PENNY JORDAN - Scandals

‘None the less, Lord Fitton Legh brought John up as his son.’

‘And John worshipped him. Him and Fitton. Fitton is his life. Janey complains that sometimes she thinks the house and the land mean more to him than either she does or their sons. John isn’t very good at articulating his feelings and I do sometimes wonder if their marriage is as happy as we thought it would be when they first married. It would destroy John, I think, if he were ever to suspect that Greg, and not the late Lord Fitton Legh, was his father, and that he himself had no right to the title or to Fitton.’

‘So have we now finally accounted for everyone?’ Jay asked ruefully.

‘Yes,’ Amber confirmed, looking up as they both heard the familiar sound of the tea trolley outside the drawing-room door.‘Here’s Mrs Leggit with the tea,’she announced unnecessarily, smiling at their housekeeper as she came in. ‘We’ve just been discussing Christmas, Mrs Leggit. It would be lovely if we have snow.’

‘They’ve had some already up in Buxton, or so I’ve heard,’ the housekeeper answered, adding as she headed for the door, ‘Mind you, they are much higher up there, than we are down here.’

‘Christmas, the family and snow. Wouldn’t that be perfect?’ Amber smiled at Jay as she handed him his tea.

‘Perfect,’ he agreed.

It was snowing and Olivia hated snow in New York. It wasn’t like proper snow at all – not like snow in Aspen, or Switzerland. New York’s snow made yellow cab drivers even more bad-tempered than they were ordinarily, and turned to slush on the sidewalks. She just hoped that it didn’t snow heavily enough to ground the planes at JFK so that her flight to Manchester was cancelled. To Manchester and to Robert.

Her rich chestnut shoulder-length hair gleamed with health as she stepped out of Vanity Fair magazine’s reception and waited for the lift to take her back down to the lobby. Tall and slender, her classically elegant features and blue eyes, enhanced by discreet makeup, Olivia carried with her an air of calm confidence that right now belied the excitement she felt inside. Soon she would be seeing Robert. She sighed ruefully at herself. When was she going to grow up and behave like a proper twenty-five-year-old and not a wide-eyed teenager in the grip of her first crush? Never, probably, where Robert was concerned, she admitted. She had loved him for so long that she couldn’t imagine not loving him, she admitted as she stepped out of the lift into the lobby of the building that housed Si Newhouse’s publishing empire of glossy magazines. She was wearing the new butter-soft leather boots she’d seen in Barneys and not been able to resist, and they were about as suitable for slushy pavements as a pair of high-heeled summer sandals. The hem of her long dark cream cashmere coat would also, no doubt, be marked, but she’d felt she had to wear it since that Mecca of fashion, Vogue magazine, also had its offices in the building. She was sure she’d seen Christy Turlington, one of the so-called supermodels, in the lobby when she’d come through.

At least now she’d delivered the article she’d been working on for Vanity Fair, a real coup for her, and she was keeping everything crossed that they liked it, even if the deadline had meant that she’d had to stay home instead of accompany her parents and younger brother on their flight this morning.

Still, it wouldn’t be long before she was following them, and then there’d be Denham, her grandparents, Christmas, the whole family and Robert.

Engrossed in the pleasure of thinking about her cousin, she almost walked straight into the man heading for the lift, her stomach clenching in dismay and dislike when she looked up and recognised who he was.

Tait Cabot Forbes, political investigative reporter sans equal, sans pity for his victims, sans everything, really, that made a human being human. Tait was a walking, talking, writing law book, looking for someone to break one of those laws so that he could pillory them without mercy. He could have built a skyscraper out of the reputations he had shredded so mercilessly in his freelance newspaper articles and on his TV programmes, and she hated him.

There had been a time when Olivia had actually admired him, and even seen him as something of a hero for his brilliant exposés of those whose moral failings were damaging humanity, but that had been before he had decided to wage war on her parents.

Family meant a great deal to Olivia – all her family, but most especially her parents and her teenage brother. Olivia didn’t just love her parents, she respected and admired them, and to have their reputation besmirched all over the pages of the New York press by a man who was notorious for bringing down those he targeted had been an assault on them she could never forgive.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t the doggedly devoted daughter,’ Tait greeted her. ‘Still public enemy number one, am I? I don’t suppose that exchanging Christmas kisses is in order then?’ he teased when Olivia tried to step past him.

She hadn’t intended to lower herself to speak to him but his comment proved too much for her self-control.

‘I’d rather kiss a rat,’ she told him angrily.

‘Flattery. It does it for me every time,’ Tait retorted, giving her what she thought of as a shark smile, all polished white teeth in a face tanned by a lifetime of summers spent sailing off Cape Cod.

He was good-looking, Olivia acknowledged grudgingly, if one liked that big healthy Eastern Seaboard all-American male look. In fact his hair and eyes were dark enough for him to have Italian blood. Now wouldn’t that be a thing, a Boston Brahmin – top-of-the-heap WASP – with Italian immigrant blood in his veins?

Olivia knew that her antagonism towards him wasn’t shared by her female media colleagues. The word on the New York street was that Tait wasn’t just the bestlooking reporter, he was also the best in bed.

‘Your folks spending Christmas here in New York, are they?’

‘No. Not that it’s any of your business.’

The melting snow had slicked down his thick dark hair so that it hung over his forehead in damp spikes, the bright lights in the lobby highlighting the small lines fanning out from his eyes and the thickness of his eyelashes. He might have women falling over themselves for his attention, but Tait Cabot Forbes was exactly the kind of man who turned her off, Olivia thought. Unlike Robert.

Robert. It was comforting to be able to blot out Tait’s face by focusing instead on her own personal mental image of her cousin. Robert was her perfect man. The courtly behaviour he must have learned as a young boy living with his grandmother and stepgrandfather made him unique in Olivia’s eyes: a true gentleman of the old school, who set high moral standards for himself and who believed in such old-fashioned virtues as honour and loyalty.

And love? Olivia gave a small sigh. She knew perfectly well that all Robert felt for her was mere stepcousinly affection, even if he had been kind when she’d been in the throes of her painfully obvious teenage crush on him. The fact that the teenage crush had now become a carefully hidden woman’s love was her business and her problem, and definitely not something she would allow out into the open to humiliate her and embarrass Robert.

‘Tait.’ The sound of a woman’s voice, filled with delight as she spotted the reporter and came hurrying over, gave Olivia a chance to escape. A very welcome chance, she thought thankfully as she slipped past Tait and out into the street. Once there, without having intended to do so, she looked back, only to see Tait exchanging the ‘Christmas kisses’ she had refused with the pretty blonde who had hailed him.