The Perfect Lover. PENNY JORDAN

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      ‘You tell me...but I do enjoy my job,’ Katie pointed out

      They were saying goodbye at the airport, their mother having dropped them off on her way to a meeting of the charity she and their great-aunt Ruth had set up in their home town some years earlier.

      ‘Sorry I can’t see you off properly,’ she had apologised as they climbed out of her small car.

      ‘Don’t worry about it, Mum; we understand,’ Louise had consoled her.

      ‘You could always come over to Brussels to see me, you know,’ Louise told her twin abruptly now. ‘I’ll pay for the ticket, if that would help.’

      Katie gave her a brief hug. She knew how difficult it was for her sister to admit that there were any chinks in her emotional armour, even to her twin. To the world at large, Louise always came across as the more independent one of the two of them, the leader. But in reality Katie believed that she was the one with the less sensitively acute emotions, even though she knew that Louise would have sharply denied such an allegation. Louise had always taken upon herself the role of the bigger, braver sister, but Katie knew that inside Louise was nowhere near as confident or as determinedly independent as others seemed to think.

      Even their parents seemed to have been deceived by Louise’s outward assumption of sturdy bravado, and consequently she was the one who was always treated that little bit more gently, the one for whom extra allowances were always made, Katie acknowledged. A fact which made her oddly protective of her sister.

      ‘Oh, by the way, did you know that Professor Simmonds has been seconded to Brussels? Apparently he’s been asked to head some committee on fishing rights in the North Sea,’ Katie told her vaguely.

      ‘What? No, I didn’t know,’ Louise responded, her face paling.

      ‘No? I thought that perhaps you may have bumped into him,’ Katie told her innocently.

      ‘No, I haven’t!’ But if what Katie had just told her was true, Louise suspected that she was certainly going to do so. The committee Katie was talking about had to be the same one that Louise’s boss had just been co-opted onto. Of all the unwanted coincidences!

      Louise’s thoughts rioted frantically, her stomach churning, but she dared not let Katie see how shocked and disturbed she was.

      ‘I know you don’t like him,’ Katie was saying quietly.

      ‘No. I don’t,’ Louise agreed curtly. ‘After all, he cost me my first, and—’

      ‘Louise, that’s not fair,’ Katie objected gently.

      Louise looked away from her. There was so much that Katie didn’t know, that she couldn’t tell her.

      Gareth Simmonds had been her tutor at Oxford at a particularly traumatic time in her life, and he had been a witness not just to that trauma, and the way she had made a complete and utter fool of herself, but he had also...

      Louise bit her lip. The feeling of panic churning her stomach was increasing instead of easing.

      ‘That’s the final call for my flight,’ she told Katie thankfully, giving her twin a swift hug before grabbing hold of her flight bag and heading for her gateway.

      Gareth Simmonds in Brussels!

      That was all she needed!

       CHAPTER TWO

      GARETH SIMMONDS in Brussels! Louise gave a small groan and closed her eyes, shaking her head in refusal of the stewardess’s offer of a drink.

      Trust Katie to wait to drop that bombshell on her until the last minute. Still, at least she had warned her, and forewarned was, as they say, forearmed.

      Gareth Simmonds. She ground her teeth in impotent fury. She had been halfway through her first year when he had stepped into the shoes of her previous tutor, who’d had to retire unexpectedly on the grounds of ill health, and he and Louise had clashed right from the start.

      She had resented the far more pro-active role he had made it plain he intended to play as her tutor. She had been used to his elderly and ailing predecessor, who had, in the main, been content to leave her to her own devices—something which had suited Louise down to the ground, giving her, as it had, ample opportunity to give the minimum amount of attention to her studies whilst she concentrated on what had become the far more important matter of making Saul fall in love with her.

      The situation would have been bad enough if Gareth Simmonds had merely concerned himself with his official role as her tutor, but, no, that hadn’t been enough for him. He had had the gall...the cheek... the... the effrontery to take it upon himself to interfere in her personal life as well.

      Louise’s tense shoulders twitched angrily. The last thing she needed right now—just when she was beginning to feel she was getting her life back on an even keel again, just when the events of the weekend had made her feel that at last, finally, she had begun to reclaim her sense of self-respect—was to have the whole ugly mess of her past dragged up again in the person of Gareth Simmonds.

      He was going to Brussels to head a committee, Katie had said, when repeating to her the information she had garnered at an informal reunion of her old university classmates, and not just any committee either. Louise could feel her body starting to tense defensively. The thought that she might have to have any kind of contact with Gareth Simmonds was unacceptable, untenable. Anger, pride and panic started to well up inside her, causing her throat to tighten as though her own despairing emotions were threatening to choke her.

      Gareth Simmonds. They had clashed straight away, something about him sending sharp, prickling, atavistic feelings of dislike and apprehension quivering through her body, and that had been before that disastrous confrontation between them at the end of her first year at Oxford, when he had sent for her and warned her of the potentially dire consequences of her not giving more time and attention to her work.

      She had been far more headstrong and self-willed in those days, and the fact that he had had the gall to challenge her over anything, never mind the torment of her love for Saul, had driven her to retaliate. But he had been too quick for her, too subtle...too...

      She had hated him with much the same intensity with which she had loved Saul, and with just as little effect, and the last thing she wanted or needed at this stage in her life was to be confronted with the physical evidence of her own youthful stupidity.

      She could still remember...

      There had been a good deal of giggling and gossip when he had first arrived at Oxford—the youngest Chair they had ever had, and the sexiest, according to his female students. Louise had shrugged her shoulders in disdain. However sexy others might find him, she was not interested. In her eyes he could never match up to Saul. No man could.

      True, he might be over six feet with the kind of Celtic colouring that produced a lethal combination of thick dark hair and incredibly brilliant dark blue eyes, but for all Louise cared he could have modelled for the hunchback of Notre Dame.

      ‘Have you heard his voice,’ one besotted student had breathed, wild-eyed. ‘I could orgasm just listening to him.’

      Louise had looked witheringly СКАЧАТЬ