Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN
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herself up in sacrifice, virginal and pure; as innocent as a child and yet as knowledgeable as Eve. I wanted to reach out to you, take hold of you. You had been in the river and I could see the water still running off your skin, your breasts, your belly, your … The moonlight turned your body the colour of moonstones, pale and almost translucent. I wanted to bury my face between your legs and lick the drops of water from your skin. I wanted to join you in your pagan nakedness, your sensual abandonment to the night and the moon, and then you turned your head and saw me and—’
‘Fell off my perch and into the river,’ Olivia finished for him shakily. She was glad of the concealing darkness around them, not because Saul had evoked the embarrassment her adolescent self had experienced at being so shamingly discovered by her so much older and more sophisticated male relative cavorting around naked in the river, but because of the sensations, the emotions, his words had aroused in her now.
‘I never knew you could be so poetic,’ she finally managed to say as she struggled to dismiss the surge of heat she could feel invading her body. It would serve no good purpose and only add fuel to embers, which, she suspected, given half a chance, could start to burn very dangerously out of control if she admitted to Saul that if he had done all those years ago any one of the things he had just described, he would have made the magic of the night complete.
Hadn’t she, after all, gone down to the river to fulfil an old local tradition that said a girl should offer a prayer to the midsummer night’s moon to be granted the love of the man of her choice? And in those days, Saul … well, she had certainly had a mammoth crush on him.
Right now, Saul was feeling very vulnerable, she reminded herself. His marriage had broken down and he had turned to her for support and advice as a close family member … her father’s cousin, she reminded herself firmly.
‘It was just as well it was you who caught me and not Gramps,’ she commented lightly, ‘even if I didn’t think so at the time, considering the ticking off you gave me.
‘Is there no way you and Hillary can give your marriage a second chance?’ she asked him, changing the subject as they walked down the path that led through Queensmead’s more formal gardens and through the water meadow bordering the river.
‘A second chance?’ Saul derided cynically. ‘Our marriage has had more second chances than I’ve had hot dinners. No, Meg was the result of our last attempt at a second chance,’ he admitted frankly, ‘and I wish to God she hadn’t been. No child should be conceived as a Band-Aid to fix an ailing marriage.’
‘Oh, Saul,’ Olivia protested, automatically reaching out to touch his arm sympathetically.
The years that separated them no longer seemed the vast gulf they had appeared to her at fifteen when she had been at the height or rather the depths of her mammoth crush on him. Nor did Saul himself really appear to resemble the Godlike remote creature she had built him up in her mind to be in those days. She rather preferred him as the fallible human being he actually was, she admitted ruefully, and whilst the awe in which she had once held him might have gone, her awareness of his sexuality certainly hadn’t.
Quickly she released his arm, causing him to stop and look searchingly at her in the dusky half-light before very firmly taking hold of her hand and gently tucking her arm back through his own.
‘Caspar can’t object,’ he told her, ‘if that’s what you’re worrying about. We are cousins.’
‘It wasn’t and we’re not … cousins,’ she clarified. ‘Well, not first ones, second maybe … heavens, I’m beginning to sound like Gramps. He always makes such a big thing of the fact that he and your father are half-brothers.’
‘Mmm … Well, it’s always amazed me to see the different ways he treats your father and Jon. If I were Jon …’ He stopped and shook his head.
‘What will you do now?’ Olivia asked him, changing the subject again. ‘What will happen to the children if Hillary does go back to America?’
‘If she does? Believe me, there’s no “if” about it. This afternoon she was on the phone organising her flight. I’ve got to go back to work, of course. The parents, or rather Mum, has offered to help out with the kids for the time being but that’s only a temporary solution and it means uprooting them, which I don’t really want to do. I suppose my best option is to take on a nanny to look after them.’
‘Where’s Hillary now?’ Olivia asked him. They had almost reached the river and she could see it gleaming darkly under the shadows of the clouds that raced across the moon.
‘She’s got a dinner date, would you believe it? I don’t know who with.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Trust Hillary. You know it wasn’t very far from here that I saw you on that night,’ he reminded her.
‘I can’t remember, was it …?’ Olivia replied untruthfully, adding as she turned her back on the river, ‘We’d better go back, I—’
‘Livvy …’
‘Yes.’
She knew what was going to happen, of course. She wasn’t fifteen any more and she knew perfectly well what that particular note in a man’s voice meant. She could have ignored it. Ignored Saul, but instead …
Instead, she turned back to him and he stepped towards her, lifting his hands to touch and then cup her face, stroking her skin with those long, lean fingers, learning its contours with delicate and very deliberate sensuality.
‘Saul!’ She reached to catch at his hands and remove them from her face but it was too late to avoid the downward movement of his head, the warm male pressure of his mouth, his kiss.
She ended it as quickly as she could, willing her own lips not to give in to the temptation to respond; stepping back from him quickly and determinedly and starting to walk back down the path they had just come without waiting for him.
‘Livvy, I’m sorry,’ he apologised as he caught up with her. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘No, you shouldn’t,’ she agreed lightly.
‘Still friends?’ he asked her.
‘Still friends,’ she repeated, emphasising the second word meaningfully.
Saul laughed as he caught hold of her hand, dropping it again as she tugged it away from him.
‘All right, all right, I get the message,’ he assured her, adding ruefully, ‘Caspar’s a lucky man, although I get the impression that he wasn’t too pleased when you offered to stay on here to help Jon.’
‘Did he tell you that?’ Olivia asked sharply.
‘Not in so many words.’
‘It won’t be for very long. Just a few weeks until Dad gets back on his feet.’ Not even to Saul could she admit that it wasn’t just because of her father that she felt compelled to stay. There was her mother, as well. So far there had been no repeat of the ugly scene Olivia had walked in on. But her mother was so frighteningly vulnerable; look at the way she was clinging to Uncle Jon. She needed someone to be there for her.
But Olivia knew that there was no point in trying to tell Caspar how she felt. He had made his views on her mother’s condition quite plain enough.
‘You wanted to see me, Grandfather?’ Max paused edgily just inside Ben’s study door.
He had just been on the point of leaving for Chester, ostensibly on a self-imposed mission to update the Chester side of the family with the latest news on David’s progress, but in reality, he had planned, after discharging this duty, to spend the rest of the evening indulging in a little R and R away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of Haslewich. He knew of a club where the membership rules were pretty elastic, provided you could afford to break them, and the girls … Then when his mother had informed him that his grandfather wanted to see him, he had been tempted to put off answering Ben’s summons until the morning, but he knew quite well that his mother would refuse