The Perfect Lover

The Perfect Lover
PENNY JORDAN

The breathtaking saga of The Perfect Family continues?She had found passion in Gareth Simmonds's arms. For one brief moment, in sun-drenched Italy, Louise Crighton had been able to forget her hurt at seeing the man she thought she loved fall for someone else.Ashamed at her unexpected?and uninhibited?response to Gareth, she had gone out of her way to avoid seeing him again. But now Gareth is back, as attractive as ever. One question burns in Louise's mind: Does Gareth still suspect that she'd used him as a substitute for another man?

This was what she had ached for...

She had been so hungry for him to kiss her like this, she acknowledged dizzily, as his mouth started to move over hers. She adjusted her body to get closer to him and felt him shift his weight to accommodate her.

Against his mouth she cried his name.... “Saul. Saul...Saul....”

Abruptly Louise found herself being set free, pushed away from the intimacy of the male body her own craved so badly. Only his hands still held her.

“Open your eyes, Louise,” she heard a harsh and shockingly familiar male voice demanding bitingly. “I am not your precious Saul, whoever he might be....”

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The PerfectSinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Crightons (#u381fcbe0-7bda-5480-af65-1821a20c5502)

A Perfect Family

The Perfect Seduction

Perfect Marriage Material

Figgy Pudding

The Perfect Lover

The Perfect Sinner

The Perfect Father

A Perfect Night

Coming Home

Starting Over

The Perfect Lover

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Table of Contents

Cover (#ue280fbc9-dd80-5f8e-9bb2-d1a47a21501a)Excerpt (#ueb838316-a66c-5121-8998-bf89b2e7caef)About the Author (#uad1ea51f-de24-51f1-afd5-dc74a7fc4e36) The Crightons Title Page (#u4c3de423-4d7a-531b-8f2b-21c2ebdcc0f7) CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#u381fcbe0-7bda-5480-af65-1821a20c5502)

‘MY GOODNESS, we are honoured, aren’t we? It isn’t very often these days that you manage to tear yourself away from the bureaucratic delights of Brussels.’

Louise tensed as she heard the sarcastic voice of her elder brother, Max. They had never got on particularly well, even as children, and in her view maturity had done nothing to improve either their relationship or her brother.

‘It was commented at Christmas that you weren’t around,’ Max continued jibingly. ‘But, of course, we all know Saul was really the reason for that, don’t we?’

Louise gave him an angry look before retorting, ‘Perhaps if you spent more time thinking about your own relationships and less talking about other people’s you might learn something genuinely worthwhile, but then you never were much good at appreciating what’s really of value in this life, were you, Max?’

Without giving him any opportunity to retaliate, Louise turned on her heel and walked quickly away from him.

She had promised herself that on this, her first visit home since she had started working in Brussels over twelve months ago, she would prove to her family just how much she had changed...matured...and just how different, distant almost, she was from the girl who...

Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Saul, her father’s cousin, who was standing with his wife, Tullah, and the three children from his first marriage. Tullah had her arm around Megan, Saul’s daughter, while Saul held the little boy they had had together.

The large drawing room of her grandfather’s house seemed to be filled by the presence of her peers, proudly showing off their growing families.

Clustered around the fireplace were her cousin Olivia, with her husband and their two children, talking animatedly with Luke, from the Chester branch of the family, and his American wife Bobbie and their little girl, while Maddy, her brother Max’s wife, kept a discreet eye on Gramps, who was becoming increasingly irascible.

According to her mother, Maddy was close to a saint for humouring him the way she did. When Jenny Crighton had made this comment this morning, over breakfast, Louise had immediately pointed out that if Maddy could put up with being married to Max, then her grandfather must come as a form of light relief.

‘Louise,’ her mother had protested, but Louise had remained unrepentant

It was no secret in the family that Max was not a good or kind husband to Maddy, and privately Louise couldn’t understand why on earth Maddy stayed with him.

‘You’re looking very cross.’

Louise grimaced as she saw her twin sister. Twins were a feature of the Crighton family, in the same way that poppies were a feature of a field of corn—they sprang up all over the place, although as yet there were no sets in the current new generation.

‘They’ll come,’ her father’s aunt Ruth had predicted.

‘I’ve just been receiving the benefit of Max’s brotherly conversation,’ Louise informed her grimly. ‘He doesn’t change...’

‘No...’ Katie looked at her twin. ‘You know, in a lot of ways I feel quite sorry for him. He—’

‘Sorry for Max?’ Louise exploded. ‘What on earth for? He’s got everything he’s ever wanted—a cushy place in one of the country’s leading sets of chambers, with his pick of all the best briefs—and all he’s had to do to get it is to persuade poor Maddy to marry him.’

‘Yes, I know what he’s got in the material sense, Lou, but is he happy?’ Katie persisted. ‘I think he feels what happened with Uncle David far, far more than he’s ever shown. After all, they—’

‘They were both made in the same mould. Yes, I know,’ Louise cut in. ‘If you want my opinion, it would be a good thing for this family if Uncle David never surfaced again. Olivia as good as told me that her father had been guilty of serious malpractice when he and Dad were partners, and that if he hadn’t disappeared when he did...’

Both of them were silent for a moment as they remembered David Crighton, their father’s twin brother and Olivia’s father, and the near disaster he had plunged the family into prior to his disappearance some years earlier.

‘That’s all in the past now,’ Katie reminded her gently. ‘Dad and Olivia have managed to sort out all the problems they had been having with the practice—and in fact they’ve built up the business so much that they’ve decided they need to think about taking on an extra qualified solicitor to cope with the increased workload. But Gramps still misses David, you know. He was always—’

‘The favourite. Yes, I know. Poor Gramps. He never has had very good judgement, has he? First he makes David the favourite, ahead of Dad, and now it’s Max.’