PENNY JORDAN - The Perfect Lover

Clustered around the fireplace were her cousin Olivia, with her husband and their two children, talking animatedly with Luke, from the Chester branch of the family, and his American wife Bobbie and their little girl, while Maddy, her brother Max’s wife, kept a discreet eye on Gramps, who was becoming increasingly irascible.

According to her mother, Maddy was close to a saint for humouring him the way she did. When Jenny Crighton had made this comment this morning, over breakfast, Louise had immediately pointed out that if Maddy could put up with being married to Max, then her grandfather must come as a form of light relief.

‘Louise,’ her mother had protested, but Louise had remained unrepentant

It was no secret in the family that Max was not a good or kind husband to Maddy, and privately Louise couldn’t understand why on earth Maddy stayed with him.

‘You’re looking very cross.’

Louise grimaced as she saw her twin sister. Twins were a feature of the Crighton family, in the same way that poppies were a feature of a field of corn—they sprang up all over the place, although as yet there were no sets in the current new generation.

‘They’ll come,’ her father’s aunt Ruth had predicted.

‘I’ve just been receiving the benefit of Max’s brotherly conversation,’ Louise informed her grimly. ‘He doesn’t change...’

‘No...’ Katie looked at her twin. ‘You know, in a lot of ways I feel quite sorry for him. He—’

‘Sorry for Max?’ Louise exploded. ‘What on earth for? He’s got everything he’s ever wanted—a cushy place in one of the country’s leading sets of chambers, with his pick of all the best briefs—and all he’s had to do to get it is to persuade poor Maddy to marry him.’

‘Yes, I know what he’s got in the material sense, Lou, but is he happy?’ Katie persisted. ‘I think he feels what happened with Uncle David far, far more than he’s ever shown. After all, they—’

‘They were both made in the same mould. Yes, I know,’ Louise cut in. ‘If you want my opinion, it would be a good thing for this family if Uncle David never surfaced again. Olivia as good as told me that her father had been guilty of serious malpractice when he and Dad were partners, and that if he hadn’t disappeared when he did...’

Both of them were silent for a moment as they remembered David Crighton, their father’s twin brother and Olivia’s father, and the near disaster he had plunged the family into prior to his disappearance some years earlier.

‘That’s all in the past now,’ Katie reminded her gently. ‘Dad and Olivia have managed to sort out all the problems they had been having with the practice—and in fact they’ve built up the business so much that they’ve decided they need to think about taking on an extra qualified solicitor to cope with the increased workload. But Gramps still misses David, you know. He was always—’

‘The favourite. Yes, I know. Poor Gramps. He never has had very good judgement, has he? First he makes David the favourite, ahead of Dad, and now it’s Max.’

‘Mum’s really glad that you were able to make it home for Gramps’s birthday,’ Katie told her sister quietly. ‘She was...upset at Christmas when you didn’t come home...’

‘When I couldn’t come home,’ Louise corrected her sharply. ‘I told you at the time. My boss put me under pressure to put together a report on the legal aspects of a new community law she thought might be passed, and I had no option but to agree. It wouldn’t have been worth coming home for what would have amounted to just about forty-eight hours, even if I could have got the flights.’

Three months after leaving university, and not wanting to take the next stage in her training to become a barrister immediately, Louise had taken a temporary post working for a newly appointed Euro MP who’d wanted someone to work for her as a legal researcher.

Six months ago the temporary post had become a permanent one, and while the hours were long and the work extraordinarily demanding, Louise had thrown herself into it with determination, knowing that the contacts she was making in Brussels would ultimately equip her to make a change of career should she want to do so.

Their choice of careers couldn’t have been more different, Katie acknowledged as she silently and sympathetically studied her twin. While Louise, true to her nature, had chosen to fling herself head-first into the maelstrom of politics and intrigues in the hothouse melting-pot atmosphere of Europe’s bureaucratic capital, she had opted to join a still very youthful and emergent new charity which had been set up to help young children across the world who had been made orphans and refugees by war.

‘Have you spoken to Saul and Tullah yet?’ Kate asked her sister softly.

Louise reacted sharply to her question, tensing and almost physically backing off from her as she replied angrily, ‘No, I haven’t...Why should I? For God’s sake, when is everyone in this wretched family going to stop behaving as though...?’ She stopped, and took a deep breath.

‘Look, for the last time, Saul means nothing to me now. I had a silly, stupid crush on him, yes. I made a total and complete fool of myself over him, yes. But...’ She stopped again, and shook her head.

‘It’s over, Katie. Over.’

‘Mum thought when you didn’t come home at Christmas—’ Katie began.

Louise wouldn’t let her finish, breaking in bitterly, ‘That what? That I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Saul? Or, worse, that I might—’

‘She thought that perhaps you’d met someone in Brussels.’ Katie overrode her with quiet insistence. ‘And that you weren’t coming home because you wanted to be with him...’

Interestingly, a soft tide of warm colour started to tinge her sister’s skin, and, even more interestingly, for once in her life she seemed almost lost for words as she turned her head and looked down at the carpet before saying quickly, ‘No. No, there isn’t anyone... at least not like that. I...’

It wasn’t totally true—there was someone, of sorts—but she knew perfectly well that the relationship Jean Claude wanted with her was one based on sex only.

Jean Claude was twelve years older than her, and moved in the higher echelons of Brussels’ diplomatic circles. He was, as he himself had told Louise, a career diplomat, who currently held a post connected with the French fishing industry.

Louise wasn’t quite sure as yet how she felt about him. He had a suave, dry sense of humour, and the kind of Gallic good looks that fell just short enough of outrageously handsome to ensure that he was very attractive to the female sex. Politics and the law, as Jean Claude had already teasingly commented to her, could make very exciting bedfellows.

‘Brazen, I think you mean,’ Louise had corrected him firmly.

‘Be careful if you’re looking for commitment,’ a colleague had already warned Louise. ‘He’s got a reputation for liking variety.’

Louise had shrugged away the other woman’s comments. Commitment was the last thing on her mind at the moment, and would be for a very long time to come. She might be over Saul in the sense that she was no longer suffering from the massive crush which had caused her to make such an idiotic fool of herself, but she was certainly far from over the feelings of humiliation and searing self-disgust—self-dislike—which had resulted from the sharp realisation of just how dangerously and potentially destructively out of control her feelings for Saul had threatened to become.

She would certainly never make that mistake again. Never allow herself to become such a victim, such a slave to her emotions ever again—she didn’t really understand how it had happened in the first place. Right from her early teens she had set her sights firmly on aiming for a career. Marriage, babies, emotions, although she’d once have openly welcomed them with Saul, were more Katie’s forte than her own. The terrifying force of her feelings for Saul had been an abberation, and the behaviour they had resulted in so totally abhorrent and repugnant to her that even now, nearly three years later, she could scarcely bear to think about it.