Her One and Only

by Penny Jordan

  ‘I could see how much Charlotte has taken to you as well. That’s wonderful. Mind you, you’re so gentle and loving that you’d be able to cope with even the most difficult of step-children and anyone can see that Charlotte is not that. And, of course, it couldn’t be better, you and Seb living so close to one another.’

  ‘Louise...’ Katie began desperately and then stopped as Louise glanced out of the window and exclaimed,

  ‘Oh, here’s Gareth. He must have wondered why we’ve been gone for so long. Oh, Katie, I’m just so happy for you,’ Louise told her excitedly, and she turned to embrace her twin in a loving hug. ‘I can tell you now that there was a time when I wondered...well, you were always so determined to defend Gareth in the early days when I was so antagonistic towards him, and I suppose because we are twins and because I love him so much, I worried that you might...’

  With every word Louise spoke Katie could feel her anxiety and anguish growing. It lay like a block of ice against her heart; weighed like the heaviest of lead weights on her conscience. It was all her worst fears come to life. Louise had intuitively sensed her own feelings despite everything she had done to try to prevent her from doing so. Louise was her twin, her other half, and there existed between them a bond which called forth from Katie, not just her fiercest loyalty, but also a need to put Louise’s needs above her own, to protect her from the hurt and pain that knowing that she, Katie, loved Gareth would cause her. She struggled with her conscience not wanting to deceive her twin but as she already knew, it was almost impossible to stop Louise once she took hold of an idea and started to run with it. And, after all, the truth would very quickly become apparent—it was so obvious that she and Seb loathed one another.

  * * *

  ‘AND YOU WON’T forget about your grandfather’s party, will you?’ Jenny Crighton reminded Louise as she kissed her goodbye.

  They had brought the car across from Belgium and were driving on to see Gareth’s family in Scotland before returning to Brussels. As she hugged her mother, Louise promised her, ‘We’ll be there. How could we possibly miss it when it will be Katie’s first formal opportunity to show Seb off to the family?’

  ‘Seb?’ Jenny questioned in surprise. ‘But...’

  ‘I could see that there was something between them straightaway,’ Louise continued happily, ‘and I’m just so glad for Katie, Mum. She’s been so unlike her normal self just lately. That’s worried me. It’s funny the way things work out, isn’t it?’ she continued conversationally. ‘If she hadn’t had to give up her old job because of that awful boss who was making life so miserable for her, she would never have come home and then she wouldn’t have met Seb.

  ‘You should have seen her face when Charlotte told us what the girl at the fair had predicted for her and Seb,’ Louise had chuckled. ‘A baby boy no less,’ she enlightened her bemused parent. ‘Charlotte was thrilled to bits. No potential problems there, that’s very clear, but then Charlotte’s almost a young woman herself and since, from what Guy told me, Seb and his ex-wife’s divorce was mutually agreed and they get on tolerably well together, at least Katie won’t be walking into an unpleasant situation.

  ‘She’s so sensitive, too sensitive for her own good I sometimes think. She always puts other people’s feelings and other people’s needs above her own.’

  ‘Yes, she does,’ Jenny agreed soberly.

  It was news to her that Katie was romantically involved with Seb Cooke, but Louise was quite correct when she stated that Katie had been unlike her normal self over the last year or so. Always quiet, she had become to a mother’s anxious eye worryingly withdrawn, and it had been at least in part because of her concern that Jenny had suggested to Jon that they persuade Katie to come home and join the family business when she admitted that she was thinking of changing her job.

  Not that Jenny had any objections to Seb Cooke as a prospective son-in-law, far from it. She had taken to him virtually immediately and she thought that Charlotte was a honey. No. What did surprise her was that her normally hesitant and even reticent daughter should have committed herself so immediately.

  * * *

  ‘OH, YES, GUY, I’m sure that Katie would be thrilled with it,’ Jenny enthused as she studied the pretty little desk which Guy had invited her to come and see. The antiques shop they had originally begun as a joint venture was now managed by one of Guy’s many relatives, Didi Fowler, while Guy concentrated on the other aspects of his small financial empire.

  ‘I remember how much she loved the one I found for my sister Laura,’ Guy agreed, ‘and when Didi said that this one had come in I thought of Katie and her new apartment straightaway. When does she actually move in, by the way? I know that Seb has terminated the lease on his rented property and that he intends to start living in his apartment on his return from this conference he’s gone to.’

  ‘Katie said that she’d like to move in as soon as she can and, of course, now that she and Seb are seeing one another I imagine she’ll want to move in when he does.’

  ‘Katie and Seb?’ Guy whistled soundlessly. ‘I hadn’t realised...’ he began and then shook his head.

  ‘Neither had I,’ Jenny admitted. ‘But Katie confided in Louise and Louise mentioned it to me without realising that Katie hadn’t said anything yet herself.’

  ‘A Cooke and a Crighton...that will cause something of a stir. Ben isn’t going to like it. How is he, by the way...?’

  ‘Not too good, I’m afraid,’ Jenny told him worriedly. ‘Maddy says he’s becoming increasingly distressed about David’s absence—we don’t use the word “disappearance” around Ben, we never have done, it upsets him so much. You know how much he’s always thought of David. He was always the favoured son.’

  ‘Mmm... If you ask me, that was probably the root of

  David’s problem. It wasn’t just that Ben had such high expectations of him, it was that he gave David the belief that he had the right to expect the world to place him on the same pedestal his father had done. Well, personally, I can’t see how he could ever come back.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be easy,’ Jenny admitted, ‘for any of us. But I can’t help wishing for Ben’s sake if nothing else that he would at least get in touch with us... In truth, Guy, I’m afraid that if David leaves it too much longer it could well be too late,’ she told him sombrely. ‘The doctors say there’s no valid reason why Ben shouldn’t have made a much better recovery from his last operation than he has. In theory he’s got every reason to have done so. Just on the basis of the dedicated nursing Maddy’s given him, and we had all hoped that having Max based in Chester and living permanently at Queensmead would help—you know that after David, Max has always been his favourite.’

  ‘But Max isn’t the person he originally was any longer, is he? Max is much more Jon’s son now than he’s David’s nephew.’

  ‘Yes. As Max himself would be the first to say, what he went through in Jamaica was very much a “Saul on the road to Damascus” conversion for him.’ The seriousness left Jenny’s eyes and she laughed, explaining to Guy, ‘Little Leo must have heard his father using that particular phrase himself because he asked Max what his Uncle Saul was doing on the road to Damascus.’

  When they had both finished laughing, Guy went over and patted the desk they had been admiring and told Jenny in amusement, ‘Perhaps I should keep this and present it to Katie as a wedding present.

  ‘Seb’s a good man,’ he told her reassuringly. ‘Very highly principled, which will suit Katie.’

  Having confirmed to Jenny that he would keep the desk for her daughter, Guy went home to tell his wife that they might shortly expect to be celebrating another wedding in the family.

  ‘Seb and Katie. Oh, that’s wonderful,’ Chrissie enthused. ‘Charlotte will be thrilled. She’s really taken to Katie,’ she added, reiterating Louise’s comment to her mother earlier.

&nb
sp; Meanwhile, totally unaware of the future being mapped out for them, the two supposed lovers were both independently going about their daily business.

  Katie had a busy day filled with appointments all morning and an appearance at court in the afternoon, while Seb was on his way to attend a large conference on the moral implications resulting from the giant strides forward the scientific world was currently making in the field of genetics.

  Seb’s last telephone call before he had left had been to the interior designer, giving her the go-ahead on the designs she had submitted to him. He would be gone less than a week but she had assured him that, given her contacts, enough of the work would be completed to enable him to move into the apartment on his return.

  The conference was being held in Florida. Not an ideal venue so far as Seb was concerned, not with the long flight involved. Closing his eyes he settled back in his seat, preparing to go to sleep using a relaxation technique he had perfected over the years, but for once neither his mind nor his body were prepared to respond to the commands he was giving them. Instead, behind his closed eyelids, an image formed of the last person he wanted to think about.

  Infuriatingly, instead of achieving his normal Zen-like state of pre-sleep calm, Katie Crighton’s features kept forming themselves in a series of intimate pictures, the most disconcerting of which set Katie’s eyes and hair and mouth in the tousled-haired solemn-expressioned face of a small boy child.

  ‘Oh, no. Oh, no way, no way at all.’

  Seb wasn’t aware that he had muttered his denial out aloud until he saw the curious look the man in the adjacent seat was giving him.

  Scientifically he knew it was totally impossible for anyone to ‘see’ into the future—true, they could make accurate assumptions based on the hard evidence of given facts—and it was perhaps predictable that the gypsy woman should have assumed that he and Katie were a couple and therefore, that she should at some stage bear his child, but there had been something, not so much about her predictions, but about the woman herself, that had touched an almost primeval chord inside him.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. All right, why not acknowledge it—admit it to himself, he did want Katie. Sexually she pressed buttons he had forgotten he had long ago, if in fact he had ever known.

  Sex for him, while a pleasurable experience, had never driven him, never obsessed him, never possessed him as it did some men. Because his awareness of how people viewed Cooke men and their supposedly uncontrollable sexuality had subconsciously made him determined that he would not just rise above the low expectations people had of his family academically, but also determined to rise above the taint of their notorious sexual profligacy.

  It was because of that that he had insisted on corralling his youthfully sexual desire for Sandra within the acceptable, respectable confines of marriage. Time and experience might have shown him the foolishness of that, but he had never again allowed his sexual desire to get out of control or indeed to have any real input into his life.

  Since he had passed thirty he had come to consider himself as a man who had the maturity and the ability to treat the sexual side of his nature as less important to him and with less value to his life than the cerebral satisfaction it gave him to distance himself from any power it might have threatened to have over him.

  Now, irritatingly, ridiculously, here he was at thirty-eight discovering that, far from being a thoroughly tamed and unimportant facet of his nature, it had become an out of control hydra-headed monster that sprouted ten new heads for every one he destroyed. Right now, for instance, he had gone from visualising Katie to remembering how it had felt to kiss her; how soft and warm her skin had felt, her breast...how betrayingly her nipple had pulsed and her breathing quickened...how betrayingly, too, she had flushed and looked away, unable to meet his eyes when the gypsy had spouted all that rubbish about them being a couple. Oh, yes, she was as physically and intimately aware of him as he was of her, although he doubted that she had gone as far as entertaining, envisaging, the kind of sexual fantasies about him that were plaguing him about her.

  Charlotte had been conceived by accident, the result of a missed birth control pill, her conception something neither he nor Sandra had recognised until several weeks later. But if he was to father a child now, he would want to know it, sense it, feel it, share with Katie the knowledge that the heat of their passion had ignited the spark that was life.

  What the hell was he doing...thinking? Catching the passing stewardess’s eye, Seb ordered the drink he had refused earlier. He must be suffering from some kind of altitude sickness. Either that or that damned gypsy had put some kind of spell on him. Disbelievingly he closed his eyes. Now he knew he was really losing it. Spells, predictions...these were things that belonged to the superstitious, the Middle Ages, to a time when people had still believed that the world was flat. He was a scientist, for heaven’s sake.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘IT’S BEGINNING TO look like home already.’

  Whirling round Katie hugged her mother gratefully.

  Jenny had just spent the best part of the afternoon hanging the curtains she and Maddy had made for Katie’s sitting room.

  ‘This damask really looks wonderful,’ Jenny murmured, adding feelingly, ‘Mind you, it was murder to sew... I’ve been trying to persuade your father that we ought to give the drawing room a face-lift and this fabric would be perfect.’

  ‘Mmm...it even looks as though it could be antique,’ Katie enthused. ‘And I love this soft gold colour.’

  ‘Mmm... Maddy has a very good eye. It goes perfectly with your carpet.’

  The carpet which had been fitted throughout the apartment was like the curtain fabric, a bargain tracked down by Maddy. Originally ordered by another customer and dyed to her specification, the order had been cancelled when the customer had decided at the last minute that she wanted a different colour.

  Her expensive mistake had been Katie’s lucky bargain. The soft, pale gold plain wool might not have been to everyone’s taste, nor particularly practical, but as both Maddy and Jenny had reassured her she was hardly likely to have much dirt trodden into it living in a top floor apartment.

  It had been at Maddy’s suggestion that Katie had been persuaded to spend what she had considered to be a very large sum of money on a wallpaper border to go beneath the room’s elegant coving. The border, formal swags of gold on a cream background, was, Katie had to admit, perfect with the carpet and curtains and she had liked Maddy’s suggestion, too, that she might stencil rope tassels on either side of the chimney.

  However, rather than employ a decorator, she had decided to paste them up herself. An old sofa, again unearthed by Maddy from the attics at Queensmead, was currently being re-upholstered and the bits of furniture which her parents had donated were already in place, along with the double bed she had bought.

  ‘I’ve hung the old curtains from the guest bedroom at home in your bedroom for now. They’ll do until you find a fabric you like. Come and have a look at them.’

  As Katie followed her mother into her bedroom Jenny looked at the bed and remarked dryly, ‘Wouldn’t a king-sized one have been better? I know your father always complained that our old double was too small and Seb’s a good inch or so taller than him.’

  Speechlessly Katie stared at her mother, the colour draining from her face.

  ‘Louise told me,’ Jenny said gently.

  ‘Louise told you,’ Katie croaked in shock. ‘Louise told you about...’

  ‘...about you and Seb. Yes,’ her mother confirmed.

  Walking over to Katie she put her arms around her and hugged her tenderly.

  ‘I’m so pleased for you, darling. I didn’t want to say anything but...well, I know these last couple of years haven’t been very happy ones for you. Of course, your grandfather isn’t exactly thrilled, not with Seb bei
ng a Cooke, but then I’m sure that Seb will be more than a match for Ben. You’ve both been summoned to present yourselves to him at his party, needless to say.’

  Katie had to sit down. Why? Why hadn’t she cautioned Louise not to say anything? Why hadn’t she realised what would happen if she didn’t? This was dreadful. Awful. Worse than the very worst possible nightmare she could ever have conjured up. Worse than Louise discovering that you love Gareth? an inner voice demanded grittily. No, not worse than that. With this, the only person who would be hurt would be her. What on earth was she going to do? Thank goodness Seb was safely out of the way, out of the country. Somehow she was going to have to find the courage to tell her mother that Louise had got it wrong—and before Seb came back.

  Taking a deep breath she closed her eyes and then said shakily, ‘Mum...’

  But it was too late; her mother was already speaking. ‘When I told Guy, he wasn’t sure whether or not he ought to keep the desk for a wedding present, but...’

  ‘Guy knows...’ Katie interrupted her hollowly.

  Her mother nodded her head.

  ‘Mmm... Apparently Chrissie wasn’t all that surprised...’

  Silently Katie looked at her mother, totally unable to find the words to express the enormity of the situation she was in.

  Guy knew!

  Chrissie knew!

  Everyone, it seemed, knew that she had told her twin that she and Seb were in love. Lovers, in fact, to judge from her mother’s unexpectedly frank comment about her double bed earlier...

  Everyone... Everyone except Seb. A feeling of sick panic filled her. What was she going to do? Even if she told her mother the truth now, it was far too late to stop what was going on getting to Seb’s ears. Even if she admitted, retracted, everything, he was bound to hear something. Heaven alone knew how many people were already involved.