Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

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      To Jenny’s relief the band stopped playing.

      ‘We must go back to the table,’ she told David firmly. Her heart was beating far too fast and her face was far, far too flushed. She felt … she felt …

      The last thing, the very last thing she needed tonight was to be reminded of how she had once felt about David or how … When he finally let her go with obvious reluctance, Jenny made her way quickly back to their table, but she knew that the damage had already been done.

      ‘I can still remember the first time you kissed me,’ David had told her. Well, so could she, although her memories of it were, she suspected, different from his.

      It was true that she had been picking blackberries and no doubt her hands and her mouth had been stained with their juice, but it had been David and not she who had instigated the kiss, David who had teased and challenged her by guessing that she had still not been properly kissed, demanding, when she denied it, that she prove it to him by showing him just how expert and experienced she actually was.

      She had put down her basket of blackberries and walked slowly towards him, her head held high, her pride refusing to allow her to back down and inwardly feeling more terrified than she had ever felt in her whole life.

      From before the previous Christmas the other girls in her class had been boasting about their new-found skills in the art of snogging and whilst she had smiled and pretended not to care that she was excluded from this new game, in private she had secretly studied every kiss she’d seen in films, endlessly wondering and worrying how she would fare when a boy finally kissed her. And now that that day had come it wasn’t just any boy; it was him … David Crighton.

      Screwing up her courage as tightly as she had already screwed up her eyes, she pursed her lips and made a despairing dart in David’s direction and then stopped, her face burning with humiliation as her lips made contact only with thin air.

      Opening her eyes she saw that David had moved to one side and was watching her in amusement, his mouth curled into a wide smile.

      ‘You really haven’t a clue, have you?’ he had told her, shaking his head.

      ‘Yes, I have,’ Jenny had fibbed.

      ‘Liar,’ he had chided her softly, adding with a smile, ‘It doesn’t matter, though. In fact, I rather like the idea of being the one to teach you.’

      ‘I don’t need anyone to teach me anything,’ Jenny had stormed at him.

      ‘No?’

      She had turned round, intending to retrieve her basket and walk away, only David moved faster, planting himself between her and the blackberries, walking towards her slowly as she backed away from him until she could back away no longer. He had, she discovered, trapped her very neatly between his body and the stone wall behind her.

      What happened then was, of course, inevitable. He had kissed her tightly closed lips once briefly and then a second time less briefly and then … and then he had bent down and picked up a handful of blackberries from the basket, popping one into his own mouth before offering one to her.

      Naïvely she had opened her mouth for it—and for him. The fate of the rest of the blackberries he had removed from the basket was something that left her trembling and weak-kneed for weeks afterwards every time she thought about it, although the sensual intimacy of it was spoiled for ever for her when illuminatingly she later overheard another girl describing David’s favourite trick of passing sweets from his own mouth to a girl’s.

      She had ended up with her mouth ripely stained by blackberries, a fact that gained her a scolding from her mother for eating the fruit she had wanted for a pie but that thankfully, at the same time, helped to disguise her tell-tale swollen lips.

      Odd, but she never ate blackberries these days, blaming her aversion on the seeds.

      Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Jon shifting uncomfortably in his seat; the toasts were about to begin. Apart from that one small hiccup when David had insisted on dancing with her, everything had gone perfectly and according to plan. Even Ben had praised the food and Jenny had lost count of the number of guests who had come up to her and praised the décor of the marquee and in particular the richness of Ruth’s floral arrangements as well as doing a very gratifying double take as they noted her own appearance.

      The quartet engaged to play through the meal had been an excellent if expensive idea and the cream backdrop had provided exactly the right touch of quiet elegance for the women’s gowns and the men’s dinner jackets. Even the younger members of the family had behaved impeccably. So why did she have this dull, heavy feeling, of emptiness almost, of … disappointment …?

      David was getting to his feet whilst the eagle eye of the catering manager checked that everyone had a full glass of champagne; Jenny could see the look of pride and love in Ben’s eyes as he watched his heir, his most loved son; and she knew without having to check that the same look would be mirrored in Jon’s eyes. The feeling of heaviness intensified.

      David cleared his throat. He knew his speech off by heart and had no need really of the notes he had placed on the table in front of him; that had always been one of his gifts, the ability to memorise whole tracts of written material.

      He glanced round the marquee. His shirt collar felt tight and he was hot, too hot, his stomach muscles tense, the meal he had eaten lying like a millstone in his stomach. That damned phone call. A spasm of pain ripped through him, paralysing him with its intensity. It seemed to spring out of nowhere, forking through him like lightning and with the deadly speed of a poised snake. First came the sharp sting of its poisoned bite and then the burning flood of its deadly aftershock; it was a pain like no other he had ever experienced or dreamed of experiencing. All around him he could hear noise but it no longer seemed to touch him; only the pain could touch him.

      Someone was screaming. It was Tiggy, Jenny recognised sickly as she and Jon struggled to get David into a recovery position, his body a leaden weight in her arms. She must not use the word ‘dead’. Not yet … please God, not yet.

      ‘What is it … what’s happened …?’

      That was Ben, his voice querulous and shaky, the frightened voice of an old man, as he stood helplessly watching the chaos erupt around him.

      Someone—one of Hugh’s sons, she couldn’t see which one—was trying to calm everyone down, to stem the panic that had flooded the marquee when David slumped across the table just as he was starting to give his speech.

      ‘The ambulance is on its way.’

      Jenny turned gratefully towards Neil Travers. ‘Thank God you were here,’ she told their doctor simply. ‘If you hadn’t been …’ Unable to stop herself, she asked anxiously, ‘How is he? Will he …?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘It’s too soon to say. Right now he’s alive. We won’t know any more until we get him into hospital. He’s obviously had a pretty major heart attack, how major we won’t know until—’ He broke off as they both heard the wail of an ambulance siren. ‘You stay here with him,’ he instructed Jenny unnecessarily. ‘I’ll go and tell them what’s happened.’

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