the busy street, but then the car driver behind him, growing impatient with the delay, tooted his horn and she hesitated and then turned aside, shooting him a searing look before marching stiffly away from him.
Just as equally infuriated by her behaviour as she seemed to have been by his, Seb shot her departing back a fulminating look of male contempt for her female foolishness before slipping the car back into gear and continuing with his journey.
As Katie walked through Haslewich’s busy main thoroughfare she was aware of a heavy weight of unhappiness dulling what, by rights, should have been a joyous and hopefully positive return to the bosom of her family.
She was twenty-four years of age, in excellent health, a fully qualified solicitor who had been not just asked, but beseeched by her father and her cousin to join them in the family partnership in their home town. Indeed she had even had the satisfaction of having her elder brother no less, add his persuasive arguments to those of the other members of the family.
‘Dad needs you Katie,’ Max had told her. ‘They’re absolutely inundated with work, and we all know how grandfather would react if Dad were to suggest taking on a non-Crighton partner, just as we all know that no solicitor worth his or her salt would join the partnership without the expectation of being offered their own partnership. For you to come home and join Dad and Olivia would be the ideal solution to the problem. You’re young in terms of legal experience at the moment, but a partnership in the not too distant future is assured.’
‘Yes, I daresay it is,’ Katie had agreed quietly. ‘But you seem to forget Max that I already have a job.’
‘I know you do,’ Max had agreed, ‘but I’m not completely blind Katie, something’s gone wrong in your life. Look, I’m not going to pry or ask questions, God knows I don’t have the right to act the big brother with you now, after all I was hardly a caring one to you when you and Louise were growing up. What I will say to you, though, is that some people need to seek solitude, to lick their wounds and heal themselves, and others need the care and comfort of their close family, and we both know which camp you fall into.’
It was true, Louise, Katie’s twin sister was more the type to seek the solitude Max had just described than her, but then Louise was hardly likely to need to do so. Louise after all was blissfully in love with and loved by Gareth.
Louise and Gareth.
Katie had closed her eyes thankful that no one had guessed her shameful poisonous secret. It made no difference that she had loved Gareth quietly and sedately and from a distance a long time before Louise had realised the exact nature of her feelings for him. And the reason it made no difference was not just because Louise was her other half, her dearly beloved if sometimes somewhat headstrong and exasperating twin, but because Gareth himself did not love her…Gareth loved Louise.
Stoically Katie had accepted the agonising searing burn of her own pain, claiming pressure of work for her increasingly infrequent visits home and her even more infrequent get-togethers with her twin, but then as though fate had not done enough she discovered that it had another blow in store for her.
Her boss, for whom she had worked ever since she had joined the legal department of the charity to do her articles after leaving university, had resigned, and the man who had taken his place…
Katie closed her eyes in midstep. Jeremy Stafford had at first seemed so charming, so very much on her own wavelength that even now she couldn’t properly come to terms with what had happened.
When he had started asking her to work late, she had done so willingly, enjoying not just the rapport between them but the knowledge that the work they were doing was ultimately benefiting people who were so very desperately in need of help.
The first time Jeremy had suggested dinner as a “reward” to them both for their hard work, she had felt nothing but pleasure, no sense of wariness or suspicion had clouded her happy acceptance of his suggestion. How naive she had been, but then from the way that Jeremy had always talked about his wife and small children she had assumed that he was so happily married that any kind of betrayal of his wife and their marriage vows—well, it had simply never crossed her mind that it might have crossed his…But she had been wrong…not only had it crossed his, it had lingered there and quite unequivocally taken up a very lustful and leering residence as she had so unpleasantly discovered.
At first when he had started to compliment her on her face and then her figure she had simply assumed that he was being pleasant, but then had come the night when he had put his arm around her when they were leaving the restaurant and then attempted to kiss her.
She had fobbed him off immediately, but to her consternation instead of apologising as she had expected him to do he had turned on her claiming that she had led him on; that she was a tease and worse, oh yes, much much worse. Of course after that there had been no more intimate dinners and no evenings working late, instead there had been hostility and even victimisation: accusations about missing reports which she knew she had filed, mistakes which she knew she had not made, errors which she knew were simply not hers.
Not that she had any intention of telling Max any of that. The change her elder brother had undergone following the attack he had suffered on a Jamaican beach while he was in that country trying to trace their father’s missing twin brother, David Crighton, had not merely converted him into a passionately devoted husband and father, it had also turned him into a surprisingly caring and concerned brother and son. If Max guessed for one moment what was going on, Katie knew that he would lose no time in seeking out Jeremy Stafford and demanding retribution for his behaviour.
Had they been children still involved in playground jealousies and quarrels that might just have been acceptable, but they were adults. She was supposed to be in charge of her own life. As a modern independent woman she was expected to be able to deal with her own problems. The sadness was, she loved her work, loved knowing that what she was doing no matter how small, was a benefit to other people.
The Crighton women carried a strong gene of responsibility and duty towards their fellow men and women. In her great-aunt, Ruth Crighton, it had manifested itself in the establishment of an enclave of charitably run accommodation units for single parents and their children. In her mother, Jenny, it showed in the way she gave so much of her time and energy to others. Katie’s sister had become involved in a programme to help young drug addicts in Brussels where she and Gareth lived and worked.
Katie froze as the sudden sharp screech of a car’s brakes brought her back to reality.
Without realising what she was doing she had started across the road without looking properly, but that in no way excused the manic dangerousness of the speed at which the driver of the car, now stopped in front of her, had to have been driving to have been forced to halt with such a screech. Katie knew nothing about cars and the fact that the very powerful engine of the Mercedes the man was driving was responsible for the intensity of his braking rather than his speed was therefore completely lost on her. Instead what she was aware of was the look of totally unwarranted fury in his eyes as he glowered ferociously out of the car at her.
As her own shock held her motionless she was distantly aware of the fact that he was outrageously good-looking with thick, virtually jet-black, well-groomed hair, chillingly icy grey eyes and a mouth that even when clamped grimly closed still betrayed the fact that he had a disturbingly full and sexy bottom lip.
But none of that compensated for the fact that he had nearly run her over. Determinedly Katie took a step towards the car and then stopped as the driver behind him hooted impatiently. Much as she longed to give Mr Sexy Mouth a piece of her mind, she really didn’t have time. She was due at the office ten minutes ago, hardly a good start to her first official working
