The Perfect Match?. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ at least they’re together now and so deeply in love that Bobbie complains that despite the fact that they were all married at the same time, Ruth and Grant are a far more romantic couple than her and Luke.’

      ‘Well, Bobbie and Luke do have a young child and two busy careers,’ Guy commented, ‘while her grandparents are both retired and free to concentrate exclusively on one another.’

      “They may both be retired but Ruth is still on half a dozen local committees as well as running her single-parent units,’ Jenny reminded him. ‘And Grant has an extraordinary spread of business interests to keep him busy. I sometimes feel exhausted just listening to what they’ve been doing. I can’t help comparing their energy and the enjoyment they get out of life with Ben’s growing lack of interest in everything.’

      Jenny’s forehead pleated in a worried frown as she reflected on her father-in-law.

      ‘Is he still going ahead with his hip-joint replacement operation?’ Guy asked her.

      ‘I hope so,’ Jenny told him feelingly. ‘It’s scheduled for the end of the summer and the plan was that Maddy would be there when he comes out of hospital to look after him. He responds far better to her than he does to any of us. partially because she’s Max’s wife, of course, and so far as Ben is concerned, Max can do no wrong.’

      ‘But not so far as you, Max’s mother, are concerned,’ Guy offered shrewdly.

      Jenny shook her head. ‘Ben has always spoiled Max and Max has never needed any encouragement to believe he deserves to receive preferential treatment. I did hope that when he and Maddy married...’ She stopped and shook her head, changing the subject to ask, ‘Anything interesting in that lot?’

      ‘Not really,’ Guy replied, taking his cue from her and letting the subject drop, switching from discussing personal matters to their shared business interests. ‘I’ve had a call to do another house clearance this morning although I doubt that there’ll be anything there of any interest. Charlie Platt,’ he added grimly.

      ‘Charlie Platt?’ Jenny queried, frowning again, then her expression clearing. ‘Oh yes, I know who you mean.’

      ‘Yes,’ Guy went on. ‘By all accounts he virtually drank himself to death.’

      ‘Oh, poor man,’ Jenny sympathised compassionately.

      ‘Poor man nothing,’ Guy told her grimly. ‘He was the biggest con man in town. His parents publicly disowned him. He died leaving debts all over the place.’

      From the tone of his voice, Jenny wondered if Guy was one of the people he had owed money to. If so, she doubted that Guy would admit, even to her, that he had been taken advantage of.

      Normally an easygoing, compassionate man, generally inclined to judge others gently rather than harshly, he also possessed a surprisingly fierce streak of pride, accentuated, Jenny suspected, by the fact that his family, the Cooke clan, various members of whom were spread throughout the town, had originated, so local history had it, from the unsanctified union of one of a band of travelling Romany Gypsies and the naively innocent daughter of a town schoolmaster. They were generally held in a mixture of awe and contempt by their less enterprising and energetic peers.

      The girl had been married off in haste and disgrace to a local widowed tavern keeper desperately in need of someone to take charge of his sprawling brood of existing children.

      Dependent upon where you stood in the local hierarchy, there was a tendency to regard the activities of the Cooke clan, both professionally and privately, as extremely suspect or extremely enviable.

      Over the generations, the name Cooke had become synonymous, not just with the local taverns and public houses that they ran, but also with such disparate activities as poaching, gaming and other enterprising methods of increasing their income, a habit the more God-fearing local folk were inclined to put down to the genes they had inherited from their roving-eyed Gypsy forebears.

      Not that any members of the family went in for poaching or its equivalent these days. That practice had died out with his grandfather’s generation, Guy had once wryly told Jenny, along with the bulk of his then-adult male relatives, most of whom had been with the Cheshire Regiment during the First World War.

      ‘But that kind of reputation is hard to lose,’ Guy had told Jenny. ‘Once a Cooke, always a Cooke!’

      ‘And having those brigandish dark good looks of yours doesn’t help,’ Jenny had teased him gently.

      ‘No,’ Guy had agreed shortly. He had lost count of the number of fathers who had sternly admonished their daughters against dating him when he had been younger. He thought now that he must have been the only teenage boy in the locality to have gained the reputation of being wild and dangerous whilst still possessing his virginity.

      It was half-day closing, and after Jenny had left and Guy had locked up the shop, he went home to work on his other business interests, which ranged from a half share in the very popular local restaurant owned by one of his sisters and her husband to a smaller share in a firm of local builders owned by yet another relative.

      He had recently been considering the validity of investing in small local properties that could be renovated and then let out on short-term leases to employees of one of the large multinationals that had recently started to move into the area.

      Antiques, especially furniture, were his first love but the business he shared with Jenny was hardly sufficient to keep him fully occupied.

      He frowned as he studied the post. He and Jenny were the prime motivators behind the Antiques Fair that was due to be held at Fitzburgh Place the following month, a combined event to promote the area and hopefully raise money for Jenny and Ruth’s pet charity, the single mothers homes scheme, which Ruth had started as a result of her own experiences as an unmarried mother.

      As Guy started to check off the list of exhibitors to the fair against the list of invitation letters he had sent out, he remembered what Jenny had said about Charlie Platt.

      He and Charlie had been at school together... just. Guy had entered the school just as Charlie was on the verge of leaving it to move up to the seniors.

      A thin, pale boy, who had suffered badly from childhood asthma, which thankfully he had later outgrown, Guy had shown no signs then of the fact that as an adult male he would grow up to be strong and muscular. He had been small and vulnerable-looking, the youngest of his mother’s brood, a quiet, studious boy whom his female siblings had mothered and whom Charlie Platt had immediately and instinctively focused on as an ideal victim for his practice of blackmailing the vulnerable into parting with their dinner money.

      Guy had tried to resist, refusing trenchantly to hand over the money—he was, after all, well used to being cuffed and teased by his much larger and far more boisterous male cousins—but he had had one fear he kept hidden from his family and that was of water. Because of his asthma, he had never been allowed to learn to swim or to play in the river that bounded the town in case the cold water brought on an attack.

      Charlie Platt had very quickly discovered Guy’s fear, both of the river and, even more importantly, of other people’s discovering how he felt. Predictably he had made use of it.

      Guy knew he would never forget the day Charlie Platt had held him under the water for so long that Guy had really believed he was going to die, probably would have died if one of his bigger and older cousins hadn’t happened to come along, seen СКАЧАТЬ