A Perfect Night Read online

  'He and Mum have both said separately to me that they never should have married... They confused lust with love. Have you ever been in love?' she asked Katie curiously.

  Too taken aback to feel offended by the intimacy of her curiosity Katie didn't know what to say, but fortunately Charlotte didn't seem to notice her hesitancy, continuing instead,

  'I wish that Dad could find someone to love... I think part of the reason he buried himself in his work when I was a baby was because it was so hard for him to face up to the fact that he and Ma had married for the wrong reasons and that they didn't really love one another,' she told Katie wisely. 'I'd hate to get to Dad's age without ever having loved anyone properly and being loved back by them,' she added abruptly.

  She giggled, confiding, 'Dad thinks that every boy I date is going to seduce me, but I'm not ready for that kind of relationship yet. I've got too much to do, but one day soon I shall be. Dad has this bit of a thing about the reputation of the Cooke men as wicked seducers.

  Although he never really talks about it, I think that's why he insisted on marrying Mum instead of just going to bed with her. Of course, I know things were different when they were young but I don't think there's anything wrong in someone wanting to explore their sexuality. It's part of growing up, isn't it?

  'When I do commit myself to a man, a relationship, I want it to be because I know beyond any kind of doubt that I love him, so I want to make sure that I've got the sex thing sorted out first. I mean for both sexes, losing one's virginity is kind of a very major rite of passage, isn't it, and of course I want it to be with the right person.

  'I expect you felt the same when you lost yours,' she added questioningly.

  Katie could feel herself floundering, lost in a sticky morass of conflicting emotions and thoughts. Was Charlotte trying to seek her advice or was she simply using her as a sounding board? The age gap between them wasn't huge, but it was enough for Katie to know that in Charlotte's eyes they stood on opposite sides of the chasm that was experience. If only Charlotte knew the truth. From what she had just said Katie felt that Charlotte's outlook and attitude towards sex was far more mature than her own, but then Charlotte wasn't in love with a man she could never have.

  Charlotte's comments about her father had been equally enlightening, although after the way he had behaved towards her, Katie was finding it extremely hard to reconcile the man who was so moralistic that he had married a woman he didn't love with the one who had behaved so sexually demandingly towards her.

  'Hi... I've come to relieve you.'

  Katie looked up and smiled as Tullah, Saul's wife, came up to join them.

  'Oh good, that means you can come with me and help me find Dad,' Charlotte informed Katie as she slipped her arm through hers.

  Find Seb That was the last thing Katie wanted to do, but Charlotte obviously wasn't going to take 'no' for an answer and so reluctantly Katie found herself walking beside her as Charlotte led the way to the spot where she had arranged to meet Seb.

  CHAPTER SIX

  'LOOK who I've brought with me,' Charlotte told Seb as she gaily wriggled her way through the crowds to his side, tugging Katie after her.

  'I'll bet you're dying for something to drink after all that story-telling,' she teased Katie as she slipped her free arm through her father's so that she was standing between them.

  'Dad...' she began, but Katie, guessing what was coming and knowing that Seb would have as little ap-petite for her company as she did for his forestalled Charlotte, telling her quickly, 'No Charlotte, it's alright.

  My mother has brought a family picnic and she'll be expecting me to join them.'

  Oddly as she looked at him, instead of seeming relieved at the prospect of being freed from her company Seb was actually frowning. She was just on the point of disengaging herself from Charlotte when a small boy suddenly dashed towards her carrying a sharp pointed stick which must at one stage have had a balloon attached to it from the strips of brightly coloured plastic dangling from it It wasn't the burst balloon that caused Katie to dart forward anxiously snatching him up as he started to fall, however, but the knowledge that the sharp end of the stick was potentially dangerous to him.

  As she grabbed him he gave a loud wail of protest that quickly turned to a broad beaming smile as Katie deftly distracted his attention by cuddling him and asking him who he was.

  'Me Joey,' he told her flashing her an impishly dev-ilish Cooke smile so like Seb's that her heart suddenly lurched against her ribs causing her to miss a breath.

  'Joey...there you are...'

  Katie turned round as a plump dark-headed woman came hurrying towards them. Immediately Joey stretched out his arms wriggling to be handed over as he cried eagerly,

  'Mum...'

  'He was going to fall,' Katie told the young woman as she handed him over, not wanting her to think that she had had any ulterior motive in picking him up.

  'Yes, I know... I saw you,' the other woman told her.

  As she cuddled her son her eyes studied Katie; their velvety dark gaze so intense and hypnotic that Katie couldn't drag her own gaze away.

  'Here,' the woman added meaningfully as she touched her forehead. 'I sensed he was in clanger and then I saw you reaching for him...' Her eyes flashed with pride and hauteur as she saw Katie's expression.

  'If you don't believe me ask him,' she told Katie with a small toss of her head looking at Seb. ' He's one of us and he knows that some of us have the sight...the gift...'

  Katie knew it too. The ability for certain female members of the Cooke clan to foretell future events was a well documented local fact, but this was the first time she personally had been the focus of witnessing it in action.

  'I wasn't doubting you,' Katie reassured her, gently reaching out her hand to smooth the little boy's tangled curls. His hair was dark like his mother's—like Seb's—

  and wonderfully soft to touch. Seb's child... Seb's son would have just such hair. For a moment she thought she must be falling under some extraordinary spell the gypsy woman had cast, for unbelievably she suddenly had a mental image of Seb's child, as potent and lifelike as though he actually already existed. But almost immediately her common sense reasserted itself and she told herself that she was simply being over-imaginative.

  But then, just as they were about to walk away, the gypsy woman reached for Katie's arm and told her softly, nodding in Charlotte's direction,

  'She is not a child you have made together but there will be one and very soon.'

  Releasing Katie she turned to Seb who had listened to the entire exchange in silence.

  'You do not believe me, but it is true,' she told him fiercely. 'Give me your hand,' she instructed Katie, reaching for it and taking hold of it before she could draw back from her.

  It was ridiculous of her to feel that she was in the presence of a mystical power as awesome and ancient as life itself Katie acknowledged, and yet that was how she felt as the girl pored over her hand and then pronounced firmly, 'It is written quite clearly here. You are one another's fates, although neither of you has recognised it yet, but before you can do so, you,' she told Seb, turning to him and addressing him almost sharply,

  'must close the door on what you are using to deny yourself your future. There is no need for it, no place for it. And you,' she told Katie a little more gently, 'must close the door on that which you know can never right-fully belong to you...'

  For a moment none of them spoke. A stillness—a silence—seemed to envelop them like an invisible cloak and then excitedly Charlotte was holding out her hand to the girl pleading, 'What about me? What can you see in my hand?'

  The woman's expression lightened as she released Katie's hand and took hold of Charlotte's.

  'I see that you still have a long journey to complete along the path of knowledge before you begin your life's work. And I see, too...' Very gently she closed Charlotte's fingers over her palm and then told her slowly, 'I see that you will be among those who wil
l give to the world a very great deal of good.'

  And then abruptly she released Charlotte's hand and was gone, disappearing into the swirling crowd leaving the three of them to stand in silence while they digested her predictions.

  'Well...' Charlotte gasped. 'Wasn't that extraordinary... Did you notice her eyes? I felt almost as though she was hypnotising me.'

  'She probably was, or at least attempting to do so,'

  her father told her curtly, adding grimly, 'It's all rubbish, of course.'

  'I really must go,' Katie told them both. There was absolutely no way she could bring herself to look at Seb, not after what the girl had said. Seb was right, it had all been rubbish, a piece of ineffective guesswork on the other woman's part based on the fact that they were together. She had probably assumed that they were already a couple and that Katie, who quite obviously couldn't be Charlotte's mother, must want to have Seb's child herself. It was silly for her to feel so hyper-sensitively aware of that mental image she had had of that small dark-haired boy so very, very like Seb. That had simply been a coincidence that was all.

  'She obviously thought that the two of you were a couple,' Charlotte commented with a wide smile.

  'No.'

  'No way...'

  Charlotte looked from her father to Katie and then back again as they both uttered their denials at the same time.

  'Oh, but you heard what she said,' she teased. 'It's inevitable ...fate...'

  'I'd say the explanation is much closer to hand and owes far more to a vivid imagination than any super-natural influence,' Seb announced dryly.

  'Katie—there you are. Ma has sent us to look for you so that we can eat lunch.'

  With the sudden appearance of Louise, with Gareth at her side and their son in his arms, it was tempting to tell Seb that he was wrong and that a certain mischievous and even malign unseen force appeared to enjoy wreak-ing havoc with her composure, but of course Katie knew she would do—could do—no such thing, not without revealing just why the arrival of her twin sister with her husband and baby should be so uncomfortable for her.

  It was normal custom in the Crighton family and most especially her own generation of it for both its female and male members to embrace, hug and kiss one another in greeting, but after the first time she had frozen back in anguish when Gareth had attempted to hug her when he and Louise had become a couple. Gareth had always kept his distance from her and Katie had been profoundly grateful to him for doing so. But contradictorily on this occasion, all too aware of Seb's keen eyes and Charlotte's curious ones on them, she almost wished that he would step forward and give her a brotherly hug.

  Of course introductions had to be made and while Charlotte cooed enthusiastically over Nick, Gareth and Seb exchanged male pleasantries, each patently calmly assessing the other.

  'You'll never guess what's just happened,' Charlotte started to tell Louise excitedly, while Katie's heart sank.

  Only let her twin get wind of what the girl had predicted... But to her relief instead of immediately teasing them both over the girl's prediction, Louise was un-characteristically tactful and silent on the subject, simply reiterating their parents were waiting to begin lunch.

  'Mmm...lunch, that sounds like a good idea, Dad,'

  Charlotte told her father enthusiastically. 'I'm starving...'

  As she saw the rather rueful look Seb was giving the fast food outlets close by, Louise suggested promptly,

  'Look, why don't you join us. Knowing Ma there' 11

  be more than enough...'

  'Oh, no...'

  'Thank you, but no...'

  As both Seb and Katie spoke together, Louise raised her eyebrows a little, her attention focusing rather too keenly for Katie's liking on what she knew to be her give-away flushed face.

  But before she or Seb could reiterate their rejections of Louise's suggestion, Guy and Chrissie were coming towards them.

  'I was just inviting Sebastian and Charlotte to join us for lunch,' Louise explained immediately to her mother's ex-business partner.

  'You were...that's good because I've just seen Jenny myself and accepted her invitation that the five of us should join you...'

  Her heart sinking Katie automatically turned to go to her sister's side but as she did so, Guy asked her apol-ogetically, 'Katie, would you mind taking your father's keys and going to the car to get the cutlery your mother asked me to collect. Anthony needs changing before lunch and our car is parked on the other side of the field, so...'

  Only too glad to have an opportunity to get away from Sebastian Cooke, Katie immediately nodded her head and took her father's car keys from Guy.

  'We're in our usual picnic spot,' Louise told her sister cheerfully as she fell into step beside Chrissie to exchange mother and baby stories.

  Katie had gone less than a few dozen yards when she suddenly heard Seb calling her name.

  Turning round she watched warily as he hurried to catch up with her.

  'I just wanted to have a few words with you before we join the rest of your family for lunch,' he told her curtly. 'All that rubbish that fake "fortune teller" was spouting had absolutely nothing to do with me,' he informed her unnecessarily.

  Immediately Katie could feel her temper starting to burn.

  'Well, I certainly didn't have anything to do with her predictions,' she snapped back immediately. 'The very idea is ridiculous. For a start we'd have to...'

  She stopped, her face going scarlet at the unexpectedly explicit mental images of just what they would have to do to make the woman's predictions come true filled her mind.

  'We'd have to what?' Seb picked up softly for her.

  'Go to bed together. Is that what you were going to say?'

  Primly Katie looked away from him before answering in a very stifled voice, 'Actually no. What I was going to say is that we would have to...to have a very different relationship from the one we do have...'

  'Like I said, we'd have to go to bed together,' Seb told her succinctly. 'And there's no way that's going to happen.'

  Katie couldn't help it, she gave a small gasp of cha-grined pride as he delivered his immediate and unequivocal rejection of her.

  'You're right,' she agreed quickly and decisively. 'It isn't. The kind of man I would want...the kind of man I find attractive,' she hastily amended, 'Is... would be...'

  'Would be what?' Seb challenged her sharply.

  Katie was too caught up in her feelings to be either cautious or tactful.

  'He wouldn't be anything like you,' she told him pointedly. 'He'd be kind...gentle...caring...' Her voice softened betrayingly, her eyes suddenly remote and dreamy as she continued a little huskily, 'He'd be wise and...and understanding and he'd...he'd never...' She stopped and then told him fiercely, 'he would never, ever, be anything, anyone...like you...'

  'No, he wouldn't,' Seb agreed grittily. 'Not me, nor any other red-blooded male. He sounds more like some mythical sexless cardboard cut-out of a man than the real thing,' he told her scathingly. 'A fictional hero who bears as much resemblance to a real man as...'

  'You're just saying that because you're not like that,'

  Katie interrupted him defiantly. 'There are men like that...men who...'

  'Men who what?' Seb immediately challenged her, falling into step beside her as Katie, fearing that she was losing ground in their argument turned on her heel and started to hurry towards the field in which her parents'

  car was parked.

  'Let go of me,' she protested as Seb reached for her arm when she continued to ignore him.

  'Not until you've answered my question,' he told her grimly. 'Men who what? Tell me exactly what it is about this mythical mate you deem so desirable—because it certainly can't be his sexuality.'

  'Seb!' Katie flashed back at him immediately.

  'There's more to a relationship...to love...than that...'

  'Indeed there is, but I think you'll find most men—

  and women—want the pleasure of en
joying and arousing their chosen partner's sexual desires. You must have experienced that for yourself,' he continued curtly when Katie made no response other than tensing in his grasp as they both came to a halt opposite one another. His expression changed subtly as he looked down into her wary eyes.

  'You have experienced it, haven't you, Katie?' he asked her softly.

  'What I have or have not experienced is no concern of yours.' Katie defended herself valiantly.

  'Perhaps not,' Seb agreed, but instead of releasing her and turning away as she had expected, he suddenly moved closer to her causing her stomach to turn in anxious protest. 'Or perhaps our fortune-teller does know something that you and I do not... Shall we find out...?'

  'No...' Katie started to protest, but it was too late.

  Cloaked as they were by the shadows cast by the trees at the edge of the field it was dangerously easy for Seb to draw her fully into his arms, imprisoning her there as he bent his head and his mouth came down expertly and inescapably over hers.

  It was a kiss more of anger and retribution than anything else, Katie was not so naive that she didn't recognise that fact.

  He had resented the fortune-teller's prediction and he was angry with her because he didn't like her and this was his way of punishing her.

  'No...' she managed to protest sharply against his mouth as she struggled to break free of him, her teeth accidentally grazing his bottom lip as she did so.

  'What the...'

  As she heard him curse Katie froze. She could taste the slight saltiness of his blood on her own tongue and was horrified by what she had done, even if he had pro-voked it.

  '...and what you want is a gentle passive lover,' she heard him demanding savagely. 'You're a liar, Katie.

  You want a man whose passion matches your own, a man who...'

  'What I don't want is you,' Katie told him frantically.

  'And I don't want you,' Seb assured her sharply, his expression changing and holding her in paralysing thrall he added rawly, 'but I want this...'