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  ‘You’d do that...for me...’ she whispered.

  ‘For you and for us,’ Liam told her softly. ‘If that’s the only way I can convince you that you mean more to me than anything or anyone else...’

  ‘Oh, Liam...’ Tenderly Samantha touched his face with her fingertips. ‘I guess that must mean that you love me,’ she told him dreamily, her tears falling on his skin.

  ‘Just why the hell else would I come racing across the Atlantic like a complete fool,’ Liam challenged her gruffly. ‘Have you any idea what it did to me to hear you telling me that you were going to go get yourself an English husband...an English father for your kids...’

  ‘But I didn’t know. You never said.’

  ‘You never wanted me to say,’ Liam retorted. ‘You treated me like...like I might have been your brother.’

  ‘That was because...well, when you first came to work for Dad you made it plain that you were strictly off limits and...’

  ‘You were still a kid...a baby...’ Liam interrupted her. ‘And then, later, when you grew up, you just didn’t seem to want to know.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Samantha admitted, ‘not until...’ She stopped and blushed a little and then laughed. ‘I guess I had to go to bed with you to find out just exactly what I do feel for you.’

  ‘Uh-huh... So it wasn’t just to get me to help you make a baby then,’ he reminded her.

  Samantha shook her head.

  ‘I guess I had to tell myself it was because I was so shocked by what I had done, but deep down inside I think I must always have known...have felt... That Sunday at the Grosvenor when all the family were there it felt so good, so right—us being together. I missed you so that night.’

  ‘Nowhere near as much as I missed you,’ Liam groaned as he took hold of her.

  As he started to kiss her she snuggled closer to him, eagerly responding to his rising passion, but then suddenly she pulled away from him and demanded softly, ‘Liam, is there really nothing you wouldn’t do for me...?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he responded. ‘Why, what is it you want...?’

  ‘Well, this time...’ She stopped and flushed prettily. ‘This time when we make love, could I have...could we... I want your baby, Liam,’ she told him.

  ‘Liam!’ she protested as he started to kiss her with devastating intensity, running his hands possessively the length of her torso, cupping her breasts and then pulling her so tightly into his own body that she could feel the powerful throb of his arousal.

  ‘Whatever you want from me you can have, whenever you want it,’ he told her rawly. ‘But when it comes to making babies...’ He cupped the back of her head and massaged the flesh, looking deep into her eyes.

  ‘I think we both know that that’s something we want to happen after we’re married and not because of what anyone else might think but because we want our kids to grow up knowing that we loved and respected one another to want to give them that security.’

  ‘Oh, Liam...’ Samantha sighed blissfully as she melted into his arms. ‘Oh, Liam...’

  The house was fully furnished with beds in every room, but Samantha knew that, right now, it wouldn’t have mattered where they were, so compellingly and urgent was their need and their hunger for one another. Just the touch of Liam’s breath on her bare skin was enough to send her body into tiny shivers of almost orgasmic pleasure and as for his reaction when she touched and kissed him...

  ‘So, you want to hold out until we’re married,’ she teased him at one point, and in the end they both admitted it was a very near-run thing.

  * * *

  THEIR WEDDING TOOK place three weeks before her father’s official retirement and six before Liam’s inauguration as the state’s new Governor and, of course, during her father’s speech there were several jokes about him losing a daughter but gaining a Governor’s wife in the family.

  Later, when she stood next to her mother, her sister and her brother as their father received the thanks of the state officials for what he had done for the state, and then later still when she stood beside Liam whilst her father spoke of his pride in knowing just what Liam would achieve, she was filled with such pride for the man she had married that she felt that her heart would burst with it. But her most special memory of all as she listened to Liam giving his acceptance speech and discreetly patted the still-flat smoothness of her stomach, whispering to their growing child to listen to its daddy, she was thinking not of the future but of the very special and private occasion when the baby growing inside her was conceived.

  ‘You’ll love it,’ Liam had insisted when she had made a face and exclaimed in horror when he told her that their brief honeymoon was not to be in some idyllic tropical paradise, but a back-packing trip into the mountains.

  But the few days they had spent there had proved to be far more memorable than any luxury surroundings could ever have been, especially the first night when they had made camp in the small secret glade Liam had taken her to right beside a spring-fed small mountain pool. They had swum there together naked, the water icy cold against the heat of their skin, and then they had made love beneath the stars with their benign silvery glow the only witness to Samantha’s soft cries of pleasure as their bodies merged together and created the new life she was now carrying.

  The whole family had come over for the wedding, every single one of them, including Bobbie proudly bearing her newborn son, and Samantha had noticed again how withdrawn and quiet Katie had been.

  ‘Jenny is very concerned about her,’ Ruth had told them. ‘She works so hard, too hard, Jenny thinks. I’ve suggested that she ought to try to persuade Katie to move back to Haslewich. They could do with her help in the family-run practice.’

  Samantha, who had seen the hopeless, helpless look in

  Katie’s eyes whenever they rested on her twin and her husband, wasn’t so sure that it was just hard work that was affecting Katie but she kept her thoughts to herself. The family suspected that Louise might be pregnant, but nothing had been said yet. Samantha couldn’t imagine anything worse than to love one’s twin’s man. She couldn’t imagine how she would have coped if, for instance, Bobbie and Liam had fallen in love. Just to have the thought form inside her head was enough to make her go dizzy at the thought of the pain such a situation would bring.

  James, too, had attended their wedding looking slightly sheepish and keeping his distance from her. Not that he had any need to do so, she had no right to demand an explanation from him for that kiss she had seen him and Rosemary exchanging. But Rosemary’s fiancé certainly did. Now Samantha looked across the room to where Liam was working at his desk and then got up and walked over to him, taking up a teasing provocative pose as she perched beside him, swinging the long length of her legs.

  ‘Well now, Mr. Governor, sir,’ she breathed sexily, ‘they say that power is a very sexy aphrodisiac and that powerful men are very, very sexy in bed.’ As she spoke she was reaching across and starting to unfasten his shirt. ‘Would you say that that was true...’

  Liam leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes and then teased her, ‘Well, I guess there’s only one way you’re going to know,’ before getting up and taking hold of her hand and asking her, ‘Have I told you today how much I love you, Samantha Connolly?’

  ‘Mmm...not since breakfast,’ Samantha responded.

  ‘Mmm... Well, I do...and I always will.’

  ‘Always...even when I’m hugely pregnant,’ Samantha asked him.

  ‘Especially then,’ Liam told her softly. ‘Oh, yes, most especially then.’

  It was perfect. Life was perfect. Their love was perfect. Liam was perfect. The perfect man, the perfect husband...the perfect father...and she loved him more than she would ever, ever be able to find all the words to say.

  * * * * *

  A Perfect Night

 
Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  AS SEB DROVE past the sign that read, Haslewich—Please Drive Carefully, he was aware of a dispiriting grey cloud of self-criticism and disappointment dulling what, if life mirrored fiction, by rights should be his triumphal return to the place of his birth.

  He was thirty-eight years old, virtually at the top of his career ladder having just been headhunted by the international drug company Aarlston-Becker to head their research team. No small feat surely for a man who, as a boy, had been sneeringly dismissed by one of his teachers as ‘just another hopeless by-product of the Cooke clan.’

  He had money in the bank accumulated by hard work and shrewd investment, a family who even if he hadn’t seen much of them in recent years were by all accounts more than willing to do the modern equivalent of roasting a fatted calf to welcome him home, and he was about to take a kind of professional post that many among his colleagues would have given their eye-teeth for; all of which surely must be pretty heavyweight pluses on anyone’s balance sheet of life.

  But then he needed some heavyweight assets to balance out the equally, to him at least, heavyweight negative aspects of his life.

  ‘What negative aspects?’ his second or was it third cousin Guy Cooke had asked him dryly when they had been discussing the subject of his impending return.

  ‘How about an ill-judged early marriage followed predictably, I suppose, by a divorce.’

  Guy’s eyebrows had lifted as he shrugged dismissively. ‘Divorce isn’t exactly a social sin any longer, Seb, and from what you’ve told us your ex-wife has remarried very happily and the two of you are on relatively comfortable terms.’

  ‘Oh, yes, from Sandra’s and my own point of view the divorce was the best thing we could have done other than not to have married in the first place.

  ‘No, it’s not the fact that we married far too young and for all the wrong reasons that I feel bad. It’s...’ He had paused, grimacing before continuing, ‘Sandy always used to complain that I was a selfish bastard not really fit to be either a husband or a father, too wrapped up in my career and my own professional goals. I thought at the time that she was being ridiculous. After all, I was working to provide a decent standard of living for her, or so I used to tell her and myself, but of course that was just the excuse I used to conceal the fact that she was right, that I was being selfish, and that the rush I got from knowing I was right in there at the cutting edge of discovering new drugs that were going to provide the kind of breakthrough that would change the world was far more important to me, far more compelling and addictive than any pleasure I got from being with her.’

  Guy and Chrissie, his wife, had exchanged ruefully happily married looks while Chrissie had lifted their son Anthony up off the floor to give him a hug, and although they had both made the right kind of protestingly reassuring noises Seb hadn’t been deceived. Of course privately they must both have thought that he had been selfish. How could they think otherwise? Seb had seen the loving commitment Guy was making to his own family, had witnessed at first hand during his stay with them when he had attended his initial interview the ‘hands on’ fathering that Guy was giving his son.

  ‘But at least you and Charlotte have formed a proper father and daughter bond now,’ Chrissie had reminded him gently.

  ‘Yes, more thanks to Charlotte’s maturity than any good parenting on my part,’ Seb had returned, adding, ‘After all, she could very easily have refused to see me when I wrote and asked her if she would consider allowing me back into her life. George, Sandra’s second husband, has been far more of a proper father to her than I have.’

  ‘Maybe so from a practical point of view,’ Guy had agreed, ‘But biologically you are her father and you only have to see the two of you together to see that.’

  ‘Oh, yes, she’s got my genes when it comes to her physical looks,’ he agreed.

  ‘And she’s got your brains by all accounts, too,’ Chrissie had laughed.

  ‘Well, Sandra and I met originally at university so I suppose that aspect of her nature is down to both of us, but I admit that I was surprised when she told me that she intends to follow much the same career path as I’ve chosen.’

  ‘And since she’s going to be studying for her “A” levels at a private sixth-form college near Manchester, you’re bound to be able to see a lot more of her.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Seb had agreed. ‘Although at sixteen she’s almost an adult now with her own life and her own friends. Sandra did say though that she was relieved to know that I would be on hand for her at the weekends, especially now that Sandra and George are likely to be based abroad for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘Well, we certainly loved meeting Charlotte,’ Chrissie had told him warmly. ‘Although I suspect she felt a little bit overwhelmed by the massed ranks and fervent curiosity of the Cooke clan in force.’

  The Cooke clan. How he had hated and chafed under the burdensome weight of his family’s reputation when he had been growing up, Seb reflected now. Of course he hadn’t known then that he wasn’t on his own and that Guy, too, had suffered his own personal war between his inner needs and the town’s expectations. But then Guy had met Chrissie and in helping her to make peace with her family history Guy had come to terms with his own unhappy childhood memories.

  Seb knew that without the incentive of having Charlotte at college in nearby Manchester there was no way he would have come back to his birthplace in the small historical Cheshire town where, or so the story went, his family line had come into being following the seduction of a local girl by a member of a notorious band of Romany travellers who visited the town every year.

  The children—the clan—that union had given birth to down through the centuries, whether rightly or wrongly, had garnered a notorious reputation in the town for not always walking on the right side of the law, and of course predictably it had often been a case of ‘give a dog a bad name...’ Certainly it seemed that historically, their family had been a convenient peg for the townspeople to hang all their local crimes of theft and unlawfulness on.

  Now, of course, those days were gone and his relatives so far as Seb knew were, in the main, sturdy and worthy citizens, and so intermarried and interwoven with the families and fabric of the area that they could not in all fairness any longer be considered to be a separate and dangerously untrustworthy clan of outsiders.

  Even so the lusty lifestyle of the original ancestors had left its mark on the collective conscience of the other families in the town. Cooke men had a reputation for fathering sturdy sons whose dark eyes tended to hold the kind of gleam that mothers and young impressionable girls quite rightly found dangerous.

  Seb had known from an early age that he wanted to escape from the restrictions of living in a small-town community where everyone knew everyone else. He had wanted to break through the glass ceiling imposed on him by the expectations and reservations of those around him simply because of the surname he carried. It had been his interest, cultivated and encouraged by his grandfather and a fascination with the problems that manifested themselves in the plants his grandfather grew because of their genetic make up which had initially led to his choice of career.

  University might have freed him from the restrictions imposed on him by his small-town upbringing but in order to get there he had had to focus on the more self-absorbed, self-interested side of his personality and that ultimately had created a blinkered concentration on his career to the detriment of his personal relationships.

  It had taken a comment he had overheard from a fem
ale colleague to make him realise the error of his ways. She had been talking with another co-worker, unaware that he was in an adjacent room and could hear them.

  ‘He actually hasn’t seen his daughter in over ten years. Can you believe that?’

  ‘It happens,’ the other woman had pointed out. ‘Divorced men do lose touch with their children.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but he just doesn’t seem to care. Doesn’t he have any human feelings?’

  That night at home alone in his empty executive apartment Seb had replayed the overheard conversation in his head and he had asked himself the same question.

  The answer had shocked him.

  Yes, he did care, more than he had known, and he had cared even more after that first fateful reunion with Charlotte when he had recognised not just in her face, her physical features, but in her personality as well, such a strong resemblance to him that he had felt as though someone, something, some emotion, was cracking his heart in a vise.

  It had not been an easy task building bridges that would allow them, allow her, to lower the guard she had quite naturally put up against him. She’d been outwardly pleasant and friendly, but he had nevertheless known that inwardly she was extremely wary of him. And who could blame her? But that had been three years ago, and now he was very much a part of her life. But he was still aware that nothing, no amount of remorse or regret, could totally eradicate the past.

  Sandra, his ex-wife, had gone on to have two more children, both boys, with her second husband, George, and Charlotte was very much a part of that happy close-knit family, but she was also his daughter and, like him, a Cooke.

  ‘All these relatives,’ she had marvelled laughingly when she had visited the town with him. ‘I can’t believe it. We seem to be related to half the population.’

  ‘At least,’ Seb had agreed dryly, but unlike him Charlotte seemed to delight in her heritage.

  ‘Things have changed,’ Guy had told him. ‘There’s been a large influx of new people into the town, opening it up, broadening both its boundaries and its outlook.