PENNY JORDAN - A Perfect Family

He wanted it, hungered for it, yearned for it, ached for it and, by God, he intended to have it, and no female, no sex discrimination law was going to stand in his way.

There was only one way to deal with the situation now and Max knew exactly what it was, but first he had to find out exactly the identity of the hopeful candidate for the vacancy. The partners would no doubt know and so, too, would the senior clerk, but Max quickly dismissed him from his calculations. He would never divulge that kind of information to him, which left only the partners and anyone who had their confidence or access to it.

Max was still mulling over what course of action he could take when he climbed into his car two hours later and headed for the North.

‘Here we are, home.’

‘Very impressive,’ Caspar murmured as Olivia brought her car to a halt and turned round in her seat to look at him.

‘Here’s Tiggy,’ she announced when she saw the front door open and her mother hurry towards the stationary car.

Caspar remained silent as he turned to take his first look at Olivia’s mother. Her use of her mother’s nickname whenever she spoke of her wasn’t anything unusual in the society in which he had grown up, but a certain undertone that was always in Olivia’s voice when she spoke about her mother made his study of the older woman thoughtfully assessing.

Physically, they were very alike; Olivia had inherited her mother’s beauty including her high-cheeked facial features. In contrast to her mother, however, Olivia’s beauty radiated from within her in a way that made it almost unimportant that she possessed the kind of looks that could take one’s breath away. Beside her daughter, Tiggy seemed to be a beautiful but blank two-dimensional image.

Caspar’s first feeling as he watched her was one of disappointment. Why so? he wondered as he got out of the car and waited for Olivia to introduce them. What had he expected … hoped for, if indeed he had hoped for anything? Perhaps despite that carefully neutral note he had already observed in Olivia’s voice, her mother would still turn out to be more rather than less of what her daughter already was.

‘Livvy darling … at last … Oh dear, look at your nails and your hair, and those jeans … Oh, darling—’

‘Tiggy, this is Caspar,’ Olivia interrupted her mother calmly. ‘Caspar, this is my mother.’

‘Tiggy, you must call me Tiggy,’ Tiggy announced in the slightly breathy voice that years ago admirers had told her was so incredibly sexy. ‘Come on in, both of you. I’m afraid your father and I are just on our way out,’ she told Olivia as she urged them into the house. ‘We’re having dinner with the Buckletons….’

The front door was already open, the parquet floor gleaming richly of wax, and as he stepped inside, Caspar’s initial impression was one of a room filled with soft colour and flowers. There were huge bowls filled with floral arrangements everywhere: in the fireplace, on a round polished table in the middle of the room, on a pair of small tables beneath imposing Georgian silver-framed mirrors that faced one another across the width of the room.

‘I do so think that flowers are important,’ he heard Tiggy telling him as she saw him staring at his surroundings. ‘They make a house come alive, turn it into a home,’ she was saying quietly, then … ‘Oh, Jack, no, don’t you dare bring that animal in here. Use the back door. You know the rules.’

Caspar frowned as a young boy and a large, slightly overweight golden retriever walked in through the still-open front door.

‘Well, if you’re going out, we’d better not keep you,’ he heard Olivia telling her mother. ‘I take it that we’re in my room. We—’

‘Oh dear … Darling, I’m sorry but that’s something your father wants a word with you about. It’s not that we mind, of course … but it’s your grandfather. You know how old-fashioned he is and how important public opinion is to him. Your father feels that he just wouldn’t be at all happy about you and Caspar … well, especially with the Chester family coming over for the party, your father felt—’

‘Are you trying to say that you expect me and Caspar to sleep in separate rooms?’ Olivia interrupted her mother incredulously. ‘But that’s …’ She started to shake her head, anger darkening her eyes, her voice crisping authoritatively as she remonstrated with her mother. ‘There’s no way—’

Caspar touched her lightly on her arm. ‘It’s okay, I understand. Separate rooms will be fine,’ he told Tiggy easily.

Olivia shook her head and pulled a rueful face at him. The sheer intensity of her love for him frightened her at times. Love was a word that was expressed freely and mercilessly in her home, but as an emotion, she wasn’t sure she fully understood it—and it left her feeling vulnerable and wary.

She had practically swooned at his feet with lust the moment she set eyes on him. Who wouldn’t have done? Six foot two with broad, well-muscled shoulders and physique to match, he had inherited from somewhere or other the facial bone structure of a Native American warrior chief along with the Celtic colouring that was the most compelling of all—black hair and dark blue eyes.

As she walked into his lecture, Olivia simply hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him—and she wasn’t the only one. She had almost fainted on the spot when he had asked her out, but she had retained enough sanity and enough sense of healthy self-preservation to insist that their first date be somewhere busy and public and to arrange her own transport home just so that she wouldn’t give in to the temptation—if it was offered—of going straight to bed with him.

She didn’t and it wasn’t, but not, as both of them confessed to one another later, because it wasn’t what they wanted.

Oh yes, she had wanted him all right—and still did—but now she loved him, as well, loved him intellectually and emotionally as well as physically. He was her lover, her mentor, her best friend … her everything, and she couldn’t envisage how on earth her life had ever seemed complete without him, how she had not, for all those years when he had not been there, somehow been conscious of a huge, aching, empty gap where he would one day be.

He was her whole world; he made her complete and yet she found it hard to tell him how much he meant to her emotionally. That was far, far harder than to tell him just what kind of effect he had on her physically, but then Olivia was very leery of emotions, of feeling them and exhibiting them. Her mother was emotional, everyone said so; they also said with varying degrees of sympathy that that was why her mother needed and deserved special handling, special allowances.

Even as a very small child, Olivia was aware that those special allowances made for her mother’s emotional nature always seemed to be given at the expense of other people, that in some way or other those closest to her mother had to be less emotional as though to compensate for her mother’s excesses.

‘You really are the most amazing person,’ Caspar had told her one day after she had spent weeks tracking down a particular book she knew he had wanted, presenting it to him with casual indifference. ‘You’ll do something like this, but just try to get you to tell me that you love me.’

‘You know I do,’ Olivia returned warily.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, adding lightly, ‘but it would still be nice to hear you say it, though.’

‘I know,’ Olivia admitted, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the small phrase then … and she still couldn’t, not even during the most intense moments of their shared heights of passion.

‘I just don’t believe this,’ she told him fifteen minutes later after her parents had left and Jack had gone out to a friend’s. She had gone from her childhood bedroom to the small attic guest-room where Caspar was unpacking his case. ‘They might at least have put you up in the room next to mine.’