Bobbie waited until Jon and Jenny had disappeared before standing up and quietly making her way across to where Joss stood anxiously staring towards the main hotel doors. She touched him lightly on the arm, causing him to jump and then turn round, his anxious expression giving way to one of beaming delight as he saw her.
‘You’re here. I thought you must have changed your mind.’
‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ Bobbie assured him.
He was so kind and open, so ... so young and vulnerable; the lessons life taught him now would be indelibly etched on his personality. Did she really want it on her conscience that she...?
‘Come on,’ Joss was urging her. ‘It’s this way.’
It was not her job to take on the responsibility for Joss’s emotions, she reminded herself sternly as she turned to follow him. She was here for a different purpose, a very different purpose, which reminded her...
As Joss pushed open the double doors and stood back for her to precede him into the large, well-packed room, she turned to him and commented, ‘My, that sure is a lot of people. I guess all your family must be here.’
‘Almost,’ Joss agreed, his eyes clouding a little as he informed her, ‘Great-Aunt Ruth isn’t here, though.’
‘Great-Aunt Ruth,’ Bobbie marvelled after a second’s pause during which she kept her eyes firmly on the elegantly decorated room with its artistic and impressive swags and garlands of natural greenery and flowers. She had a small gift in that direction herself and because of it was well aware of the time and skill that must have gone into first conceiving the idea for the decorations and then putting it into practical use in order to achieve such an apparently artless and ‘natural’ effect. ‘She sounds very formidable. I guess she’s not a party person....’
‘She was going to come.’ Joss informed her, ‘but she’s babysitting for Olivia and Caspar instead. That’s them over there,’ he told Bobbie helpfully, indicating a couple who stood talking to Joss’s parents.
The woman was about her own age, Bobbie guessed, in her mid- to late twenties, the man with her a little older. She was stylishly dressed, her hair cut in an immaculate shiny bob, and Bobbie studied her carefully before turning back to Joss.
‘I do wish Aunt Ruth were here,’ Joss was telling her. ‘I wanted you to meet her.’
Once again Bobbie found it easier to study her surroundings rather than meet Joss’s eyes. ‘Well, I’d like to meet her, too,’ she returned lightly. ‘I guess we’ll have to try to fix something up before I move on.
‘Oh my,’ she exclaimed, her attention suddenly caught by the man leaning casually against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Handsome simply wasn’t the word to describe him, she acknowledged; if a man could be described as ‘beautiful’ without in any way detracting from the sheer male animal magnetism of him, then this man was.
From the top of his shiny, well-groomed dark hair to the tip of his evening shoes, he epitomised everything that was masculine and good-looking. He would have made a perfect movie star, Bobbie thought, a heartthrob in the true, old-fashioned sense of the word.
‘Who is that?’
‘That’s Max,’ Joss told her in an oddly flat voice, adding reluctantly, ‘He’s my brother.’
His brother. Now Bobbie was surprised and, as she turned from watching Joss’s face close up and his eyes become slightly shadowed to study the handsome six-footer leaning so slouchily against the wall, she asked him ruefully, ‘So why wasn’t he mentioned when you were cataloguing your family’s available males?’
‘Because he isn’t...available, that is,’ Joss answered in that same flat voice. ‘Max is married.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Vainly Bobbie searched the room looking for the woman who would be the kind of mate such a man would undoubtedly choose—the female equivalent of himself. Stunning, almost theatrically good-looking and possessed of that same head-turning charismatic appeal he patently had in such abundance.
‘That’s Madeleine, his wife, over there,’ Joss told her, obviously guessing what she was doing and then adding quickly and almost defensively as Bobbie studied the woman he had indicated, ‘She’s nice. I like her.’
‘I’m sure she is,’ Bobbie agreed gravely as she took in Madeleine’s plain face and slightly dumpy figure, acknowledging two things. One, that Max must either be completely and utterly head over heels in love with her, or two, he must have some other equally powerful and compelling reason for marrying her. Bobbie suspected she knew which.
‘Why don’t we hire someone to make enquiries for us before we do anything?’ Bobbie had suggested when they had first discussed the matter, a little queasily aware of how uncomfortable she would feel prying into other people’s private business, but Samantha had shaken her head forcefully.
‘We can’t ... take the risk of involving anyone else,’ she reminded her sister. ‘We’re going to have to do it ourselves.’
‘You mean I’m going to have to do it,’ Bobbie retorted feelingly. ‘After all, you can’t just take off for Europe. Not now you’re halfway through your master’s.’
‘No, I can’t,’ Samantha agreed cheerfully, then added teasingly, ‘You should have come with me when I took that couple of years out and travelled. We have to go through with this, Bobbie,’ she went on to say more seriously. ‘Remember all those years ago how we said we would?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ Bobbie had agreed. How could she have forgotten the childhood vow she and Sam had made? ‘I just hate the feeling that we’re doing anything underhand...spying...’
‘Us do anything underhand?’ Sam had shouted bitterly.
Silently Bobbie looked down now at Joss.
‘Where are your sisters?’ she asked him conversationally.
‘Over there,’ he replied, indicating the pair of identical twins who stood chatting with what was obviously a large group of shared friends. They were, Bobbie was pleased to note, wearing completely different outfits and had completely different hairstyles, but there was still no mistaking those shared inherited features.
‘My goodness, who on earth is that with Joss?’ Jenny exclaimed, having caught sight of her youngest child for the first time since he had entered the room.
‘She’s certainly not someone you could fail to notice, is she?’ Olivia laughed as she, too, studied the endearingly odd combination of a very youthful Joss and the magnificently eye-catching young woman who was with him.
‘She reminds me of a lioness,’ Jenny murmured, ‘all golden grace and power. I wonder where Joss met her?’
‘I think I know,’ Jon informed them, having turned round to see what was occupying his wife’s attention. ‘Minnie Cooke at the wine bar mentioned that Joss had been in the other day with a tall blonde American.’
‘American, eh... I think I’d just better go over and say hello ... a fellow countrywoman and all that.’
‘Caspar,’ Olivia warned, adding firmly, ‘We’ll both go over.’
As families went, this one certainly liked to give the impression that it was protective of its own. Bobbie reflected cynically as she registered the interest she was beginning to excite amongst certain adult members of Joss’s family.
Max had already prised his shoulders off their resting place on the wall to give her a lazy once-over. Luke, peering past the head of his blonde companion, had sent a look of frowning scrutiny in her direction. Jenny appeared frankly astonished and now here was Olivia with Caspar in tow bearing down on them.
Bobbie held her breath and then counted to ten before easing herself into her chosen role.
‘Hello there.’ Olivia smiled warmly, extending her hand towards Bobbie. ‘You must be Joss’s friend.’
‘I hope so,’ Bobbie responded with equal warmth, shaking Olivia’s hand firmly as she introduced herself. ‘Bobbie Miller. Bobbie being short for Roberta.’
‘I’m Olivia Johnson, Joss’s cousin, and this is Caspar, my husband.’
By the time Caspar had returned with the drinks that Olivia had
dispatched him to fetch for them, she had elicited the information that Bobbie, having finished her studies, was taking time out to ‘do’ Europe before returning home to work in her father’s law firm.
‘So your father’s a lawyer... what a coincidence. Our family, the Crightons, are nearly all involved in the law in one form or another.’
‘Dad was an attorney,’ Bobbie informed her carefully. ‘Right now he’s in Congress.’
‘So what exactly brought you to Haslewich?’ Caspar asked cheerfully, handing Bobbie her drink. ‘It’s not exactly on the normal tourist route.’
‘No,’ Bobbie agreed. ‘I guess I just got kinda interested in the place when I overheard someone talking about it in Chester, so I thought I’d drive out and take a look around. That’s when I met Joss.’
‘She was in the churchyard,’ Joss informed them.
‘It feels rather scary to see those headstones with dates going back so far,’ Bobbie cut in... ‘I guess your family must have been in the town for centuries.’