How the hell can you run a television company in the Cotswolds, if you spend all your time in London, hawking your ass round the advertising companies? Rupert shrugged again. As your local MP I'm just passing on what's being said. Of course! Instantly Tony remembered the girl. Beattie Johnson was one of the most scurrilous and successful women columnists dubbed. I always believe in laying one's ghost. Below the blank stare of the dark glasses, his curved smiling mouth seemed even more insolent.
As the plane revved up, both men turned to look out of the window, and Tony found himself trembling with rage. But not even the splendid, striped-silk-shirted bosom of the air hostess, which rose and fell as she showed passengers how to inflate their life jackets, could keep Rupert's eyes open.
By the time they were airborne, he was asleep. Tony accepted a glass of champagne and tried to concentrate on the Watt Street Journal. He didn't know which he resented most Rupert's. There had hardly been a husband in Gloucestershire, indeed in the world, Tony reflected, who hadn't cheered four years ago when Rupert's beautiful wife, Helen, had walked out on him in the middle of the Los Angeles Olympics, running off with another rider and causing Rupert the maximum humiliation.
But, infuriatingly, Rupert had appeared outwardly unaffected and had risen to the occasion by winning a show-jumping gold medal despite a trapped shoulder nerve, and going on two years later to win the World Championship, the only prize hitherto to elude him. Then, giving up show jumping at the pinnacle of his fame, he had moved effortlessly into politics, winning the Tory seat of Chalford and Bisley with ease.
Even worse, he had turned out a surprisingly good MP, being very quick on his feet, totally unfazed by the Opposition or the Prime Minister, and prepared to fight very hard for his constituency. Although scandal had threatened eighteen months ago, when Rupert's then mistress, Amanda Hamilton, wife of the Foreign Secretary, had withdrawn her patronage on finding out that Rupert was also sleeping with her teenage daughter,.
Now, as Minister for Sport, with Gerald Middleton as an exceptional private secretary to do all the donkey work, Rupert was free to roam round exuding glamour, raising money for the Olympic team here, defusing a riot against a South African athlete there. Responsibility, however, hadn't cleaned up his private life at all. Divorced from Helen, he could behave as he chose, hence his cavorting with Beattie Johnson in the Post House that morning.
Glancing at Rupert, sprawled out on the pale-grey leather seat, taking up most of Gerald's leg room, beautiful despite the emergent stubble, Tony felt a further stab of jealousy. He couldn't remember a time in his forty-four years when he hadn't envied the Campbell-Blacks. For all their outlandish behaviour, they had always been looked up to in Gloucestershire.
They had lived in the same beautiful house in Penscombe for generations, while Tony was brought up behind net curtains in a boring semi in the suburbs of Cheltenham. Tony also had a chip because he only went to a grammar school, where he'd been teased for being fat and short, and because his conventional colourless father although subsequently ennobled for his work in the war had been considered far too valuable as a munitions manufacturer to be allowed to go off and fight, unlike Rupert's father, Eddie, who'd had a dazzling war in the Blues.
Even when Tony's father had been given his peerage, Eddie Campbell-Black and his cronies had laughed, always referring to him dismissively as Lord Pop-Pop, as they blasted away slaughtering wild life with one of his products on their large estates. Growing up near the Campbell-Blacks, Tony had longed to be invited to Penscombe and drawn into that rackety, exciting set.
But the privilege had been bestowed on his brother Basil, who was ten years younger and who, because Tony's father had made his pile by then, had been given a pony to ride and sent to Harrow instead of a grammar school, and had there become a friend of Rupert's. Spurning the family firm when he left school, he'd gone straight into advertising and specialized in buying television air time.
Having learnt the form, from there he moved to the advertising side of television. A brilliant entrepreneur, who felt he was slipping unless he had a dozen calls from Tokyo and New York during Christmas dinner, by changing jobs repeatedly he had gained the plum post of Chief Executive at Corinium Television eight years ago. Having shot up to five feet ten and lost his puppy fat in his twenties, Tony had in middle age grown very attractive in a brutal sort of way; although with his Roman nose, heavy-lidded charcoal-grey eyes, coarsely modelled mouth and springy close-cropped dark hair, he looked more like a Sicilian wide boy than an English peer.
He chose to proclaim the latter, however, by wearing coronets on absolutely everything. And on the little finger on his left hand gleamed a massive gold signet ring, sporting the Baddingham crest of wrestling rams, above the motto chosen by Lord Pop-Pop: Peaceful is the country that is strongly armed. Considerably adding to Tony's sex appeal was a hunky bull-necked body, kept in shape by self-control and ruthless exercise, and a voice deliberately deep and smooth to eradicate any trace of a Gloucestershire accent.
This only slipped when he went into one of his terrifying rages, which flattened the Corinium Television staff against the cream-hessianed walls of his vast office.
In fact, it irritated the hell out of Tony that, despite his success, his fortune and his immense power, Rupert still refused to take him seriously. Well, this will always be my Jackie Collins of countryside England and Rivale hoping for a meal of fish and chips with peas. Octavia Brennan is a beautiful yet flawed young woman, living the high life in s London.
Rupert was never faithful to his first wife, Helen, even when he though he was in love with her. Aug 25, Louise rated it really liked it. Click on a plot link to find similar books! Not to mention the fact that Rupert is 38 with two children and an inability to stay faithful to women, whilst Taggie is barely I do hope there are few more Bonkbusters t I have read this cooer times before So finally I read the Rupert and Taggie love story — not quite how I expected it to come about.
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The bonkbuster that popped my Jilly Cooper cherry and therefore my favourite of all her Rutshire Chronicles. I read Riders and found the most often light and humorous style of rivalls author worth trying another one of her books. But yeah, the romance between Rupert and Taggie made me swoon — view spoiler [mmmmmm, that ending scene at the airport, with all the clutching and desparate kissing. I also found myself annoyed with the plot device of young, precocious girl in Riders, Fen and here, Caitlin — I sense that Cooper is attempting to build a youthful version of herself into each of her stories.
In more recent years, her Rutshire Chronicles have come under fire for dated and problematic portrayals of race, homosexuality, gender roles and sexual consent. There are so many other characters, some with bigger, some with smaller parts, but I felt that I really got to know all of jilpy really well and felt I was almost part of their little world at the end and would really like to know how it continues.
We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Riders may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to womens fiction, chick lit lovers.
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