Saul wasn’t looking forward to what he had to do,
and Olivia’s uninhibited pleasure at seeing him made him feel even worse. He waited until she had made them both a drink before starting to speak. “Livvy, there isn’t any easy way to do this,” he began quietly, whilst Olivia’s heart turned over at the ominous tone of his voice. “What is it? What’s happened? Caspar …” she demanded and then stopped, her face flushing as she realized from Saul’s surprised expression just how wrong and revealing her reaction was. “No. This doesn’t have anything to do with Caspar,” Saul said. He took a deep breath. “It’s David …” 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. 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 Starting Over
Penny Jordan
Table of Contents
The Crightons CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
‘HAVE YOU ANY idea just how long it is since we last had sex?’ Caspar knew the moment the words were spoken that they were the wrong ones, not just for Olivia’s own mood but as an expression of what he himself was truly feeling, but it was too late to recall them. He could see that from Olivia’s expression. ‘Sex! Sex! Is that all you can think about?’ she demanded furiously. ‘We’re married. We’re supposed to have sex,’ Caspar told her recklessly, his own anger and sense of ill-usage picking up from hers as he compounded his original folly. ‘We’re supposed to do an awful lot of things,’ Olivia couldn’t resist pointing out sharply. ‘Yesterday for instance you were supposed to take the girls out to the park, but instead you went playing golf with your brother.’ ‘Oh, I see, so that’s what all this is about is it?’ Caspar challenged her. ‘No sex, because yesterday I was out having a bit of R and R with my brother.’ ‘Your half-brother actually,’ Olivia corrected him coldly. Her heart was thudding frantically fast, trying to push its way through her ribs, her skin. She felt sick, breathless, overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of her own emotions and the effort it was taking for her to control them. Any minute now she would start breaking out in a sweat and then … then … But no she wasn’t going to allow herself to feel sick never mind be sick; doing that brought her far too close to the shadow of her own mother and the neuroses that drove her. The perpetual cycle of binging and then purging which had dominated her life and the lives of those around her. They had been in the States for a number of weeks, initially to attend the wedding of one of Caspar’s half-brothers, but also so that Caspar could spend some time with his large and extended family and introduce his English wife and their daughters to them. Olivia had never wanted to attend the wedding in the first place; right now she was so busy at work that taking a few days off never mind a few weeks made her feel sick with anxiety, and she and Caspar had quarreled bitterly over her refusal. The fact that she had at the very last minute changed her mind, was not out of a desire to please Caspar, but because of her point-blank refusal to join the rest of her family in welcoming her father, David, back to his home town. Her total boycott of the family celebration, not just of his return, but also of his marriage to Honor, had caused the existing rift between Caspar and herself to deepen into a very dangerous hostile resentment.
