The Perfect Seduction, page 1
Letter to Reader
Title Page
The Crighton Family
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
EPILOGUE
PERFECT MARRIAGE MATERIAL
Copyright
Dear Reader,
When I first started to write, my favorite reading was sagas, stories spanning not just generations but centuries, with young brides who grew to become loved matriarchs, aggravating younger sons who matured into fine strong men, and daughters who, like their mothers, kept a watchful maternal eye on their children—and their children’s children.
As an author, I have concentrated on the modern-day romances I enjoy writing so much. But the desire to write a series of novels based around one family has never left me—partly because my own personal ideal is to live in a small country town surrounded by a network of family connections. And I am fortunate to live in a part of the English countryside, Cheshire, which is steeped in history, the perfect setting for my family series.
I very much wanted to write about the emotion, joy and often sadness that bond a family together, and with this series I feel that I have in some sense fulfilled a part of myself—the name Crighton originally belonged to my husband’s mother’s family. I hope you will take my fictional family to your heart and love them as much as I do.
Welcome to Penny Jordan’s miniseries featuring the Crighton family.
This is no ordinary family because, although the affluent Crightons might appear to have it all, shocking revelations and heartache lie just beneath the surface of their perfect, charmed lives.
Penny Jordan has been writing for more than fifteen years and has an outstanding record: over 100 novels published, including the phenomenally successful Power Games, Cruel Legacy and Power Play, which hit the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists.
Her latest mainstream release—A Perfect Family—gives the full inside story of the Crighton family and is available through MIRA Books. Their story continues in three Harlequin Presents novels:
The Perfect Seduction (#1941 March 1998) Perfect Marriage Material (#1948 April 1998) The Perfect Match? (#1954 May 1998)
Penny Jordan
The Perfect Seduction
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN
MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
The Crighton Family
BEN CRIGHTON: Proud patriarch of the family, a strong-minded character in his seventies, determined to see his dynasty thrive and prosper.
RUTH CRIGHTON. Ben’s sister. After a tragic love affair during the war years, Ruth has devoted herself to the family and become a source of comfort and advice.
DAVID CRIGHTON: Twin brother of Jon, and favorite son of Ben. Glamorous, charming and selfish, he doesn’t deserve his status as heir to the Crighton fortune....
TIGGY CRIGHTON: Beautiful, fragile wife of David, an ex-model who is determined to remain youthful as long as possible. Desperate for attention, she flirts with all men.
OLIVIA JOHNSON: Daughter of David and Tiggy, an independent young woman who’s met her match in husband Caspar. In defiance of family opposition, Livvy became a talented lawyer outside the family firm.
CASPAR JOHNSON: An American law tutor, devoted to his wife, Olivia.
JON CRIGHTON: Younger twin of David, steady and reliable, he carries the burden of responsibility in the family law firm.
JENNY CRIGHTON: Wife of Jon, a very practical and warmhearted woman devoted to her family. Partner in a local antique business and a role model for her niece, Livvy.
LOUISE and KATE: Twin teenage daughters of Jon and Jenny. Vibrant, spirited characters determined to go their own way.
JOSS: Charming ten-year-old son of Jon and Jenny.
LUKE CRIGHTON: Charismatic, devastatingly attractive, a talented lawyer with women vying for his attention. Part of the Chester branch of the Crighton family.
BOBBIE MILLER: A beautiful and bright young woman, determined to have revenge on the Crighton family for the heartache they caused her mother. She sees Luke as a means of getting close to the family....
SAM MILLER: Bobbie’s twin sister, living in America.
The Crighton Family
CHAPTER ONE
JOSS saw her first. He was on his way back from visiting his great-aunt Ruth in her house on Church Walk and she was standing in the churchyard studying the headstones, her head bent over one of them, a tumble of thick, glossy blonde curls obscuring her face. When she looked up, alerted to his presence by the sound of a small twig cracking under his foot, Joss stared at her in open wonder and awe.
She was tall, much much taller than him; at least six foot, he estimated.
‘And a couple of inches,’ she drawled in amusement as she watched the way he was assessing her height, ‘and then I guess you’d be somewhere roundabouts right. I-guess no one kinda likes to think of a woman being over six foot. Tell them you’re five-eleven, it’s okay and my, aren’t you lucky being so tall, but tell them you’re sixone going on six-two and they think you’re a freak. After all, what kinda right-thinking woman allows herself to grow too tall for most of your average guys.’
‘I don’t think you’re too tall,’ Joss told her gallantly, manfully squaring his own ten-year-old shoulders and looking up into her eyes.
And what eyes they were, surely the deepest, darkest blue that ever was. Joss had never seen eyes like them before. He had never seen anyone like her before.
She watched him gravely for a second before her mouth curled into a smile that made Joss’s insides turn to jelly and told him, ‘Why that’s mighty kind of you, but I guess I know what you’re really thinking ... that for a woman this tall finding a boy tall enough for me to look up to is kinda hard. Yes, well, you’re right,’ she went on with another dazzling smile, ‘and if you happen to know of any—’
‘I do,’ Joss told her quickly, already fiercely protective of her; already determined that no one should dare to criticise her or find her less than complete perfection, not even she herself. As he gazed at her, his eyes mirrored the intensity and immediacy of his first calf-love.
Speculatively she hesitated, not wanting to hurt him and yet at the same time wary of any involvement that might deflect her from her purpose in being there.
Haslewich might not be on any official tourist route like Chester, but she had been determined to visit it and, as yet, she had still not seen the remains of the castle and its wall, nor the newly sanitised salt-works that had recently been opened to the public as a tourist attraction, never mind the rest of the town’s historic sites. So far, in fact, all she had done was glance around the churchyard.
‘I’ve got two cousins,’ she heard Joss telling her. ‘Well, they aren’t exactly cousins,’ he acknowledged. ‘They’re really seconds, or maybe even thirds, I don’t know which. Aunt Ruth would know.
‘But anyway, James is six foot two and Luke is even taller and then there’s Alistair and Niall and Kit and Saul, too, I suppose, although he’s quite old—’
‘Gee...I’m really impressed,’ Bobbie interrupted him gently.
‘I could always introduce you to them,’ Joss offered enthusiastically. ‘That is, if you’re going to be here for a while...?’
He let the question hang.
‘Well, that kinda depends. You see ... gee ... I’m sorry but I don’t know your name. We haven’t introduced ourselves yet, have we? I’m Bobbie, short for Roberta,’ she told him whilst inwardly acknowledging ruefully that she really didn’t have the time to waste on this sort of thing, but he was just so appealing and not a day over ten or eleven. Give him another ten or fifteen years and he was going to be dynamite. She wondered absently what his cousins were actually like.
‘Bobbie...I like that,’ he told her and she hid her smile as the look in his eyes told her that whatever her name had turned out to be, it would have got an equally enthusiastic response. ‘I’m Joss,’ he added, ‘Joss Crighton.’
Joss Crighton. That altered everything. Thick eyelashes veiled her eyes.
‘Well now, Joss Crighton, suppose you and I go find a diner and get to know one another a little bit better and you can tell me all about these cousins of yours. Would they be Crightons, too?’ she asked him casually.
‘Yes, they are,’ he agreed. ‘But ... well, it’s a long story.’
‘I can’t wait to hear it. They’re my favourite kind,’ she assured him solemnly.
As he fell into step beside her, matching his own stride to her long-legged, elegantly feminine walk, Joss couldn’t help stealing awed glances at her.
She was wearing cream trousers and a shirt in the same colour with a camelly-coloured coat over the top; her blonde hair, now that she had lifted her head, hung down past her shoulders in thick, luxurious waves. Joss could feel his heart threatening to burst with pride and delight as he guided her through the town square and into one of the pretty, narrow streets that led off it.
‘Gee, is that really real?’ she paused to enquire as they passed a clutch of half-timbered Elizabethan buildings, huddled together for support.
‘Yes, they were built in the reign of Elizabeth I,’ Joss told her importantly. ‘The main structure of wooden beams is infilled with panels of wattle an
‘Uh-huh,’ Bobbie responded, refraining from telling him that she had majored in British history before switching her talents to a more modeRN and financially rewarding field.
‘We don’t actually have diners in this country,’ Joss informed her politely, ‘but there is a ... a place just down here....’
Bobbie hid her amusement. No doubt he was taking her to the town’s McDonald’s. Only, as she soon discovered, he wasn’t and she hesitated fractionally as he directed her attention to a very smart and up-market-looking wine bar, glancing thoughtfully from the sign above the doorway that stipulated that alcoholic beverages were not supplied to persons under eighteen to Joss’s very obviously nowhere near eighteen-year-old face and back again. She didn’t want to hurt his dignity, but at the same time she didn’t exactly relish the thought of being asked to leave because she was accompanied by a minor.
‘I can go in so long as I don’t have anything alcoholic to drink. I know the people who run it,’ he explained as he pushed the door open for her. At the same time he crossed his fingers behind his back as he tried to calculate just what he could buy with what was left of his week’s bus fare and spending money, which was all he had in his pocket, and whether or not Minnie Cooke, who ran the wine bar, would give him any credit.
Minnie’s brother, Guy, was in partnership with Joss’s mother in an antique business, which they ran. She recognised Joss as soon as he walked into the wine bar, her eyebrows lifting slightly as she looked from Joss to his companion.
‘Yes, Joss?’ she asked him cautiously.
‘I ... er ... we’d both like a drink and something to eat,’ he told her firmly, adding in a far less certain voice, ‘Minnie, could I have a word with you?’
‘Look, why don’t you let me make this my treat?’ Bobbie offered, guessing his dilemma. He was just at an age when any kind of public humiliation, no matter how slight, was a major issue, and the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt or slight him in any way, but Minnie Cooke, too, had summed up the situation and stepped into the breach.
‘Why don’t you find yourselves a table. I’ll send someone over to take your order. We can sort out the bill later,’ she added to Joss quietly, as Bobbie made her way to a table.
Whoever Joss’s companion was, she certainly was a stunningly beautiful woman, Minnie acknowledged as she dispatched one of her many nieces to take their order. She was most probably a guest they had staying with the family. Olivia, Joss’s cousin, was married to that American, wasn’t she?
‘Jade,’ she told her niece sharply, ‘go and serve table four.’
‘I’ll have a glass of Perrier with lemon and ice,’ Bobbie told Jade easily. ‘Nothing to eat, though.’
‘I’ll have the same.’ Joss couldn’t quite conceal his relief as he heard Bobbie order, beaming his approval at her across their shared table.
‘So,’ she prompted after Jade had brought them their drinks. ‘These cousins of yours.’ She put her elbow on the table and leaned her chin on her hand as she smiled at him.
Joss was completely bewitched. A huge lump filled his throat and he had the same indescribable feeling that he always got when he watched the young badger or fox cubs coming out for their first night’s play in the spring, watched over by their mothers. Like them, she touched his emotions in a way he simply didn’t have the words to describe.
Guiltily Bobbie nibbled on her bottom lip. She really ought not to be doing this. He was so young and so vulnerable. She was here for a purpose, she reminded herself sternly, and she couldn’t let herself be swayed from that self-chosen task now, especially not by...
‘I guess with their kinda height they must be sports jocks, huh,’ she joked to Joss as she banished her unwanted thoughts.
‘No,’ Joss told her seriously.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her; he had never seen anyone remotely like her. There couldn’t be anyone like her. She was unique, wonderful, perfect and certainly nothing like his own twin sisters or the other girls he knew. She was older than them, of course, just how much older he wasn’t quite sure but she must be twenty-something.
‘Luke and James are both barristers,’ he told her. ‘That is, they’re...’ He tried to think of the American term, suddenly realising that she might not fully understand just what a barrister was.
But apparently she did, because she shook her head and told him firmly, ‘Yes, I know ... lawyers, huh. Gee. I guess I’d have preferred it if they were sports jocks,’ she confessed, wrinkling her nose.
‘Well, they are, sort of,’ Joss assured her. ‘James played rugger for his school and so did Luke and Luke was an Oxford Blue, as well. That’s...that’s with rowing,’ he explained.
‘Rowing...’ Bobbie just managed to conceal her smile. When she had been doing her master’s, there had been a couple of guys over from Oxbridge working alongside her. ‘And you’re sure that they’re as tall as you say they are?’ she teased him mock-seriously.
Joss nodded his head.
‘And they’re really your cousins...?’
‘Third cousins, I think,’ Joss agreed.
‘Third cousins... Gee... I guess you’d better explain to me what that means,’ Bobbie coaxed him, mentally silencing the scornful inner voice that demanded to know why she needed to ask that question when she had a whole string of thirds and fourths of her own back home.
‘Well, I’m not sure exactly what it means,’ Joss began, ‘but you see in the beginning there was Great-Grandfather Josiah. He came from Chester with his wife to start a new solicitor’s practice here in Haslewich because of a quarrel he had had with his father and brothers in Chester and so the Crighton family here in Haslewich is separate from the Crightons who live in Chester, but we are still related. Luke and James and their sisters, Alison and Rachel, as well as Alistair, Niall and Kit all belong to the Chester branch of the family. Luke’s father, Henry, and his brother, Laurence, are both barristers, too, or at least they were. They’re now both retired. Luke is a QC, that’s Queen’s Counsel. That’s what Gramps wants Max to be, but I’m not sure—’
‘Whoa, hang on...hang on.’ Bobbie laughed. ‘Who are Gramps and Max? It’s all just too confusing...’ She shook her head.
‘It wouldn’t be,’ Joss assured her with great daring, ‘if you met them.’
‘Met them?’ Bobbie’s dense blue eyes widened in curiosity. ‘Well now, there’s a thought, but—’
‘We... my twin sisters are having a party this weekend to celebrate their eighteenth birthdays,’ Joss hurried on eagerly. ‘It’s going to be held at the Grosvenor... that’s a hotel in Chester. You could come and then you could meet them all....’
‘I could come...’ Bobbie frowned. ‘Well now, Joss, that’s mighty kind of you, but I don’t think...’
‘You could come as my friend,’ Joss told her. ‘It’s allowed...I am allowed to take a friend. It will be all right....’
A friend maybe, Bobbie conceded but she doubted that the type of friend his parents had in mind when making such an agreement was a twenty-six-year-old woman they didn’t know, especially when... Joss was watching her ... waiting, a look of mingled pleading and hope in his eyes, and she didn’t have the heart to disappoint him, and besides ... why look a gift horse in the mouth after all...?
‘And I’ll get to meet these tall cousins of yours, you say?’ she responded, pretending to be weighing the matter up.
Joss nodded his head.
‘And you think he’ll like me, do you, this Luke? Wasn’t that who you said was the taller of the two?’
‘Well, er...’ Suddenly Joss was flushing and unable to meet her eyes.
‘What is it?’ she quizzed him. ‘Doesn’t he like blondes?’
‘Oh yes, he does,’ Joss assured her fervently, immediately looking so mortified that she had to fight hard not to explode into laughter as she guessed what was wrong.
