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Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series - Пенни Джордан - Читать любовный роман онлайн в женской библиотеке LadyLib.Net
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Джордан Пенни
Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series
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QUEENSMEAD was very much as she had pictured it, Bobbie realised: a large, gracious house set in its own grounds reached via a traditional sweeping drive, its seventeenth-century stone façade draped in the soft tendrils of a huge wisteria.
Although ostensibly Bobbie was merely attending the family get-together as Amelia’s temporary nanny, virtually as soon as they had entered the house, Olivia had deftly removed Amelia from her arms and told Bobbie firmly that she was to make sure she enjoyed herself and that she was certainly going to enjoy showing her daughter off to her relatives.
Despite its generous proportions, the large drawing room was very crowded. Jon and Jenny, who had arrived ahead of them with the twins, Joss and Olivia’s younger brother, claimed her attention whilst Louise and Katie thanked her for the small antique brooches she had given them as their eighteenth-birthday presents.
‘I’ll have to take you over to introduce you to Gramps,’ Olivia told her as she handed Amelia over to an admiring Jenny.
‘Ben’s not in a very good mood, I’m afraid,’ Jenny warned them ruefully, adding quietly, ‘I think having Max here reminds him of your father, Olivia. I rather think he feels that Jon isn’t doing as much as he could to try to track David down.’
‘Dad won’t be found unless he wants to be found,’ Olivia responded tersely. ‘I just wish that Gramps could see that, but then he’s always had a blind spot where Dad is concerned. I wish sometimes I could tell him the truth,’ she declared fiercely.
‘I doubt that he would believe you if you did. He needs to cling on to his faith in David, his belief in him,’ Jenny told her wisely. ‘I’m sorry, Bobbie,’ Jenny apologised. ‘We’re being very rude, talking about family matters and ignoring you.’
‘Bobbie is almost a member of the family,’ Olivia insisted and then added slyly, ‘and very soon she might become one officially, as well.’
Whilst Bobbie protested, her cheeks burning hotly, Jenny gave her an interested look but didn’t press the matter, leaving it to Olivia to explain.
‘Luke’s pretty smitten with Bobbie,’ she elaborated whilst teasingly shaking her head as Bobbie tried to contradict what she was saying. ‘It’s no good,’ Olivia said, laughing. ‘The pair of you have given yourselves away too clearly to start denying it now.’
‘Hello there. I was hoping we might get to meet again.’
Bobbie turned thankfully towards Max as he strolled over to join them, his arrival a welcome interruption, although it was obvious that Olivia didn’t think so because almost immediately she announced, ‘I was just about to take Bobbie to introduce her to Gramps, Max, so I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us.’
‘You haven’t met my grandfather yet?’ Max asked Bobbie, pointedly ignoring his cousin as he turned his back to her, effectively blocking her out of the conversation. Instead, he concentrated on Bobbie, giving her the benefit of his heated crocodile smile and a look that slid slowly from the top of her head all the way down to her toes. It lingered appreciatively on her body in a manner that was both extremely practised and, so far as Bobbie was concerned, extremely unappealing, but she kept her thoughts to herself, waiting politely whilst Max reached out and tucked her hand through his arm as he told her, ‘Come with me, but let me warn you that he—’
‘Doesn’t like Americans,’ Bobbie supplied dryly for him. ‘Yes, so I’ve been told.’
‘It isn’t an aversion I share,’ Max assured her softly with another appreciative look. ‘Far from it.’
‘But your wife, I believe, is British,’ Bobbie pointed out sweetly, just ever so slightly emphasising the words ‘your wife’.
‘Very much so,’ Max agreed suavely, looking more amused than concerned that she should have reminded him that he was a married man, confirming her inward assessment of him when he continued, ‘My wife is also small, plump and, I’m afraid, rather plain and a brunette, while I, I must admit, have a penchant for long-legged blondes, especially when they’re as beautiful as you are.’
His audacity was unbelievable, Bobbie decided as she replied with cool firmness, ‘Really. Unfortunately I do not have a penchant for married men, especially those as unkind about the woman they’ve chosen to marry as you have just been. Please excuse me,’ she added as she detached herself from him and started to move away.
Only she didn’t get very far because as she turned round, to her consternation, she found her way blocked by Luke. When had he arrived and why was he looking at her like that?
‘Er...Luke,’ she faltered as guiltily as a child caught with her fingers in the cookie jar, as she later angrily told herself.
‘Luke,’ she heard Max drawling in a far more composed voice, ‘I was just taking Bobbie over to introduce her to Grandfather.’
‘Really. Via a rather long detour I can only presume,’ Luke returned coldly as Max looked innocently round the empty room he had brought her to and told him, ‘Your grandfather is in the library with your wife.’
‘Oh, is he? That’s obviously why we couldn’t find him, then,’ Max replied cheerfully, but he made no attempt to remain with them, Bobbie noticed, excusing himself with some vague comment about needing to speak with his father and leaving Bobbie on her own to face Luke’s obvious ire.
‘I might have known,’ Luke said grimly. ‘I imagine it must be a case of like to like, but let me warn you, if you’re hoping to get anything more than a very brief tumble in bed and the dubious pleasure of boosting Max’s ego out of him, you’re going to be very disappointed.’
‘There’s obviously not much to choose between you, then, is there?’ Bobbie quipped, using flippancy to cover the churning havoc his presence was creating in her body.
She knew she had gone too far, though, when Luke turned towards her, reaching for her wrists, his teeth baring in a feral smile of high-octane anger, but before he could say or do anything, mercifully Olivia popped her head round the door.
‘Not still quarrelling? I thought you’d have made it up by now, the pair of you. You should be kissing and making up, not fighting....’
She was gone before either one could say anything, responding to Caspar’s summons from the other side of the door, leaving Luke to demand savagely, ‘And just what the hell was that all about?’
‘Olivia thinks that you and I...that we’re...that we’re romantically involved,’ Bobbie informed him shakily.
‘She what?’
‘Don’t blame me. I’m not the one who dragged you into my hotel room and then left a note at the reception desk that anyone could have seen,’ Bobbie reminded him grittily. ‘You were keen enough to have Fenella think we were involved. It’s a pity that you didn’t think a little harder and realise that others might make the same mistake.’
‘I see, and you, of course, being the person you are, obviously haven’t thought it desirable to put Olivia right.’
The sarcastic contempt dripping from his words made Bobbie flinch, but she was determined not to let him see just how much he was hurting her.
‘Why should I do your dirty work for you?’ she challenged him spiritedly.
‘Why indeed,’ he returned unpleasantly, ‘especially when you could have some hidden agenda of your own that makes it an advantage for you to be publicly, at least, romantically attached to me?’
He had come perilously close, too close, to guessing the truth for Bobbie’s peace of mind, guilt and anxiety panicking her into reacting angrily. ‘There couldn’t be any advantage, public or private, that would make me want that—or you,’ she denied vehemently.
‘No!’ Luke contradicted her firmly. ‘That isn’t the way I remember certain events—far from it. In fact, while I hate to call you a liar,’ he drawled unkindly, ‘there have been at least two occasions I can call to mind when you evinced anything but reluctance to demonstrate just the opposite.’
Bobbie glared at him. ‘If you’re referring to the way you forced yourself on me ... the way you kissed me totally against my will...’ She stopped, her face flushing as she saw the way Luke was looking at her. ‘I...I’ve told you before,’ she started to protest defensively. ‘I was thinking about someone else.’
Wildly she started to head for the half-open door, knowing that she was on unsafe ground, very unsafe ground indeed, but she was still unable to resist one final act of defiance in the face of his accusations.
‘Under normal circumstances,’ she raged furiously, ‘there’s just no way I’d respond to you and anyway I wasn’t responding to you ... I was...’ She shook her head. What was the point in arguing with him? The sensible thing to do would be quite simply to walk away from him right now.
But unfortunately she had left it a little too late. Luke’s gaze was already mercilessly fixed on her and as she measured the distance between them and the narrow doorway he was blocking, he sprang into action, catching hold of her as she tried to run past him and imprisoning her easily in his arms despite her attempts to struggle free. Kicking the door shut and enclosing them both in the semi-darkness of the room, he pushed her back against the closed door.
‘You’re sure about that, are you?’ he demanded mockingly.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ Bobbie lied through gritted teeth. ‘And even if I wasn’t, I don’t get any kicks from...from physical violence,’ she told him bitingly.
She could feel Luke’s anger as he absorbed the impact of her angry remark, and her own body tensed in wary response. How much, after all, did she actually know about him? How much did she...?
‘Neither do I,’ she heard him telling her curtly and with so much distaste in his voice that she knew he was speaking the truth. ‘But I don’t like liars,’ he continued. ‘When I kissed you, you responded to me.’
‘I responded to being kissed,’ Bobbie protested. ‘It had nothing to do with you. You were ... I thought you were someone else,’ she lied again.
‘Is that a fact? Well, let’s just put that to the test, shall we?’ Luke told her and she could tell from the deceptive softness of his voice that he was very, very angry, indeed, far more angry in fact, than he had been when he had physically stopped her from leaving.
The panic that flared inside her and had her struggling and trying to break free from his imprisoning grip had nothing to do with any fear or horror at the thought of being kissed or even touched by him. No, it was the fear, her fear, of what she might do, how she might react when he did that was urging her to struggle so desperately to break free of him, Bobbie acknowledged. But all her struggles could not break his firm hold of her. All they were doing, she had to admit, was exhausting her strength and bruising her ego far worse than his strong hands on her wrists were likely to be bruising her flesh.
He waited until she paused to draw a deep lungful of air before releasing her wrists so that he could use his arms to bind her tightly against him, so tightly that she could feel the hard imprint of his body against her own, even through both their layers of clothing, Bobbie realised. So closely that...
‘Look at me, Bobbie,’ she heard him commanding her grimly, and to her own self-disgust she found that she was obeying him, lifting her gaze to meet his. ‘Good,’ he told her mock-softly. ‘Now we both know that this time you know exactly who I am, don’t we?’ And before she could argue or object, he did what she had known he intended to do all along and what she had told herself she would resist with every ounce of her mental, emotional and physical strength. He bent his head and started to kiss her.
It was a bruising, hard, angry kiss that cerebrally Bobbie realised should have left her completely cold and unmoved, a kiss of icy, arrogant male passion, born of a male need to dominate and conquer, the kind of kiss a conquering warlord would give a captive victim and yet, the moment his mouth touched hers, Bobbie knew she was lost.
Oh, she still felt angry—bitterly, furiously so—still resented what he was doing, resented him. She still rejected with her mind, her reason, everything he was, everything he was doing to her, but her body, her senses, had urges and needs of their own and to them the hard possession of Luke’s kiss had nothing of the gloating male triumph her mind flinched from, none of the sense of subjugation that her feminine pride fought so hard against. No, they saw and felt only a heady sense of power and heat; a sweet, soaring obliterating surge of feminine triumph that she...they, could make this man, who resented her so much, who disliked her so much, ache so much for her that he couldn’t stop himself from touching her, kissing her, wanting her and most empowering of all, reacting to her. And wantonly they played on that reaction, teasing it, enticing it, inciting it, so that without being able to do a thing to stop herself, Bobbie discovered that she had raised her own arms to wrap them tightly around Luke as she opened her mouth to the demanding pressure of his probing tongue, that the anger fuelling her was making her body ache and yearn, that the low growl of sound Luke made deep in his throat as she raked his tongue passionately with her teeth and pushed herself even closer to his body so that she could feel the powerful surge of male arousal that jolted through him, made her emit a small, purring, femininely feline sound of triumphant pleasure of her own.
As she felt his hands on her body, a fierce, wild thrill of hunger swept through her, banishing logic and reason and even reality; they were man and woman, yin and yang, cause and effect, two primitive forces that when combined together...
When Bobbie felt Luke’s hand covering her breast, pushing aside her clothes with savage urgency to reach the soft warmth of her flesh, she moaned a sharp protest beneath her breath, but the protest wasn’t because he was touching her. She was trembling from head to foot, the sheer force of the desire that had erupted inside her from out of nowhere making her body ache with something approaching an actual physical pain.
She had never dreamt that physical desire could generate such an intense and immediate reaction, such a sense of urgency and aching, teeth-grinding immediacy.
‘Luke...’ She neither knew nor cared what she might be betraying as she dragged her mouth from his to whisper his name in female need, the look in her eyes as they met his, his flashing a message of intense pride and equally intense desire.
She could see Luke’s response in the way his pupils dilated, feel it in the unexpected tremor that passed through his body as he responded as though by telepathy to the need conveyed in her husky moaning of his name to run the hard pad of his thumb over the soft curve of her breast until he found her nipple and then to circle it and go on circling it as Bobbie gasped her physical pleasure in his touch and instinctively pressed herself even closer to him. And she could hear it in the harsh sound of the air escaping from his lungs as he muttered something unintelligible under his breath and then, leaning back against the wall, urged her between his parted thighs. Then, under the protective shadows, he dragged her clothes completely free of her breast so that he could satisfy the need pounding through both their tormented bodies by fastening his mouth over the swollen point of her nipple and sucking rhythmically on it.
It was the sound of a child crying in the hallway outside that broke the dark spell that was binding them together, causing them to spring apart and watch one another breathing harshly, confronting one another not as lovers but as warriors, foes, enemies, Bobbie recognised sickly as she tried to come to terms with what had happened, what she had done.
Denied the physical protection of the warmth of Luke’s body and the emotional and mental protection of the sheer heat of the need that had possessed her, Bobbie started to shiver.
Luke’s face was hidden from her by the shadows, not that she wanted to look at him, to see the contemptuous triumph she was sure must be in his eyes. No matter how much one might deplore it, there was still this unspoken belief that whilst it was still just acceptable for a man to be motivated by and give in to sexual desire, where a woman was concerned the waters were far more muddied and dangerous. Bobbie wasn’t even sure herself which side of the fence she stood on. Certainly she would never condemn another woman for admitting that she felt only physical desire and lust for a man, but when that woman was herself... She pushed away the idea that love could be tangled up in her emotions.
‘I hate you, do you know that?’ she told Luke huskily, adjusting her top before she opened the door and walked shakily through it—and away from him—moving down the hallway blindly to mingle with the other guests, her fists clenched as she fought to suppress her emotions, coming only to a halt when she realised she had reached the far side of the drawing room and could go no farther.
‘So you’re the American I’ve been hearing so much about.’
As Bobbie turned her head, she saw that there was someone seated in the wing-chair next to the window, a man in his seventies whom she had no difficulty whatsoever in guessing to be Ben Crighton.
‘I imagine so,’ she concurred warily.
‘Hah. Been telling you about me, have they? Warning you!’ he exclaimed with a dry laugh.
‘It has been mentioned that you don’t particularly care for my countrymen,’ Bobbie agreed calmly.
‘They were over here during the war. Caused a lot of trouble, a lot of resentment, turning women’s heads whilst their own men were away fighting.’
Bobbie forced herself not to make any kind of response, instead simply listening.
‘You’re looking after young Amelia, so I hear,’ Ben commented gruffly.
‘For the time being,’ Bobbie returned.
‘Joss said he met you in the churchyard looking at the gravestones, our gravestones.... Interested in us, are you?’
‘You’re a very...interesting family,’ was all Bobbie allowed herself to be provoked into saying.
‘Saw you talking to young Max earlier.’
Bobbie waited, expecting to be told once again that Max was a married man, but to her surprise, Ben didn’t refer to Max’s marriage at all.
‘He’s the image of my son, David...always was,’ he related instead. ‘Much more like him than his own father. Same character...’
Bobbie said nothing. From what she had heard about David, Olivia’s father, she doubted that she would have liked him very much.
‘He’s abroad at the moment....’
Bobbie had no idea why she should be swept by compassion for a man she barely knew and who, from what she had heard, was as obstinate, narrow-minded and bigoted as any man could be. But whatever the reason, instead of pointing out that his son David was abroad—period—having simply disappeared in the night, leaving his family to deal with the havoc his disappearance had caused, she continued to say nothing.
The silence between them was only broken when Jenny suddenly appeared at her side, announcing, ‘Bobbie, there’s a telephone call for you...your sister... she sounded...’ She touched Bobbie’s arm gently. ‘She said she needed to speak with you urgently. You can take the call in the study. You’ll be private in there.’
Her mouth dry with apprehension, Bobbie followed Jenny as she weaved her way through the throng, her heart thudding nervously as Jenny guided her across the hallway and pushed open the door to a small, cosy room almost filled by a huge desk.
As Jenny gently closed the door and left, Bobbie walked over to the desk and picked up the telephone receiver, saying uncertainly, ‘Sam...?’
‘Bobbie. Thank the Lord. Listen, have you said anything yet?’
‘No...no, not yet. Sam, why are you calling me here? Is it Mom?’
‘No, or at least not in the way you mean. She’s okay. Look, Bobbie, you’ve got to do it today, confront her, show her, show them.’
‘Sam,’ Bobbie protested, ‘it isn’t that easy...I...’
‘Bobbie, you’ve got to, that’s why I’m ringing. Dad’s on to us and—’
‘What?’
‘Now don’t panic. Just listen up, will you? He found out I’d been ringing you in Chester, and you know Dad. He put two and two together and came up with four. He grilled me like he was one of his own Secret Service gorillas,’ she told Bobbie indignantly.
‘Oh, Sam, no...’ Bobbie had to sit down. Her legs, her whole body, had gone weak with shock and stress. She sank into the comfortable leather swivel chair behind the desk and clutched the receiver. ‘What did he say?’
‘Oh, you know Pop. There was a lot of idealistic stuff about how we should be above wanting to make others pay for their errors. How it should be simply enough for us to be aware of them and to feel sorry for them because of the way they are. He said that nothing we would do could make things any easier for Mom, and then Grandpa had to get in on the act and he said—’
‘Grandpa!’ Bobbie interrupted her twin on a stifled gasp. ‘Oh, Sam, no... How did Grandpa find out?’
‘He came in while Dad was reading me the Riot Act,’ Samantha confessed, ‘and of course, he had to hear the whole thing. Anyway, I told them it was too late to do anything now and I told them what you were going to do and—’
There was a sharp click on the telephone line as though someone had picked up another handset.
Nervously Bobbie asked her sister, ‘What was that? . Has someone come in...Dad or...?’
‘No. There’s no one else here,’ Samantha assured her. ‘We’re not going to give up, Bobbie, not now. We can’t afford to. She’s got to be made to pay.’
Bobbie bit her lip. She had never been totally happy with her twin’s plans but weakly she had allowed herself to be persuaded into going along with them. Knowing now that her father and her grandfather had discovered what they were doing brought home to her how much they would both dislike and disapprove of Samantha’s scheme.
‘Bobbie,’ she heard her sister warning her grimly, before pausing and then telling her bitterly, ‘Look, over fifty years ago, Ruth Crighton pretended that she’d fallen in love with Grandpa and even promised to marry him. He believed her, they were lovers and then he got a message—not from her, mind you—but from her father via his own commanding officer announcing that Ruth never wanted to see him again, and when he tried to telephone her to talk to her, she told him that it was true and that she wanted nothing more to do with him.
‘No explanations were given, no reasons, no apologies, but worse than that, a thousand times worse, she never even told him that she was already carrying his child. She simply took herself off to the other side of the country, gave birth to Grandpa’s baby, our mother, in secret, and then walked away...walked away... abandoned Mom totally, leaving her to be given away for adoption like...like an unwanted kitten.
‘If Grandpa hadn’t been visiting an injured airman in that same hospital, if he hadn’t happened to overhear two nurses gossiping about “that poor little motherless Crighton baby” and made enquiries, he would never even have known that Mom existed. When I think of what might have happened to her, it makes my blood run cold.
‘You know what a hard time Grandpa had convincing first his commanding officers and then the British authorities that he was Mom’s father and that he had a right to bring her up himself. You know the hardship that both he and Mom suffered when he first brought her back to this country. How first his family treated her and then Pop’s. You know what it’s done to Mom, knowing that her own mother didn’t want her...that she hadn’t even left so much as a letter for her...a note...anything...so that at least Mom could have felt that she had been loved by her...that she hadn’t wanted to part with her. It’s like Mom says. It’s not just the fact that she’s never known her mother that hurts. What hurts much, much more is that Ruth has never, ever wanted to know her...that she’s never, ever tried to find her, to make even the most basic enquiries to find out what happened to her.’
‘It was a very difficult time, Sam,’ Bobbie told her sister in a low voice. ‘The end of the war. British servicemen were coming home. Perhaps Ruth felt guilty about the fact that she’d been involved with an American. She had been engaged to someone else and...well, as Mom always says, she couldn’t have had a more loving father or been a more loved child.’
‘So guilty that she abandoned her own child? That’s some guilt,’ Samantha told Bobbie bitterly. ‘Pity she hasn’t felt even a quarter of it for what she did to Mom. We have to see this through, Bobbie. She has to be made to pay...she deserves to pay. We agreed....’
Bobbie was just about to try to convince her sister that they should abandon their plan when the study door opened. Her eyes widened in shock as she saw Luke striding towards her. It wasn’t so much the total unexpectedness of his appearance that left her speechless and virtually unable to move as he snatched the receiver from her hand and slammed it down, cutting her off from Samantha, as the look of murderously cold fury in his eyes.
‘So, you’re going to make Ruth pay, are you,’ he demanded, thin-lipped as he took hold of her upper arm in a painfully hard grip. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. In fact, what I think you are going to do right now is to leave.’
‘Leave...?’ Bobbie protested squeakily. ‘But—’
‘My God, I was right about you all along, wasn’t I?’ Luke charged, overriding her nervous protest. ‘But even I hadn’t realised just how...how much you were going to demand from Ruth to keep quiet about her past.’ His mouth twisted as though soured by something foul tasting.
‘Blackmail... In my book it’s the shabbiest, meanest, most heartless crime of them all, but I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked. After all, it’s not the first time I’ve come across it, although thankfully the closest contact I’ve had to have with the perpetrator has been when I’ve refused to handle his defence.’
‘Blackmail!’ Bobbie’s eyes rounded with horror. ‘Luke. You’ve got it all wrong—’ she started to deny it but then broke off to wince in helpless protest as his angry grip on her upper arm tightened as he swung her round to face him.
‘No. You’ve got it wrong,’ he contradicted her flatly, ‘and if I were you, I shouldn’t bother wasting my breath trying to convince me otherwise, Bobbie. I’m not quite that much of a fool. Come on...this way....’
To Bobbie’s chagrin, she found that she was actually being compelled to walk and, in fact, almost run as he positively dragged her out of the room and down the corridor in the opposite direction she had originally come.
‘Let me go...what are you doing? Where are you taking me?’ she protested in panic as she tried in vain to wriggle free.
‘Let you go? No way, and as for what I’m doing...I’m doing what I should have done the first time I met you if I’d had any sense,’ he told her grimly, stopping so abruptly in front of a small, almost invisible door set into the wall that Bobbie cannoned painfully into him.
When he opened it, Bobbie saw that it led into the garden. Her legs shook with relief. For one awful moment she had actually wondered...dreaded... feared...that he might be going to imprison her somewhere.
‘This way,’ he instructed, yanking her round and virtually marching her along a narrow path. Beyond the hedge in front of them, she could just make out the glimmer of car roofs.
Without giving her the chance to say anything, Luke forced her across to his own car, using his body as well as his constraining arm to imprison her between the car and himself as he unlocked the passenger door.
‘Get in,’ he told her curtly.
‘Well now, what’s going on here? No prizes for guessing why you two are sneaking off. I wonder...?’
Relief flooded through Bobbie as she recognised Max strolling towards them, but before she could open her mouth to ask him for help, Luke had all but pushed her into the passenger seat of the car and was shutting the door on her.
‘Roberta isn’t feeling very well,’ she heard Luke telling Max in a distant voice. Tell Olivia not to worry and that I’ll take care of her, will you, Max? Oh, and give your grandfather my apologies, as well.’
As Luke started to walk round to the driver’s side of his car, Bobbie tried to push open the passenger door and call out to Max, who was now disappearing in the direction of the house. She found that Luke had locked her in, and even as her shaky fingers tried to activate the electric windows, she realised that they wouldn’t operate without the ignition key. Then Luke was opening the door and sliding into the car beside her, setting it in motion with the doors already relocked and leaving her no alternative but to stay where she was.
‘You have no right to do this,’ she finally managed to say as he swung the car out onto the main road. ‘You’re kidnapping me and that’s a crime and—’
‘So’s blackmail,’ Luke countered tightly, ‘and as for my kidnapping you...we’re lovers...an item...an accredited couple...remember?’
The aggressively angry way in which Luke was driving the car caused Bobbie to be thrown back against her seat, the jolt making her gasp for breath, but it wasn’t that that made it impossible for her to respond to Luke’s taunt. She was still in shock from hearing him accuse her of wanting to blackmail Ruth.
‘You can’t do this, Luke,’ she warned him, but the sideways glance of derision he gave her made her heart bang heavily against her chest.
‘Who’s going to stop me?’ he scoffed. ‘Your partner in crime?’ He shook his head and laughed mirthlessly. ‘I think not, and besides, you didn’t leave me much option. After I’d heard what the nasty, cold-blooded little pair of you were planning, I knew I had to act swiftly to protect Ruth.’
Since that one statement encompassed three errors on which she urgently needed to take issue with him, it was, as Bobbie was forced to acknowledge later, rather odd that it should be the least important of them she should protest to him about first, telling him shakily, ‘We are not little and I resent your use of that kind of demeaning and discriminative language, especially when—’
‘Oh please,’ Luke interrupted her savagely. ‘Spare me at least the politically correct whinge. My God, you really are in a class of your own, aren’t you?’ Luke breathed aggrievedly. ‘You haven’t a scrap of conscience about what you were planning to do, the hurt you were about to inflict, and yet you’ve got the gall to come on to me about calling you little...for all the world as though you’re the wronged party.’
‘I am,’ Bobbie insisted fiercely. ‘And how dare you talk to me about conscience. You must have deliberately listened in on our conversation. A private conversation...’
‘Only accidentally,’ Luke told her tersely. ‘I wanted to make a phone call of my own and had no idea the line was already in use until I picked up the receiver—’
‘At which point any normal, decent person would have replaced it,’ Bobbie rebuked him smartly, ‘not eavesdropped.’
‘For Ruth’s sake, I had no other option,’ Luke returned grimly. ‘And thank God I did. How much were you intending to blackmail her for? Not that it matters—be it one penny or a million pounds, the concept is still the same.’
‘We were not planning to blackmail Ruth,’ Bobbie denied angrily. ‘You’ve got it all wrong.’
‘No, you’re the one who’s got it all wrong,’ Luke replied acidly. ‘Just how wrong you’re about to find out....’
They were heading for Chester, Bobbie noticed. Inwardly she was quaking with apprehension and a sick sense of aching disillusionment.
Why on earth did she have to be such an idealistic and romantic fool? Now was quite definitely not the time to have herself mentally and emotionally confronting the fact that a small, deep and very secret feminine place within her had hoped against hope that if Luke were to be told the truth he would instantly and unhesitatingly share her feelings and not just share them, but also want to champion them, to champion her, she admitted; to love her so unequivocally and totally that he immediately and completely understood the complexity of her emotions.
But then, of course, Luke did not love her, did he? And if she was honest with herself, she had already known that.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she demanded as she firmly closed the door on her foolish dreams.
‘Somewhere where you won’t get the chance to put your nasty little plan into action—where you won’t get the chance to make any contact with Ruth at all, somewhere where I can keep an eye on you until I can make arrangements to get you sent back where you came from.’
‘What! Sent back...? You can’t do that.’
‘No? Even in this country we can and do deport undesirable aliens.’
Undesirable aliens! Bobbie took a deep breath and then counted to ten before saying coolly, ‘I appreciate that your massive ego, your superiority complex and sense of justice give you the delusion that you can do whatever you like, Luke, but unfortunately for you and fortunately for me you are just as subject to the laws of the land as I am myself and not even you can have me forcibly imprisoned or forcibly repatriated just because it’s what you want.’
Luke gave her a look that turned her blood to ice as he warned her, ‘Don’t tempt me. If that’s a challenge you’ve just issued, then consider it taken up. The prison I have in mind for you may not be Chester gaol but rather my flat, and as for your repatriation, well, let’s just say I am sure I shall be able to think of some way to encourage you to want to return home....’
Bobbie dared not look at him.
‘You must think a lot of Ruth to go to all this trouble on her behalf,’ Bobbie offered shakily.
‘Yes, I do,’ Luke agreed calmly, ‘but it wouldn’t matter who you were trying to blackmail. My reaction would be the same. If that’s the kind of behaviour you’ve been brought up to think of as the norm, then no wonder Ruth dumped your grandfather.’
Bobbie stared at him in silence for several seconds, not because shock had deprived her of the ability to respond but because of the sheer weight and intensity of her fury.
When she did speak, she spaced her words carefully and slowly, reminding herself that there was nothing to be achieved in doing what she most wanted to do, which was to scream at him and beat her fists against his chest as she forced him to take back his insults.
‘My grandfather and my parents,’ she began and then had to stop because her voice had started to tremble so much her mouth could barely shape the words. ‘You aren’t fit to be in the same room with them,’ she told him shakily when she could speak. ‘To breathe the same air...to exist in the same universe.’
‘Abused children often display an intense degree of loyalty towards their parents. It’s a phenomenon social workers often remark on,’ Luke said brusquely. ‘Apparently it’s because they don’t know any other way of relating, any other kind of relationship.’
‘My parents...my family, are not child abusers,’ Bobbie denied furiously. ‘You don’t understand....’
‘I understand perfectly,’ Luke corrected her flatly. ‘After all, I heard your sister telling you that Ruth had to be made to pay.’
‘To pay for abandoning our mother, yes,’ Bobbie protested, ‘but not to pay in financial terms. What we meant—’
‘Don’t waste your time lying to me, Bobbie,’ Luke warned her coldly as he negotiated a difficult turning.
They were in Chester now and Bobbie realised with a sinking heart that there was every possibility that he would be able to carry out his threat and incarcerate her in his flat. But he couldn’t keep her there for ever. Sooner or later he would have to leave her on her own and when he did...
Fiercely she started to make plans. If it came to the worst, she would just have to phone Sam and...
She tensed as she realised that Luke had stopped the car. Instinctively she reached for the door but Luke gave her a warning look and told her softly, ‘I shouldn’t bother making a run for it if I were you. I used to play rugger and I promise you that if I have to I’m quite willing to bring you down in the kind of tackle that could do a lot of expensive damage to those perfect teeth of yours.’
‘My teeth happen to be my own, thank you very much, and not the result of some expensive cosmetic dentistry,’ Bobbie responded sharply, tilting her chin at him so that he would know that she wasn’t in the least bit intimidated by his threat.
Even so, she decided that it might not be a good idea to risk humiliating herself by trying to run away from him, remembering the ease with which he had constrained her earlier and, of course, the street was empty, which meant that there was no one she could call out to for help.
‘You can’t keep me here for ever,’ she warned him ten minutes later after he had bundled her unceremoniously up the entry stairs and into his surprisingly spacious and elegant living quarters above the firm’s offices. ‘For a start, Olivia is bound to want to know what’s going on. I am supposed to be working for her after all....’
‘I can promise you that keeping you here for ever is the last thing on my mind,’ Luke assured her unkindly, ‘and as for Olivia... Well, I think she will understand when I explain to her that the pair of us were just so overcome by our emotions that we had to be together. Just as she’ll also understand why you decided you had to return home once we had decided that our...er... passion for one another had worn itself out.’
Bobbie stared at him. ‘You’ve got it all planned out, haven’t you?’ she accused him, ‘but you’ve still got it all wrong.’
‘So you keep protesting,’ Luke agreed coldly, ‘but I’m sure you’ll understand when I say that you just aren’t convincing me.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Bobbie objected spiritedly. ‘Isn’t there a law in this country that says a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty? You want me to be guilty, Luke, and that’s why you’ve already prejudged me. You want to think the worst of me. You want to believe that I’m...I’m...’
‘A blackmailer,’ Luke supplied relentlessly for her. ‘You condemned yourself with your own words, Bobbie.’
‘That was a private conversation,’ she told him angrily, ‘and one that you’ve completely misinterpreted. Ruth abandoned my mother when she was less than a couple of days old. Have you any idea what that meant? No, of course you haven’t. My mother was rejected at birth by her own mother—totally and completely abandoned. Something like that hurts and goes on hurting all through a person’s life....’
‘And so you decided to make Ruth hurt, as well, but through her bank account rather than her emotions,’ Luke taunted her cynically.
‘No, that’s not true,’ Bobbie denied fiercely. ‘Ruth is my grandmother,’ she reminded him. ‘You surely don’t think...’
‘The grandmother who didn’t want you, who rejected your grandfather and your mother,’ Luke pointed out cruelly. ‘In a world where it isn’t unknown for children to murder their parents to get their hands on their money, why should I believe that you have any warm feelings for Ruth, why should anyone? In fact—’
‘You want to believe the worst of me,’ Bobbie cried out passionately. ‘You’ve been antagonistic towards me, suspicious of me, right from the start.’
‘With good reason,’ Luke told her curtly. ‘As it happens, it never occurred to me that you might be a potential blackmailer but I did rather wonder, in view of your suspicious curiosity about the history of our family, if you were thinking of attempting a similar bogus claim as a client of mine was subjected to last year when someone turned up claiming to be his illegitimate son.
‘Fortunately we were able to prove that his claim was totally fictitious, but the stress of what he was put through caused my client to suffer some acute anxiety and it also placed a great deal of strain on his marriage since this young man was claiming that he had actually been conceived during the early years of the marriage.’
‘It does happen.’ Bobbie observed.
‘Maybe, but in my view that isn’t any justification for the havoc that the result of some unfortunate liaison can cause.’
‘The result. You’re talking about human beings,’ Bobbie told him passionately. ‘People with feelings ...with needs, with emotions...but, of course, that’s something you wouldn’t know anything about, isn’t it?’ she flung at him furiously.
‘On the contrary, I know exactly what it means,’ Luke corrected her softly.
An electric tension suddenly seemed to have filled the room, making it difficult for Bobbie to breathe properly. She could hear the rapid shallowness of her own breathing and was even more conscious of the heavy unevenness of Luke’s making an agonizingly sensual counterpoint to her own.
She could see a small betraying pulse beat under Luke’s skin as he hardened his jaw and, like a forest fire spreading over dry, desperately thirsty timber, all it took was the merest breath of air, the smallest indrawn breath, to fan and spread the dangerous flames Bobbie could feel leaping so fiercely to life inside her; all that was needed was the merest spark to set alight the raging conflagration of passion they had shared earlier, and for her, in making that verbal reference to it, Luke had supplied that spark.
Hungrily she focused on his mouth and was unable to make herself look away. Think about Mom, then about Sam...think about how Luke has insulted you, misjudged you...hurt you, she warned herself, but it was no use. The fire was already burning out of control and she was consumed by it and with the searing heat of her own need—a need she knew instinctively that Luke shared.
‘My God, you know what you’re inviting...inciting... don’t you?’ Luke warned her rawly, but he was still coming towards her, closing the gap between them, taking hold of her with the same bruising grip he had used earlier but which they both knew had nothing to do with wanting to imprison or hurt her.
Bobbie didn’t even try to escape or move. She simply stood there watching... waiting... knowing...
‘You realise that this time I’m not going to be able to stop, don’t you?’ Luke told her thickly. ‘You know what’s going to happen between us...what’s destined to happen between us....’
‘You hate me,’ Bobbie reminded him, making a last feeble bid to drag them both back to sanity and reality.
‘Yes,’ Luke agreed bleakly, ‘I hate you. I hate myself, too. In fact, I loathe and despise the pair of us. You, and myself even more so for knowing what you are and yet still wanting you. Wanting you,’ he groaned and then said savagely, ‘Dear God, if only it were that simple. I shouldn’t have brought you here!’
‘Then let me go,’ Bobbie said simply. She wasn’t going to plead with him, to beg to be set free and besides... It was her pride that was stopping her from doing so, she assured herself heatedly. That was all. Her pride...nothing else and most certainly not the twisting, aching, crying need for him that was tormenting her so painfully.
‘I can’t,’ Luke told her broodingly, focusing abruptly on her as he added, ‘You know that and you know why....’
‘Because...because of Ruth,’ Bobbie whispered, her mouth suddenly dry, her heart pounding with heavy, slow strokes that made her feel breathless and light-headed.
She stiffened as Luke’s tortured gaze dropped to her mouth. He lifted his hand and dragged the hard pad of his thumb along her bottom lip.
The sensation of the slight roughness of his skin moving against the sensitive flesh of her mouth, already swollen from the passionate kisses they had exchanged at Queensmead, made Bobbie’s whole body shiver in sensual pleasure—a reaction which she knew Luke had to have registered.
His thumb stopped moving, the air between them so charged with their mutual tension that Bobbie could hardly breathe.
‘You do know what you’re doing to me, don’t you?’ Luke demanded roughly before his head came down.
Instinctively Bobbie tried to protect herself from what she knew was going to happen, trying to sink her teeth into his thumb in a defensive action born out of panic; only instead of withdrawing from her in angry pain, Luke pressed his thumb deeper into her mouth, caressing the soft, swollen, exquisitely responsive inner flesh of her lip.
‘Look at me,’ Bobbie heard him commanding her rawly. ‘Look at me and see what you’re doing to me.’ She battled and failed to control the soft moan of tormented pleasure that escaped her. ‘Look at me, Bobbie.’
Helplessly she did so, her own eyes widening in shocked recognition of the desire, the arousal, the fiercely male pleasure she could see burning so darkly in his eyes.
It was impossible for her to look away, impossible, too, for her to prevent him from seeing in her own expression her feminine counterpoint to his arousal.
Weakly she gave in to the need overpowering her, touching his flesh with the tip of her tongue, savouring the taste and texture of it before wantonly drawing it deeper into her mouth, stroking and sucking on his thumb with a rhythmic urgency she was far, far beyond controlling.
Through the heat haze of her own passion, she heard Luke mutter something beneath his breath and then he was kissing her mouth with the kind of passion that sent her own body into a tumultuous response, wrapping his arms around her and still kissing her; picking her up and carrying her through to the bedroom.
Bobbie had a vague impression of cool neutral colours and natural fabrics, a large bed with polished wooden headboard and footboard, a couple of matching, very masculine chests, the clean, fresh smell of cedar warmed by sandalwood as though the creamily soft bedlinen had been stored in an antique armoire.
As he laid her on the bed, Bobbie could see the entwined initials embroidered onto the pillows, a legacy, no doubt, from some past Crighton’s bride’s lovingly prepared dowry.
‘I shouldn’t be doing this. It goes against everything I’ve ever believed in, everything I’ve been—’
‘Then stop! Stop now and let me go,’ Bobbie interrupted Luke wildly as she lay imprisoned beneath him, his hands framing her face as he searched her face.
He gave her an unkind smile.
‘Is that really what you want?’ he tormented her, lifting one hand to deliberately trace a line downwards from the hollow of her throat between her breasts.
Dear God! She could almost see, never mind feel, her breasts swelling and straining upwards in wanton and urgent demand for his touch—and not just the touch of his hands, she acknowledged as he bent his head and slowly started to use his mouth to follow the path of his tormenting finger.
She could feel herself starting to tremble violently. The scent of his skin, his hair, of him, filled her nostrils like some kind of black-magic aphrodisiac.
‘Luke...’ She moaned his name, a soft, keening sound of female need, closing her eyes and arching her body, quiveringly, achingly, desperately trying to cling on to the self-control she could feel slipping away from her and carrying her along with all the momentum and danger of a mountain avalanche.
She could feel the warmth of his breath against her skin through her clothes and had to fight the sharp urge to slide her fingers into his hair and urge him closer to her body. He was kissing the space between the buttons fastening her top, his mouth pushing aside the fabric as he played on her tormented body and overstrung emotions, deliberately tantalising and tormenting her, she felt sure.
But she was gone way, way beyond the point where she could summon pride and common sense or even dignity to halt the landslide, the shocking swiftness of her descent into the dark realm of her almost violent demanding needs and when Luke’s hand reached out to cover her breast over her clothes she cried out harshly in longing to have him touch her more intimately, to have him satisfy the hunger, the urgency she felt for skin-on-skin contact.
She wanted him so much that she didn’t even realise what she was doing as she started to tug frantically at her top.
‘What is it...what do you want?’ she heard Luke demanding hoarsely as his hand covered her own and held it fast against her body, trapping it and her as he looked deep into her eyes. ‘Tell me, Bobbie,’ he insisted thickly. ‘Tell me...I want to hear you say it....’
Bobbie licked her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, shuddering as she felt the fierce lick of the inner flames burning through her. ‘I want you, Luke...I want you to...’
‘Yes...you want me to what?’ he asked her rawly. ‘You want me to tear every stitch of clothing from your body and leave it...you...naked to me...to my eyes... my hands...my mouth...?’
Bobbie moaned, trembling intensely, unable to stop herself from reacting, not just to what he was saying to her and the mental images he was conjuring up for her, but to what she could see in his eyes, as well, the message he was so clearly giving her that whilst he might verbally be playing the protagonist and pretending that he was aloof from the need that burned through her and fully in control of himself and her, the truth was that he had as little control over what was happening and his own fiercely male response to it as she had herself.
And perhaps that was why instead of fighting him, clawing her way back to reality and resisting everything he was offering her, everything she knew she so badly wanted, everything she knew he so badly wanted, she let him see in her eyes exactly what she was feeling, exactly what she was needing, exactly what the passionate, explosive, annihilating blend of physical desire and angry emotion was doing to her.
‘Yes. Yes. I want all of that...and more, much more...more....’ she admitted huskily, wildly, giving in to the dangerous thrill of not just going with the speeding avalanche but actively pushing it, increasing its velocity, its power. Somewhere, way, way below her, trauma and pain awaited her but at this moment all she cared about was the shocking, hitherto unknown, all-consuming excitement of being exposed to so much danger, of being a part of it, co-responsible for it, of knowing, despite what Luke was trying to imply, that all she had to do to make him join her in her self-created descent to destruction was to reach up, yes, as she was doing right now, and start unfastening the buttons of his shirt. Not all of them...not yet...just enough for her to be able to slide her hands inside his shirt so that she could caress the hard bones of his shoulders whilst her tongue tip explored the hollow of his throat and then moved upwards to caress his jaw.
She heard him groan, felt the reverberation of the low, tormented sound he couldn’t withhold all the way down to her toes and knew that now he would do it, now he would do exactly what he had threatened as she felt the hands he had used to imprison her tugging feverishly at her clothes, trembling against her skin as he unfastened and pulled down her top, exposing her breasts to the late-afternoon sunlight so that they were gilded with its warmth.
‘Oh God. Milk and honey,’ she thought she heard him mutter as he cupped them both and then rubbed the pads of his thumbs over and over her nipples until she lost control completely and could only hear herself crying out pleadingly to him that she wanted, needed, had to feel the heat, the touch of his mouth against them. ‘Like this?’ he demanded rawly.
But she couldn’t make any response. All she could do was to hold the back of his head in her hands and look down at his dark hair as he lay against her breast and the hot, urgent tug of his mouth on her nipple sent a jolt of sensation hot-wiring all the way from the centre of her breast to the heart of her womb. Instinctively her thighs parted, her body arching, a shocked cry leaving her lips as she realised what was going to happen.
Luke knew it, too. She could tell by the way he was looking at her as he reluctantly released her breast to look into her face whilst he still nuzzled its swollen temptation.
‘This shouldn’t be happening.’ Bobbie hadn’t realised she had spoken the words out loud until she felt Luke’s hands travelling lower down her body. ‘No,’ she protested, but they both knew her denial wasn’t of him or his touch but of her own response to it.
‘Take me now...take me now, Bobbie,’ she heard him whispering hoarsely to her. ‘You know you want to. You know you’re ready to.’
She didn’t make any verbal response. She couldn’t. Both of them were shaking as he removed the rest of their clothes, and when she saw him looking at her, Bobbie wanted desperately to be able to hold on to the moment, to lie proudly beneath his gaze, all female. She wanted to have the time to do her own share of gazing, to subject his naked body to as uninhibited and erotic a scrutiny as he did to hers, but she couldn’t. Quite simply, they didn’t have the time. She didn’t have the time and the feeling that engulfed her as she saw that he was ready for her turned the whole of her insides to liquid heat.
His first thrust made her clench her teeth to try to stop herself from grinding them together in frustration, it was so slow and careful.
She wanted to urge him to move faster, deeper, to ride the wave of her desire for him as it crested but then she forgot what it was she had been about to say...to demand... as he started to thrust once more, swiftly, deeply, once, twice and then again, and just as she was beginning to pick up his rhythm, returning to his earlier slower movement.
It was torment, torture, an unbearable white hell of sensation so acutely pleasurable that she wanted to scream with the exquisite ecstasy of it. But quite simply, there wasn’t time. Even as she opened her mouth the wave broke, sending them both crashing through the foam-speckled, churningly fierce, white-water rapids of their mutual desire.
She heard Luke cry out, the sound of a man in mortal agony or immortal ecstasy, and then, shockingly, shudderingly, it was over.
When Bobbie opened her eyes, the bedroom was in darkness. It took her several seconds to remember where she was and why. She had fallen so quickly and so deeply asleep after...after...afterwards, that her body was still curved with feminine vulnerability next to Luke’s. Not that she could have moved away from him even if she had wanted to, at least not without waking him up, because one very powerful male thigh—one very powerful, naked male thigh—was thrown across her body, anchoring her to the bed and to him.
Even though she hadn’t moved, something must have alerted Luke to the fact that she was awake because suddenly she felt the change in the tempo of his warm breath against the nape of her neck. His hand stroked slowly down her naked arm and then up again, coming to rest against her bare breast. Tiny quivers of sensation flooded her body, tiny pinpoint darts of pleasure emanating from the vulnerable place below her ear that he was caressing so slowly and deliciously with his mouth.
‘Turn round,’ she heard him instructing her softly. ‘I want to kiss you properly.’
This time the build-up was more leisurely, the caresses he bestowed on her body and she on his, with both their hands and their lips, more intimate and prolonged, but the final outcome was the same—an explosion of white-hot passion that engulfed the two of them, causing them to cry out and cling to one another as the full flood of their shared need ripped through them both.
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