James had called round to collect him and he had seen Fenella sitting demurely in the back of James’s car.
‘She rang me up and asked me to collect her,’ James had informed him, looking both upset and uncomfortable when Luke had told him pithily that he had been deceived and that there was no way he had ever intended asking Fenella.
‘Oh, but she said—’ he began, but Luke cut him short.
‘I don’t give a damn what she said, James,’ he snapped testily. ‘I am telling you that she tricked you and that I most certainly did not invite her to come with us. God knows how she even knew about tonight in the first place.’
‘Oh, I think that’s probably my fault,’ James confessed. ‘I bumped into her in town while you were in Brussels and we got talking and I mentioned the party. She said she knew all about it and that you were taking her and...’ James looked uncomfortable. ‘I know that you and she...and I thought... well...’
‘You know that she and I what?’ Luke demanded grimly, answering his own question by continuing, ‘We dated for a while a long time ago, yes, a long time ago,’ he underlined. ‘She approached me for advice about her divorce and that is the only kind of contact I have had with her since her marriage, and that’s the only kind of contact I intend to have with her. She’s poison, James,’ Luke warned his younger brother. ‘Take my word for it.’
Poison she indeed was, and infuriated though he might be by the way she was clinging to him like a piece of ivy, good manners and a very male disinclination to cause a scene prevented Luke from disengaging her arm from his and walking off and disowning her.
‘Fenella...what’s it,’ Jon commented quietly to Jenny after they had disappeared to remove their coats. ‘Isn’t she the one that Luke used to...?’
‘Mmm...I think so,’ Jenny agreed.
‘I thought she was married to Sir Peter Longton,’ Jon remarked.
‘She is,’ Jenny confirmed. ‘Or rather she was. Apparently they’re going to divorce.’
‘Well...I doubt that will please Luke!’
Jenny shot her husband a questioning look. ‘Won’t it? They are here together.’
‘They are certainly both here but, reading Luke’s body language, they are not, definitely not, together,’ Jon informed her. ‘And if she is hoping that Luke will prove as malleable as a man as he was as a boy, I suspect she’s going to be doomed to disappointment.’
As Jon and Jenny gently swept their guests towards the private suite they had reserved for the party, Joss started to search the foyer anxiously. It was eight o’clock.
‘Joss,’ Jenny called out as she saw her youngest child hovering by the entrance.
‘I won’t be a moment,’ Joss told her, excitement giving way to disappointment and anxiety as he searched the foyer a second time for his new friend.
Jenny frowned. She had almost forgotten that Joss had told her that he wanted to invite a friend.
‘Come on, Mum,’ Louise demanded.
Jenny gave Joss an uncertain look. He was, after all, only ten years old, but the lobby of the Grosvenor was surely a safe enough place for him to be allowed to wait for his friend on his own for a few minutes whilst she checked that everything was in order in their private suite.
Bobbie waited until Jon and Jenny had disappeared before standing up and quietly making her way across to where Joss stood anxiously staring towards the main hotel doors. She touched him lightly on the arm, causing him to jump and then turn round, his anxious expression giving way to one of beaming delight as he saw her.
‘You’re here. I thought you must have changed your mind.’
‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ Bobbie assured him.
He was so kind and open, so ... so young and vulnerable; the lessons life taught him now would be indelibly etched on his personality. Did she really want it on her conscience that she...?
‘Come on,’ Joss was urging her. ‘It’s this way.’
It was not her job to take on the responsibility for Joss’s emotions, she reminded herself sternly as she turned to follow him. She was here for a different purpose, a very different purpose, which reminded her...
As Joss pushed open the double doors and stood back for her to precede him into the large, well-packed room, she turned to him and commented, ‘My, that sure is a lot of people. I guess all your family must be here.’
‘Almost,’ Joss agreed, his eyes clouding a little as he informed her, ‘Great-Aunt Ruth isn’t here, though.’
‘Great-Aunt Ruth,’ Bobbie marvelled after a second’s pause during which she kept her eyes firmly on the elegantly decorated room with its artistic and impressive swags and garlands of natural greenery and flowers. She had a small gift in that direction herself and because of it was well aware of the time and skill that must have gone into first conceiving the idea for the decorations and then putting it into practical use in order to achieve such an apparently artless and ‘natural’ effect. ‘She sounds very formidable. I guess she’s not a party person....’
‘She was going to come.’ Joss informed her, ‘but she’s babysitting for Olivia and Caspar instead. That’s them over there,’ he told Bobbie helpfully, indicating a couple who stood talking to Joss’s parents.
The woman was about her own age, Bobbie guessed, in her mid- to late twenties, the man with her a little older. She was stylishly dressed, her hair cut in an immaculate shiny bob, and Bobbie studied her carefully before turning back to Joss.
‘I do wish Aunt Ruth were here,’ Joss was telling her. ‘I wanted you to meet her.’
Once again Bobbie found it easier to study her surroundings rather than meet Joss’s eyes. ‘Well, I’d like to meet her, too,’ she returned lightly. ‘I guess we’ll have to try to fix something up before I move on.
‘Oh my,’ she exclaimed, her attention suddenly caught by the man leaning casually against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Handsome simply wasn’t the word to describe him, she acknowledged; if a man could be described as ‘beautiful’ without in any way detracting from the sheer male animal magnetism of him, then this man was.
From the top of his shiny, well-groomed dark hair to the tip of his evening shoes, he epitomised everything that was masculine and good-looking. He would have made a perfect movie star, Bobbie thought, a heartthrob in the true, old-fashioned sense of the word.
‘Who is that?’
‘That’s Max,’ Joss told her in an oddly flat voice, adding reluctantly, ‘He’s my brother.’
His brother. Now Bobbie was surprised and, as she turned from watching Joss’s face close up and his eyes become slightly shadowed to study the handsome six-footer leaning so slouchily against the wall, she asked him ruefully, ‘So why wasn’t he mentioned when you were cataloguing your family’s available males?’
‘Because he isn’t...available, that is,’ Joss answered in that same flat voice. ‘Max is married.’
