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      Liam was a good driver and long before they had crossed the state line Samantha had dropped off to sleep, her body angled towards Liam’s, one hand resting under her face.

      After he’d safely overtaken a truck, Liam turned his head to look at her. She had to be one of the most breathtakingly stunning women he had ever seen. Her sister Bobbie was beautiful but where Bobbie exuded an air of relaxed self-control, Samantha was a bundle of quicksilver fieriness, impulsive, impatient, almost too sensitive for her own good at times, proud and…

      Liam cursed under his breath. As he knew all too well, there were almost no lengths Samantha would not go to to prove her point if someone hurt her pride. And he knew better than most, having watched both girls grow up, that despite all the positive influences they had received from their parents and family, both of them, but especially Samantha, were privately a little sensitive about their height.

      Liam could remember overhearing a much younger Samantha telling her mother in a low voice choked with tears, ‘Mom, the other girls at school say that I should have been a boy because I’m so big…but I’m not a boy, I’m a girl and…’

      ‘They’re just jealous of you, darling,’ her mother had reassured her quickly. ‘You are indeed a girl, a very beautiful, clever and lovable girl, a very feminine girl,’ she had reinforced, and Liam had watched as Sarah Jane had very cleverly and with maternal love and concern, made sure that her daughters learned how to focus on the very feminine aspects of their personalities, to hold their heads up with pride and grace.

      They were tall, and as a teenager Samantha especially had gone through a phase when she had been all gangly limbs, a little lanky and perhaps almost boyish, but that had been as a teenager. Now she was all woman…Oh, yes…now she was very definitely all woman!

      Waking up beside him, Samantha wondered what had caused that sudden burst of fire to ignite the darkness of Liam’s eyes. Whatever it was, whoever it was…Was it a whoever rather than a whatever? Samantha suddenly wondered. The new PR woman perhaps? She gave a small, quick, sharp intake of breath. Liam might be prepared to bow to the fears of the more conservative lobby and do the conventional thing, marry in order to improve his public appeal, but there was no power on earth that could ever force her to do the same thing. Her principles, her need of her own self-respect, were far too strong, but Liam of course, was far too pragmatic to understand such a sensitive point of view. Cousin James in Chester was very sensitive. She had noticed that in him the moment they had met, and had been touched and warmed by it and by his concern for her.

      James.

      She was already beginning to feel a very definite tingle of excitement at the thought of seeing him again. The Crighton men made wonderful fathers, even the family’s erstwhile outcast Max had totally and unexpectedly shown that he possessed the loving Crighton gene when it came to parenting.

      ‘He seems more thrilled about this new baby they’re expecting than Maddy is,’ Bobbie had confided to her sister when she had passed on to her the news that Max’s wife Maddy was pregnant with their third child.