She knew that Max had been badly injured; she knew he was close to death

But somehow, Maddy simply could not make her brain accept the fact that she might never see him again, that he might never walk arrogantly and irritably through the front door of Queensmead, bringing with him that highly charged atmosphere that always seemed to be so much a part of him.

She closed her eyes. Max was far too alive to be dying. Her throat suddenly closed and her body started to tremble.

“Oh, God, please let him live,” Maddy prayed. Max wouldn’t want to die. She tried to picture him, her husband, lying white and still in his hospital bed, but she couldn’t. All she could visualize was the way he had looked the first time they had gone to bed together, when she had woken up to watch him with the eyes and the emotions of a woman deeply and bemusedly in love.

The smell of him on her skin, the taste of him on her mouth—these were sensations she would remember forever.

As she raised her cup to her lips, Maddy suddenly realized that her face was wet with tears.

Penny Jordan’s novels “… touch every emotion.” —Romantic Times

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Crightons

A Perfect Family

The Perfect Seduction

Perfect Marriage Material

Figgy Pudding

The Perfect Lover

The Perfect Sinner

The Perfect Father

A Perfect Night

Coming Home

Starting Over

The Perfect Sinner
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

The Crightons

Title Page

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Copyright

1

Max Crighton, thirty years old, married, successful, sexy and the father of two healthy, energetic play school age children, and right now thoroughly disenchanted and bored with his lot, surveyed the other occupants of the ballroom of Chester’s Grosvenor Hotel—presently the scene of his sister’s wedding reception—with cynical contempt.

Louise, the bride and the most dominant of his two younger twin sisters, was laughing up into the handsome face of her new husband, Gareth Simmonds, while various members of the collective Crighton and Simmonds clans looked on in what to Max was grotesquely irritating sentimentality. Louise’s twin sister Katie stood to one side of the bride, and slightly in her shadow.

Twins!

Twins ran through the genealogical history of the Crighton family. His own father was the younger one of one pair and his grandfather, Ben Crighton, the lone survivor of another.

Twins!

Max was eternally grateful to his parents for the fact that his life had not been overshadowed; that he had not been overshadowed by another half, another self, threatening his position of sole supremacy, and it was about the only thing he was grateful to them for.

As he glanced around the large room, Max was coolly amused to observe the way so many of his relatives failed to meet his gaze. They didn’t like him very much, but he didn’t care. Why should he? Having people like him had never been one of Max’s ambitions.

The brand new Bentley Turbo convertible car he was currently driving, his position as a partner in one of London’s most prestigious sets of legal chambers; they hadn’t been acquired because people liked him. To be one of London’s foremost barristers had been Max’s driving goal in life, ever since he had been old enough to learn from his grandfather just what the word barrister meant.

Max’s uncle David, his father’s twin brother, had once been destined for that same golden future, but Uncle David had failed to make it. There had been a time, too, when Max had feared that he also might fail, when despite all the promises he had made himself, all the promises he had made to his grandfather, he might, through no fault of his own, have the prize he so desperately wanted snatched from him at the last minute. But he had found a way to turn the situation to his own advantage, to show those who had tried to bring him down just how foolish they had been.

He glanced across the room to where his wife, Madeleine, was sitting with his mother and his grandfather’s sister, his great aunt Ruth.

While not one of his female cousins of his own generation, nor the wives of his male ones, could ever be said to be the kind of high-profile trophy wives that their partners could take satisfaction in flaunting beneath the envious eyes of other men, they were certainly attractive enough—very attractive indeed, in fact in the case of Luke’s wife Bobbie—to underline Madeleine’s dreary, boring plainness.

Max’s mouth curled cynically as his wife glanced up and saw that he was watching her, in her eyes the look of a rabbit momentarily trapped in the dazzle of a car’s headlights, before she quickly looked away from him.

Madeleine did, of course, have one redeeming feature as his wife. She was extremely wealthy and extremely well connected, or at least her family was.

‘What do you mean, you don’t want our baby,’ she had faltered in shocked disbelief when she had so humbly and so adoringly brought him the news that she was pregnant with their first child.

‘I mean, my oh-so-stupid wife, that I don’t want it,’ Max had told her callously. ‘The reason I married you was not to procreate another generation of little Crightons, my cousins can do that….’

‘No … then why … why did you marry me?’ Madeleine had asked him tearfully.

It had amused him to see the dread in her eyes, to feel the fear she was trying so hard to conceal.

‘I married you because it was the only way I could get into a decent set of chambers,’ Max had told her coldly and truthfully, and cruelly. ‘Why so shocked?’ he had taunted her. ‘Surely you must have guessed….’

‘You said you loved me,’ Madeleine had reminded him painfully.

Max had thrown back his head and laughed.

‘And you believed me…. Did you really, Maddy, or were you just so desperate to get a man, to get laid, to get married, that you chose to believe me?

‘Get rid of it,’ he had instructed her, his glance flicking dispassionately towards her small, round stomach.

But Maddy hadn’t done as he had demanded. Instead she had defied him, and now there were two noisy, squalling brats to disrupt his life—not that he allowed them to do so.

It had been a positive stroke of genius on his part to encourage his grandfather to become so dependent on Maddy that the old man had insisted that she was the only person he wanted around him.

Persuading Maddy to virtually live full-time in Haslewich, the Cheshire town where he had grown up and where his great-grandfather had first begun the legal practice that his own father now ran, had been even easier, a move that had left him free to pursue his own life virtually unhindered by the interference and responsibility of two turbulent children and a clinging wife.

Max felt not the least degree of compunction about the affairs he had enjoyed during his marriage, relationships that in the main, had been conducted with female clients for whom he was acting, on whose behalf he had been instructed by their solicitors to ensure that their divorces from their extremely wealthy husbands allowed them to continue living in the same financial comfort they had been accustomed to during their marriages.

It was not unusual for these women—rich, beautiful, spoiled and very often either bored or vulnerable—to feel that a relationship with the handsome young barrister who was going to make their husband part with as much of his fortune as he could was a justifiable perk of their divorce, as well as an additional small triumph against their soon-to-be ex-husbands.

It was not to be hoped, of course, that they would keep the details of such a delicious piece of vengeance a secret.

Confidences were shared and exchanged with ‘girlfriends,’ and Max had very quickly become known as the barrister to have if one was getting a divorce—and not just because of the wonderful amounts of money he managed to wrest from previously determinedly ungenerous husbands.

Even his marriage to Maddy, which initially he had intended should last no longer than the time it took to get himself established, had begun to be a bonus. After all, marriage to Maddy and the existence of two small dependent children meant that all his lovers had to appreciate right from the start of their affair that it could only ever be a temporary thing, that no matter how desirable, how enticing they might be, he as a man of honour could not put his own needs, his own desires, above the security of his children. For their sakes he had to stay married.

‘If only there were more men like you …’ more than one of his lovers had whispered. ‘Your wife is so lucky….’

Max totally agreed, Madeleine was lucky. If he hadn’t married her she could have been condemned to a life of being the unmarried daughter.

There was currently a whisper that her father was being considered for the soon-to-be-vacant post of Lord Chief Justice, and it would certainly do his own career no harm at all if that whisper should become a reality.

Max knew that Madeleine’s parents didn’t particularly care for him, but it didn’t worry him. Why should it? His own parents, his own family didn’t like him very much, either. And he didn’t particularly like them. The only member of his family he had ever felt any real degree of warmth for had been his uncle David, and even that had been tinged with envy because his grandfather doted on David. Max also felt contempt for David, because for all his grandfather’s talk and praise, David had, after all, still only been the senior partner in the family’s small-town legal practice.

Love, the emotion that united and bonded other people, was an alien concept to Max. He loved himself, of course, but his feelings for others veered from mild contempt through disinterest to outright resentment and deep hostility.

In Max’s eyes, it was not his fault that others didn’t like him, it was theirs. Their fault and their loss.

Max glanced at his watch. He’d give it another half an hour and then he’d leave. Louise had originally wanted to get married on Christmas Eve, but the wedding had actually taken place a little bit earlier, primarily because it was the turn of Great-aunt Ruth and her American husband, Grant, to fly to the States to spend Christmas with Ruth’s daughter and her husband.

Great-aunt Ruth’s granddaughter, Bobbie, and her husband, Luke, one of the Chester Crightons, were going with them, along with their young daughter.

* * *

Several yards away, Bobbie Crighton, who had observed the way Max had looked at poor Maddy, reflected grimly to herself that Max really was detestable. She had once heard his cousin Olivia remark very succinctly, ‘Max is the kind of man who, no matter how attractive the woman he’s speaking with is, will always be looking over her shoulder to see if he can spot someone even better….’

Poor Maddy, indeed. Bobbie didn’t know how she could bear to stay in her marriage, but then, of course, there were the children.

She patted her own still-flat stomach with a small, secret smile; her second pregnancy had been confirmed only the previous week.

‘I think this time it could be twins,’ she had confided to Luke, who had raised his dark eyebrows and asked her dryly, ‘Women’s intuition?’

‘Well, one of us has got to produce a set,’ Bobbie had pointed out to him, ‘and I’m the right age for it now. Mothers in their thirties are more likely to have twins….’

‘In their thirties? You are only just thirty,’ Luke had reminded her.

‘Mmm … I know, and I rather think that these two were conceived on the night of my thirtieth birthday,’ she had told him softly.

Luke was one of four children—two boys and two girls. His father, Henry Crighton, and his father’s brother, Laurence, were the senior partners, now retired, in the original solicitors’ practice in Chester. Over eighty years ago there had been a quarrel between the then youngest son, Josiah Crighton, and his family, and he had broken away from them and gone on to found the Haslewich branch of the Crighton firm and family.

While Luke’s brother and sisters and the other Chester cousins and their Haslewich peers were extremely good friends, Ben Crighton, the most senior member of the Crighton family in Haslewich, was still obsessed by the family tradition of competitiveness with the Chester members, even if it was now in spirit only.

It had been a burning ambition of Ben’s all his life that initially his eldest son and then, when that had not been possible, his eldest grandson, Max, should achieve the goal that had been withheld from him and be called to the bar.

All through his growing years, Max had been alternately bribed and coerced by his grandfather to fulfil this goal, his naturally competitive spirit sharpened and fed by his grandfather’s tales of the injustices suffered by their own branch of the family and the need to restore the family’s pride by proving to ‘that Chester lot’ that they weren’t the only ones who could boast of reaching the higher echelons of the legal profession.

When Max had announced to his grandfather that he was to join one of London’s most prestigious sets of chambers, he had made Ben Crighton’s dearest wish come true.

As Bobbie surveyed the Grosvenor’s ballroom now, she couldn’t help remembering the first time she had attended another family occasion—Louise and her twin Katie’s coming of age, an event to which she, as a stranger then to the family, had been invited by Joss, Louise and Katie’s younger brother.

Max had behaved very gallantly towards her then. Too gallantly for a married man, as Luke hadn’t hesitated to point out. Conversely, she and Luke had clashed immediately, equally antagonistic towards each other.

She was glad that Louise had brought her wedding forward from Christmas Eve so that they could all attend. She would have hated to have missed the celebration, but she was looking forward to spending Christmas with her parents and sister as well. Her mother, Sarah Jane, would be thrilled when she told her about her pregnancy, and so, too, she hoped, would Sam…. A small frown touched her forehead as she thought about her twin sister.

Something was wrong with Sam’s life at the moment. She knew it, could sense it with that extraordinary magical bond that made them close….

In a small anteroom just off the ballroom, the youngest members of the Crighton family were having a small party all of their own, not so much by design as by accident. From her seat within watching distance of the door, Jenny Crighton was keeping a motherly eye on the events, though she knew they could come to no harm.

Who would have thought in such a short space of time that the family would produce so many little ones, a complete new generation.

Olivia, her husband’s niece and the eldest of his twin brother David’s two children, had started it all, and now she and Caspar, her American husband, had Amelia and Alex. Saul, Ben’s half-brother Hugh’s elder son, had Jemima, Robert and Meg from his first marriage and now a baby from his marriage to Tullah, and of course her own daughter-in-law, Maddy, had Leo and Emma.

Maddy … Jenny could feel her body tensing as she took a quick look at her daughter-in-law, who was seated between her and Ruth, her head bent down. Maddy might seem to the unaware onlooker calm and serene, but Jenny had seen the tears sparkling in her eyes several minutes ago and she had known who had been the cause of them.

Even now, after all these years, she still hadn’t come to terms with the reality that was her eldest son, and it hurt her unbearably to know that it was Max, flesh of her flesh, hers and Jon’s, who was the cause of so much hurt and pain.

She ached to ask her son why he behaved in the way he did. Why. What it was that motivated him to be the person he was, but she knew that if she even tried to talk to him he would simply give her that half mocking, half sneering contemptuous little smile of his and shrug his shoulders and walk away.

She had never been able to understand how she and Jon had ever produced a person like Max, and she knew that she never would. She knew, too, that every time she looked at her daughter-in-law and witnessed the pain her marriage was causing her, she was overwhelmed by guilt and despair.

Maddy was everything that she, Jenny, could have wanted in a daughter-in-law, or a daughter, and as such she was dearly loved by her, but Jenny would had to have had far less intelligence than she did have to be able to convince herself that Maddy was the kind of wife that Max should have gone for.

Max thrived on opposition, challenge, aggression. Max wanted most what he could have least, and poor Maddy just wasn’t … just couldn’t … Poor Maddy!

At her mother-in-law’s side, Madeleine Crighton had a pretty fair idea just what Jenny was thinking and she couldn’t blame her in the least.

Max had only arrived home at Queensmead this morning, the lovely old house that belonged to his grandfather and where Maddy and the children had now virtually made their permanent home, with only an hour to spare before the wedding began, having assured Maddy that he would be there early the previous evening. Not an auspicious start, and to make matters even worse, Leo was going through a belligerent and rather touchingly possessive phase where his mother was concerned. Unlike his father, Leo didn’t seem to realize that her looks made it a visible implausibility that any man could ever feel possessively jealous about her—and he had glowered at Max when he had arrived, refusing to leave her side to go to his father.

In private Maddy knew that Max couldn’t care less whether the children ignored him or not. In fact, if the truth were known, the less he had to do with them, the happier he was. After all, he had never wanted either of them.

But in public, it was different. In public, in front of his grandfather and others, his children had to be seen to love their father, which Leo, quite plainly at the moment, did not. And then Emma had been sick. Not, fortunately, badly enough to harm her dress, but certainly enough to cause the kind of delay that had Max swearing under his breath and telling Maddy with chilling cruelty that she was as useless as a mother as she was a wife.

Maddy knew what the true cause of his anger was, of course. It was a woman. It had to be. She knew the signs far too well now not to recognize them. Max had left a woman behind in London whom he would far rather be with. And no doubt she was the reason he had not come down to Haslewich last night as they had agreed.

Maddy told herself that his infidelity didn’t have the power to hurt her any more, but deep down inside she knew that it wasn’t true.

Maddy knew that her mother-in-law and the rest of Max’s family felt very sorry for her. She could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices, and sometimes, when she looked at Max’s cousins and their wives with their families and saw the love they shared, she felt positively rent with pain for all that she was missing out on, although she tried to tell herself stoically that what you never had you never missed. She had certainly never been loved as a child as she had longed to be. Her mother was a peer’s daughter who had always given Maddy the impression that she considered her marriage, and with it her husband and her daughter, as somehow slightly beneath her. She held herself slightly separate from them and spent most of her time on a round of visits to a variety of relatives while Maddy’s father, a career barrister, made his way via the Bench towards his goal of being appointed Lord Chief Justice.

Maddy, their only child, had not featured very significantly in her parents’ lives. Now that she was married she hardly saw them at all, and to come to Haslewich and discover that there was not just a home waiting for her with Max’s grandfather, but also a role to play where she was really genuinely needed had, for a time at least, been a comforting salve on the open wound of her destructive marriage.

Maddy was, by nature and instinct, one of life’s carers, and when other people grimaced over Max’s grandfather’s tetchiness, she simply smiled and explained gently that it was the pain he suffered in his damaged joints that caused him to be so irascible.

‘Maddy, you are a saint,’ she had been told more than once by his grateful relatives, but she wasn’t, of course, she was simply a woman—a woman who right now longed with the most ridiculous intensity to be the kind of woman whom a man might look at the way Gareth Simmonds, her sister-in-law Louise’s new husband, was looking at Louise, with love, with pride, with desire … with all the things Madeleine had once mistakenly and tragically convinced herself she had seen in Max’s eyes when he looked at her, but which had simply been mocking and contemptuous deceits designed to conceal his real feelings from her.

Max had married her for one reason and one reason only, as he had told her many, many times in the years since their wedding, and that reason had been his relentless ambition to be called to the bar; an ambition that she had discovered he might never have fulfilled without her father’s help.

‘Maddy, why do you put up with him? Why on earth don’t you divorce him?’ Louise had asked her impatiently one Christmas when both of them had sat and watched Max flirting openly and very obviously with a pretty young woman.

Maddy had simply shaken her head, unable to explain to Louise why she remained married to her brother. How could she when she couldn’t really explain it to herself? All she could have said was that here at Haslewich she felt safe and secure … wanted and needed…. Here, while she had a task to complete, she felt able to side-line the issue of her marriage, to pretend to herself, while Max was away in London and she was here, that it was not, after all, as bad as it might seem to others.

The truth was, Maddy suspected that she didn’t divorce Max because she was afraid of what her life might be, not so much without him as without his family. It was pathetic of her, she knew, but it wasn’t just for herself that she was being what others would see as weak. There were the children to be considered as well.

In Haslewich they were part of a large and lovingly interlinked family network where they had a luxury not afforded to many modern children, the luxury of growing up surrounded by their extended family—aunts, uncles, cousins. The Crighton family was part of this area of Cheshire, and Maddy desperately wanted to give her children a gift that she considered more priceless than anything else; the gift of security, of knowing they had a special place in their own special world.

‘But surely if you lived in London, the children would be able to see much more of their father,’ one recent acquaintance had commented to her not long ago.

Madeleine had bent her neat head over the buttons she was fastening on Leo’s coat so that her hair fell forward, concealing her expression as she had responded in a muffled voice, ‘Max’s work keeps him very busy. He works late most evenings….’

Luckily the other woman hadn’t pressed the subject, but as she ushered Leo towards the path that cut across behind the building where he attended play school classes three mornings a week—Madeleine refused to use the car unless she absolutely had to, one of the pleasures of living in a small country town was surely that one could walk almost everywhere—Madeleine had felt acutely self-conscious. Within the family it was accepted that Max remained in London supposedly mostly during the working week, but in reality for much longer stretches of time than that, so that she and the children could often go weeks if not months on end without really seeing him.

Although her marriage was a subject that she never discussed—with anyone—Madeleine knew that Max’s family had to be aware that it wasn’t merely necessity that kept Max away.

Sometimes she was sorely tempted to confide in Jenny, Max’s mother, but the natural reticence and quiet pride that were so much a part of her gentle nature always stopped her, and what, after all, could Jenny do? Command Max to love her and the children; command him to …

Stop it, Madeleine hastily warned herself, willing her eyes not to fill with tears.

Max was already in a foul-enough mood without her making things any worse. He might not be the kind of man who would ever physically abuse either his wife or his children, but his silent contempt and his hostility towards them were sometimes so tangible that Madeleine felt she could almost smell the dark, bitter miasma of them in the air of a room even after he had left it.

The first thing she always did after one of his brief visits to Queensmead was to go round and open all the windows and to breathe lungsful of clean, healing fresh air.

‘Where’s that husband of yours?’ she remembered Ben asking her fretfully recently as he shifted his weight from his bad hip to his good one. The doctor had warned him the last time he had gone for a check-up that there was a strong possibility that he might have to have a second hip operation to offset the wear-and-tear caused to his good hip by him favouring it to ease the pain in his ‘bad’ one.

Predictably he had erupted in a tirade of angry refusal to accept what the doctor was telling him, and it had taken Madeleine several days to get him properly calmed down again.

But despite his irascibility and his impatience, she genuinely liked him. There was a very kind, caring side to him, an old-fashioned protective maleness that she knew some of the younger female members of his family considered to be irritating, but which she personally found rather endearing.

‘I do not know how you put up with him,’ Olivia had told her vehemently only the previous week. She had called to see Madeleine, bringing with her Christmas presents for Leo and Emma, and she had brought her two small daughters, Amelia and Alex, with her.

‘Daughters! Sons, that’s what this family needs,’ her grandfather had sniffed disparagingly when she had taken the girls in to see him. ‘It’s just as well we’ve got young Leo here,’ he had added proudly as he gazed fondly at his great-grandson.

‘I will not have him making my girls feel that they are in any way inferior to boys,’ Olivia had fumed later in the kitchen to Madeleine as they drank their coffee.

‘He doesn’t mean anything by it,’ Madeleine had tried to comfort her, pushing the plate of Christmas biscuits she had baked that morning towards Olivia as she spoke.

‘Oh, yes he does,’ Olivia had told her darkly as she munched one of them, ‘and I should know. After all, I heard enough of it when I was growing up. He never stopped making me feel … reminding me … that as a girl I could never match up to Max, and my father was just as bad. Sometimes I used to wish that Max had been my father’s child and that Uncle Jon had been my father….’

‘Jenny’s told me how dreadfully Gramps spoiled Max when he was growing up,’ Madeleine remarked quietly.

‘Spoiled him is exactly right,’ Olivia had agreed forthrightly, momentarily obviously forgetting that Madeleine was Max’s wife. ‘Anything Max wanted he got, and Gramps was forever boasting about him to everyone else. Whenever we had a get-together with the Chester lot, there was Gramps singing Max’s praises, and woe betide anyone who tried to argue with him.

‘I hate to think what it would have done to Gramps if Max hadn’t got a place in chambers. I know that it was touch-and-go for a while, and of course, the fact that your father is so influential obviously helped in the end.’

‘Yes,’ Madeleine had agreed. She knew Olivia far too well to suspect her of any kind of malice or unkindness. She was simply stating what she saw as the facts, and her opinions were quite naturally tainted by her dislike of Max. She had always been completely open with Madeleine about her feelings for her cousin, explaining that they went back a long way, and that much as she liked Madeleine herself, she doubted that she could ever pretend to feel anything other than wary acceptance of Max.

Did Olivia know that the only reason that Max had married her had been to further his career? Madeleine hoped not. Olivia was basically very kind-hearted, and Madeleine knew she would never have deliberately hurt her by raising the subject if she had known the whole truth.

‘Gramps is going to be putting an awful lot of pressure on Leo to follow in Max’s footsteps,’ she started to warn Madeleine, but Madeleine stopped her, shaking her head calmly.

‘Leo isn’t like Max,’ she told Olivia quietly. ‘I think if he takes after anyone, it’s Jon, and I suspect that if he does go into the law he will be quite happy to follow Jon into the Haslewich practice.

‘To be truthful, I think if any of the babes are destined to be real high flyers, it’s going to be your Amelia….’

Olivia had smiled lovingly at her elder daughter.

‘She is very quick and very determined,’ she had agreed, ‘but life doesn’t always turn out as we expect it to. Look at Louise. We all thought that she was going to be a real career girl, and look at her now. She and Gareth are so very, very much in love, and Louise is already talking about having a family and putting her career on hold. Now it’s Katie, whom all of us have always thought of as the quiet twin, the one who would probably settle down the first, who looks as though she’s going carve out a career for herself.’

Olivia didn’t say anything to her about the fact that she, Madeleine seemed to have no interest in anything outside her domestic life and her children, she noticed rawly.

‘Mmm … these cookies are delicious,’ Olivia had suddenly confounded her by saying. She added, ‘You could cook professionally, Maddy. I’m not surprised that you manage to coax Gramps into eating so well.’

Madeleine had said nothing, just as she had said nothing about the kitchen cupboards that were brimming with the fruits of her labours over the long summer and autumn—literally. She enjoyed gardening as well as cooking, and with Ruth’s expert tuition and assistance when she was in Haslewich, Madeleine had resurrected Queensmead’s neglected kitchen garden, with its espaliered fruit trees and its newly repaired glass house along its south-facing wall. She was presently cosseting the peach tree that had been Ruth and Jenny’s birthday present to her and that she hoped might bear fruit next summer.

Since moving into Queensmead, she had quietly and gently set about bringing the old house back to life—dusty rooms had been cleaned and repainted, furniture mended and waxed. She had even made the long trip north to Scotland to persuade her maternal grandparents to part with some of the sturdy country furniture not deemed grand enough for the lofty, elegant rooms of their Scottish castle and currently housed in its attics, but which she had known immediately would be perfectly at home at Queensmead.

Guy Cooke, the local antique dealer with whom Jenny had once been in partnership, had whistled in soundless admiration when he had visited Queensmead and been shown the newly revamped and furnished rooms.

‘Very nice,’ he had told Madeleine appreciatively. ‘Too many people make the mistake of furnishing houses like Queensmead with antiques that are far too grand and out of place, or even worse, buying replicas, but these … you’ve definitely got an eye, Maddy.’

‘It helps having grandparents with attics full of furniture,’ Madeleine had laughed as Guy turned to examine the heavy linen curtains she had hung in one of the rooms.

‘Wonderful,’ he had told her, shaking his head. ‘You can’t buy this stuff now for love nor money. Where …?’

‘My great-great-grandmother had Irish connections,’ Madeleine had told him mock-solemnly. ‘I found it …’

‘I know, in the attics,’ Guy had supplied for her.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Madeleine had laughed again. One of her third cousins had apparently been aggrieved to discover that Madeleine had made off with the linen from one of the many spare bedrooms, having earmarked it for some expensive decorating project herself.

‘I’m so looking forward to Christmas this year,’ Jenny suddenly said to her. ‘You’ve done wonders with Queensmead, Maddy, and it’s going to make the most wonderful venue for the family get-together. That’s one thing that the Chester family doesn’t have that I suspect they rather envy….’

‘Mmm … Queensmead is a lovely home,’ Madeleine agreed.

‘Jon’s had a word with Bran,’ Jenny told her, ‘and he’s arranged for the tree to be delivered the day after tomorrow. I’ll come round if you like and give you a hand decorating it.’

‘Yes, please,’ Madeleine accepted with alacrity. The Christmas tree that was to go in Queensmead’s comfortably sized entrance hall was coming from the estate of Bran T. Thomas, the Lord Lieutenant and a close friend of the family. Elderly and living on his own, he had been invited to join the family for Christmas dinner. Madeleine liked him. He had a wonderful fund of stories about the area and talked so movingly about his late wife that Madeleine often found her eyes filling with tears as she listened to him.

‘I think Louise is getting ready to leave,’ Jenny warned her daughter-in-law now, disturbing Madeleine from her reverie.

As she glanced towards the newly married couple, Maddy’s heart suddenly missed a beat. They seemed so happy, so much in love, Gareth looking tenderly down into Louise’s upturned face and then bending to kiss her. As they reluctantly broke apart, Maddy could quite plainly see the look of shimmering joy illuminating Louise’s face. It wasn’t that she begrudged Louise her happiness—how could she? It was just … it was just … Swallowing hard, Maddy looked the other way.

Obligingly Madeleine got up and went to separate her own two children from the happy mass playing in the adjacent anteroom.

Leo, who had been a page boy, had conducted himself with aplomb, and Emma had swiftly recovered from the morning’s bout of nausea, but they were tiring now as Madeleine’s experienced maternal eye could tell.

As Bobbie, Ruth’s granddaughter, came to find her own daughter, she grimaced at Madeleine and confided, ‘I’m not looking forward to a transatlantic flight on top of this….’

‘But it will be worth it once you’re with your family,’ Madeleine reminded her.

‘Oh, heavens, yes,’ Bobbie agreed fervently.

As Luke came to join her and picked up their small daughter, cradling her tired body in his arms, Bobbie couldn’t help reflecting on the differences between Luke and Max.

Her Luke was a tender, loving father and an equally loving husband, while Max … Max might pretend in front of others—especially his grandfather—to be a caring human being, but Bobbie could see through that pretence.

Poor Maddy.

2

Poor Maddy. She had heard herself so described so often that sometimes she thought she ought to have been christened thus, Maddy reflected several hours later, unwillingly recalling hearing Bobbie whisper the two words under her breath as she had turned to smile at Luke.

Leo and Emma were safely tucked up in bed, their stories read and sleep not very far away.

Ben had gone to bed protesting that Maddy was fussing unnecessarily and that there was nothing wrong with him, even though it was perfectly obvious that he was in pain. Tiredly Maddy headed for her own bedroom. Supposedly it was the room she shared with Max on his rare visits home, but in reality … Max might deign to sleep in the large king-size bed alongside her, but for all the intimacy, the love, the natural closeness one might expect to be shared between a married couple, they might just as well have been sleeping in separate beds and at opposite ends of the large house.

On this occasion, though, Max was not intending to stay the night and had already left for London. Maddy had long since ceased to struggle with the pretence that their marriage was either happy or ‘normal,’ just as she had ceased to question the fact that Max was returning to London ostensibly to ‘work.’

And the worst thing about the whole horrid situation was not that Max cared so little for her, but that she cared so much. Too much. What had happened to the dreams she had once had, the bright shining hopes, the belief that Max loved her?

Her maternal ears, forever tuned, picked up the sound of a soft cry from Emma’s room. Tiredly she slid out of bed. Emma was going through a phase of having bad dreams.

Having parked his Bentley at the rear of the smart mews house he had bought with the wedding cheque given to them by Maddy’s grandparents, Max unlocked the front door and headed for the bedroom, dropping his overnight bag on the floor and stretching out full length on the bed as he reached for the telephone and confidently punched in a set of numbers.

The woman’s voice on the other end of the line sounded sleepy and soft.

‘Guess who?’ Max asked her, tongue in cheek.

There was a brief silence before she responded.

‘Oh, Max … But I thought! You said you were going to a family wedding and that you’d be staying for the weekend….’

‘So, I changed my mind,’ Max told her, laughing. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

‘Breakfast … Oh, Max … I don’t … I can’t …’

She sounded more alert now, and Max could picture her sitting up in bed in her Belgravia house, her tawny hair down round her shoulders, her skin honey gold from her recent holiday in Mauritius. He had flown out to join her there for five days.

‘Some client conference,’ the solicitor who had originally instructed him had commented enviously when he had handed Max Justine’s fax.

‘When you’re playing for millions, the cost of flying your barrister out for an urgent conference is pretty small beer,’ Max told him carelessly.

Justine was the wife of a millionaire, soon-to-be billionaire corporate raider. The first thing she had done when she had discovered that he was having an affair with one of her ‘friends’ was to instruct her solicitor that she wanted him to hire Max as her barrister, the second was to arm herself with as much evidence as she could of her husband’s business affairs, including his complex and often adventurously artistic interpretation of the tax laws.

Max had decided appreciatively that she had enough on him to make it a piece of cake for them to get her the kind of divorce settlement that would make her virtually as comfortably wealthy as his ex as she had been as his wife, and to get him the kind of publicity that would ensure that he maintained his position as the country’s foremost divorce barrister.

‘Divorce isn’t really the kind of thing we like to specialize in here in chambers,’ the most senior member, a QC and one of the country’s foremost tax law specialists, had advised Max stiffly when he had originally joined them. ‘It’s not really quite us, if you know what I mean.’

Max had known exactly what he meant, but he had also been acutely aware of the fact that it was only his father-in-law’s name that had got him a place in the chambers at all. He also knew that the only reputation he had then to gain him the clients who would bring him the kind of high profile and even higher income he craved so desperately was one of being unwanted and rejected by his previous ‘set,’ where he had been allowed to work only as a tenant and on the cases that no one else wanted to deal with.

His new chambers attracted a clientele who wanted and expected only the best barristers whose names and reputations they already knew, and so Max had seen a niche for himself in the one field where the chambers didn’t already have a specialist—matrimonial law.

That had been several years ago, and now Max’s reputation had grown and his name on a case was likely to strike dread in a wealthy husband about to enter the divorce arena.

The extremely high fees Max charged for his services weren’t the only benefit he earned from his work. Max had quickly and cynically discovered that newly divorced and about-to-be-divorced women very often had an appetite for sex and the male attention that went with it, which ensured him a constant turnover of willing bed mates.

One of the main advantages of these relationships, from Max’s point of view, was that they were always relatively brief. While his female clients were going through their divorces, he provided a comforting male shoulder to lean on, someone with whom they could share their problems as well as their beds. But once everything had been finalized, he was always able to very quickly and firmly detach himself.

If any of his lovers showed a tendency to cling and become possessive, he suddenly became far too busy with ‘work’ to be able to take their calls—they soon got the message. A new client, a new lover—it was time for Max to move on.

The affair with Justine, because of the extremely complex nature of her husband’s financial affairs and the huge amount of money potentially involved, had lasted considerably longer than usual, and as yet Justine’s husband had not been served with any divorce papers.

‘I’ve got at least two friends who got damn all out of their ex’s,’ Justine had told Max, showing him her expensive dental work in a very sharp, foxy smile.

‘I have no intention of allowing that to happen to me. Here is a list of the assets I intend to make a claim on,’ she had told Max, handing him an impressively long typed schedule.

They had been lovers for more than two months, and Max had to admit that he was impressed. He doubted that Justine had a single ounce of emotional vulnerability in her entire make-up. She was one of the most sexually demanding women he had ever had, abandoning herself completely and totally to the sexual act and not allowing him to stop until she was completely and utterly satisfied. But once she was, she was immediately and instantly back in control; her mind, her brain, were as sharp and dangerous as an alligator’s teeth.

Her husband would be lucky to escape with even half of his fortune intact, Max had decided as he listened to her plans for using her knowledge of his tax affairs to blackmail him into settling and giving her what she wanted.

‘I don’t intend to file for divorce until after this new deal he’s working on has gone through,’ she had told Max candidly. ‘It’s worth almost five hundred million, and I want to make sure I get my share of it.’

‘Look. I … I can’t talk now,’ he heard her saying quickly to him now. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow. I’ll come round to your place….’

She had rung off before Max could object, leaving him angrily aware of his sexual frustration and even more importantly, with a sharp sense of unease.

It was going on for two o’clock in the morning, but he felt too restless for sleep. Max’s instinct for survival was very acute and very finely tuned. It had had to be. As his grandfather’s favourite he had spent his growing years fighting off any potential claims on his position from his siblings and cousins, and as a young adult he had had to strive to maintain that position.

Now that he was married to Madeleine, his grandfather’s favour didn’t matter in quite the same way. Madeleine’s trust funds were worth considerably in excess of his grandfather’s assets, but it wasn’t just the desire for wealth that drove Max. He had another need that in its way was just as intense, and that need was to stand apart from his peers, to set himself above them, to be envied by them. Friendship, affection, love, none of these interested Max nor mattered to him.

Supremacy, that was what Max craved. Supremacy and the security that came with it. The supremacy of being the best divorce barrister, the best QC, the best head of chambers in the best set of chambers. In Max’s opinion, there were two ways to gain those goals. The first was through merit and skill, the second—sometimes the more subtle—was an underhanded method of gaining power, which made its acquisition all the sweeter. To emerge as top dog was important when others had openly derided one’s fitness for such a role.

It had amused him recently to bump into Roderick Hamilton, the barrister who had beaten him on a vacancy they had both applied for in his last set of chambers and who had none too subtly crowed his victory over him.

Max had invited Roderick to join him for a drink and over it had encouraged him to talk about himself. He had learned that Roderick had married somebody from the county set, the lower echelons of the upper classes of whose acquaintanceship he had once boasted to Max.

His wife, to judge from the photograph he had shown Max, was the plain horsy type, and no, they had no children as yet … but they were trying…. His dream, it turned out, was to buy himself a small country house.

‘But they’re so damned expensive, old chap, and Lucinda’s wretched horses cost the earth to keep.’

Max had smiled and casually mentioned his own two children. Maddy’s grandparents’ family seat was also dropped into the conversation along with references to its history and its decor; not too much, just enough to ensure that Roderick realized that he, Max, was living the life-style that the other man so desperately wanted, that he had fathered the children that Roderick so far had not.

And sweetest of all had been when he had given him a lift home in his new Bentley, to coolly refuse the invitation extended for him and Maddy to join Roderick and his wife ‘for supper one evening.’

‘’Fraid no can do, old chap,’ Max had told him, giving him his crocodile smile. ‘We’re pretty fully booked right now.’

Revenge indeed.

Max couldn’t really remember when he had first discovered this power he had within himself to hurt others. What he could remember, though, was the sickening sense of anger and fear he had felt when he had once overheard his father and his uncle David talking about him.

He had been about ten at the time and already feeling the effects of Louise and Katie’s arrival on his relationship with his parents. Max had never been the kind of child who liked being held or touched. Even before he could walk he had wriggled out of the reach of adults who would have picked him up and fussed over him, resenting, too, his cousin Olivia’s challenging presence in the arena of his life. Olivia, who was always cuddling up to his mother. Olivia, whom his mother seemed to like more than she liked him.

‘You’ve got a fine boy there,’ he could remember hearing his uncle David say enviously to his father. ‘The old man thinks I’m letting the side down by not giving him a grandson. Mind you, I’ve got to say, Jon, that you and Jenny don’t seem to realize just how lucky you are.

‘If Max was mine … Perhaps he should have been mine,’ David had said very softly. ‘Dad certainly seems to think so. He says that Max is far more like me than you. You know, Jon, sometimes it seems to me that you and Jenny don’t like your son very much.’

The two men had moved out of earshot before Max could hear any more. What had his uncle David meant? Why didn’t his parents like him?

Deliberately Max had begun to test them, anxious to discover if what his uncle David had said was the truth.

He asked for a new bicycle and he was told he couldn’t have one, but the twins were given new tricycles for their birthday.

Max had ‘borrowed’ one of them, and when it had ‘accidentally’ been pushed under the wheels of a delivery van and smashed, he had told his stern, grave-eyed father that he hadn’t meant to push the bike, he had just let go of it at the wrong time.

The other tricycle had mysteriously disappeared, and when questioned about it Max had stubbornly refused to say a word.

His sharp eyes began to notice how much more time his mother spent with the twins than she did with him, how much more fuss she made of Olivia.

He told her that he didn’t want her to take him to school any more and that he was going to ask his grandfather to tell uncle David to take him. This was despite the fact that more often than not it was Jenny who took Olivia to school, David being far too self-engrossed to consider doing anything so mundane as the school run.

Max began to listen keenly to the way his grandfather compared his two sons, praising David and speaking contemptuously of Max’s own father, Jon. His father, Max had discovered, was a man to be despised and ignored. His grandfather and his uncle David became the pivotal male role models in his life. To cloak his childish fear of his parents’ rejection of him, he began to cultivate a protective wall of indifference to any kind of adult emotion, and at the same time he started to learn how to manipulate it to gain his own ends.

In much the same way as he had learned to distrust his parents—his father might speak of chastising him out of love for him, but Max knew better: his father did not love him, his father did not like him. Max had heard his uncle David saying so—so Max also learned to distrust and alienate his peers. Better to protect himself by cultivating and inciting their antagonism than to risk the pain of being rejected by them.

Now, twenty odd years down the line, if anyone had suggested to Max that it was out of the seeds of his extreme emotional sensitivity and vulnerability as a child that his adult persona had grown, he would have laughed at them in cynical mockery.

He was as he was; he liked being as he was, and for those who didn’t like it or him—then too bad!

It irritated him that Justine had put him off instead of inviting him to go straight round, as he had expected her to do.

He had been looking forward to the release he knew that having sex with her would have brought him; not just for his sexual desire but also from the anger and sense of ill-usage that being with his family always caused him.

Madeleine, with her pathetic humility and eternal self-sacrificing; his parents with their well-mannered ‘niceness’; his cousin Olivia with her smug self-satisfaction; Luke with his arrogant superiority; and Saul, the perfect father and husband. God, but they all irritated the hell out of him. He knew how much they disapproved of him … disliked him…. How sorry they felt for ‘poor Maddy,’ how they talked about him behind his back, but he was the one whose name was beginning to appear with flattering regularity in the society columns; he was the one whose income was running very satisfactorily into six figures; he was the one who never lacked a willing sexual partner—a variety of willing sexual partners. Well, at least not normally!

Tomorrow he would have to punish Justine a little for tonight, to point out to her that he had virtually walked out on a family gathering just to be able to spend the night with her—it didn’t matter that he would have left, anyway; she wasn’t going to know that. Yes, just a small cooling off on his part; a discreet hint of withdrawal should be more than enough to make her come running, eager to appease him.

He had a meeting in chambers to attend in the afternoon, which would give him an excuse to cut short the time he spent with her, further reinforcing and underlining the stance he intended to take with her. It was their final chambers meeting before they closed down the office for the Christmas and New Year period.

Apart from Justine’s proposed divorce, Max had no other major work currently in progress, but that did not concern him too much. Early spring was always a good time for new briefs; the forced conviviality and intimacy of the winter months en famille often proved to be the breaking point for a marriage under strain. Also, Justine had already dropped several hints about inviting him to join her when she went skiing. Max had no particular love of either the sport or the cold, but he had to admit that the thought of Aspen and its social life, its socialites, was extremely tempting.

He would tell Maddy that it was business, of course. Getting off the bed, he started to strip off his clothes before heading for the shower.

Like virtually all other male members of his family, Max was a stunningly sexy man. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a naturally well-muscled torso, he shared his male cousins’ dark-haired and very masculine good looks. However, in Max they possessed a certain almost magnetic intensity that one of his smitten victims had once described as making her completely spellbound, like standing in the path of a ten-ton lorry, knowing it had the potential to destroy you and yet being so hyped up on the mixture of adrenaline-induced excitement and fear that knowledge produced that you simply couldn’t move out of its way.

‘It’s that look of cold ruthlessness in his eyes,’ she had continued, shivering sensually. ‘You just know, the moment you look at him, that he doesn’t give a damn about you or your emotions, but somehow you just can’t help yourself.’

There was a sharp ache in Max’s body, which he knew from experience could only be alleviated by sex. He smiled grimly to himself as he turned on the shower. He should, after all, have taken Maddy to bed before he left Haslewich. Although he would never have told her so, despite her lack of self-esteem and her plainness, there was about Maddy a very rich vein of sexual warmth and generosity, a femininity, a womanliness that Max knew perfectly well most men would have found extremely alluring, all the more so because her own unawareness of it meant that it would be a secret that only a lover would have access to, just as only one lover would have access to her body.

Maddy had been a virgin when he had first taken her to bed, inexperienced and unknowing, untutored, but her body had surrounded him with a softness, a warmth as instinctive and natural as her protective mother love for her children.

She didn’t receive him with that same innocent generosity and warmth any more, of course. On the rare occasions when they did have sex, he could feel how much she resented his ability to arouse her and how hard she strived to resist her physical desire for him. It amused Max to let her. He knew he could make love to her more often and easily turn her resistance into molten liquid acceptance and desire, but what was the point? The last thing he wanted was for Maddy to be sexually demanding or sexually possessive.

He showered himself briskly, then stepped out of the cubicle, smoothing his dark, wet hair back sleekly off his face as he reached for a towel.

If he was going to go to Aspen he would need to buy himself some suitable clothes. He had read that a lot of the Hollywood set went there for the season. He started to smile as he rubbed his body dry and then padded naked across to his bed.

Max was going through some paperwork when he heard the front doorbell ring. On his way to answer it he quickly checked his appearance in the hallway mirror. He was wearing the expensive after-shave that Justine had given him and the Turnbull and Asser shirt, which had been another present from her. The gold cuff links had been a gift from another grateful client. He glanced at his watch, a Rolex that Maddy had given him as a wedding present. Justine was earlier than he’d expected her. Well, she was still going to have to make due reparation for last night and wait a little for her sex. Yes, and plead with him for it, too!

Max opened the door.

‘Crighton, may I come in?’

Without waiting for Max’s assent, Justine’s husband stepped determinedly into the hallway.

Max had met him on only one previous occasion at a dinner party given by a friend of Justine’s to which he had been invited.

Although not as tall as Max and certainly a good twenty years older, Robert Burton nevertheless possessed that aura of power and forcefulness common to most entrepreneurially successful men. He might not walk with a deliberate swagger nor verbally boast of his achievements or his wealth, but he most definitely had about him that air that warned other males that he considered himself to be their superior, and as he eyeballed Max with cool aggression as he marched past him, Max was immediately and acutely aware of a relentless dislike he could feel emanating from him.

To give Max his due, though, apart from a small betraying distortion of his pupils and a reactive tensing of his muscles, he gave no other sign that his visitor was not the person he had expected to see, even managing a passably plausible, polished wave of his hand in the direction of his sitting room as he invited, ‘Robert. Good to see you, old man. What can I do for you …?’

On the verge of walking into the sitting room, Robert Burton turned round and thoroughly scrutinized Max.

‘I’ll say this for you, Crighton, you’ve got nerve,’ he commented tersely. ‘I’m a very busy man and I don’t have time to play verbal games. Justine has told me what’s been going on and …’

‘Ah. Good.’ Max cut in on him smoothly. ‘I did counsel her to tell you that she wanted a divorce. These things are always better when the two parties concerned discuss them as adults, and—’

‘Better for the bank balances of their lawyers, yes,’ Robert Burton cut him off acidly, ‘but let’s not get side-tracked. It isn’t your professional relationship with my wife I’m here to discuss.’ He paused meaningfully. ‘I do know, like I said, what’s been going on. A friend tipped me off. Apparently you’ve got quite a reputation for bedding your female clients….’

Max gave a small shrug. ‘When a marriage is breaking down, people become emotionally—’

‘Vulnerable,’ Robert Burton supplied darkly before Max could finish. ‘But it’s hardly professional behaviour to use that vulnerability against them, is it, and I should have thought that a man in your position would have to be very careful about guarding his professional reputation. After all, that’s really what a barrister has to sell, isn’t it? His reputation is his product. Unless, of course, you’ve decided that it’s more financially profitable for you to trade on your reputation in the bedroom rather than in the courtroom. Rumour does have it, of course, that it wasn’t so much your legal skills or qualifications that got you into your chambers in the first place. Does your wife know that you regularly bed your female clients?’

‘It’s a very pleasant bonus to my work,’ Max acknowledged with a taunting smile and a small shrug, ‘and I can’t deny that it is a perk that I do find very enjoyable … after all, what normal heterosexual man would not?’

It was one of Max’s greatest assets that he possessed a remarkable gift for turning the tables on his opponents and sending back the arrows they fired at him with devastating speed and accuracy, and he could see from the betraying narrowing of Robert Burton’s eyes and the hard edge of colour seeping up under his skin that he had succeeded in getting him off guard.

‘In your shoes, I’d be rather careful about what I admit to,’ he warned Max. ‘I doubt very much you’d enjoy being on the other side of a lawsuit….’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Max agreed, and added urbanely, ‘but then I doubt that very many men would like to stand up in court and admit that their wives preferred me as a lover. Which reminds me, since I am acting for your wife in the subject of her divorce, I really should advise you that it is quite unethical for you to approach me….’

‘There isn’t going to be a divorce.’

Max stared at him in disbelief.

‘Justine and I have had a little talk,’ Robert Burton told him with heavy irony, ‘and we’ve decided that we’re going to give our marriage a second chance. I think that what Justine really needs is to be a mother. A woman needs a child, children, and they do say, don’t they, that the conception and birth of a child cement a couple more closely together than anything else. You’ve got children, haven’t you?’

He gave Max a challenging look.

‘Divorce can be an extremely expensive and messy business, and as Justine now agrees, it makes sense for the two of us to stay together. Oh, and by the way, there’s no point in you trying to get in touch with her. She flew out to New York on Concorde this morning.

‘I hope I’ve made myself understood,’ he told Max as he turned round and opened the door, ‘but then, I know you’ll have got my drift, won’t you, Crighton.’

As Max automatically followed him to the front door, the older man continued with obvious enjoyment, ‘Oh, and by the way, perhaps I’d better warn you, I’ve had a word with the senior partner in your chambers, alerting him to certain facts I felt he ought to know. After all, a chambers like yours trades on its reputation, and anything that might damage that reputation has to be very swiftly and mercilessly dealt with, doesn’t it … rather like anything that might threaten a man’s marriage or his financial status.

‘It’s the mark of an intelligent man, I believe, to act quickly and decisively to protect what he values.’

Max said nothing. He didn’t need to. He knew exactly what Robert Burton was saying to him. He had somehow or other persuaded Justine not to go ahead with her divorce because he had no intention of allowing her to profit financially from her marriage to him. Simpler and far more financially expeditious to remain married to her. But it was his remark about his own professional status that had alarmed Max the most, especially that comment he had made about speaking with the head of his chambers.

Although technically Max was his own boss and none of the other members had any kind of jurisdiction over his actions or his morals—in practice … Well, he would soon find out, since no doubt the subject would be raised at this afternoon’s meeting, if it was going to be raised.

‘Hell and damnation,’ he muttered grimly as he consigned Justine to the past and the long list of his ex-lovers an hour later as he left his mews house en route to the old-fashioned set of chambers in the Inns of Court where the high status of their address more than compensated for the cramped office that Max occupied.

The senior partner’s office was, quite naturally, the most luxurious: large, elegantly furnished, reeking of that unmistakable indefinable aura of old money, class and power, and Max could never walk into it without coveting it and everything that went with it. Already he had promised himself that one day it would be his.

3

‘Ah, Max, there you are….’

As Harold Cavendish, the senior partner, gave him his benign smile and waved him into a chair, Max stiffened warily when he realized that he was the last to join the meeting.

As the meeting followed its normal and predictable course, Max allowed himself to relax a little and mentally began to run over in his mind who would make the most suitable replacement in his bed.

When the meeting was over, Max got up to leave, then froze as the senior partner placed a restraining hand on his arm and told him quietly, ‘Er, no, Max. I’d like you to stay. There’s something we need to discuss.’

Harold Cavendish waited until the others had gone before beginning to speak. Max might not be very popular in chambers and Madeleine’s father might have had to put pressure on them to take Max on, but there was no doubt whatsoever about the effect he, and his brand of dark, smooth good looks, had on their female clientele. It wasn’t just his own business that Max had increased while he had been with them, as Harold himself was keenly aware.

Max always reminded him of a particular breed of German dog, all sleek good looks and power on the outside, but inwardly possessed of an unreliably vicious streak that, when provoked, could be extremely dangerous. His wife had once told him wryly that it was the thought of harnessing and controlling all the sexual power and uncertainty that was Max that made women behave so foolishly over him.

‘It’s the knowledge that they’re never quite totally in control of him that is so alluring,’ she had told him. ‘Max represents the dark and dangerously exciting side of sexual attraction.’

‘Chap’s a bounder,’ he had objected gruffly. ‘Look at the way he treats poor Madeleine.’

‘Yes, I know,’ his wife had agreed ruefully, ‘and I’m afraid that that just makes him all the more potently alluring.’

Harold had shaken his head, not really understanding what she meant, and he was no closer to understanding now just why so many pretty women were foolish enough to get involved with Max.

Harold waited until Max had closed the door before telling him uncomfortably, ‘Had a chat with Robert Burton. He, er … seemed to think there could be something unprofessional going on between you and his wife….’

Max said nothing.

‘He’s a very powerful man and we handle a lot of his friends’ and contacts’ work.’

Max still said nothing, and Harold found himself fighting against a sense of irritation with him that he wasn’t doing the decent thing and making things easier for him.

‘Fact is, old chap, that to put it bluntly, Burton isn’t too happy about the way …’

‘His wife’s solicitor was instructing me with regard to her divorce,’ Max interrupted him coolly. ‘If Robert Burton chooses to misinterpret that … relationship … then …’

‘Well, yes. Yes, of course,’ Harold agreed hurriedly. ‘But one has to think not just of one’s own reputation, you know, but the reputation of chambers as a whole as well, and if it gets around that … well … if Burton should get it into his head to put the word about … The fact is, Max, that we’ve discussed the subject among ourselves and Jeremy tells us that you’ve no major work on at the moment, so we think … that is, we feel … it might be a good idea for you to take some extended leave, say a month or so … just until this unpleasantness blows over, and then …’

Max stared at him in disbelief.

‘You’re barring me from chambers,’ he accused. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘No. No … of course not,’ Harold agreed hurriedly, ‘no such thing … no such thing at all. Fact is, old chap, that all of us need to take a decent break from time to time, and young Maddy would probably appreciate the chance to see a bit more of you….’

Max looked coldly at him. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell him that he didn’t give a damn about what Maddy would appreciate, but he managed to restrain himself.

Robert Burton had certainly managed to put the wind up Harold, he acknowledged bitterly. Pompous old bastard, who was he to tell Max what he could and couldn’t do. Take some extended leave … They couldn’t make him, of course, no, no way could they do that, but they could make life pretty unpleasant for him if he refused, Max admitted angrily. If they chose to do so, they could adopt tactics that ultimately could force him out of chambers, and once that became public knowledge, his chances of continuing to receive not just the fat briefs he had grown accustomed to getting, but also the status and accolades that went hand in hand with being a member of such a prestigious set of chambers, would diminish abruptly. There was no way, after the work he had put in, the sacrifices he had made to get where he was, that Max was ever going to allow himself to be downgraded or side-tracked to somewhere second rate.

As he listened to Harold’s pompous meanderings, he told himself fiercely that when the day came when he took over as head of chambers, he would make everyone involved in this pay for what they were doing to him, especially that creep Jeremy Standish, the clerk-cum-office manager, whom Max knew perfectly well neither liked nor approved of him.

‘So you can see, I’m sure, what I mean—’ Harold was continuing to waffle uncomfortably ‘—and like I said, Maddy, I am sure, will …’

Max had had enough, and giving an impatient shrug, he stood up.

‘A month …’ Max began, but Harold, suddenly becoming courageous and mindful of his fellow members’ urgings and the responsibility he owed them, insisted firmly, ‘Two months, Max. That will give plenty of time for any potential unpleasantness to die down….’

Two months … Max gave him a hard stare, tempted to argue but sharply aware of how it would make him look if he lost.

God, but Justine had truly mucked this up, he fumed half an hour later back in his own small office. And if he had her here right now … he’d … Two months … Just what the hell was he going to do?

As he stared angrily out of his office window, there was a brief rap on the door and Jeremy Standish walked in.

‘Maddy was on the phone while you were with Harold,’ he told Max. ‘She asked me to remind you that it’s Leo’s nativity play tomorrow afternoon and that your grandfather will be going….’

As Jeremy saw the murderous expression darkening Max’s eyes he couldn’t resist adding, mock innocently, ‘I’m sure Maddy will be delighted when she knows that you’re going to have a couple of months off. You must miss her and the children so much with them living in the country and you living in town….’

Leo’s flaming nativity play, that was all he needed, but of course, if he didn’t go, his grandfather was bound to start asking awkward questions. Max still hadn’t repaid the loan he had cadged off him when he and Maddy had got married—and, in fact, he had no intention of repaying it. Max had witnessed his grandfather’s growing involvement with his own son and already sensed that if he wasn’t careful, Leo might begin to usurp his own so-far-unchallenged position as his grandfather’s favourite, and there was no way Max was going to allow that to happen. He was already beginning to think it had been a mistake to allow Maddy to have so much contact with his grandfather and thus easy access to his ear. Not that he had any fear that his grandfather would pay any attention to anything she might choose to say. His grandfather despised women and was an old-fashioned chauvinist.

Two flaming months and not even the chance of a fortnight or so in Aspen now to alleviate it. And of course, he would have to tell Maddy, whether he wanted to or not. The last thing he wanted was for her to ring the chambers and find out that he wasn’t there—and why. And, in fact, he would have to warn her not to say anything to her parents, either. With any luck he could keep the whole thing pretty quiet. As his brain began to swing into action, Max started to make plans.

Perhaps it might be as well to remind Harold that any hint of his enforced ‘holiday’ getting out would reflect just as dangerously on the reputation of the rest of the partners as it would on him. Max might be under no illusion that Robert Burton’s real intention in putting pressure on Harold was to humiliate him, but it would do no harm to overlook that and to point out that on the surface at least, he totally believed that Harold was acting simply out of concern for the chambers as a whole, and since he had no option but to accept the situation, what he needed to do now was to make everyone else believe that taking such a period of leave was his own choice. Perhaps he could even earn a few ‘brownie’ points with his grandfather and Maddy’s family by making out that it was his wife and children that had motivated him, and living in Haslewich at his grandfather’s expense would certainly save him money. And of course, he still had women friends in Chester with whom he could alleviate his undoubted boredom.

By the time he had cleared his desk, Max had almost managed to persuade himself that two months’ leave was exactly what he wanted … almost …

‘The bed’s quite definitely William and Mary, and when I told him what it was really worth …’ Guy Cooke broke off from his description of the furniture he had been asked to value to look keenly at his ex-business partner and to ask gently, ‘Jenny, what is it, what’s wrong? You haven’t heard a word of what I’ve just said.’

‘Oh, Guy, I’m sorry,’ Jenny apologized immediately, giving him a small smile. ‘There’s nothing really wrong, it’s just …’

‘Jenny, I know when you’re happy—and when you’re not,’ Guy reminded her dryly.

Jenny shook her head and admitted, ‘It’s Jack, our nephew. His school report this time is, well, not very good at all, and the headmaster has asked to see Jon about him.’

‘What’s the problem, do you know?’ Guy asked her sympathetically.

‘Well, we’re not sure, but we think it could possibly be because of David. You know that Jack and Joss bunked off school to go and look for Jack’s father….’

‘Mmm … Chrissie mentioned it,’ Guy acknowledged, referring to his wife, who was in a rather roundabout way, a member of the Crighton family.

‘Both Jon and I have talked to Jack, and so has Olivia, but he seems to have this bee in his bonnet at the moment about David,’ Jenny told him. ‘It’s perfectly natural that he should, of course; after all, unlike Olivia, he was still really very much a child when David disappeared and he couldn’t totally take in the situation. But what’s more worrying is that Louise seems to think that Jack is actually blaming himself in some way for David’s disappearance.’

‘Blaming himself …’ Guy gave her a sharp look. ‘Why on earth should he do that?’

Jenny shook her head. ‘I don’t know. We’ve both tried to talk to him about it, but he’s at that age …’ She gave a small sigh. ‘We’ve all always been so close, and we thought he was happy living with us, but now we’re both beginning to question whether or not we did the right thing and whether he might ultimately have been happier going to Brighton with Tania.’

‘I shouldn’t have any concerns about that,’ Guy interrupted her firmly. ‘I certainly know who I’d prefer.’

Jenny gave him a wan smile. ‘Tania is his mother,’ she reminded him. ‘Even if Olivia says that in her opinion Jack has been far better off with us.’

‘Olivia should know, she is Jack’s sister.’

‘Yes, I know, and we’ve been through the whole history of David’s disappearance with Jack and explained to him about the … the problems that had arisen here with the business.’

‘It can’t have been easy for you,’ Guy commented. ‘I can still remember just what you and Jon went through at the time.’

‘It was a shock, especially for Jon when he found out that his twin had been defrauding one of their clients. I know it’s a dreadful thing to say, but if that client hadn’t died when she did and Ruth hadn’t been able to refund the money David had “borrowed” from her estate, I don’t know what would have happened.

‘Olivia, Jon and I have explained to Jack just what the situation was. While, legally, his father is free to return to this country if he should want to do so, there could be no question of him ever being able to practise in the business.

‘I know it’s an issue that we would have had to deal with at one stage, but I just wish that it hadn’t manifested itself right now when Jack is working towards his A levels.’

‘Mmm … I know that Joss is planning on going up to Oxford, but what is Jack hoping to do?’

‘We had talked and thought he wanted to follow Jon into the practice. There’s a very close bond between them, but just recently … I know all teenagers go through a turbulent period, but it seems lately that Jack really resents us both, but particularly Jon. His behaviour is hurting Jon, although he never says anything.’

‘Mmm … I expect he’s concerned that he might be rearing a second Max, although …’ He stopped when he saw Jenny’s expression and asked, ‘Is that what Jon thinks, Jen?’

‘Not exactly, but he has said recently that he wonders if he’s adequate father material. He blames himself for the fact that Max is as he is. He always has done, and I feel the same way—that we both failed him. We can’t help wondering if there was something we could have done, something we neglected to do, some sign we missed or some …’ She paused and shook her head. ‘Jack is nowhere near being like Max, of course, but Jon is beginning to feel that somehow or other he must have failed him—Jack’s become so abstracted, so withdrawn just recently, and of course you always worry that … about …’

‘Drugs,’ Guy supplied shrewdly for her.

‘Well, one reads such things,’ Jenny admitted, ‘and although we’re only a relatively quiet small country town, we’re not that far from Manchester or …’

‘I know what you’re saying,’ Guy agreed. Then he added quietly, ‘I could put a few feelers out for you if you want me to….’

Guy’s family, the Cookes, were involved in every aspect of Haslewich life, including some which were not strictly ethical or honourable.

There was a local story that the Cookes had once included in their number a member of the Gipsy band that had travelled through the area, and it was from this alliance that the family had inherited their strikingly dark tangled curls and good looks.

Jenny hesitated. The headmaster had recently alerted all the parents at the boys’ school to the fact that drugs were being sold outside the school gates, despite the police’s attempts to put a stop to it. She had no reason to suspect that either Joss or Jack were taking them, and she was pretty sure that Jack’s recent change in behaviour and attitude was because of his confused emotions about his father.

‘I wouldn’t want Jack to think that we didn’t trust him,’ she told Guy slowly. ‘Jon’s worried that Jack might feel that, as our nephew, he comes second place to Joss, which isn’t the case at all. We love them both very dearly, although of course in different ways, and because Jon was himself always aware that in his father’s eyes he could never compare to David, Jon is determined that Jack won’t suffer in the way that he did.’

‘It’s a very difficult situation,’ Guy acknowledged.

‘Jon hates having to take anyone to task,’ Jenny told him ruefully, ‘but it is so important that Jack works hard and gets good grades when he sits his A’s.’

‘I saw Max driving into town earlier,’ Guy told her.

Jenny forced a small smile.

‘Oh, did you? Good. Maddy will be pleased. She was afraid that he might miss Leo’s first performance in the play school Christmas play,’ she told him with a smile.

She wasn’t smiling ten minutes later, however, as she hurried back to her car, pitting her body against the cold of the sharp east wind. Maddy had confided in her only a few days ago that she was concerned about Leo’s growing antagonism towards his father.

‘Gramps thinks I’m overcoddling Leo, but I’ve tried to explain to him that it’s because he doesn’t see very much of Max and Max isn’t … Max doesn’t …’

Maddy’s voice had trailed off, but she hadn’t needed to explain. Jenny knew exactly what her eldest son was and what he wasn’t. Joss spent more time with, and was far closer, to his small nephew than his father, and Jon, too, made sure that he gave his small grandson as much attention as he could.

Maddy wasn’t there when Max arrived at Queensmead. She had gone out to do some shopping, taking both children with her. The rich scent of the greenery and fruit she had used to make the Christmas garlands that decorated the hallway and stairs, as well as the warmth of their seasonal colours against the mellow patina of the panelling, might have caused another man to stop and savour not just the seasonal spirit they evoked but also the quiet skill of the woman who had made them, but Max gave his wife’s handiwork no more than a brief, cursory frown as he headed for the stairs. Before he could climb them, his grandfather’s study door opened and the older man limped painfully into the hallway, his austere expression giving way to a warm smile as he saw his favourite grandchild.

‘Max,’ he exclaimed eagerly. ‘You’re back. Come and have a drink with me.’

Max watched the way his grandfather’s hand trembled as he poured them both a Scotch. He was aging rapidly, his once-tall, ramrod-straight frame now spare and bent, his walk betraying the wariness of someone who had lost the security of being able to depend on his own physical strength.

‘Maddy’s gone out—shopping,’ he told Max. ‘Why on earth do women need to make such a fuss about Christmas? You’d think Maddy was going to be feeding an army from the way she’s been carrying on. She hasn’t even had time to change my library books for me this week,’ he added with the petulant selfishness of the elderly. ‘And she forgot to make my nightcap last night.

‘Come over here,’ he instructed Max abruptly. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’

Frowning, Max followed him, watching as he struggled with the lock on the drawer of his desk before removing a card, which he thrust in front of Max.

‘It’s from David,’ he told Max tersely. ‘It came yesterday. It’s post-marked Jamaica …’

‘Jamaica …’ Max’s frown deepened. The last they had heard of David was that he was somewhere in Spain, but that had been more than a year ago, and despite all his own father’s attempts to do so, he had not been able to trace the whereabouts of his twin brother.

‘I knew he wasn’t in Spain, told Jon so, too, but he wouldn’t listen,’ he could hear his grandfather complaining.

‘It’s time he came home, Max. I want him home. This is where his place is. This is where he would be if that damned woman hadn’t driven him away.’

It was no secret to Max that his grandfather blamed Tania, nicknamed Tiggy, David’s estranged wife, for his son’s disappearance, claiming to anyone who would listen that it had been Tania’s unstable temperament and the eating disorder she suffered from, along with her dangerous mood swings and her extravagant life-style, that had prompted David’s near fatal heart attack and then caused him to disappear.

Max frowned as he studied the postcard his grandfather had handed him, not really paying much attention to what the older man was saying. After all, he had heard it all before, and if it had not been second nature to him to keep on his grandfather’s good side, he would have lost no time in cynically pointing out that there were far easier ways of removing an unwanted wife from one’s life than to flee the country.

Even so, he couldn’t resist saying jibingly, ‘Well, Uncle David has nothing to fear from Tiggy now that she’s got a new man in her life.’

‘Exactly,’ his grandfather pounced. ‘I want David found, Max. I want him found and I want him to come home before …’ He stopped, wincing as he started to massage his aching hip.

‘Dad’s already made several attempts to trace him,’ Max pointed out uninterestedly, ‘and …’

‘Using detective agencies. Pah … useless … Jon should fly out to Jamaica himself, and if he had any real brotherly love for David … But then, of course, he’s always been jealous of David and I …

‘I’d go myself if it wasn’t for this damned hip,’ he told Max angrily. ‘Damned if I wouldn’t. I know David … he’s my son … my flesh … my blood ….’

Listening to him, Max forbore to point out that so was his own father, but then Ben most certainly did not know Jon, and what he knew of David was only what he had allowed himself to know … what he wanted to believe David to be rather than what he actually was.

Jamaica … Max dropped the card onto the table, where it lay face up, white sands gleaming under an impossibly blue sky and an even bluer sea … Jamaica …

His body suddenly stiffened.

‘If you really want someone to go and look for Uncle David, I suppose I could fly out there and do a bit of checking up, look around …’ he began, pseudo-hesitantly.

‘You!’

The delight in the old man’s voice might have touched the heart of another man, but Max refused to allow anything, anyone, to touch his, and he simply, instead, gave him a calculated smile.

‘But how can you?’ his grandfather protested shakily. ‘Your work …’

Max shrugged carelessly.

‘As it happens, things are pretty slack at the moment, and I had been thinking of taking a few weeks’ leave. I may as well spend some of it in Jamaica as here under Maddy’s feet …’

‘You mean you really would go, Max?’

Max watched dispassionately as his grandfather fought to control his emotions, coming over to him and grasping his shoulders as he blinked rapidly and told him huskily, ‘I knew I could rely on you, Max. You’re your uncle David all over again. He wants to come home, I know he does. Once he knows that that unhinged woman isn’t going to make a nuisance of herself … My God, just let her try. She’s already caused enough damage. When I think …’

‘It’s going to be an expensive trip,’ Max warned him, ignoring his comments about Tiggy. ‘And …’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ his grandfather quickly assured him.

‘Jamaica’s a fair-sized island, and there’s no saying just whereabouts David might be,’ Max pointed out—or even if he would still be there, Max acknowledged, but he kept that thought to himself. A few weeks in Jamaica at his grandfather’s expense was exactly what he needed right now. Smiling to himself, he mentally thanked Harold. Who knew, he might even be able to pick up some potential new clients while he was out there.

Finding David was, of course, another matter entirely and not one he was inclined to give any serious thought to. After all, if his uncle genuinely wanted to return home, there was absolutely nothing to stop him from doing so.

Silently he studied his grandfather. Did he really honestly believe what he was saying; that the only reason David had left—disappeared—was because his marriage had broken down? Well, if so, it was no business of his to enlighten him, but the old man really must be losing his grip.

‘Max, you don’t know how much this means to me, my boy,’ he heard Ben telling him gruffly. ‘I should have known I could rely on you. Your father …’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘It’s always been a disappointment to me that Jon doesn’t … that he isn’t … he doesn’t know how lucky he’s been to have a brother like David,’ he finished heavily. ‘I lost my twin brother …’

Max looked impatiently at his watch.

‘Look, Gramps,’ he interrupted, cutting across the old man’s all-too-familiar reminiscences, ‘if I’m going to Jamaica, I should make a few phone calls. It’s not going to be easy getting a flight to the Caribbean at such short notice at this time of the year. Half of Belgravia and Sloane Square will be flying out there on the first flights out of Heathrow after the New Year, and then I’ll have to get myself sorted out with a hotel.’

Given the choice, Max would have infinitely preferred to ignore the Christmas and New Year celebrations at Haslewich completely, of course, and taken the first flight he could to the Caribbean, but he knew that not even Maddy would wear that one.

‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ his grandfather agreed.

‘And … I think we should keep this thing just between the two of us for now,’ Max told his grandfather smoothly. ‘As you’ve said, Dad doesn’t seem to be too keen on having David home and …’

‘Yes. Yes, you’re right,’ his grandfather conceded.

Max smiled confidently at him. The old boy was amazingly easy to manipulate once you knew which buttons to press. The one marked ‘David’ was always a dead cert. Contemptuously, Max wondered why his own father didn’t press it a little bit more often. There was no way that he, Max, would allow the old man to patronize him and put him down, comparing him unfavourably to others the way Ben did with Jon. No way at all, and it irritated Max that Jon should do so. After all, his father could be stiff-necked and stubborn enough when it suited him, and Max already knew that the news that he was going to Jamaica to look for David would not be received well in his parents’ household—for a variety of reasons.

The last thing his father would want was for David to be found and encouraged to come home. Not because, as Ben seemed so deludedly to believe, Jon was jealous of his twin. Max knew that Jon wouldn’t welcome the complications and hassles that would arise with having David and all the potential problems surrounding his fraudulent behaviour back on his doorstep.

In his father’s shoes, Max knew that he would have lost no time at all in informing Ben of just what his precious son had done. But Jon, to Max’s disgust, had gone to inordinate lengths to protect his father from discovering the truth about his favourite.

David wouldn’t come back to Haslewich, of course, and Max knew full well that it was extremely unlikely that he would even be able to find him—not that he intended to try very hard! A leisurely month or so relaxing in the sun was more the kind of thing he had in mind. He would pay some local agency to make a few general inquiries, of course, just to keep Gramps happy.

He would wait until after Christmas to break the news to Maddy that he was going to Jamaica. That way, there was no risk of him coming under family pressure or disapproval and no risk either of his father or anyone else bending Ben’s ear to try to make him change his mind.

‘Oh, Maddy, he looks so sweet.’

Maddy turned to give Jenny a rueful, watery smile before they both turned back towards the stage where Leo was giving his first public performance in the play school nativity play as one of the ‘shepherds.’

The sturdy house-tame lamb, born late in the year and abandoned by her mother to be hand-reared in the kitchen of a local farm, decided that it was time she had some attention and playfully butted Leo.

Manfully he grabbed hold of her collar, commanding, with the same intonation he had heard his aunt Olivia using to the pretty golden retriever puppy that was the latest addition to her household, ‘Sit …’

Even Ben, seated at the other side of Jenny, had given an appreciative bark of laughter, and as Jenny told Maddy mirthfully later when the audience had stopped laughing, Leo had most definitely stolen the show.

Max, on Maddy’s other side, gave his son a dispassionate, contemptuous look. The child irritated him. Surely he realized that sheep did not ‘sit.’

Leo was beginning to annoy Max. The boy had actually dared to stand in the doorway to Max and Maddy’s bedroom the last time Max had come home, glaring belligerently at him and refusing to allow Max to enter.

‘Make him move,’ he had told Maddy softly, without breaking eye contact with Leo, ‘because if you don’t …’

When the parents went backstage to collect their offspring, it was Jon whom Leo ran excitedly to once the play was over, flinging himself into his grandfather’s arms and then burrowing his face against Jon’s neck as Jon swung him up off the floor.

There was something about one’s grandchildren that made them so infinitely special and precious, Jon acknowledged as he kissed the little boy and ruffled his hair.

Jon had no way of explaining to himself why it was so easy for him to love Leo, when it had been so hard for him to love Max. Leo was Max’s son; you couldn’t look at him without knowing that. Physically he looked exactly as Max had looked at the same age, but temperamentally, emotionally …

It made Jon’s heart ache with compassion for Leo and anger against Max, to see the way Max treated his son. It was no wonder that Leo now refused to go near him. Maddy was very loyal and never criticized Max, but Jon had seen the pain in her eyes as she watched Max ignoring Leo, turning his back on him and deliberately showing the child how little he cared about him.

Initially, when Leo had been born, Jon had forced himself to stand back, to remind himself that he was Leo’s grandfather and not his father, but then he had watched Joss playing with him, seen the bond growing between uncle and child, seen the way Max was threatening to damage his son emotionally by rejecting him, and he had made himself a vow that for as long as Leo needed him in his life, he was going to be there for him.

Jon knew already, without knowing how he knew, that it would be Leo who one day would take his place in the family business, that Leo, like him, would be a Crighton who wanted to stay close to the place that had bred him, that Leo would be his kind of Crighton, just as Jack had also been showing signs of wanting to come into the family firm.

Jack … Jon started to frown slightly as he thought about his nephew. He had believed that Jack was happy with them, that he had accepted his father’s disappearance, but these last few months … Jack’s headmaster had warned them that if Jack’s work did not improve, there was no way he was going to get the A level grades he needed to go on to university. Jon had discussed the subject with Jack, but far from being concerned, Jack had merely told him truculently that he didn’t care—that he’d changed his mind, that he didn’t want to be a solicitor after all.

‘Then what do you want to be?’ Jon had asked him exasperatedly. It would be some years down the line before Jack could possibly join the family practice so could not relieve the pressure both he and Olivia were experiencing currently with so many new cases coming into the Haslewich office. Olivia had joined Jon a few years before and now they were considering taking on a third partner because they were both having to work a lot of extra hours. But that particular route, bringing in someone from outside the family, hadn’t appealed to either of them. And as if work wasn’t enough of a worry, Jon and Jenny were both concerned about Maddy and how she and the two children were being affected by the fact that Max spent so little time with them.

‘She’s such a lovely girl. She deserves so much better,’ Jenny had protested the last time they had discussed their son’s marriage. ‘I feel so helpless to do anything, though. Every time I try to raise the subject, she fobs me off. She’s happy here in Haslewich, she says she likes looking after Gramps. She loves Queensmead, and there’s no doubt that she’s turned it into a proper home, but she’s living the kind of life that’s more suited to some Victorian great-aunt than a young woman, and I’m afraid … It’s so unfair, Jon, she’s got such a lot to give. I know it’s a dreadful thing to say, but I really wish that she could meet someone else, someone who would value her and love her….’

That was as close as either of them had come to acknowledging that Max did not love his wife, but then, why discuss something that was so painfully obvious to everyone who witnessed it.

If Maddy did ever decide to leave Max and make a new life for herself somewhere else, he would lose the special closeness he had with Leo, Jon acknowledged, and he would hate that.

‘I love you, Jon,’ Leo whispered tremulously to him now, as though he had picked up on his grandfather’s thoughts.

Jon hugged him. Just very occasionally, when he was feeling especially emotional, Leo referred to him as ‘Jon.’ The rest of the time he called him Grampy.

On the other side of the room, where he had been deliberately flirting with the nursery class’s pretty young teacher, Max suddenly frowned as he watched the interplay between his son and his father.

What was Jon doing holding Leo like that, as though he was his child, and Leo, what was Leo doing looking at Jon as though … Ignoring the pretty teacher’s mock shy response to his sexual innuendo, Max strode across the room, firmly taking hold of Leo and swinging him down to the floor as he commanded curtly, ‘Leo, stop acting like a baby.’

The combination of being wrenched away from Jon and the frightening presence of his father caused Leo to tense and scream protestingly in Max’s hold.

‘Go away, I don’t like you,’ he told Max loudly, causing one or two nearby parents to stare.

Max looked coldly at his son. No one was allowed to tell Max that they didn’t like him.

‘It’s time Leo went home,’ Max instructed Maddy coldly over his shoulder. ‘He’s behaving badly.’

Maddy shook her head urgently at Leo. There was to be a celebration tea for the children served in the hall just as soon as she and the other hard-working helpers had got everything ready, and Maddy knew how much Leo had been looking forward to this treat. He had talked of it for days, and only yesterday he and Maddy had made special little cakes for the party while he practised the three short sentences he had to say in the play.

Maddy’s heart ached for him as she saw the expression in his eyes as he watched his father.

Another mother, another woman, would no doubt have coaxed and protested ‘Max … no … you know how much he’s been looking forward to the party,’ but Maddy knew that anything she might try to say or do to alleviate the situation would only make things worse. She could see from Max’s expression that there was no way he was going to back down, and she knew, too, that there was something in Max that would give him pleasure in denying his child his enjoyment. She had no idea what it was that had warped Max’s character so badly and made him the man he was, nor, she suspected, did anyone else. He could not have had better or more loving parents … but Jenny had intimated to her that Max had always been a difficult child … some children were.

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