A Perfect Night Read online

  'No, not in Seb,' Jenny told him gently. 'I suspect that the confidence she lacks is in herself... I noticed particularly how when she was at university she developed the habit of standing in the shadows as it were, of accepting second place...second best...'

  'Like father—like daughter,' Jon offered ruefully as he and Jenny exchanged mutually understanding and loving looks. For many years Jon himself had stood in the shadow of his twin, so much so that his resultant lack of self-esteem had affected every aspect of his life and he and Jenny had been determined that their twin girls would not suffer similarly; encouraging them both to develop and be proud of their differences as well as their similarities.

  'Seb will be good for her. He won't allow her to take a back seat in life. As a Cooke he'll know just what it means to sometimes have to fight to win other people's respect and, even more importantly, to maintain one's own. He will understand Katie's vulnerabilities and she'll see through his outer image of toughness to the sensitivity that lies beneath it.'

  'Mmm...well, it all sounds very positive and hopeful.'

  'I can see a very happy future ahead for the two of them.'

  'And I can see a very expensive one ahead for us,'

  Jon riposted. 'Why couldn't fate have arranged for them to meet a little earlier? That way she and Louise could have had a double wedding, two for the cost of one, so to speak.'

  The airport was exceptionally busy. After she had gone through to the departure lounge Katie checked the board for her flight and then made her way through the crowd to the coffee shop. As she did so, out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a tall dark-haired man crossing the concourse in front of her.

  Immediately a fierce surge of joy and excitement raced through her.

  'Seb.'

  His name was on her lips, her heart pounding. He was here. He had come to look for her. He wanted her. He loved her just as she loved him. She loved him! She loved Seb. For a few seconds Katie stood perfectly still as the world kaleidoscoped around her and the revelation of her own emotions hit her with all the devastating effect of a strong drug taking over her senses, entering her bloodstream. Her thoughts, her emotions were so searingly intense that she was oblivious to everything else going on around her. She might have been standing completely alone so little did the busy crowds around her impinge on her awareness.

  She loved Seb.

  She closed her eyes and said his name slowly, sa-vouring it and then opened them again frantically searching for his familiar figure. But as she started to hurry towards him, he stopped and turned and with a sickening jolt Katie recognised that the man she had been following wasn't Seb at all and that now she had seen it she saw that his face bore no resemblance to Seb whatsoever. His features lacked the patrician nobility of Seb's.

  His bone structure was nowhere near as masculine, his eyes nothing like Seb's cool grey ones. He was quite simply not Seb and how on earth she had ever believed that he was, she couldn't imagine. Why, after all, would Seb be here? He didn't even know she was at the airport.

  He didn't know and would probably not have cared if he had. He certainly wouldn't have cared enough to come rushing here after her, to take her in his arms and declare undying love for her.

  Seb love her?

  This must be what the intense intimacy of the kind of sex they had shared did to a woman Katie decided, shivering almost feverishly. It made her vulnerable. It made her love the man who had shown her...given her such pleasure. Slowly Katie shook her head trying to clear the miasma of painful thoughts crowding into it.

  Had she fallen in love with Seb when they had been making love or had she perhaps, unknown to herself, been attracted to him before that? She didn't know and had no way of ever knowing, but what she did know was that that moment, that split second of time when she had thought she had seen Seb, when she had believed he loved her, would be engraved on her heart and her memory for the rest of her life. There was no going back now from the discovery she had made or going back from the knowledge she had gained. No, there was no going back from anything now.

  Absently Katie glanced at the departure board and then realised that they were boarding her flight. Like an automaton she made her way to the appropriate gate.

  Now she knew why she had felt so impelled to be with Louise, why she was being urged to seek out the one person who could help her to make sense out of what was happening to her. People didn't fall in love without knowing they had done so...did they? It just wasn't possible—was it? How could she have loved Seb without knowing that she did so?

  Once on the plane Katie took her seat like a sleep-walker. Her mind, her heart, all of her was filled with images and thoughts of Seb. Seb striding angrily into her apartment. Seb kissing her with such furious passion.

  Seb touching her body; looking at her, his anger transmuted into pure molten desire. Seb...

  Why hadn't she had some inkling, some suspicion, some built-in protective warning system to tell her that this would happen; that she would feel like this— love like this?

  'Katie...over here...'

  Automatically Katie turned in the direction she could hear her twin's voice coming from. Louise was waiting for her on the other side of the flight gate. Quickly Katie hurried towards her, all the things she had planned to say; the logical explanations she had intended to make, forgotten as they rushed into one another's arms.

  Tears filled her eyes, rolling down her face as she told Louise chokily, 'Lou, I'm in love...with Seb...'

  Releasing her Louise studied her and then asked gently, 'Is that a problem? I thought the two of you made a good couple.'

  'Us being a couple isn't the problem,' Katie admitted.

  'Or rather... Where's Nick?' she asked, changing the subject and looking round for Louise's little boy.

  'With Gareth,' Louise told her promptly. 'Gareth had a few days' leave owing and so I told him it was time that he and Nick did a little bit of father and son bond-ing. They've gone to stay with friends for a few days.'

  There was no way that Louise was going to tell her twin that until she had received her phone call she too had been planning to take part in this short family break.

  Gareth had raised his eyebrows but made no demure when she had told him that there had been a change of plan.

  'Katie never asks for anything,' Louise had told him soberly. 'Of the two of us I'm always the one who makes demands on her. She needs me Gareth. I have to be here for her. I owe it to her,' she had finished softly.

  Now, as she looked at her twin's pale face, Louise knew that she had been right to listen to that small inner voice.

  'Come on,' she announced, taking hold of Katie's arm. 'You and I are going to go and have a proper girlie lunch. There's this fabulous restaurant we've discovered not far away from the house.'

  Katie started to protest and shake her head. The last thing she felt like doing was eating, but typically Louise wasn't giving her the opportunity to object, tucking her arm through Katie's and urging her towards the exit.

  As Seb drove towards the Yorkshire Dales, the site of Charlotte's field trip, a sudden bottle-neck in the traffic slowed him down enough that he had the opportunity to reach for his mobile phone and punch in Katie's number.

  He had made a mental note of it earlier in the morning while he had been on the phone to her mother, never guessing how soon he was going to need to use it.

  Impatiently he waited as the phone rang, willing Katie to pick up the receiver, smothering the sense of anguish and disappointment he felt when there was no reply.

  Charlotte had been taken to the hospital nearest to the field trip site and although Seb had spoken to the staff nurse in charge of her ward and had been reassured that keeping her in was only a precaution and that she was fine, he knew his natural parental fears would not be allayed until he had seen her.

  He just hoped that he would be able to reach Katie by telephone before too long. If he couldn't... 'You'll have a boy child' the gypsy had said. A child
... a boy ...a son... Katie's son... There was no way he was going to abdicate his parental responsibilities a second time. No way he was going to be an absent father. No way he was not going to be fully and totally a part of his child's life...

  Charlotte had been lucky... He had been lucky in that his absence had not damaged her, but he still had to carry the guilt of knowing he had not been there for her when he ought to have been, he still had to bear the guilt of knowing that his own selfish behaviour could have com-promised her happiness and her life... Just as his own selfish behaviour could have resulted in the conception of another child.

  Unplanned this baby may be, he acknowledged, but not unwanted. The sensation that had ripped through him at the thought of Katie carrying his child had shocked him. Charlotte was his daughter and he loved her, but he had never once felt anything for Sandra like he had just experienced now thinking about Katie conceiving and carrying his child.

  He liked Sandra as a person, respected and admired her as a mother and as a wife—someone else's wife—

  but he didn't love her, had never loved her the way he did Katie. But Katie didn't love him and if she should have conceived because of his lack of self-control...

  God, what a mess he had made of everything.

  'Truthfully, Louise, I'm just not hungry,' Katie protested. 'All I want...' A single, solitary tear slid down her face causing Louise to change her plans and the direction in which she was driving.

  'What are you doing?' Katie protested in alarm as her twin did an illegal U-turn virtually in the middle of the busy city street.

  'Don't worry,' Louise grinned. 'No one was watching... We're going home,' she added by way of explanation. 'We can talk properly there.'

  The house Louise and Gareth were renting in Brussels was down a pretty, leafy road; a small town house with a good-sized, private rear garden.

  'Come on,' Louise smiled reassuringly at her twin as she parked her car and then got out, walking round to the passenger door and waiting for Katie and then taking hold of her hand almost as though she thought she might run away, Katie acknowledged wearily.

  But where, after all, was there for her to run to? Who was there for her to run to? Nowhere and no one. She just wished she hadn't made that ridiculously overemo-tional statement at the airport. No wonder Louise was treating her as though she had less common sense than her small son Nick.

  'We'll sit out in the garden,' Louise announced as she led the way into the house and then through it out onto a pretty paved patio area, virtually pushing Katie into one of the comfortable garden chairs before telling her,

  'Stay there. I'll go and get some wine...'

  'I don't...' Katie began but Louise shook her head and told her ruefully,

  'Well I certainly do. Just one glass,' she suggested in a more gentle voice. 'It will do you good.'

  The wine Louise poured for them both was clean and crisp and deliciously cold. It tasted good, Katie admitted, shaking her head over the plate of sandwiches Louise was offering her.

  'So...tell me everything,' Louise commanded her.

  'You're in love with Seb. Well, I could see that. What's troubling you? Is it the thought of making such a big commitment...marriage can seem very scary. I know.'

  'No. It's nothing like that,' Katie interrupted her, taking a deep breath before saying starkly,

  'What I let you think before, what I told you, simply wasn't true. Not then... Seb and I weren't...hadn't...

  There was nothing between us and...'

  'But there is now,' Louise cut across Katie's stumbling explanations. 'Now you're in love with him...'

  'Yes...' Katie looked down at her almost empty wine glass feeling her face grow hot as certain memories flooded through her. Then she drained the last of her wine and turned to face Louise, telling her with a blunt-ness that ordinarily would have been totally out of character for her, 'It... I... I went to bed with him. We had sex...and it was...' She paused, her face growing even hotter, but when she searched Louise's face and could see no hint of shock or criticism there she took another deep breath and continued, 'It was wonderful. I hadn't...

  I never thought... He was angry at first. Angry with me because he'd discovered that people were talking about us as a couple. I tried to explain and apologise, but...he took hold of me and started to kiss me and then what had started out as... I couldn't help myself... I just wanted him so much,' Katie confessed in a low voice.

  'I'd never imagined I could feel like that. Not me. My own feelings just overwhelmed me... I just wanted him so much. I know this must be hard for you to understand,' she told Louise, unable to fully look at her now.

  'You and Gareth...you love one another and...'

  'I didn't love him the first time I had sex with him,'

  Louise interrupted her to tell her matter of factly. 'Actually...' She stopped. 'Perhaps we're even more alike than either of us has ever recognised. Gareth was very angry with me the first time we made love, Katie, and I felt just the same as you've said you felt. I was the one who drove things on, who insisted...who seduced...' she underlined ruefully.

  Katie lifted her head and listened warily.

  'The first time I went to bed with Gareth I was convinced it was Saul I loved, not him. I was furiously angry with Gareth and with myself and he was equally furiously angry with me, but somehow all that anger became transmuted, transformed into something else.'

  Katie closed her eyes and then opened them again.

  'When I went to bed with Seb,' she confessed gruffly,

  'I thought...' She stopped and bit her lip and then, looking right at her twin, she confessed huskily, 'I thought...felt...believed that it was really Gareth I loved.'

  For a moment the silence between them was so intense, so profound, that Katie feared that she had gone too far, said too much, violated their twinship so severely that their lifelong bond had been severed, but then Louise moved, pushing back her chair, coming towards her, taking hold of her and hugging her so hard that Katie had to gasp for breath.

  'Oh Katie, Katie, it's so awesome that we should both have experienced the same thing, that we should both have shared almost exactly the same things. You know what this means, don't you?' Louise demanded in a por-tentous voice.

  Katie looked at her, her heart starting to beat heavily and painfully. What was Louise going to say? That because Katie had admitted to having loved Gareth things could never now be the same between them, that Louise could never again trust her...?

  'No...what does it mean?' Katie forced herself to ask.

  'It means that you and Seb are quite definitely meant for one another,' Louise told her excitedly. 'Just like Gareth and I were...'

  Katie hated to disillusion her but she had to. Sadly she shook her head.

  'No. Seb doesn't love me,' she told her positively.

  'He took you to bed, made love to you,' Louise reminded her.

  'He wanted me,' Katie agreed. 'But he doesn't love me,' she said painfully. She hesitated and then looked uncertainly at Louise.

  'You won't say anything to Gareth about...about me having thought I loved him, will you?' she begged Louise. 'I realise now that...' She stopped. Even if she hadn't already recognised how unreal and unsupportable her supposed love for Gareth had really been, she knew that hearing Louise describe his anger with her when they had made love, and recognising that Gareth was the tender almost detached gentle lover she had imagined was nothing more than an unreal fantasy would have destroyed the fragile romantic image she had built up around her brother-in-law.

  She had believed she loved him because there had been no one else there in her life for her to love, she realised with sudden wisdom. Loving Gareth had been a subtle form of emotional protection, of safeguarding her emotions. Rather like that thicket of briars which had grown up around Sleeping Beauty, and like the prince who had hacked his way through that thicket, Seb had found a way through her emotional protection and into her heart.

  If she had gained not
hing else from what had happened, she had at least gained maturity and a much deeper knowledge of her real self. And of course, she had regained the special closeness with Louise her twin.

  An hour later as they strolled together through Brussels' shopping area, Katie paused to study the display in a small boutique window.

  The dress, a cobwebby knit creation that clung lovingly and seductively to every curve of the mannequin's body was both impossibly expensive and even more impossibly provocative.

  'He'll be furious with you for wearing it in public where other men's eyes could see what he wants to keep only for himself,' Louise murmured to her before adding temptingly, 'Why don't you buy it?'

  'Certainly not,' Katie demurred. 'Have you seen the price, and besides where would I wear it? Mind you I could do with something,' she admitted ruefully.

  'There's Gramps's "do" coming up...'

  Louise rolled her eyes expressively and groaned,

  'Don't remind me,' and then, as her voice changed tone and became quieter, she asked gently,

  'What will you do?'

  '...about Seb?' Katie responded. 'I don't know. Perhaps I should look for another job...move away...'

  'Why not move here?' Louise suggested promptly.

  'You'd get a job easily enough and we've got plenty of spare bedrooms... Or,' she added, pausing and then looking at Katie before saying firmly,

  'You could always tell him how you feel, and then he...'

  'No! That's impossible,' Katie denied immediately.

  Ten minutes later while they were sitting in a cafe drinking coffee, Louise suddenly gave a small exclamation and got up. 'I've just remembered, I didn't put enough money in the parking ticket machine. You wait there while I go and get another ticket. I shan't be long...'

  'No,' she insisted when Katie started to get up.

  'There's no need for you to come. Finish your coffee and order us both a second cup... You don't know what a treat...a luxury...it is for me to simply be able to sit and drink coffee. I love Nick to pieces but just occasionally it's absolute bliss to have some time to myself.