the family of otters he had seen playing in the river as he cycled past.

      ‘Mum says that you’re going to Gramps’s on Sunday,’ he remarked.

      ‘Yes, that’s fight,’ Bobbie agreed neutrally.

      ‘You mustn’t mind if Gramps says anything to you about your being American,’ Joss told her earnestly. ‘He doesn’t mean... Well, he’s not... Mum says that a lot of his grumpiness is because of the pain in his hip.’

      Bobbie tried to stop her mouth from twitching in wry amusement at Joss’s unguarded honesty.

      He stayed for almost an hour drinking Bobbie’s homemade lemonade and eating the cookies she had baked earlier in the afternoon for Caspar, who had teased Olivia that at last he had found someone who could make him proper American cookies.

      ‘Do you know something, Bobbie?’ Joss confided to her as he got up to leave. ‘You really look like one of my cousins, only she’s got red hair—that’s Meg, Saul’s daughter. She’s only four, though, but Aunt Ruth noticed it, as well,’ he added informatively.

      Bobbie was glad there was no one there but Joss to witness the shock his words had caused her and fortunately he was too engrossed in finishing off his last cookie to look directly at her. If he had...

      Bobbie could remember Saul from the party. Tall, dark-haired, good-looking and very sexy. He had once been in love with Olivia, Caspar had told her. He was now in his mid-thirties, over a decade younger than her mother. How ironic that Joss should comment that while she and Saul’s child looked alike, she had red hair.

      ‘See you on Sunday,’ Joss called out to her as he rode off.

      Oh yes, she would definitely see him, but Bobbie doubted that he would ever look so warmly on her again.

      It had all seemed so simple when she and Sam had discussed it at home. So easy. So straightforward and right. Then she had expected that the hardest thing she would have to do would be to get close enough to the family to put their plan into action.

      ‘It’s no good just going for a one-to-one confrontation,’ Samantha had insisted when Bobbie had suggested this course.

      ‘Perhaps if I just explained how Mom feels, how it has affected her, how much she needs to know why she was so ruthlessly rejected.’

      ‘That won’t work,’ Samantha had told her. ‘There’s no point in appealing to someone’s finer feelings or their sense of compassion when it’s obvious that they don’t have any. No! What we have to do is to show them up for what they are, confront them in public in front of their family.’

      It had never occurred to her then that once she actually met the family she would like them. Well, certain members of it at least, she amended hastily, dismissing the far too detailed and accurate mental portrait of Luke her memory had just supplied her with. People who had just been names to her at first were now so very much more.

      What did a person do when the facts led in one direction and one’s emotions in another that was completely opposite? How did one make a decision—a judgement—like the one she had to make? She wasn’t used to playing God and it wasn’t a role that sat easily on her shoulders, but then...

      ‘Think of Mom...think of what she’s suffered...how she’s been hurt,’ Samantha had urged her, and Bobbie only had to picture her mother’s face when she talked about her past to be filled with the same aching, angry, but helpless feeling of furious resentment on her behalf that she had experienced when she had first heard what had happened.

      ‘We can’t alter what’s been done,’ her father had said gently once to Bobbie when, as a teenager, she had burst into an impassioned speech about the unhappiness in her mother’s past.

      ‘But it’s all so unfair,’ Bobbie