The Perfect Father. PENNY JORDAN

short, an absolute honey. He would be very easy to love, a wonderful husband and father…and an equally wonderful lover? The kind of lover she knew instinctively a man like Liam would be.

      Samantha put down her lipstick and frowned. Now what on earth had put that thought into her head?

      Liam as a lover…! Her lover? No way at all!

      She glanced at her watch. Time she was downstairs. Liam would be picking her up in five minutes and he was very hot on good timekeeping.

      Even though she had said her goodbyes to her parents the previous evening, she wasn’t totally surprised to have them rush downstairs minutes before she left to hug and kiss her and reiterate their messages of love to her twin as well as the rest of the Crightons.

      ‘Don’t forget that your grandparents should be arriving in Haslewich during the time you are there,’ Samantha’s mother reminded her.

      ‘How could I forget anything involving Grandma Ruth?’ Samantha teased her mother.

      Ruth Crighton, as she had been before her late marriage to Sarah Jane’s father, was affectionately known as Aunt Ruth to virtually all of the Crighton family and so had become Grandma Ruth to Bobbie, Samantha and their younger brother.

      Blissfully married at last to the American soldier she had first met during the Second World War, Ruth divided her time together with her husband between Haslewich and Grant’s beautiful American house.

      ‘Better not keep Liam waiting,’ her father counselled as they all heard the knock on the door.

      She went to let him in and he thanked her before going over to her mother to give her a very easy and natural almost filially warm hug. Samantha acknowledged grudgingly that there was no way she could ever fault Liam’s behaviour towards her parents. He might deliberately rub her up the wrong way, inciting her to open rebellion and sometimes even outright war, but no one could have faked the look of very real warmth and affection he was giving her folks.

      ‘I see you took my advice about the suitcases,’ was his only comment to her once they were inside his car and he had loaded her two cases into its trunk.

      Samantha scowled at him.

      ‘My decisions to repack had nothing to do with you,’ she told him loftily and a mite untruthfully. ‘Mom wanted me to take some extra gifts over for the family.’

      The derisory look Liam was giving her silenced her.

      ‘Dad said you were picking up a Washington PR expert from the airport,’ she commented, deliberately changing the subject.

      ‘Mmm…’

      ‘You surprise me, Liam,’ she told him. ‘I thought you were far too confident to feel you needed any image polishing or manipulating.’

      ‘ I don’t,’ Liam assured her, ‘but some of your father’s supporters are concerned that Lee Calder could be planning to market himself as the family’s champion and they want to start up a damage limitation exercise.’

      ‘By what, marrying you off to this PR woman?’ Samantha asked flippantly before adding, ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler just to marry your current date…whoever she is…’

      ‘There is no current date,’ Liam told her. ‘And to be frank, Samantha, I’m getting rather tired of this image you keep trying to push of me as some kind of serial lady-killer. For your information—’ He broke off, cursing as a truck suddenly swerved out of a side street in front of them.

      Samantha was far too glad of the diversion to reintroduce the same topic of conversation once the truck had gone. Much as she enjoyed baiting Liam, she also knew when it was wise to back off a little.

      ‘I could say much the same thing to you, you know,’ Liam murmured, turning his head to look directly at her as she turned towards him, warily waiting for what he was going to say.

      ‘If you’re as keen to prove to your colleagues as you said that you are woman enough to be a mother, then there are far easier ways of doing so than going looking in England for a man to father your child.’

      ‘What are you suggesting—artificial insemination. No way!’ Angrily Samantha turned away from him, staring in silence out of the car window.

      Liam was a good driver and long before they had crossed the state line Samantha had dropped off to sleep, her body angled towards Liam’s, one hand resting under her face.

      After he’d safely overtaken a truck, Liam turned his head to look at her. She had to be one of the most breathtakingly stunning women he had ever seen. Her sister Bobbie was beautiful but where Bobbie exuded an air of relaxed self-control, Samantha was a bundle of quicksilver fieriness, impulsive, impatient, almost too sensitive for her own good at times, proud and…

      Liam cursed under his breath. As he knew all too well, there were almost no lengths Samantha would not go to to prove her point if someone hurt her pride. And he knew better than most, having watched both girls grow up, that despite all the positive influences they had received from their parents and family, both of them, but especially Samantha, were privately a little sensitive about their height.

      Liam could remember overhearing a much younger Samantha telling her mother in a low voice choked with tears, ‘Mom, the other girls at school say that I should have been a boy because I’m so big…but I’m not a boy, I’m a girl and…’

      ‘They’re just jealous of you, darling,’ her mother had reassured her quickly. ‘You are indeed a girl, a very beautiful, clever and lovable girl, a very feminine girl,’ she had reinforced, and Liam had watched as Sarah Jane had very cleverly and with maternal love and concern, made sure that her daughters learned how to focus on the very feminine aspects of their personalities, to hold their heads up with pride and grace.

      They were tall, and as a teenager Samantha especially had gone through a phase when she had been all gangly limbs, a little lanky and perhaps almost boyish, but that had been as a teenager. Now she was all woman…Oh, yes…now she was very definitely all woman!

      Waking up beside him, Samantha wondered what had caused that sudden burst of fire to ignite the darkness of Liam’s eyes. Whatever it was, whoever it was…Was it a whoever rather than a whatever? Samantha suddenly wondered. The new PR woman perhaps? She gave a small, quick, sharp intake of breath. Liam might be prepared to bow to the fears of the more conservative lobby and do the conventional thing, marry in order to improve his public appeal, but there was no power on earth that could ever force her to do the same thing. Her principles, her need of her own self-respect, were far too strong, but Liam of course, was far too pragmatic to understand such a sensitive point of view. Cousin James in Chester was very sensitive. She had noticed that in him the moment they had met, and had been touched and warmed by it and by his concern for her.

      James.

      She was already beginning to feel a very definite tingle of excitement at the thought of seeing him again. The Crighton men made wonderful fathers, even the family’s erstwhile outcast Max had totally and unexpectedly shown that he possessed the loving Crighton gene when it came to parenting.

      ‘He seems more thrilled about this new baby they’re expecting than Maddy is,’ Bobbie had confided to her sister when she had passed on to her the news that Max’s wife Maddy was pregnant with their third child.