Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 had protested. ‘It nearly even stopped you and Mom getting married.’

      ‘I know. I know,’ her father agreed. ‘But fortunately your grandfather was able to make it a bit easier for us. He used that special brand of Southern charm he has to coax the family around.’ Her father chuckled. ‘It was certainly the first time I’ve ever seen Great-Aunt Emma actually flirting.’

      ‘Great-Aunt Emma flirted with Grandpa...?’ She stood wide-eyed.

      ‘She certainly did, and then, of course, when they realised that he was connected through his mother’s side to an influential and wealthy family...’

      ‘They still didn’t really want you to marry Mom, though, did they, Dad, even though Grandpa is very rich and Mom his only child...?’

      ‘No, they didn’t,’ her father affirmed honestly. ‘But I can tell you this, when you love someone as much as I love your mother, no power on earth can stop you from being together. The reason I wanted my family to accept and value her was because I knew it was what she wanted. As far as I was concerned, I’d have gladly turned my back on the whole pack of them rather than lose your mother.’

      ‘Even your parents?’ Bobbie asked him quietly.

      ‘Even my folks,’ her father agreed. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Bobbie. I loved them very much and I had a great deal of respect for them. I still do. But I love your mom more...much, much more. You see, honey, the kind of love you have for that one special person in your life is just so different from any other kind of love that once you’ve experienced it... Well, you just wait and see.’

      ‘I wouldn’t want to fall in love with someone you and Mom didn’t like,’ Bobbie had protested.

      Prophetic words. She could just imagine how her parents, especially her mother, would feel if she were to announce that she had fallen in love with a Crighton. Fallen in love with? Bobbie tensed.

      Restlessly she paced the room. She wasn’t in love with Luke....

      She wasn’t silly enough to let herself fall in love with someone like Luke. She had far too much regard for her own emotional well-being, too strong a sense of self-esteem, too much awareness of the pain that lay ahead of her in loving a man who not only most assuredly did not return her feelings but who, even if he had, was quite simply someone she could never share her life with.

      Yet, perversely, instead of looking forward to Sunday in the knowledge that once it was over, once she had carried out the task that had originally brought her to Cheshire, she would be free to leave and return home, safe from any more heart-searching over Luke who surely, with the Atlantic safely between them, would quickly become nothing more than a distant—a very distant—memory, Bobbie acknowledged that she was actually dreading it.

      But of course, there was nothing that she could do to stop Sunday coming. Nothing at all!

       CHAPTER SIX

      QUEENSMEAD was very much as she had pictured it, Bobbie realised: СКАЧАТЬ