Penny Jordan - Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

She glanced at the motorway sign by the side of the road. ‘Only another couple of exits now,’ she told him, ‘then we’ll be home.’

As she concentrated on the traffic, she didn’t notice his small frown as he heard her say the word ‘home.’ To him, home was wherever he happened to be living at the time. But to her …

She had come to mean a lot to him, this pretty, clever Englishwoman, who in some ways seemed so much younger than her American contemporaries and in others so much more mature. Unlike them, she seemed instinctively to put him first and that was very important to him—a legacy from all the years as a child when he had felt more like an unwanted parcel being passed from one parent to the other than a loved and wanted child.

Families—he was instinctively suspicious of them, but thankfully this visit would only be a short one and then he and Olivia would be leaving for America and their own life together—just the two of them.

‘Do you think the weather will stay fine? It will be awful if it doesn’t, everywhere muddy and wet, and with a marquee out in the rain.’

Jenny Crighton looked up from the guest list she had been checking to smile at her sister-in-law.

‘With any luck the weather should stay fine, Tiggy,’ she reassured her. ‘But even if it doesn’t, the marquee will be heated and—’

‘Yes, but people will have to walk across the lawn and—’

‘The marquee people are putting a walkway down from the house to the marquee. It will be covered and quite dry,’ she promised her patiently as though this had not been a subject they had discussed many times before.

It had come as no surprise to her to discover that although Tiggy had spent a good deal of time on the telephone talking about what hard work organising the joint fiftieth birthday celebration for their husbands had been, it was she, Jenny, who had been left to do the actual work. But then, that was their relationship all over, she acknowledged wryly. Tiggy had always been the glamorous one of the two of them whilst she was the more homey, hard-working one.

People made allowances for Tiggy and for her vulnerabilities; men were bedazzled by her even now when both of them were in their forties, and Tiggy, because she was Tiggy, could never quite resist her need to respond to their admiration and soak it up and feed on it. She meant no harm, of course. She adored David, everyone knew that, and he clearly worshipped her.

Jenny could still remember the look of pride and dazed awe in his eyes that summer he had brought Tiggy, his bride, back home and introduced her to them all. David—how everyone loved him—his father, the clients, his friends, the children, everyone, but no one so fiercely nor so determinedly as her own husband, Jonathon, his twin brother.

It had been Jonathon’s idea that they should have this double birthday celebration and combine it with a grand family reunion.

‘Dad would love it. You know how much the family means to him,’ he had told Jenny when they were discussing it.

‘He may well love it, but he will carp like mad about the cost,’ Jenny had warned him dryly, ‘and it will be expensive if we are to do it properly.’

‘Of course we are and Dad won’t mind … not if it’s for David.’

‘No,’ Jenny had agreed, but she had had to turn her face away so that Jonathon wouldn’t see her expression.

She knew, of course, why so much family emphasis was placed upon David; why her father-in-law was so determined that these twins of his should be so close, so supportive of one another, or rather that Jonathon should be so supportive of his brother.

Ben himself had been a twin but his brother had died at birth, and that loss had marked and scarred virtually the whole of his life.

Jonathon had been brought up knowing that in his father’s eyes he should consider himself most fortunate to have such a twin there in life beside him.

Only once had Jenny seen the fierce pride in Ben’s eyes turn to disappointment and that had been when David had left the set of chambers where he had been in training for the Bar, following a career pattern that had been laid out for him from the first moment of his birth.

‘Well, I hope you’re right about the weather,’ Tiggy was saying fretfully now. ‘My shoes still haven’t arrived, you know, and they promised that they would be here. It’s far too late to get another pair made and dyed and—’

‘They’ll be here. There’s still plenty of time,’ Jenny soothed her.

Tiggy had been a model in the sixties and she still had the same haunting, high-cheeked beauty she had possessed then, although the years of dieting and worrying about her weight had, in Jenny’s opinion, left her too thin. Her almost waiflike appearance, so appealing in a young, immature girl, somehow, to Jenny at least, seemed oddly jarring in a woman of forty-five.

Not that Jenny would ever voice such views. She was well aware of how others judged her and her relationship with Tiggy, and those, apart from her closest friends, could interpret it as envy, as those same critics judged Jonathon as being jealous of David.

Her normally mild brown eyes showed a brief flash of emotion before she controlled it and turned her attention back to the large area of lawn in front of them. It had taken quite a bit of diplomatic manoeuvring to get her father-in-law, Ben, to agree that the birthday festivities could be held here.

He had grumbled as Jenny had known he would about the cost and the inconvenience, but of course, when the time came he would rise to the occasion as the convivial patriarchal host, accepting the admiration and praise of their guests without a flicker of conscience.

There had been battles over each and every stage of the preparations for the weekend’s celebrations, which was no more and no less than Jenny had anticipated, but the irony of it was that Ben would be the first to complain if even the slightest detail fell short of his exacting standards—a fact that he was as well aware of as she was herself, Jenny acknowledged.

Of course, she had had to use diversionary and indeed, at times, almost underhanded tactics to get her own way on some points. A reminder that at his own insistence, members of the Chester side of the family had been invited to the event and had to be impressed had proved a handy tool for digging out his deepest-rooted objections about cost and one that Jenny admitted she had wielded shamefully at times.

Not that she minded; indeed, she positively enjoyed the challenge of doing battle with her formidable father-in-law. Conversely, she knew that whilst in public he paid lip-service to the conventional view that Tiggy, on account of her looks, must take precedence in his affections and approval, privately, she was the one who had his respect.

Oh yes, men respected her, liked her, trusted her, turned to her for advice and comfort, but they did not flirt with her or see her as a desirable, sexual woman, a situation easy enough to smile over now, but not so easy when younger.

Jenny could still remember how she had felt the first time she had met Tiggy. She and Jon had been married for four or five years at that time and had been trying for a baby without success for the last two. The sight of Tiggy blooming with David’s love, basking in both that and her discreetly evident pregnancy had caused Jenny more than one pang of pain and self-pity. She had hardly been able to bring herself to look at Jon, and when she had, the withdrawn look in his eyes as he deliberately avoided looking at Tiggy’s pregnant body had made her bite her lip in a mixture of guilt and despair.

Jenny’s heart had sunk when they had received the telephone call summoning them to Queensmead to meet David’s new bride officially. It had been one of those sticky hot summer days when even the air they breathed had seemed heavy and tainted and somehow lacking in life-giving oxygen.