Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ like you. I work in industry,’ Olivia reminded him. ‘Wouldn’t Max have more idea?’

      ‘Max!’ Saul had snorted with derisive contempt. ‘The only ideas he’s got are how to extract more money out of Ben. Come over if you can, Livvy, please. I need someone to talk to … or are you and Caspar …?’

      ‘Caspar’s gone out,’ Olivia told him shortly, not wanting to tell him that she and Caspar had quarrelled.

      ‘So you can come over, then?’

      ‘Yes,’ she agreed after a small pause, ‘I can.’

      She had gone into the study thinking her mother was there and intending to tell her that she was going out. She hadn’t expected to find Jon there and expected even less to see the almost guilty way he seemed to be furtively going through her father’s papers.

      Tiggy appeared at the door. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ she asked Jon.

      ‘Yes, yes, I have,’ he told her, adding, ‘Look, Tiggy, I must go.’

      ‘Yes, I know you must,’ she agreed wanly. ‘Jenny will be cross with me for keeping you so long, but you will come with me when I go to see David tomorrow, won’t you?’

      ‘Yes, of course I will,’ Jon assured her gently.

      ‘I’m going to Queensmead to see Saul,’ Olivia told her mother, then turned to Jon and asked him quietly, ‘What time shall I be at the office in the morning?’

      A shadow crossed his face before he reluctantly answered, ‘I normally like to be there around eight-thirty.’

      ‘Fine, eight-thirty it is,’ Olivia agreed.

      ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’ Olivia asked Saul, concern etching her features. He had met her at the door as she arrived and had plainly been waiting for her, shaking his head as she turned towards the house.

      ‘Do you mind if we talk outside? It’s easier for me somehow. We could walk down to the river. Remember how much you used to love it as a kid?’

      ‘I can remember how exasperated you got when I disturbed your fishing expeditions.’ Olivia laughed. ‘Remember the time I fell in …?’

      ‘Can I ever forget it? You terrified the life out of me, and I’m sure your mother thought I’d pushed you in deliberately.’

      ‘I’ll bet there were plenty of times when you wanted to,’ Olivia teased him.

      ‘The temptation was certainly there,’ he agreed wryly, ‘and I don’t just mean the temptation to give you a ducking….’

      ‘Oh?’ Olivia frowned as she looked questioningly at him.

      ‘No,’ he returned softly. ‘Dunking you wasn’t what I had in mind at all the night I caught you skinny-dipping.’

      This time, Olivia’s ‘oh’ was low and vibrant with remembered teenage embarrassment. ‘It was midsummer night’s eve, and I—’

      ‘You were standing there perched on a rock in the middle of the river stark naked, curtsying to the moon,’ Saul interrupted her huskily, ‘and you looked—’

      ‘A complete idiot,’ Olivia supplied ruefully for him. ‘No … a complete naked idiot,’ she amended, tongue-in-cheek.

      ‘You looked like a young acolyte, a moon maiden, offering herself up in sacrifice, virginal and pure; as innocent as a child and yet as knowledgeable as Eve. I wanted to reach out to you, take hold of you. You had been in the river and I could see the water still running off your skin, your breasts, your belly, your … The moonlight turned your body the colour of moonstones, pale and almost translucent. I wanted to bury my face between your legs and lick the drops of water from your skin. I wanted to join you in your pagan nakedness, your sensual abandonment to the night and the moon, and then you turned your head and saw me and—’

      ‘Fell off my perch and into the river,’ Olivia finished for him shakily. She was glad of the concealing darkness around them, not because Saul had evoked the embarrassment her adolescent self had experienced at being so shamingly discovered by her so much older and more sophisticated male relative cavorting around naked in the river, but because of the sensations, the emotions, his words had aroused in her now.

      ‘I never knew you could be so poetic,’ she finally managed to say as she struggled to dismiss the surge of heat she could feel invading her body. It would serve no good purpose and only add fuel to embers, which, she suspected, given half a chance, could start to burn very dangerously out of control if she admitted to Saul that if he had done all those years ago any one of the things he had just described, he would have made the magic of the night complete.

      Hadn’t she, after all, gone down to the river to fulfil an old local tradition that said a girl should offer a prayer to the midsummer night’s moon to be granted the love of the man of her choice? And in those days, Saul … well, she had certainly had a mammoth crush on him.

      Right now, Saul was feeling very vulnerable, she reminded herself. His marriage had broken down and he had turned to her for support and advice as a close family member … her father’s cousin, she reminded herself firmly.

      ‘It was just as well it was you who caught me and not Gramps,’ she commented lightly, ‘even if I didn’t think so at the time, considering the ticking off you gave me.

      ‘Is there no way you and Hillary can give your marriage a second chance?’ she asked him, changing the subject as they walked down the path that led through Queensmead’s more formal gardens and through the water meadow bordering the river.

      ‘A second chance?’ Saul derided cynically. ‘Our marriage has had more second chances than I’ve had hot dinners. No, Meg was the result of our last attempt at a second chance,’ he admitted frankly, ‘and I wish to God she hadn’t been. No child should be conceived as a Band-Aid to fix an ailing marriage.’

      ‘Oh, Saul,’ Olivia protested, automatically reaching out to touch his arm sympathetically.

      The years that separated them no longer seemed the vast gulf they had appeared to her at fifteen when she had been at the height or rather the depths of her mammoth crush on him. Nor did Saul himself really appear to resemble the Godlike remote creature she had built him up in her mind to be in those days. She rather preferred him as the fallible human being he actually was, she admitted ruefully, and whilst the awe in which she had once held him might have gone, her awareness of his sexuality certainly hadn’t.

      Quickly she released his arm, causing him to stop and look searchingly at her in the dusky half-light before very firmly taking hold of her hand and gently tucking her arm back through his own.

      ‘Caspar can’t object,’ he told her, ‘if that’s what you’re worrying about. We are cousins.’

      ‘It wasn’t and we’re not … cousins,’ she clarified. ‘Well, not first ones, second maybe … heavens, I’m beginning to sound like Gramps. He always makes such a big thing of the fact that he and your father are half-brothers.’

      ‘Mmm … Well, it’s always amazed me to see the different ways he treats your father and Jon. If I were Jon …’ He stopped and shook his head.

      ‘What СКАЧАТЬ