Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ emotions he had felt on first holding each of his newborn children. Only with Tiggy there was an extra ingredient, a sensuality, a sexuality—a charge that left him feeling both elated and ashamed.

      Jenny was his wife and Tiggy was David’s and what worse kind of betrayal could there be than for him to covet his twin’s wife?

      ‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ Tiggy was whispering to him. ‘Can’t we go somewhere …?’

      ‘I really ought to get back to the office …’ Jon began, but Tiggy clung tightly to his arm.

      ‘We could have lunch. Everyone has to have a lunch-hour. Please, Jon,’ she pleaded, ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’

      As his plane started to climb into the surprisingly blue Manchester sky, Caspar stared bleakly through the window. Only now could he acknowledge that, illogical though it was, a part of him had gone on expecting, hoping, right until the last call for his flight to London, that Olivia would appear.

      And yet so strong was the hold of the angry, jealous child within him that even knowing that, he had not been able to allow himself to walk over to a telephone and call her.

      If she had loved him enough, then she would automatically have put him, his needs, his desires, his wishes, first; so rang the stubborn child’s voice within him.

      Only she had not … did not. Think how you would feel in her shoes, how you would behave; how you would react, given that kind of ultimatum, the analytical adult voice of his grown-up self demanded. Would you give in to that kind of emotional blackmail?

      Would you want a relationship with the kind of person who wielded it?

      Tiredly he pushed his hand into his hair. It would probably never have worked anyway; Olivia would have needed to retrain to be able to work back home. Lawyers there did not command the same kind of respect from the community that they did in Britain. The whole system was different, more political, more hard-nosed, and Olivia, despite her academic intelligence and ability, had a certain feminine softness about her that he—and, he suspected, other men, too—found subconsciously alluring. Because men liked women to be vulnerable?

      He moved irritably in his seat. She might be softhearted but she sure as hell could be stubborn, as well. Yet in her shoes wouldn’t he want to prove the doubting Thomases amongst her own family wrong, to prove that she could do the job as well and indeed better than any of them? Wouldn’t that have been a challenge he’d have found impossible to resist? So why expect Olivia to resist it?

      She had caught him off guard last night. He had never had any intention of having dinner with Hillary. It had been obvious virtually from the first moment they had met that she was looking for a way to justify leaving her marriage and someone to support her in that decision. As a fellow American and someone like her who was outside the family, it was only natural that she should turn to him, but in listening to her, there was no doubt that he had placed himself in a highly invidious position. Olivia had already made it plain that she supported Saul, but by the time he had run into Hillary last night, he had been almost glad of an opportunity to widen the rift between Olivia and himself. Well, he had certainly found it and meeting Hillary by chance at the airport this morning had not been particularly welcome.

      It was just as well that her family lived out on the West Coast, making any future contact between them highly unlikely. He still had a few days before he actually left the country, he comforted himself as his plane started to circle Heathrow. Time enough yet for Olivia to contact him … or for him to contact her.

      There was no going back now, Olivia acknowledged, no, not even if she wanted to. What she had seen at the airport had convinced her of that. Their quarrel, the reasons for it, the events leading up to it, she could understand if she divorced herself from her own emotions and studied the situation dispassionately. This didn’t mean to say that she felt she was in any way in the wrong, simply that there were realistically strong arguments for both Caspar and herself to feel aggrieved and angry, but the speed with which Caspar had quite obviously replaced her in his life—and in his bed, too, judging from the way Hillary had been draping herself all over him—no, that could not be forgiven or understood. That was treachery, betrayal on a grand scale. As a family, they seemed destined to suffer badly from it, both as the betrayed and the betrayer, she reflected soberly as she drove back to the office.

      Well, she knew what she had to do. There was no avoiding the issue now, no escape, no cowardly walking away…. And the first person she’d have to tackle had to be her uncle Jon, and after that … Her hands were shaking as she locked the door of her car.

      Haslewich was a small town and her grandfather a very upright and proud man. She dared not think what it would do to him when word got round about what her father had done. The whole family would be affected by it, each and every one of them tainted by it. The bile rose in her throat, sour tasting and heavy.

      Jon was in his office when Olivia walked in. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said without preamble.

      ‘What is it?’ he asked her after he had waved her into a chair. ‘Have you changed your mind, decided to go to America with Caspar after all? If you have, don’t worry—’

      ‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ Olivia interrupted him quietly. ‘I wanted to, but I discovered that I’d left it too late.’

      When she didn’t elaborate Jon shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

      ‘It’s all right, Uncle Jon,’ Olivia told him gently, ‘I know now why you didn’t want me working here.’

      She could see Jon physically stiffening as she spoke and she could see, as well, the way his glance strayed betrayingly to the place on his desk where he had left those incriminating bank statements. He had put them away now as well as the file.

      ‘I know what Dad’s been doing,’ Olivia pressed on firmly. ‘About the money he’s taken, stolen from Jemima Harding’s trust fund. When did you find out what was going on?’

      For a moment she thought that he was going to attempt to deny the whole thing. He took a deep breath, paused and then walked over to the window before saying tiredly, ‘I’ve been suspicious for a while, but stupidly, I suppose, with hindsight … I didn’t want to … I thought that perhaps … You mustn’t judge your father too harshly, Olivia,’ he told her. ‘God knows what kind of pressure he must have been under. I only wish …’ He stopped and shook his head.

      ‘Oh, Uncle Jon, how could he?’ Olivia demanded, suddenly giving way to her emotions, too wound up to keep still she started to pace the floor. ‘How could he do something like that …?’

      ‘I don’t think he ever meant things to go so far,’ Jon tried to comfort her. ‘I imagine that he just meant to borrow the money at first, that he fully intended to pay it back, but as things stood—’

      ‘He couldn’t do it and so instead he just borrowed more,’ Olivia interrupted bitterly. ‘Only he wasn’t borrowing it at all, was he, Uncle Jon? He was stealing it,’ she retorted sharply. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

      Jon winced as he listened to her. He felt so guilty—as much to blame as David himself. He should never have allowed David to have so much control over such a vulnerable client, especially not when he knew … But that was all in the past and he had sworn as David’s brother, his twin, sworn on the Bible to his father that the one unfortunate mistake of David’s—that small silly bit of foolishness when David was in London—was something that would never СКАЧАТЬ