A Perfect Family. PENNY JORDAN

her and she can’t see that underneath it all he’s really laughing at her. She’ll probably try to flirt with you as she would him. She doesn’t mean anything by it … it’s just her way … she can’t help it, she needs …’

      Olivia paused, groping for the right words to explain her mother’s vulnerability and then abandoned the attempt, saying quietly instead, ‘Sometimes when I see Aunt Jenny watching Max I sort of get the impression that she doesn’t like him much herself but, of course, that can’t be true. She’s his mother after all and mothers always love their children.’

      ‘Do they?’ Caspar asked her wryly. ‘I’m not sure that’s true. What certainly isn’t true is that children always love their parents. There’s virtually a whole industry growing up now around analysing why so many adult and sometimes not-yet-adult children murder their parents.’

      ‘Mmm … I was reading about that case involving …’

      They were off, both of them quickly becoming engrossed in the intricacies of the legal case Olivia had referred to.

      She was more beautiful than ever when she was animated like this, Caspar acknowledged, watching her, but never, nowhere ever near so beautiful as she was when she lay in his arms and opened her eyes, her body, her soul to him.

      ‘Caspar,’ she complained when she realised that she didn’t have his full attention, ‘what are you doing?’

      ‘Just testing this mattress,’ he explained.

      ‘Why?’ she demanded curiously.

      ‘Why do you think?’ he responded softly, turning round to kiss her before asking, ‘How long do you suppose we have before your parents come back?’

      ‘My bed’s bigger,’ Olivia whispered between returning his kisses.

      ‘Mmm …’ he murmured distractedly, nuzzling the soft, tender flesh of her throat. ‘You can show me later. Right now, right now …’

      He exhaled in masculine, sensual pleasure as he peeled down her top and exposed the taut curves of her breasts, teasing first one and then the other erect nipple with the tip of his tongue, feeling her whole body quiver in response to his touch.

      He could still remember the first time he had gone down on her, the intensity of the quicksilver shudders of pleasure she hadn’t been able to conceal from him. Thinking about it now made his own body harden.

      ‘We haven’t had any supper,’ Olivia reminded him, gasping the words between tiny shivers of responsive pleasure.

      ‘Mmm … who wants supper? I’m going to eat you instead,’ Caspar told her lovingly.

      Olivia closed her eyes; she loved the way Caspar was so wonderfully vocal in his lovemaking. He wasn’t poetic as one would-be admirer had been when she was at college, nor did he talk dirty as some men—and women—enjoyed doing, but he had a way that was somehow totally unique, totally Caspar, a way that was both deliciously erotic and entrancingly funny, and sometimes whilst she was laughing, her own arousal caught her unawares. But not Caspar. He seemed to sense that moment, that second, that heartbeat of time when between one breath and the next, laughter turned to desire and her need for him overwhelmed everything else. Just as it was doing now.

      ‘Caspar,’ she demanded, tugging urgently at his hair, feeling the hot sweetness of his breath feeding the soft, fluttering pulse he had so lovingly conjured up with his tongue.

      ‘Mmm …?’ he murmured teasingly, knowing full well what that urgent little tug on his hair actually meant.

      ‘I thought you said that Olivia was coming back tonight,’ Joss protested when his third attempt to telephone his cousin had met with no response.

      ‘I thought she was,’ Jenny agreed, deliberately keeping her back to him and to Jon.

      ‘Well, she can’t be there, otherwise she’d have answered the phone, so you must have got it wrong, and now there won’t be time to show her the badger cubs,’ Joss announced, patently aggrieved.

      ‘Livvy won’t want to see the badgers. She’s bringing her boyfriend back with her,’ Louise told her brother with elder-sister superiority.

      ‘Louise,’ Jenny warned, frowning her disapproval.

      ‘So … why should that stop her wanting to see the cubs?’ Joss demanded.

      Behind her back, Jenny could hear the twins’ stifled, knowing giggles.

      ‘Girls!’ Joss pronounced with exasperated contempt, then added, ‘Aren’t you going to eat that pie, Lou, because if you’re not …?’ He stared hopefully at his sister’s plate.

      ‘You’re looking tired,’ Jenny commented quietly to her husband when they were finally on their own.

      ‘Not really. It’s just … well, I suppose this party brings home the fact that we’re not getting any younger.’

      Jenny didn’t say anything; she knew quite well who carried the heaviest part of the burden at work in the practice. She knew equally well that any attempt by her to protest would meet with that same polite, distancing withdrawal that Jon used whenever he considered that anyone was attempting to attack his twin brother.

      In the early years of their marriage she had found it unbearably hurtful, knowing that someone else would always come first; that his loyalty, his love for his twin, would always be the most important, would always come before his feelings for her. But then she made herself recognise that it was that same loyalty to David that made him the man he was, the husband he was … the father he was … and she had said to herself that she must not fall into the same trap as others and try to make her husband what she wanted him to be rather than appreciate what he was. In their marriage at least, he would have the opportunity to be himself—to be an individual. She owed him that much. That much, and much, much more. So very much more …

       3

      ‘Thank you, Mr Thompson, everything looks lovely, and you’ll be here in the morning to finish off?’ Jenny asked the man in charge of the team that had erected the marquee.

      They had arrived earlier in the day, a dozen or more of them, all neatly dressed in an eye-catching uniform of jeans and T-shirts bearing the marquee company’s logo. Most of this group of energetic young men and women, Jenny had discovered, were students working through their summer vacations.

      They had erected the marquee with commendable expertise and speed under the watchful eye of the forty-odd-year-old foreman, breaking only for an hour’s respite and a picnic meal before going on to hang the interior awnings, put up the lights and erect the connecting ‘tunnels’ that led from the house to the marquee, one for the guests and another for the caterers.

      ‘We’ll be here sharp on the dot at eight,’ the foreman assured Jenny.

      ‘And the tables will be set up and the chairs in place by twelve?’ she checked.

      ‘By twelve,’ he agreed.

      ‘It looks absolutely wonderful,’ Olivia approved as the foreman turned to gather his team together.

      She and Caspar had called round just as Jenny was on the point of leaving home to check on how things were going and had elected to go with her. Max, who had arrived home late the previous evening, had also announced that he would join them. Jenny wasn’t sure why. He was standing on his own, scowling and looking thoroughly bored and irritated.

      ‘I hope having plain cream isn’t going to be too dull,’ Jenny worried as she turned back to study the interior of the marquee again.

      ‘No, it’s perfect,’ Olivia assured her. ‘So elegant—anything else would have been too fussy … too weddingy.’

      The marquee team were piling into the vehicles that had brought them and that Jenny