The Perfect Lover. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ and still, in times of stress, played over and over again through her memory.

      Oxford, the time after she had finally been forced to realise that Saul would never love her, that in fact he loved someone else. Oxford and Gareth Simmonds. Oxford, Italy—and Gareth Simmonds. Italy and Gareth Simmonds.

      Picking up her coffee, Louise walked into her small sitting room and curled up on the sofa, closing her eyes. She didn’t want to relive those memories, but she could feel the weight of them pressing down on her, pushing their way into her consciousness just as Gareth Simmonds seemed to be pushing his way into the new life she had made for herself.

      As though the debacle of the masquerade ball had not been punishment enough for her to contend with, that following week she had received a letter from Gareth Simmonds. A curt letter informing her that he wished to see her as there were certain matters concerning her work which he wished to discuss with her.

      Her parents knew she had received the letter, and there had been no way she had been able to keep its contents a secret from them—although Katie had been sworn to secrecy over the worst of her excesses in skipping tutorials. If her mother and father had not actually stood over her while she went through the humiliation of telephoning Gareth Simmonds and making an appointment to see him, they had certainly left her in no doubt about their feelings of shock and disappointment at the way she had been abusing both her intelligence and the opportunity that going to Oxford had given her.

      Furiously she had blamed Gareth Simmonds for adding to her problems, while having to give way to her parents’ firm insistence that they would drive her to Oxford for the interview, where she planned to stay for a few days in order to try to catch up with her work.

      They had set out after breakfast, her mother patently unhappy and trying to control her tears and her father unexpectedly grim-faced and distant, and Louise had known what was going through both their minds. Was she, like her elder brother Max, going to turn out to be one of those Crightons who had inherited the same genes as her uncle David—the ‘S’ gene, as she and Katie had nicknamed it as teenagers. The ‘S’ standing for selfish, stupid and self-destructive.

      She had wanted to reassure them, to tell them that there was nothing for them to worry about, but she had still been deep in shock herself, still traumatised not just by what she had done but by the frightening emotions which had given rise to her dangerous behaviour.

      ‘I can’t believe you could behave so appallingly,’ her father had told her grimly, his voice shaking slightly with emotion as he’d confronted her with the full enormity of what she had done after the ball.

      ‘What were you going to do? Leave Tullah in the maze until—’

      ‘No... No... I just...’ Tears streaming down her face, Louise had turned her head away from him, not able to bring herself to admit that she had been so obsessed by her need to make Saul see her as a woman, to make him love her as a woman, that she had simply seen Tullah as a hindrance who was standing in her way. Someone who was preventing Saul from seeing her, Louise, properly, and recognising that they were meant to be together.

      Katie had travelled to Oxford with them to give her some moral support. She was also going to use the time to see friends who’d stayed up in Oxford to earn some money waiting at the local bars and restaurant. While her mother had fussed around her rooms, tidying up Louise’s discarded clothes and books, Katie had simply taken hold of her hand and gripped it tightly in a gesture of sisterly solidarity and love.

      It was only when her mother had gone to shake her duvet and straighten up her untidy bed that Louise had finally moved, pushing her away and telling her fiercely, ‘I can do that...’

      What had already happened was shameful enough. To have her mother move her pillow and discover that she slept with Saul’s purloined shirt beneath it would have been the ultimate humiliation.

      When they were on their own Katie asked her awkwardly, ‘Do you...do you want to talk about it...?’

      Angrily Louise shook her head.

      ‘Oh, Lou,’ Katie whispered sombrely, her voice full of pain and despair at what her twin had done, and love and pity for Louise herself.

      ‘Stop fussing,’ Louise commanded her.

      ‘I’m sure Professor Simmonds knows what we’ve been doing,’ Katie warned. ‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of the parents, but, as I told you, he’s definitely rumbled the fact that I’ve been standing in at his lectures for you,’ she went on. ‘Have you got the notes I did for you?’

      ‘Yes,’ Louise acknowledged shortly. ‘But how could he know of our switch? We’ve played tricks on our friends before now, and they’ve never realized.’

      Katie waited several seconds before responding quietly, ‘It’s different with Professor Simmonds. He just seems to know. It’s almost as though he’s got some kind of sixth sense which allows him to tell the difference between us.’

      ‘Some sixth sense?’ Louise derided, scoffing. ‘He’s a professor of law, not a magician.’ But even so she was left feeling uneasy and on edge. Something about Gareth Simmonds challenged her to defy him and to get the better of him, and it infuriated her that so far all her attempts to do so had ended up in her ignominious defeat.

      ‘He called me Katherine,’ Katie reminded her. ‘Even though I was wearing your clothes and the others all believed I was you.’

      ‘Arrogant, self-assured pig,’ Louise muttered aggressively. ‘I loathe him.’

      But nowhere near so much as she loathed herself.

      After Katie had left to let her sister draw her thoughts together—they had made the decision that, although they both wanted to go up to Oxford, they did not want to live together, nor to be thought of as an inseparable pair, and so were taking different courses and rented separate accommodation—Louise picked up the course notes her twin had left for her. But although her eyes skimmed over their contents her brain was simply not capable of taking in their meaning. How could it, when it, like her emotions, was still struggling to come to terms with the death blow that events had dealt her?

      She had been in love with Saul and had dreamed of him returning her feelings for as long as she had been capable of knowing what being in love meant, and it had simply never occurred to her that she would not ultimately win him. Why should it? Every other goal she had ever set herself she had reached, and it had never entered her head that securing Saul’s love would be any different.

      Katie’s writing started to blur in front of her eyes. Shakily she flung the papers down, wrapping her arms around her body. She felt so cold inside, so empty, and yet at the same time filled with such an enormous weight of fear and pain.

      Automatically she went over to her bed and felt beneath the pillow for Saul’s shirt, hugging it to her, closing her eyes and breathing in the warm Saul smell of him which still clung to it. But for once his faint but oh, so evocative scent failed to comfort her.

      It wasn’t his shirt she wanted to hold, she acknowledged as she threw it away from her with a wrenching shudder. It was the man himself. Saul himself. But he had made it cruelly plain to her that that was never going to happen.

      ‘Saul, Saul, Saul...’ Helplessly she cried out his name, whispering it over and over again inside her head as the tears started to flow.

      Worn out by the intensity of her emotions, she finally fell asleep, СКАЧАТЬ