he had on the female sex, Luke, whilst not oblivious to it, was certainly dismissively contemptuous of it—and, it had to be said, of the women who reacted to it.
‘I wanted to have a word with you about the Marshall case before I leave for Brussels.’
‘You haven’t forgotten that we’ve got the Haslewich do on at the Grosvenor this weekend, have you?’ James asked him.
Luke shook his head as he perched on the comer of his brother’s desk. Both of them were qualified barristers working from the same set of chambers as their father and uncle used to, but it was Luke who was the most senior, having been appointed a Queen’s Counsel the previous year, one of the youngest in the country, a fact about which his father had lost no time bragging to his cousin, Ben Crighton, in Haslewich.
Henry and Ben were a generation removed from the original quarrel that had split the Crighton family, but they still continued the subtle interfamily rivalry their fathers had begun, much to Luke’s irritation.
He had far more important things to worry about than outdoing his cousin, Max Crighton, and he had no wish to take up the baton of family competitiveness and run with it even if Max was showing signs of wishing to do so.
‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ he agreed, ‘although I can’t say that I’m particularly looking forward to it.’
‘Mmm...well, it certainly won’t be boring,’ James commented. ‘Max is coming up from London with his wife.’
‘Mmm...’ was Luke’s only comment.
‘He’s doing pretty well for himself by all accounts,’ James continued. ‘He’s got a good tenancy, though. You’d be hard put to find a better set of chambers, and—’
‘He’s got a good tenancy?’ Luke broke in dryly, emphasising the word ‘he’s’. ‘I rather thought his sudden advancement into the upper echelons of one of London’s most prestigious sets of chambers owed more to the efforts of his father-in-law than to Max himself.’
‘You’ve never really liked him, have you?’ James asked his brother.
‘No, I haven’t,’ Luke agreed, coldly adding, ‘it’s hard to think of him as Jon’s son. If David had been his father...’
‘That was an odd business, wasn’t it?’ James said. ‘The way David just upped and left like that after his heart attack, disappearing...’
‘Mmm...I dare say he had his reasons,’ Luke commented obliquely. He had heard certain rumours about David—none of them ever verified, but he had sensed that despite the strenuous and meticulous efforts that Jon had made to track down his twin brother, he was almost relieved not to have been able to find him.
In Luke’s opinion Jon had always been the better one of the pair even if Jon’s own father had always shown a public and very marked preference for David. And now Jon and Jenny’s twin daughters were eighteen. God, that made him feel old. He was virtually twice their age, and as his great-aunt Alice had reminded him pugnaciously the last time he had seen her, fast approaching an age where, in her words, he ran the danger of no longer being seen as an eligible bachelor but rather an unpleasant misanthrope.
He knew that he was commonly considered to be aloof and disdainful; that he had the reputation of being overly arrogant, too sure of himself and dismissive of women who made a play for him; that he was, in fact, immune to the vulnerability of falling in love.
Not so. He had once been in love and very, very deeply, or so he had thought at the time, but she had married someone else and lived to regret it. She had told him this when she had come to see him, tears filling her eyes as she confessed that her marriage was over and that she needed his help to find a good divorce lawyer.
‘Have you thought long and hard about what you’ll be giving up,’ he had asked her seriously.
‘Of course I have,’ she had cried, pushing trembling fingers into her hair as she went on tearfully, ‘but do you really think that any of that matters. That his wealth, his title, that any of it means anything when I’m so unhappy...?’
‘You married him,’ he pointed out bluntly to her.
‘Yes,’ she had agreed, her mouth trembling as much as her hand had done earlier. ‘At eighteen I believed I loved him. At eighteen you can convince yourself of anything you want to believe. He seemed so...’
‘So rich,’ he offered.
She had given him a hurt look.
‘I didn’t stop to think. He swept me off my feet. I thought then you should never have let me go, Luke,’ she told him quietly.
He paused for a moment before answering her evenly, ‘As I remember it, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. You told me that you loved him and that you didn’t love me.’
‘I was lying,’ she whispered huskily. ‘I did love you, very, very much, but...’
‘You loved him more,’ he offered cynically.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, tears filling her eyes, ‘or at least I believed that I did. Please help me, Luke,’ she implored him. ‘I don’t know who else to turn to.’
‘Go and see this man—he’s a first-class divorce lawyer,’ he told her stiffly, scribbling a name and address down on a piece of paper and handing it to her without looking at her.
That had been six weeks ago. He had not seen or heard from her since, but he had not stopped thinking about her, remembering... She had been eighteen to his twenty-two; all Eve, all woman, teasing him, taunting him, laughing at him as he was unable to prevent himself from showing how he felt about her. It had been his first real experience of the intensity of emotional and physical love. And his last. He had been determined on that. Never again would any woman be allowed to put him through what she had—the pain, the self-contempt, the sheer intensity of emotions that had led only to the destruction of his pride and the humiliation of watching her walk away with another man. Any woman ... no matter who she might be.
Oh yes, he had seen the look in Fenella’s eyes as she sat opposite him and had guessed just what she was thinking. Her husband, despite his title and his wealth, or maybe because of them, was not the kind of man a woman would dream of having as her lover. A man’s man was generally how others described him, if they wanted to be tactful and generous. Overweight, boorish, self-opinionated, a traditionalist who said openly that he believed a woman’s place was in the home and, his being closer now to fifty than forty, it was understandable, Luke acknowledged cynically, why Fenella might prefer a generous divorce settlement and the chance to find herself a more congenial and appealing man. But that man was most definitely not going to be him.
Jenny was putting the final touches to the icing on the twins’ decorative birthday cake when Joss came bursting in. Predictably, Louise had announced earlier in that slightly bossy way that characterised her that they did not want their cake decorated with sickly, yukky flowers and things.
‘What do you want, then?’ Jenny had asked her, slightly exasperated. Both the girls were due to start university at the beginning of the autumn term and whilst she knew she was going to miss them, as she had commented ruefully to Jon, there were going to be certain advantages to their departure. The lack of arguments over their constant breaking of what Jenny considered to be a perfectly reasonable and even overgenerous curfew during school term time was one thing, and the other was the ability to go into her wardrobe without discovering that the very thing she wanted to wear was missing, presumed grubby and crumpled on the twins’ bedroom floor.
‘Something serious and meaningful,’ Louise had responded in answer to her mother’s wry question. She had given her father a lofty look as he teased, ‘Oh, you mean something like the Benjamin Bunny cake you drove us all crazy over...?’
‘That was years ago,’ she protested, turning her back on him as she informed her mother, ‘No. What we want is something that shows what Katie and I are planning to do with our lives.’
‘Oh,