Пэнни Джордан – Coming Home (страница 1)
Even in her sleep she was smiling. What was she dreaming of—him? He grimaced a little at his own vanity and then wondered if she would still be smiling if she knew the truth about him.
In reality they hardly knew one another, but there had been an honesty, a purity, about their coming together that had elevated it way, way above anything cheap or carnal.
Honor had talked to him openly about her life, her past, but he had not been able to be similarly honest with her.
There was no real point, he reminded himself. Their time together could only be brief, the relationship transitory, and once she knew the truth she was bound to reject him. Who could blame her? But he knew he would have to tell her, even though he couldn’t really understand the compulsion that was drivng him to do so. Just as he didn’t understand why he had felt that he must come home.
“Honor …”
Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” David began.
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
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.
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
Coming Home
Penny Jordan
Table of Contents
The Crightons
EPILOGUE
‘HOW’S GRAMPS?’
‘Not too good, I’m afraid, Joss,’ Jenny Crighton admitted in response to her youngest child’s question, looking past the tall, gangly shape of the seventeen-year-old to where her husband Jon was standing, frowning a little.
‘Maddy managed to have a word with me in private after I’d been to see him,’ Jenny told her husband. ‘She’s very concerned about the way he seems to be deteriorating. Despite the fact that medically both his hip operations have been a success, he still complains that he’s in pain and that his joints ache. He’s quite definitely losing weight and Maddy’s worried that he isn’t eating as well as he was. He’s looking positively gaunt.’
‘He is in his eighties, Jen,’ Jon reminded her, but Jenny could see that he was still frowning and she knew he was troubled. Ben was his father after all and even though they all knew that Ben could not possibly receive better care than that given to him by Maddy, their daughter-in-law, the wife of their eldest son Max, Jenny also knew that Jon still felt that he should be the one to carry the main responsibility for Ben, just as he still felt guilty because …
‘Aunt Ruth says that Ben is turning into a curmudgeonly old man,’ Joss informed them both. ‘She says he actually enjoys being grumpy.’
‘Grumpy perhaps,’ Jenny allowed, ‘but no one enjoys being in constant physical pain, Joss,’ she reminded him gently.
Joss had always preferred the company of Great-Aunt Ruth to that of his grandfather, and Jenny knew that she could hardy blame him. Ruth had been far more of a grandparent and a mentor to Joss than Ben had ever been.
Out of all his grandchildren, there was only one for whom Ben Crighton had ever shown any real liking and that was for Max. Not that such favouritism had had either her or Jon’s backing. Once there had been an acute degree of antagonism between Max and his parents, but thankfully that rift was now healed. Jenny only had to watch Max with his wife Maddy and their three children to feel overwhelmed not just with love and pride but with a humbling gratitude to whomever or whatever had drawn the master plan for her son’s life.
To say that Max had completely changed virtually overnight from a human being even she as his mother had sometimes come close to loathing to one whom everyone who now knew him spoke of with respect, admiration and love sounded overly dramatic and theatrical, but it was no less than the truth. But in order to undergo such a transformation, Max had had to sail terrifyingly close to the fine, dark edge that separated life from death. Not willingly or voluntarily but through the trauma of a vicious physical attack that could have ended his life or left him permanently injured.
Mercifully, it had not, and Max had returned to them to begin a new life here in the small Cheshire town of Haslewich.
Families! Jenny gave a small sigh, but she wouldn’t be without hers, not a single member of it, including her irascible father-in-law, Ben.
The Crighton family was a large one with several branches. But one thing that linked all of them together, one inheritance they all shared, was their fascination with the legal world, the world of lawyers, solicitors, barristers and judges. It was an in-joke in the family that every Crighton child, just as soon as he or she was old enough to know what the words meant, when asked what they wanted for Christmas or birthdays, would respond eagerly, ‘I want to be a QC.’
Queen’s Counsel. It had been a goal to which Ben had strived unsuccessfully, the goal to which he had relentlessly tried to push his own son and then more recently his grandson Max.
There had been a time when Jenny knew that had Max attained that goal, she would have felt it was somehow tainted and wrong, but when, the previous year, Max had come over to tell them that he had heard on the grapevine that he was going to receive this accolade, Jenny had been filled with love and pride for him. So, too, had Jon, who had embraced Max with emotion as he congratulated him.
But, typically, when Ben Crighton had praised his favourite grandchild on his achievement at a family gathering, he hadn’t been able to resist adding brusquely, ‘It should have been my son David. It would have been David,’ he had told them all fiercely, giving his granddaughter Olivia an angry glower, ‘if it hadn’t been for
Olivia hadn’t responded, but Jenny had seen the look of pain in her eyes and the anger in her husband Caspar’s and she had felt for her.
There had been no point in trying to console or comfort Olivia by reminding her that Ben Crighton gave as little value and love to her own daughters as he did to Olivia. Ben might have been born into the twentieth century, but he had never embraced its ethos to the extent of accepting that women were as professionally capable as men. The achievements of the female members of his own family were something Ben either ignored or criticised as women taking jobs that should more rightfully belong to men.
‘Is Gramps going to die?’ Joss asked his mother now, the anxiety in his eyes reminding Jenny that despite her youngest son’s growing maturity, the sensitive side of his nature, which had so marked him out as a child, could still hold him emotionally hostage to his fears.
‘I don’t know, Joss,’ Jenny answered him honestly. ‘According to the doctor, there is no physical reason why he should.’ She paused, choosing her words carefully. ‘But your grandfather has never been a man who has enjoyed life. He—’