The Perfect Sinner. PENNY JORDAN

family in Haslewich, was still obsessed by the family tradition of competitiveness with the Chester members, even if it was now in spirit only.

      It had been a burning ambition of Ben’s all his life that initially his eldest son and then, when that had not been possible, his eldest grandson, Max, should achieve the goal that had been withheld from him and be called to the bar.

      All through his growing years, Max had been alternately bribed and coerced by his grandfather to fulfil this goal, his naturally competitive spirit sharpened and fed by his grandfather’s tales of the injustices suffered by their own branch of the family and the need to restore the family’s pride by proving to ‘that Chester lot’ that they weren’t the only ones who could boast of reaching the higher echelons of the legal profession.

      When Max had announced to his grandfather that he was to join one of London’s most prestigious sets of chambers, he had made Ben Crighton’s dearest wish come true.

      As Bobbie surveyed the Grosvenor’s ballroom now, she couldn’t help remembering the first time she had attended another family occasion—Louise and her twin Katie’s coming of age, an event to which she, as a stranger then to the family, had been invited by Joss, Louise and Katie’s younger brother.

      Max had behaved very gallantly towards her then. Too gallantly for a married man, as Luke hadn’t hesitated to point out. Conversely, she and Luke had clashed immediately, equally antagonistic towards each other.

      She was glad that Louise had brought her wedding forward from Christmas Eve so that they could all attend. She would have hated to have missed the celebration, but she was looking forward to spending Christmas with her parents and sister as well. Her mother, Sarah Jane, would be thrilled when she told her about her pregnancy, and so, too, she hoped, would Sam…. A small frown touched her forehead as she thought about her twin sister.

      Something was wrong with Sam’s life at the moment. She knew it, could sense it with that extraordinary magical bond that made them close….

      In a small anteroom just off the ballroom, the youngest members of the Crighton family were having a small party all of their own, not so much by design as by accident. From her seat within watching distance of the door, Jenny Crighton was keeping a motherly eye on the events, though she knew they could come to no harm.

      Who would have thought in such a short space of time that the family would produce so many little ones, a complete new generation.

      Olivia, her husband’s niece and the eldest of his twin brother David’s two children, had started it all, and now she and Caspar, her American husband, had Amelia and Alex. Saul, Ben’s half-brother Hugh’s elder son, had Jemima, Robert and Meg from his first marriage and now a baby from his marriage to Tullah, and of course her own daughter-in-law, Maddy, had Leo and Emma.

      Maddy … Jenny could feel her body tensing as she took a quick look at her daughter-in-law, who was seated between her and Ruth, her head bent down. Maddy might seem to the unaware onlooker calm and serene, but Jenny had seen the tears sparkling in her eyes several minutes ago and she had known who had been the cause of them.

      Even now, after all these years, she still hadn’t come to terms with the reality that was her eldest son, and it hurt her unbearably to know that it was Max, flesh of her flesh, hers and Jon’s, who was the cause of so much hurt and pain.

      She ached to ask her son why he behaved in the way he did. Why. What it was that motivated him to be the person he was, but she knew that if she even tried to talk to him he would simply give her that half mocking, half sneering contemptuous little smile of his and shrug his shoulders and walk away.

      She had never been able to understand how she and Jon had ever produced a person like Max, and she knew that she never would. She knew, too, that every time she looked at her daughter-in-law and witnessed the pain her marriage was causing her, she was overwhelmed by guilt and despair.

      Maddy was everything that she, Jenny, could have wanted in a daughter-in-law, or a daughter, and as such she was dearly loved by her, but Jenny would had to have had far less intelligence than she did have to be able to convince herself that Maddy was the kind of wife that Max should have gone for.

      Max thrived on opposition, challenge, aggression. Max wanted most what he could have least, and poor Maddy just wasn’t … just couldn’t … Poor Maddy!

      At her mother-in-law’s side, Madeleine Crighton had a pretty fair idea just what Jenny was thinking and she couldn’t blame her in the least.

      Max had only arrived home at Queensmead this morning, the lovely old house that belonged to his grandfather and where Maddy and the children had now virtually made their permanent home, with only an hour to spare before the wedding began, having assured Maddy that he would be there early the previous evening. Not an auspicious start, and to make matters even worse, Leo was going through a belligerent and rather touchingly possessive phase where his mother was concerned. Unlike his father, Leo didn’t seem to realize that her looks made it a visible implausibility that any man could ever feel possessively jealous about her—and he had glowered at Max when he had arrived, refusing to leave her side to go to his father.

      In private Maddy knew that Max couldn’t care less whether the children ignored him or not. In fact, if the truth were known, the less he had to do with them, the happier he was. After all, he had never wanted either of them.

      But in public, it was different. In public, in front of his grandfather and others, his children had to be seen to love their father, which Leo, quite plainly at the moment, did not. And then Emma had been sick. Not, fortunately, badly enough to harm her dress, but certainly enough to cause the kind of delay that had Max swearing under his breath and telling Maddy with chilling cruelty that she was as useless as a mother as she was a wife.

      Maddy knew what the true cause of his anger was, of course. It was a woman. It had to be. She knew the signs far too well now not to recognize them. Max had left a woman behind in London whom he would far rather be with. And no doubt she was the reason he had not come down to Haslewich last night as they had agreed.

      Maddy told herself that his infidelity didn’t have the power to hurt her any more, but deep down inside she knew that it wasn’t true.

      Maddy knew that her mother-in-law and the rest of Max’s family felt very sorry for her. She could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices, and sometimes, when she looked at Max’s cousins and their wives with their families and saw the love they shared, she felt positively rent with pain for all that she was missing out on, although she tried to tell herself stoically that what you never had you never missed. She had certainly never been loved as a child as she had longed to be. Her mother was a peer’s daughter who had always given Maddy the impression that she considered her marriage, and with it her husband and her daughter, as somehow slightly beneath her. She held herself slightly separate from them and spent most of her time on a round of visits to a variety of relatives while Maddy’s father, a career barrister, made his way via the Bench towards his goal of being appointed Lord Chief Justice.

      Maddy, their only child, had not featured very significantly in her parents’ lives. Now that she was married she hardly saw them at all, and to come to Haslewich and discover that there was not just a home waiting for her with Max’s grandfather, but also a role to play where she was really genuinely needed had, for a time at least, been a comforting salve on the open wound of her destructive marriage.

      Maddy was, by nature and instinct, one of life’s carers, and when other people grimaced over Max’s grandfather’s tetchiness, she simply smiled and explained gently that it was the pain he suffered in his damaged joints that caused him to be so irascible.

      ‘Maddy, you are a saint,’ she had been told more than once by his grateful relatives, but she wasn’t, of course, she was simply a woman—a woman who right now longed with the most ridiculous intensity to be the kind of woman whom a man might look at the way Gareth Simmonds, her sister-in-law Louise’s new husband, was looking at Louise, with love, with pride, with desire … with all the things Madeleine had once mistakenly and tragically convinced herself she had seen in Max’s