Her One and Only (4 page)

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll be able to keep it for your children and tell them the stories your grandparents told you,’ Samantha told him impulsively.

Immediately his features changed and became formidably harsh.

‘Don’t you jump on the bandwagon,’ he told her grittily. ‘Everyone seems determined to marry me off. I’ve even had Lee Calder giving interviews stating that a single, childless Governor won’t understand the needs of the state’s parents. My God, when I
think
of the way he’s been trying to cut down on our education.’

Lee Calder was Liam’s closest contender for the governorship, a radical right-winger whose views Samantha’s father found totally unsympathetic. Lee was an overweight, balding man in his mid-forties, twice married with five children who he had overdisciplined and controlled to such an extent that the eldest, a boy, was rumoured to have shown his unhappiness by stealing money from his parents and trashing the family home with a group of friends one summer when the family were on vacation without him.

No matter what her
personal
opinion of Liam might be, Samantha knew that her father was quite right when he said that Liam would make an excellent Governor. Highly principled, firm, a natural leader, the state would flourish with Liam at its helm.

Lee Calder on the other hand, despite cleverly managing to package himself as a devoted family man and churchgoer, had a string of shady dealings behind him—nothing that could be proved, but there was something about the man. Samantha vividly remembered the occasion at an official function when he had grabbed hold of her and tried to kiss her.

Fortunately she had been able to push him away but not before she had seen the decidedly nasty glint in his eyes as she rejected him.

She had been all of seventeen at the time and as she recalled his second wife had been pregnant with their first child.

‘Don’t accuse
me
of trying to marry you off,’ she challenged Liam now.

‘No. By the looks of what you’ve got in that case you’re more interested in changing your own single status,’ Liam agreed derisively.

‘I’ve
told
you,
those
are for Bobbie,’ Samantha insisted.

‘And I’ve told you if
you
really want to catch yourself a man, the best way to do it is by...’ He stopped when he saw her frown, then continued. ‘You know that I’m driving you to the airport in the morning, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Samantha agreed on a small sigh. She had a very early start and had been quite prepared to order a cab but her father could be an old-fashioned parent in some ways.

‘No, sweetheart, you know what you’re like for getting yourself anyplace on time.’

‘Dad,’ Samantha had protested, ‘that was years ago...and an accident...just because I once missed a plane doesn’t mean...’

‘Liam’s driving you,’ her father had announced, and Samantha had known better than to argue with him. ‘As it happens, he’s picking someone up, as well.’

‘Someone... Who?’ Samantha had asked her father curiously.

‘Someone from Washington. I want him to take her on board as his campaign PR, she’s very good.’

‘She?’ Samantha had raised her eyebrows, her voice sharpening slightly. ‘You wouldn’t be doing a little matchmaking would you, Dad?’

‘Give your sister our love, remember,’ he had answered her obliquely, ‘and tell her we can’t wait to see them all....’

CHAPTER THREE

S
AMANTHA
CHECKED
A
SLEEPY
yawn as she ruffled her fingers through her still-damp curly crop. Despite the invigorating shower she had just taken her body was protestingly aware that it was only just gone three in the morning.

Still, she could sleep during the flight, she promised herself as she slicked a soft peachy-pink lipstick across her mouth and grimaced at her reflection.

Not bad for a woman who’d slipped over thirty. Her skin was still as clear and fresh-looking as it had been ten years ago and even if there was now a deeper maturity and wisdom in her eyes than any twenty-year-old could have, a person was going to have to stand pretty close to her to see it.

James was in his mid-thirties but he had that boyish look about him that a few Englishmen have. Although equally as tall and strongly built as his elder brother Luke and just as stunningly handsome, James had about him a certain sweetness of nature which more austere men like his brother, and to some extent Liam, too, lacked. James was, in short, an absolute honey. He would be very easy to love, a wonderful husband and father...and an equally wonderful lover? The kind of lover she knew instinctively a man like
Liam
would be.

Samantha put down her lipstick and frowned. Now what on earth had put
that
thought into her head?

Liam as a lover...! Her lover? No way at all!

She glanced at her watch. Time she was downstairs. Liam would be picking her up in five minutes and he was very hot on good timekeeping.

Even though she had said her goodbyes to her parents the previous evening, she wasn’t totally surprised to have them rush downstairs minutes before she left to hug and kiss her and reiterate their messages of love to her twin as well as the rest of the Crightons.

‘Don’t forget that your grandparents should be arriving in Haslewich during the time you are there,’ Samantha’s mother reminded her.

‘How could I forget anything involving Grandma Ruth?’ Samantha teased her mother.

Ruth Crighton, as she had been before her late marriage to Sarah Jane’s father, was affectionately known as Aunt Ruth to virtually all of the Crighton family and so had become Grandma Ruth to Bobbie, Samantha and their younger brother.

Blissfully married at last to the American soldier she had first met during the Second World War, Ruth divided her time together with her husband between Haslewich and Grant’s beautiful American house.

‘Better not keep Liam waiting,’ her father counselled as they all heard the knock on the door.

She went to let him in and he thanked her before going over to her mother to give her a very easy and natural almost filially warm hug. Samantha acknowledged grudgingly that there was no way she could ever fault Liam’s behaviour towards her parents. He might deliberately rub
her
up the wrong way, inciting her to open rebellion and sometimes even outright war, but no one could have faked the look of very real warmth and affection he was giving her folks.

‘I see you took my advice about the suitcases,’ was his only comment to her once they were inside his car and he had loaded her two cases into its trunk.

Samantha scowled at him.

‘My decisions to repack had nothing to do with you,’ she told him loftily and a mite untruthfully. ‘Mom wanted me to take some extra gifts over for the family.’

The derisory look Liam was giving her silenced her.

‘Dad said you were picking up a Washington PR expert from the airport,’ she commented, deliberately changing the subject.

‘Mmm...’

‘You surprise me, Liam,’ she told him. ‘I thought you were far too confident to feel you needed any image polishing or manipulating.’

‘
I
don’t,’ Liam assured her, ‘but some of your father’s supporters are concerned that Lee Calder could be planning to market himself as the family’s champion and they want to start up a damage limitation exercise.’

‘By what, marrying you off to this PR woman?’ Samantha asked flippantly before adding, ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler just to marry your current date... whoever she is...’

‘There
is
no current date,’ Liam told her. ‘And to be frank, Samantha, I’m getting rather tired of this image you keep trying to push of me as some kind of serial lady-killer. For your information—’ He broke off, cursing as a truck suddenly swerved out of a side street in front of them.

Samantha was far too glad of the diversion to reintroduce the same topic of conversation once the truck had gone. Much as she enjoyed baiting Liam, she also knew when it was wise to back off a little.

‘I could say much the same thing to you, you know,’ Liam murmured, turning his head to look directly at her as she turned towards him, warily waiting for what he was going to say.

‘If you’re as keen to prove to your colleagues as you said that you are woman enough to be a mother, then there are far easier ways of doing so than going looking in England for a man to father your child.’

‘What are you suggesting—artificial insemination. No way!’ Angrily Samantha turned away from him, staring in silence out of the car window.

* * *

L
IAM
WAS
A
good driver and long before they had crossed the state line Samantha had dropped off to sleep, her body angled towards Liam’s, one hand resting under her face.

After he’d safely overtaken a truck, Liam turned his head to look at her. She had to be one of the most breathtakingly stunning women he had ever seen. Her sister Bobbie was beautiful but where Bobbie exuded an air of relaxed self-control, Samantha was a bundle of quicksilver fieriness, impulsive, impatient, almost too sensitive for her own good at times, proud and...

Liam cursed under his breath. As
he
knew all too well, there were almost no lengths Samantha would not go to to prove her point if someone hurt her pride. And he knew better than most, having watched both girls grow up, that despite all the positive influences they had received from their parents and family, both of them, but especially Samantha, were privately a little sensitive about their height.

Liam could remember overhearing a much younger Samantha telling her mother in a low voice choked with tears, ‘Mom, the other girls at school say that I should have been a boy because I’m so big...but I’m not a boy, I’m a girl and...’

‘They’re just jealous of you, darling,’ her mother had reassured her quickly. ‘You are indeed a girl, a very beautiful, clever and lovable girl, a very feminine girl,’ she had reinforced, and Liam had watched as Sarah Jane had very cleverly, and with maternal love and concern, made sure that her daughters learned how to focus on the very feminine aspects of their personalities, to hold their heads up with pride and grace.

They
were
tall, and as a teenager Samantha especially had gone through a phase when she had been all gangly limbs, a little lanky and perhaps almost boyish, but that had been as a teenager. Now she was all woman... Oh, yes...now she was very definitely all woman!

Waking up beside him, Samantha wondered what had caused that sudden burst of fire to ignite the darkness of Liam’s eyes. Whatever it was, whoever it was... Was it a whoever rather than a whatever? Samantha suddenly wondered. The new PR woman perhaps? She gave a small, quick, sharp intake of breath. Liam might be prepared to bow to the fears of the more conservative lobby and do the conventional thing, marry in order to improve his public appeal, but there was no power on earth that could ever force her to do the same thing. Her principles, her need of her own self-respect, were far too strong, but Liam, of course, was far too pragmatic to understand such a sensitive point of view. Cousin James in Chester was very sensitive. She had noticed that in him the moment they had met, and had been touched and warmed by it and by his concern for her.

James.

She was
already
beginning to feel a very definite tingle of excitement at the thought of seeing him again. The Crighton men made wonderful fathers, even the family’s erstwhile outcast Max had totally and unexpectedly shown that he possessed the loving Crighton gene when it came to parenting.

‘He seems more thrilled about this new baby they’re expecting than Maddy is,’ Bobbie had confided to her sister when she had passed on to her the news that Max’s wife Maddy was pregnant with their third child.

‘A reconciliation baby,’ Samantha had commented. ‘Well, I hope it works—for the new baby’s sake.’

‘Mmm... I can’t get over how their relationship has turned around,’ Bobbie had continued. ‘Max seems to have completely given up his old ways. He’s based himself in Chester now and he and Luke have developed a rapport I would have thought completely impossible at one time.

‘It’s Maddy who’s changed the most, though. I thought that with Max back at home, recovered from the vicious attack he suffered in Jamaica and so completely repentant and determined to make their marriage work that Maddy would have reverted to her previous role of full-time wife and mother—after all, it’s no sinecure, not when you think of what running a house like Queensmead entails, and the fact that she’s also got Ben living with them.

‘I know she thinks the world of him and him of her, and of course Max has always been his favourite grandchild, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he can be very irascible and that he holds very strong and old-fashioned views. But no, instead, she’s not only kept on the work she was doing for Grandma Ruth’s mother and children charity, but she’s actually got even
more
involved. Luke told me the other day that Max had admitted that he sometimes felt as though he needed to make an appointment in order to get Maddy’s undivided attention these days.’

‘Mmm...well, I certainly noticed how much she’s blossomed the last time I was over,’ Samantha had agreed.

Previously she had found that Maddy, with her self-effacing timid ways, although sweet-natured and gentle, wasn’t someone she felt particularly drawn to, but on her last visit she had been not just amazed and intrigued by the change in her, but she had also discovered how interesting and entertaining Maddy was to talk with.

‘She certainly has. Her latest thing is that she’s instituted a bi-monthly women’s night out when we all get together and leave the men in charge of the babes. We all host the event in turn and it’s amazing the different things everyone comes up with. It’s my turn next and I was wondering if we could bribe the men into extending their child-minding so that we might have a weekend in New York.’

Recalling their conversation now, Sam remembered, too, how she had felt just that little bit envious of her sister’s almost idyllic lifestyle. Her own friends, the girls she had grown up with and then met at college, were scattered all over the States and beyond them, some married, some not, and whilst they all kept in sporadic touch there was not the close-knit sense of community, of family, between them that Bobbie had become so much a part of in her life in England.

Samantha knew enough of small close-knit communities from her childhood in New England to be aware that sometimes they could be restrictive and even stultifying but... But the pluses were greater than the minuses in the balance sheet of life, at least in her opinion, and the teasing affectionate friendships which she had witnessed existing between her twin and the other members of the Crighton clan were something she couldn’t help contrasting with her own sense of alienation and separateness from her own work colleagues.

They were approaching the airport now, the freeway increasingly busy. What was she like, Liam’s new PR? Intelligent? Sparky? Glamorous? All of those and very probably a whole lot more, Samantha decided. Her father had certainly sounded impressed by her.

Was that why she was experiencing these unfamiliar little tickles of antipathy and this disobliging sense of not wanting to like the other woman? Samantha wondered ruefully.

Liam had parked the car and was opening his door.

‘I’ll get you a trolley,’ he was informing her.

‘For goodness’ sake, Liam,’ she snapped. ‘Stop smothering me. I’m perfectly capable of getting my own trolley. I’m a big girl, remember...’

‘Maybe, but I’m an old-fashioned man,’ he reminded her almost tersely. ‘Wait here...’

‘Wait here!’ Samantha opened her mouth to snap angrily that she would do no such thing but it was too late, he was already striding determinedly to where the baggage carts were stacked.

Typically she discovered when he returned with one, unlike her he had managed to find one that wheeled smoothly and easily.

‘Liam,’ she protested fiercely when he insisted on pushing it for her.

‘What
is
it with you?’ he demanded grittily. ‘You know your trouble, don’t you, Samantha?’ He answered his own question without allowing her any time to make her own response. ‘You’re afraid of being a woman. You’re afraid of...’

‘I’m no such thing,’ Samantha interrupted him furiously. ‘I...’

‘Yes, you are,’ Liam taunted her. ‘Look at the way you even prefer to be called Sam instead of Samantha.’

‘That’s not because...it’s just easier for people to say...quicker...’

Liam’s eyebrows lifted.

‘Quicker maybe, but nowhere near as sexy.’

‘Sexy!’ She glared at him.

‘Mmm... Samantha...’ He said her name slowly, drawing out each syllable. ‘Samantha is a woman’s name and like a woman should be lingered over and enjoyed the way a man...’

‘Thanks for the psychoanalysis,’ Samantha snapped fiercely, ‘but I’ve got a plane to catch, remember, Liam? So, if you want to do some lingering I suggest you wait until you’ve picked up your new PR.
She
might be more impressed than...’

‘See, you’re doing it now,’ Liam stopped her softly. ‘What is it you’re really afraid of, Samantha...? I’ll take a guess that it isn’t not being enough of a woman...it’s being
too
much of one.’

Samantha stared at him, for once completely lost for words. His soft-voiced comment had struck unnervingly close to home, too close... To have someone,
anyone,
see so deeply and intimately into her most private self was a disturbing enough act on its own, but when that someone was
Liam,
a man who she had dismissed as someone too prosaic...too practical...too unemotional to...