PENNY JORDAN - The Perfect Lover

‘You!’ she whispered as she came face to face with the very man who had just been occupying her thoughts and exercising her temper.

‘Hello, Louise.’ Gareth Simmonds acknowledged her calmly. Shakily Louise grabbed her bag and turned her back on him. What an appalling coincidence that he should be on the same flight as her!

Determinedly keeping her back towards him, Louise edged her way into the aisle and headed for the exit.

A sharp wind whipped across the tarmac as they left the plane, and as she hurried towards the arrivals lounge Louise reassured herself that her quickened pace was caused by the chilly evening air, and certainly not by any fear of coming face to face with Gareth Simmonds a second time.

Once through Customs Louise headed for the taxi rank, giving the cab driver her address at the large block of apartments where she lived. The apartment she rented was small, and fearsomely expensive, but at least she lived on her own, she comforted herself as she paid off the taxi driver and walked into the apartment block foyer.

While she filled the kettle, Louise ran her answering machine tape. A small rueful smile curled her mouth as she heard Jean Claude’s familiar, sexy, smoky French accent. She had dated the Frenchman casually a few times, but was well aware of his reputation as an incorrigible flirt.

He was telephoning to ask if she was free for dinner during the week. Louise went to pick up and open her diary. She was due to accompany her boss to an inaugural meeting of the new committee in the morning. She suspected it might possibly run on until after lunch, and then at night there was an official dinner.

‘The French contingent especially are going to be asking some tricky questions,’ Pam Carlisle had warned Louise. ‘They’re none too happy about the fact that the Chair appointed is British. It’s only the fact that he’s known to be pro-European that’s persuaded them to give their grudging acceptance of his appointment. The disputed waters are, after all, still officially British.’

‘But they want to change that...’ Louise had guessed.

‘Well, they certainly want to get their own legal right to fish the waters.’

They had gone on to discuss the legal ramifications of the situation, and Louise had never thought to ask her boss the identity of the committee’s Chair. Why should she have done? It had never even crossed her mind that the new appointee could possibly be her ex-tutor and protagonist Gareth Simmonds. Hadn’t his prestigious lectureship coupled with the doting adoration of half the female student population been enough for him? Louise wondered bitterly.

‘I’ll bet he’s absolutely heaven in bed,’ she could remember one of her co-students breathing excitedly. ‘And he’s not married.’

‘Heaven in bed’. Louise tensed abruptly. He had certainly been hell out of it! To her at least.

‘He’s rumbled us,’ Katie had warned her. ‘He’s guessed that I’ve been sitting in at lectures to cover for you. He actually called me Katherine yesterday...’

‘So...?’ Louise had said grittily. ‘That is your name, isn’t it?’

‘It’s my name,’ Katie had agreed. ‘But at the time I was attending one of his lectures pretending to be you.’

‘He probably made a genuine mistake,’ Louise had told her irritably. She had gone home to Haslewich, on the pretext of having left some of her books behind on her last visit home, but in reality so that she could see Saul. To her chagrin, though, Saul had been away on business, and the whole exercise had proved to be a complete waste of time.

In those days she had not always treated her twin as considerately as she might have, Louise acknowledged now, as the boiling kettle disturbed her reverie, and in fact it was probably very true to say she had often been guilty of bullying and browbeating Katie into doing as she wanted.

Things were different now, of course. She had done what she could to make amends, and, as she was the first to acknowledge, there were areas in which her twin had shown considerably more strength of purpose and determination than she could ever have exhibited herself.

She had been in her late teens then, though, and so totally obsessed with Saul that nothing else, no one else, had been important.

Briefly she closed her eyes. This afternoon, when Saul had put his arms round her to give her that firm fraternal hug, initially her body had totally recoiled from his touch—not out of rejection but out of fear, a deep-rooted, instinctive, self-protective fear that there might be some hidden part of her that was still susceptible to her old romantic dreams. But to her relief what she had actually felt, all she had actually felt, had been a warm and very reassuring sense of peace and release, coupled with the knowledge that there was nothing, after all, for her to fear. Being hugged by Saul, being held in his arms, had meant no more to her than if he had been Olivia’s husband Caspar, or one of the Chester cousins, or indeed any other man of whom she had reason to be fond in a totally non-sexual and uncomplicated way.

She had known then that she was truly and totally free of the past, at least where Saul was concerned.

Frowningly she stirred her coffee.

She had behaved foolishly when she had been at university, there was no getting away from that fact, but she wasn’t alone in having done that—many other students had done the same.

She picked up her coffee mug too quickly and some of the hot liquid spilled onto her hand. She cursed angrily under her breath.

Damn Gareth Simmonds. Why on earth couldn’t he have stayed safely where he was in Oxford—and in her past?

The last thing she needed right now was having him around studying her... watching her with those too perceptive, too knowing evening-sky-blue eyes of his...judging her...just waiting for her to make a mistake...

Louise started to grind her teeth.

Well, she’d got news for him. She wasn’t the Louise she had been at Oxford any longer. She was a woman now, an adult, holding down a highly responsible and demanding job, proving that she could control and run her own life, that she didn’t need the constant back-up and support of her twin sister to be there at her side all the time, to do her bidding, to make her feel whole and complete. God, but she had hated him for throwing that accusation at her—just one of the scathing criticisms he had made of her!

It should have been Saul’s denouncement of her, after she had so dangerously tricked Tullah into following her into the maze and left her there at the masked ball, that should have remained like a scar on her consciousness, a dialogue that ran for ever through her head as she tried to argue her way out of it, but oddly it wasn’t. It was her arguments, her confrontations with her tutor about which she still had bad dreams, and still, in times of stress, played over and over again through her memory.

Oxford, the time after she had finally been forced to realise that Saul would never love her, that in fact he loved someone else. Oxford and Gareth Simmonds. Oxford, Italy—and Gareth Simmonds. Italy and Gareth Simmonds.

Picking up her coffee, Louise walked into her small sitting room and curled up on the sofa, closing her eyes. She didn’t want to relive those memories, but she could feel the weight of them pressing down on her, pushing their way into her consciousness just as Gareth Simmonds seemed to be pushing his way into the new life she had made for herself.

As though the debacle of the masquerade ball had not been punishment enough for her to contend with, that following week she had received a letter from Gareth Simmonds. A curt letter informing her that he wished to see her as there were certain matters concerning her work which he wished to discuss with her.