The Perfect Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

behaved foolishly when she had been at university, there was no getting away from that fact, but she wasn't alone in having done that—many other students had done the same.
    She picked up her coffee mug too quickly and some of the hot liquid spilled onto her hand. She cursed angrily under her breath.
    Damn Gareth Simmonds. Why on earth couldn't he have stayed safely where he was in Oxford—and in her past?
    The last thing she needed right now was having him around studying her...watching her with those too perceptive, too knowing evening-sky-blue eyes of his...judging her...just waiting for her to make a mistake...
    Louise started to grind her teeth.
    Well, she'd got news for him. She wasn't the Louise she had been at Oxford any longer. She was a woman now, an adult, holding down a highly responsible and demanding job, proving that she could control and run her own life, that she didn't need the constant back-up and support of her twin sister to be there at her side all the time, to do her bidding, to make her feel whole and complete. God, but she had hated him for throwing that accusation at her—just one of the scathing criticisms he had made of her!
    It should have been Saul's denouncement of her, after she had so dangerously tricked Tullah into following her into the maze and left her there at the masked ball, that should have remained like a scar on her consciousness, a dialogue that ran for ever through her head as she tried to argue her way out of it, but oddly it wasn't. It was her arguments, her confrontations with her tutor about which she still had bad dreams, and still, in times of stress, played over and over again through her memory.
    Oxford, the time after she had finally been forced to realise that Saul would never love her, that in fact he loved someone else. Oxford and Gareth Simmonds. Oxford, Italy—and Gareth Simmonds. Italy and Gareth Simmonds.
    Picking up her coffee, Louise walked into her small sitting room and curled up on the sofa, closing her eyes. She didn't want to relive those memories, but she could feel the weight of them pressing down on her, pushing their way into her consciousness just as Gareth Simmonds seemed to be pushing his way into the new life she had made for herself.
    As though the debacle of the masquerade ball had not been punishment enough for her to contend with, that following week she had received a letter from Gareth Simmonds. A curt letter informing her that he wished to see her as there were certain matters concerning her work which he wished to discuss with her.
    Her parents knew she had received the letter, and there had been no way she had been able to keep its contents a secret from them—although Katie had been sworn to secrecy over the worst of her excesses in skipping tutorials. If her mother and father had not actually stood over her while she went through the humiliation of telephoning Gareth Simmonds and making an appointment to see him, they had certainly left her in no doubt about their feelings of shock and disappointment at the way she had been abusing both her intelligence and the opportunity that going to Oxford had given her.
    Furiously she had blamed Gareth Simmonds for adding to her problems, while having to give way to her parents' firm insistence that they would drive her to Oxford for the interview, where she planned to stay for a few days in order to try to catch up with her work.
    They had set out after breakfast, her mother patently unhappy and trying to control her tears and her father unexpectedly grim-faced and distant, and Louise had known what was going through both their minds. Was she, like her elder brother Max, going to turn out to be one of those Crightons who had inherited the same genes as her uncle David—the 'S' gene, as she and Katie had nicknamed it as teenagers. The 'S' standing for selfish, stupid and self-destructive.
    She had wanted to reassure them, to tell them that there was nothing for them to worry about, but she had