Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ the afternoon in Tiggy’s small flat and her even smaller bed to while away what was left of the day in her arms. This behaviour had ultimately cost him his career.

      He had to make a choice, the head of chambers had told him sternly when David had been summoned to his room to account for himself. The Bar or Tiggy and the life he was leading with her.

      There had been no choice to make, really. He already knew what was expected of him, what his grandfather would expect of him.

      He had been given twenty-four hours to think it over and he had gone back to Tiggy’s flat to tell her what had happened and to collect his things. Only when he had arrived there he had found Tiggy in a flood of tears—and pregnant with his child.

      The sight of her vulnerable face and childlike body, her copious tears, had swept aside all his carefully prepared speeches. He loved her. He couldn’t live without her. She was having his baby. His grandfather would understand. He would have to understand.

      They were married three days later at Caxton Hall.

      As he kissed his new bride, David had told her sternly that henceforward there were to be no more drugs, no more partying all night and sleeping all day. They had their baby to think about.

      Docilely Tiggy had agreed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him passionately whilst she told him how much she loved him.

      It was a pity that he wasn’t still going to be a barrister, she told him. He would have looked so deliciously stern and forbidding in his court robes, but she would be just as happy married to a famous pop star and she had no doubts he was going to be famous.

      David hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his career as a pop star had ended almost as soon as it began.

      Three weeks later when the bank announced that he had overspent his allowance and that they couldn’t allow him to withdraw any more money from his account, he had told Tiggy that they were going to visit his family in Cheshire.

      ‘Cheshire?’ she had repeated. ‘But we will come back to London?’ David hadn’t told her before the trip up North that a return to their London lifestyle would not be possible.

      In the end, though, she had seen that there wasn’t any alternative.

      The wild crowd she had run with had dropped her as quickly and carelessly as it had picked her up. She was yesterday’s news now, yesterday’s girl; the sixties were like that. And neither of them had been willing to consider terminating her pregnancy although for different reasons.

      A part of David was proud of the fact that he had fathered Tiggy’s child while Tiggy had heard all the terrifying stories the models passed around and frightened themselves with—tales of unimaginable horror about girls who had been left to die in their own blood, or worse.

      Tiggy’s own family, a respectable middle-class shopkeeper and his wife would have disowned her had she tried to go home to them. David loved her, she knew that, and she desperately needed to be loved. David would keep her safe, protect her from the demons that stalked her and surely they wouldn’t have to live in Cheshire for ever.

      To David’s relief, his father had taken to Tiggy straight away and even semi-growled his reluctant approval when David had explained to him just why they had had to marry so quickly.

      The dismissal from his training for the Bar had been less easy for Ben to accept but David had known how to win him round. He always had.

      Oddly enough, it had been his mother, Sarah, the quiet, self-effacing one, always willing to fall in with whatever her husband wished, who seemed almost to dislike Tiggy. But then, as David himself had observed, Tiggy was not the kind of woman that other members of her sex took to easily. Jenny, thankfully, had been the exception, welcoming Tiggy into the family with genuine warmth.

      She and Jon had been married for several years by then. David suspected that Jenny had been so kind to Tiggy because she herself had been pregnant when she married Jon, but since he was not given to introspection he had not dwelt too deeply on the subject. He was thankful that he had managed to appease his father enough for him to agree to settle all his debts and that he and Tiggy could make a fresh start in the secure environment of his birthplace.

      David grimaced as he refocused on his bank statement. He would have to talk to Tiggy again, make her understand…. He had started to sweat heavily and there was a pain in his jaw. He touched it experimentally. He would have to make an appointment to see Paul Knighton, their dentist.

      Unlike Jon, he was not looking forward to the weekend. Fifty! Where the hell had all the years gone? Fifty … and look at him. He pushed the bank statement into a desk drawer and then locked it. His head ached and he felt slightly sick.

      Probably that damned high blood pressure young Travers had warned him about the last time he had had a check-up.

      It wasn’t going to be easy talking to Tiggy … making her listen. She had been very upset the previous evening, complaining to him that Olivia thought more of Jenny than she did her and then in the same breath begging him to reassure her that she still looked as attractive as ever, fretfully comparing herself with Olivia.

      ‘Olivia’s in her twenties,’ he had pointed out unwisely, cursing himself under his breath as he recognised his folly. Only it had been too late to recall his words then; the damage had been done and the consequences so predictable that he could reel off each stage of them. He knew exactly what he would find when he went home this evening and exactly how Tiggy would react if he tried to talk to her about what she was doing to herself, to him, to their life together.

      If anyone had told him on the day they married what lay ahead of them, he would have laughed at them in disbelief.

      Wearily he passed a hand over his eyes as though unwittingly trying to obliterate the painful memories from his consciousness.

       4

      ‘Tiggy.’

      Olivia paused hesitantly on the threshold of the small sunny sitting room. Her mother was seated at the pretty antique desk Olivia could remember her father buying her one Christmas. As she turned round to smile at her daughter there was no hint of the morning’s anxiety and trauma in her expression. In fact, she looked almost serene, Olivia recognised as she watched her tuck the cheque she had been writing into an envelope and seal it.

      ‘I’m just paying a few bills,’ she informed Olivia. ‘Your father isn’t back yet. I thought we’d have dinner in Knutsford at Est Est Est tonight. It’s always been one of your favourite places and … Where’s Caspar, by the—’

      ‘I’m here,’ Caspar responded, following Olivia into the sitting room.

      ‘He really is the most deliciously gorgeous-looking man,’ Tiggy told Olivia, dimpling Caspar a teasing, flirtatious smile.

      This was her mother at her best, at her most irresistible, Olivia acknowledged as she watched her. It was impossible to feel irritable or envious of her ability to charm or even to question her need to have to do so.

      ‘And so tall,’ Tiggy was trilling as she stood provocatively close to Caspar, looking doe-eyed up at him as she asked him, ‘Just how tall exactly are you?’

      ‘Six-two or thereabouts,’ СКАЧАТЬ