A Perfect Night by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

Cooke who doesn't fit into the normal and expected male Cooke mould.'
    As Katie went upstairs to change and prepare for the evening she was frowning. Her father had asked her if she would take over one of his few remaining conveyancing cases, explaining that what was to have been a simple court case had developed into something much more complicated, meaning that he couldn't do the work as quickly as their new client wished.
    'Nice chap. You'll like him,' he had told Katie with a smile. 'Seb Cooke... He...'
    'Seb Cooke! You want me to act for himT
    Her father had raised an eyebrow when he had heard the antagonism in her voice.
    'What's wrong? I thought...'
    'Nothing's wrong...' Katie had fibbed. The situation and her own feelings were far too complicated and personal to be explained to her father. How could she tell him that the main reason she disliked Seb so much was because of his intense sexuality...that something about him, about his power as a man, made her all the more aware of her own incompleteness as a woman.
    'He's buying the apartment adjacent to mine,' was all she could allow herself to say. ,
    'Yes, I know,' her father agreed, and then wisely decided not to pursue the subject.
    Katie had changed since she had reached maturity.
    Something had happened to her, hurt her, and much Sis he longed to help, he felt that it was impossible for hint to pry. She was an adult now and if she wouldn't even confide in her mother then who was he, a mere man—
    a mere father —to push for confidences she quite plainly did not want to share.
    Her father had an appointment with Seb on Monday, an appointment she would now have to keep in his place.
    Fortunately most of the work had already been done and it was simply a matter of Seb signing some forms and then, hopefully, at the end of the week when completion for the sale would take place, that would be an end of the matter. He would still be her neighbour of course, but there she would be able to keep her distance.
    What kind of man was he anyway? she fumed a few minutes later as she stood under the warm lash of the shower. He was buying the apartment in his own name and not putting it into the joint names of himself and his wife. That old-fashioned kind of chauvinism was something she detested and fortunately was rare now. The majority of men accepted that their wives, their partners, were equal to them in every way and behaved financially accordingly.
    She might, Katie conceded, be a little old-fashioned when it came to matters of personal intimacy, but she was thoroughly modern in outlook when it came to matters of equality between the two sexes, whether that equality related to financial aspects of a relationship or the emotional and physical ones, and so far as she was concerned, a man who was selfish towards his partner financially, who refused to accept that she had absolute parity with him, was just as likely to be selfish both emotionally and physically.
    Max, her elder brother, had once been that type of man and she had seen at uncomfortably close quarters just how destructive an effect that had had on his marriage. What was Seb Cooke's wife like? Katie wondered curiously. Attractive? Very, she suspected. Seb had struck her as the type of man who would, as an arrogant right, demand perfection in every aspect of his life, and then there was the stunningly attractive daughter as living proof of her parents' good looks.
    Was this wife clever, witty...fun to be with? Did those steel-grey eyes glow with warmth and passion when their glance rested on her?

    Katie gave herself a small mental warning shake. If she wasn't careful she was going to turn into the kind of sad person who, without an emotional focus of her own in her life, worried incessantly and even perhaps a little obsessively, about the flaws of people who were at best mere acquaintances. And that was behaviour that was...what? Typical of what, one hundred and fifty years ago, might have been the ways of the