Her One and Only (3 page)

‘Mmm... I think you’re right. In fact—’ She stopped. ‘With his ancestry it’s entirely feasible that Liam’s rational exterior could hide a very emotional and romantic heart indeed. In fact I think that Liam, contrary to what Sam said,
is
looking for love and commitment—he just hasn’t found the right woman yet, that’s all.’

She got up from the table and dropped a loving kiss on her husband’s cheek as she walked past him.

‘I’d better go up and see if Sam’s okay.’

* * *

A
WEEK
LATER
Samantha gave a small sigh of achievement and relief as the clasps on her large suitcase finally responded to the pressure of her weight on top of the case and snapped closed.

‘Thank goodness,’ Sam muttered under her breath.

She would be way over the weight limit, she
knew
that, but what the heck. A series of long excited conversations with her twin over the intervening week had elicited the information that there were a series of social events coming up in both Chester and Haslewich which Bobbie intended to have her twin join in.

‘There’s the Lord Lieutenant’s Ball at the end of your stay. We’ve already got tickets for that. It’s going to be especially wonderful this year as the current Lord Lieutenant is stepping down. You’ll need a proper evening gown for that, and then there’s the charity cricket match and the strawberry tea afterwards. The bad news, though, is that Luke has three very important court cases pending so he could be called away at short notice. And of course with the baby due soon I shan’t be able to do as much as I would have liked. However, once he or she arrives, you and I are going to do some serious fashion shopping, I’m so tired of maternity clothes.’

‘Mmm...’ Sam had enthused. ‘I’ve read that Milan is
the
place to shop right now, the prices are really keen and you know how I love those Italian designers.’

‘Mmm... Which reminds me, don’t forget to bring some clam diggers, will you, and some jeans. They just don’t do them over here like they do back home. Oh, and dungarees for Francesca and shirts for Luke and for James...’

‘How is James?’ Samantha had asked her twin coyly.

‘He’s fine and he’s certainly looking forward to seeing you,’ Bobbie had taunted her.

Samantha had laughed back. Bobbie had taunted her mercilessly at the time of her own wedding that James had fallen for her, but then Samantha had simply thought of him as a very nice soon-to-be in-law and member of the large Crighton clan.

Now, though, things were a little different.

Milan wasn’t the only city to boast fine designer shops and
she
had paid an extended visit to Boston prior to doing her packing. The resultant purchases were all designed to underscore the fact that being tall did not in
any
way mean that she was not wholly and completely a woman. A satisfied smile curled Samantha’s mouth as she contemplated the effect of her new purchases on her intended victim. James, she knew instinctively, was the kind of man who preferred to see a woman dressed like a woman.

Her smile was replaced by a small frown as she studied her closed suitcase. Closed it might be, but it still had to be gotten downstairs and there was no point in calling the man who helped with the garden to assist her. Hyram was a honey, but he was close on seventy and there was no way he could lift her case.

Nope... There
were
occasions when being tall and healthily muscled were an advantage—and this, she decided, was one of them.

She negotiated the suitcase to the top of the stairs so that she could leave it in the lobby ready for her early morning flight and had just paused to take a rest, muttering complainingly at the overstuffed case as she did so. Her face felt hot and flushed and the exertion had made her hair cling in silky strands to the nape of her neck and her flushed cheeks. Turning her back towards the stairs, she eyed the suitcase.

‘It’s not just my clothes,’ she told it sternly. ‘It’s that sister of mine and...’

‘What the...’

The unexpected sound of Liam’s voice on the stairs behind her caused Samantha to jump and turn round, forgetting that she had momentarily balanced the case precariously on one of the stairs whilst she leaned against it to hold it in position.

The result was inevitable.

The suitcase, disobligingly ignoring her wailed protest, slid heavily down the stairs, past Liam, bouncing on the half landing before coming to a halt against a solid wooden chest where the combined effect of its speedy fall and its heavy weight caused the clasps to burst open and the contents of the case to tumble out all over the stairs.

‘Oh, there now, see what you’ve done,’ Samantha accused Liam angrily. ‘If you hadn’t crept up on me like that...’

‘I rather think, more to the point,
you
shouldn’t have overpacked the thing in the first place,’ Liam corrected her dryly, turning his back on her as he headed down the stairs, hunkering down on the half landing as he proceeded to gather up the case’s disgorged garments.

It was, as Samantha later seethed to herself in the privacy of her bedroom, revoltingly unfair of fate to have decreed that the stuff which had fallen out of her case wasn’t the sturdy, sensible jeans she had bought for her sister, nor the dungarees for Francesca, her niece, nor even the shirts requested by her brothers-in-law, but instead, the frivolous bits of silky satin and lace items of underwear
she
had recklessly bought for herself on her shopping spree in Boston.

Creamy satin lace-trimmed bras with the kind of boning that meant that the kind of things they did for a woman’s figure were strictly seriously flirtatious. And, even worse, there on the carpet beside them were the ridiculously unfunctional French knickers that had helped swallow up a large portion of her pay cheque. Add to that the equally provocative garter belt and the silk stockings and combine them with the incredulous disdain with which Liam was looking from her scarlet face to the fragile pieces of feminine lingerie he was holding in his hands and it was no wonder that she was feeling uncomfortably hot and embarrassed, Samantha reflected.

‘I guess you aren’t planning to do much sport in Cheshire,’ Liam commented laconically. ‘Or—’ his eyebrows shot up as he gave her a very thorough look ‘—perhaps I’m wrong...’ He continued silkily, ‘Thinking of going hunting are you, Sam? If so...’

‘They aren’t mine, they’re a present for Bobbie,’ Samantha lied feverishly, hurrying down the stairs to snatch them away from him.

‘Mmm.... Well, if you’ll take my advice...as a man...something a little simpler and less structured would serve your purpose much better. These,’ he told her with a contemptuous look at the boned demi bra he was holding, ‘might be exciting for boys, but men...real men, prefer something a little more subtle and a lot more tactile... A sexy slither of silk and satin with tiny shoestring straps, something silky and fluid that drapes itself softly over a woman’s curves, hinting at them rather than... There’s nothing quite so sexy as that little hint of cleavage you get when a woman’s strap slips down off her shoulder...’

‘Well, thank you
very
much for your advice,’ Samantha snapped furiously at him. ‘But when I want
your
opinion on what a man finds sexy, Liam, you can be sure I’ll ask you for it. And anyway—’ She stopped abruptly.

‘Anyway what?’ Liam asked her mildly as he bent down again to retrieve a pretty silk wrap which was lying under the suitcase.

Samantha glared at him.

How could she tell him that when you were a woman with breasts as generously rounded and full as hers were, the type of silky clingy unstructured top
he
was describing was quite simply a “no-no” unless you wanted to stop all the traffic on the freeway.

‘This isn’t for Bobbie,’ he told her positively as he handed her the wrap.

‘What makes you say that?’ Samantha demanded.

‘It’s not her colour,’ he told her simply. ‘Her skin is paler than yours and her eyes lighter.
This
is your colour, but coffee or caramel would suit you even better.’

‘Thank you
so
much,’ Samantha gritted acidly as she snatched the wrap from him.

As she bent to try to stuff her possessions back into her suitcase, Liam knelt down beside her.

‘You need another case,’ he told her calmly. ‘This one,
if
you get it as far as the airport, will probably break the baggage conveyor belt. That’s if it doesn’t burst open again first.

‘You’re wrong, by the way,’ he added mystifyingly as Samantha tried to ignore the reality of what he was telling her.

‘It isn’t only women with tiny breasts who can go braless. You’ve got far too many hang-ups about your body, Samantha, do you know that?’

‘Is that a fact? Well. I’ll thank you to keep your opinions on my hang-ups and my...my breasts...to yourself
if
you don’t mind,’ Samantha gritted hot-faced at him, wondering how he had followed her embarrassed train of thought.

‘Of course, when it comes to bouncing around the tennis court, I agree that a woman needs a good sports bra,’ Liam was continuing as if she hadn’t spoken.

Samantha shot him a wary look.
She
played tennis in the residence’s court most mornings with her father and she
always
wore a sports bra—so what was Liam implying?

‘Look, why don’t
I
carry this back to your room for you so that you can repack it in two cases,’ Liam was offering.

To Samantha’s chagrin, as he picked up the case she could see that he was able to carry it far more easily than she herself had been able to do—carrying it not downstairs where she had intended to take it, she recognised, but back in the direction she had just come—to her bedroom.

As he elbowed open the door and dumped the heavy case on the floor, Samantha followed Liam into her room.

‘I
was
taking that downstairs...’ she began to upbraid him and then stopped abruptly.

Standing with his feet apart and his hands on his hips, Liam wasn’t watching her but instead was focusing on the pretty upholstered chair beside the window.

The chair—an antique—had been a gift from her grandmother, a pretty early Victorian rocker which Samantha had had recaned and for which she had made her own hand-stitched sampler cushions. But it wasn’t the chair or the cushions which were holding Liam’s attention—Samantha knew that and she knew too exactly what he was looking at.

‘Mom made me keep him,’ she began defensively, pushing past Liam and rushing over to the chair, protectively picking up the battered and slightly threadbare teddy bear who was seated on it.

‘She says it reminds her of when we were little. It was her bear before us and then Tom had him, too, and... Oh, you don’t understand,’ she breathed crossly. ‘You’re too unemotional. Too cold...’

‘You should run for government office yourself,’ Liam told her sardonically. ‘With your mind-reading talents you’d be a wow.’

‘Mind-reading,’ Samantha breathed heavily. ‘Oh you...’

‘For your information I am
neither
unemotional
nor
cold and as for Wilfred...’ Ignoring Samantha he walked up to her and deftly took the bear from her unresisting grasp.

‘I had one very like him when I was young. He came originally from Ireland with my grandfather. He was just a boy then...’

Samantha’s eyes widened. Liam rarely talked about his family—at least not to her. She knew he had no brothers or sisters and that his grandparents, immigrants from Ireland, had built up a very successful haulage business which Liam’s father had continued to run and expand until his death from a heart attack whilst Liam was at college.

Liam had sold the business—very profitably—with his mother’s approval. From a very young age he had known that he wanted to enter politics and both his parents and his grandparents, when they had been alive, had fully supported him in this ambition, but it was from her mother that Samantha had gleaned these facts about Liam’s background, not from Liam himself.

‘Why does he never talk to me...treat me as an adult?’ she had once railed at her mother when Liam had pointedly ignored some questions she had been asking him about his grandparents. She had been at college at the time and working on an essay about the difficulties experienced by the country’s immigrants in the earlier part of the century and she had hoped to gain some first-hand knowledge and insights into the subject from Liam’s memories of his grandparents.

‘He’s a very proud man, sweetheart,’ her father had responded, hearing her exasperated question. ‘I guess he kinda feels that he doesn’t want his folks looked down on or...’

‘Looked down on... Why should
I
do that?’ Samantha had interrupted him indignantly.

‘Well, Liam is very conscious of the fact that his grandparents came to this country with very little in the way of material possessions, just what they could carry with them in fact, whilst...’

‘He thinks that
I’d
look down on him because your family arrived with Cabots and Adamses and all those other “first families” on the
Mayflower
who went on to form the backbone of North American early politics, wealth and society,’ Samantha had protested hotly. ‘Is that what he really thinks of me?’

‘Sweetheart, sweetheart,’ her father had protested gently. ‘I’m sure that Liam thinks no such thing. It’s just that he’s as reluctant to have his family background put under the public microscope as your mother would be hers. Not out of any sense of shame—quite the reverse—but out of a very natural desire to protect those he loves.’

‘But Gran is still alive whilst Liam’s grandparents are dead,’ Samantha had objected.

‘The principle is still the same,’ her father had pointed out gently.

Now, some impulse she couldn’t name made Samantha ask Liam softly, ‘Do you still have it...the bear...?’

His austere features suddenly broke into an almost boyish grin and for one breath-stopping moment Samantha actually felt as though something or someone was physically jerking her heartstrings. Impossible, of course, hearts didn’t have strings and if hers had then there was no way that one Liam Connolly could possibly have jerked them. No, it was just the mental image she had had of him as a small boy listening solemnly to his grandfather whilst he related to him tales of his own Irish upbringing.