introduce you to them,’ Joss offered enthusiastically. ‘That is, if you’re going to be here for a while...?’
He let the question hang.
‘Well, that kinda depends. You see ... gee ... I’m sorry but I don’t know your name. We haven’t introduced ourselves yet, have we? I’m Bobbie, short for Roberta,’ she told him whilst inwardly acknowledging ruefully that she really didn’t have the time to waste on this sort of thing, but he was just so appealing and not a day over ten or eleven. Give him another ten or fifteen years and he was going to be dynamite. She wondered absently what his cousins were actually like.
‘Bobbie...I like that,’ he told her and she hid her smile as the look in his eyes told her that whatever her name had turned out to be, it would have got an equally enthusiastic response. ‘I’m Joss,’ he added, ‘Joss Crighton.’
Joss Crighton. That altered everything. Thick eyelashes veiled her eyes.
‘Well now, Joss Crighton, suppose you and I go find a diner and get to know one another a little bit better and you can tell me all about these cousins of yours. Would they be Crightons, too?’ she asked him casually.
‘Yes, they are,’ he agreed. ‘But ... well, it’s a long story.’
‘I can’t wait to hear it. They’re my favourite kind,’ she assured him solemnly.
As he fell into step beside her, matching his own stride to her long-legged, elegantly feminine walk, Joss couldn’t help stealing awed glances at her.
She was wearing cream trousers and a shirt in the same colour with a camelly-coloured coat over the top; her blonde hair, now that she had lifted her head, hung down past her shoulders in thick, luxurious waves. Joss could feel his heart threatening to burst with pride and delight as he guided her through the town square and into one of the pretty, narrow streets that led off it.
‘Gee, is that really real?’ she paused to enquire as they passed a clutch of half-timbered Elizabethan buildings, huddled together for support.
‘Yes, they were built in the reign of Elizabeth I,’ Joss told her importantly. ‘The main structure of wooden beams is infilled with panels of wattle and daub—that’s sort of bits of branches held together with a mixture of straw, mud and other things,’ he told her kindly.
‘Uh-huh,’ Bobbie responded, refraining from telling him that she had majored in British history before switching her talents to a more modeRN and financially rewarding field.
‘We don’t actually have diners in this country,’ Joss informed her politely, ‘but there is a ... a place just down here....’
Bobbie hid her amusement. No doubt he was taking her to the town’s McDonald’s. Only, as she soon discovered, he wasn’t and she hesitated fractionally as he directed her attention to a very smart and up-market-looking wine bar, glancing thoughtfully from the sign above the doorway that stipulated that alcoholic beverages were not supplied to persons under eighteen to Joss’s very obviously nowhere near eighteen-year-old face and back again. She didn’t want to hurt his dignity, but at the same time she didn’t exactly relish the thought of being asked to leave because she was accompanied by a minor.
‘I can go in so long as I don’t have anything alcoholic to drink. I know the people who run it,’ he explained as he pushed the door open for her. At the same time he crossed his fingers behind his back as he tried to calculate just what he could buy with what was left of his week’s bus fare and spending money, which was all he had in his pocket, and whether or not Minnie Cooke, who ran the wine bar, would give him any credit.
Minnie’s brother, Guy, was in partnership with Joss’s mother in an antique business, which they ran. She recognised Joss as soon as he walked into the wine bar, her eyebrows lifting slightly as she looked from Joss to his companion.
‘Yes, Joss?’ she asked him cautiously.
‘I ... er ... we’d both like a drink and something to eat,’ he told her firmly, adding in a far less certain voice, ‘Minnie, could I have a word with you?’
‘Look, why don’t you let me make this my treat?’ Bobbie offered, guessing his dilemma. He was just at an age when any kind of public humiliation, no matter how slight, was a major issue, and the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt or slight him in any way, but Minnie Cooke, too, had summed up the situation and stepped into the breach.
‘Why don’t you find yourselves a table. I’ll send someone over to take your order. We can sort out the bill later,’ she added to Joss quietly, as Bobbie made her way to a table.
Whoever Joss’s companion was, she certainly was a stunningly beautiful woman, Minnie acknowledged as she dispatched one of her many nieces to take their order. She was most probably a guest they had staying with the family. Olivia, Joss’s cousin, was married to that American, wasn’t she?
‘Jade,’ she told her niece sharply, ‘go and serve table four.’
‘I’ll have a glass of Perrier with lemon and ice,’ Bobbie told Jade easily. ‘Nothing to eat, though.’
‘I’ll have the same.’ Joss couldn’t quite conceal his relief as he heard Bobbie order, beaming his approval at her across their shared table.
‘So,’ she prompted after Jade had brought them their drinks. ‘These cousins of yours.’ She put her elbow on the table and leaned her chin on her hand as she smiled at him.
Joss was completely bewitched. A huge lump filled his throat and he had the same indescribable feeling that he always got when he watched the young badger or fox cubs coming out for their first night’s play in the spring, watched over by their mothers. Like them, she touched his emotions in a way he simply didn’t have the words to describe.
Guiltily Bobbie nibbled on her bottom lip. She really ought not to be doing this. He was so young and so vulnerable. She was here for a purpose, she reminded herself sternly, and she couldn’t let herself be swayed from that self-chosen task now, especially not by...
‘I guess with their kinda height they must be sports jocks, huh,’ she joked to Joss as she banished her unwanted thoughts.
‘No,’ Joss told her seriously.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her; he had never seen anyone remotely like her. There couldn’t be anyone like her. She was unique, wonderful, perfect and certainly nothing like his own twin sisters or the other girls he knew. She was older than them, of course, just how much older he wasn’t quite sure but she must be twenty-something.
‘Luke and James are both barristers,’ he told her. ‘That is, they’re...’ He tried to think of the American term, suddenly realising that she might not fully understand just what a barrister was.
But apparently she did, because she shook her head and told him firmly, ‘Yes, I know ... lawyers, huh. Gee. I guess I’d have preferred it if they were sports jocks,’ she confessed, wrinkling her nose.
‘Well, they are, sort of,’ Joss assured her. ‘James played rugger for his school and so did Luke and Luke was an Oxford Blue, as well. That’s...that’s with rowing,’ he explained.
‘Rowing...’ Bobbie just managed to conceal her smile. When she had been doing her master’s, there had been a couple of guys over from Oxbridge working alongside
