The Perfect Lover. PENNY JORDAN

of her tongue to plead with her twin to cancel her date and spend the evening with her, but then she remembered the look she had seen in Gareth Simmonds’ eyes when he had told her that he knew she had been using Katie to stand in at his lectures for her, and she resisted the impulse.

      She was not, she assured herself fiercely, the selfish, thoughtless, self-absorbed person his look had implied. She would have done the same thing for Katie...if Katie had asked...

      But Katie would not have asked, a small inner voice told her.

      

      The summer afternoon had given way to evening. Louise stared tiredly around her room. Papers and textbooks covered every surface, and her head was swimming with facts she couldn’t assimilate; they floated in her brain like congealing fat on top of her mother’s home-made stock, coagulating and clogging.

      Saul. Where was he now...? What was he doing...? She got up and walked into her small kitchenette. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten, but the mere thought of food made her feel sick.

      Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Aunt Ruth’s wine stacked in a dusty corner. Dizzily she went and removed a bottle.

      Aunt Ruth had quaintly old-fashioned ideas about how Oxford’s modern-day undergraduates lived. The wine she had chosen for her great-nieces had been carefully selected for its full-bodied richness. Ruth had imagined it would be drunk at the kind of under-grad gathering that featured in expensive TV dramas—adaptations of books set in a glittering gilded era.

      Louise opened one of the bottles and poured herself a glass. She was not normally a drinker. Oh, she enjoyed a decent glass of wine with good food, and she had gone through the normal student ritual of drinking at the bar in the students’ union during the first few weeks at university, but that had simply been a rite of passage, something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

      The red wine was rich and fruity, warming her throat and heating her cold, empty stomach.

      Louise sank down onto the floor, owlishly studying the mass of paper she had spread all around her. Katie’s handwriting danced dizzily before her eyes. Frowningly she blinked as she tried to focus and concentrate, quickly finishing off her glass of wine.

      It was making her feel distinctly better—lighter, number. It was even making it possible for her to think about Saul without that wrenching, tearing pain deep inside her, threatening to destroy her.

      Saul...

      As she walked erratically back from the kitchenette, having refilled her glass, Louise tried to summon up Saul’s beloved mental image and found, to her consternation, that she couldn’t—that for some reason his beloved, adored features had become amorphous and vague, sliding away before she could crystallise them into a hard image. Even more infuriatingly, the harder she tried to visualise him, the more impossible it became. Instead, the male image that came most easily to her mind’s eye was that of Gareth Simmonds.