by Susan Napier
So now he was relegating her from starring role in a drama to bit-player in a farce?
‘Without a note we can’t know that for sure,’ she said hotly. ‘They might be intended to destroy my character in your father’s eyes—make me seem like a danger to his family and thus wreck any chance of anyone associated with me ever getting any business from KR.’
‘And who would benefit most from that?’
‘Directly? Well, the other security companies who are making competitive bids, I suppose.’
‘And are they really likely to use that kind of dirty trick against one of their own, at considerable risk to their own reputations?’ he asked. ‘A thing like that could boomerang and be as much a threat to themselves as to you.’
Put like that it sounded highly unlikely. Rachel had been so certain of Matthew’s guilt that she hadn’t bothered to ponder any solid alternatives.
‘Well, how many enemies do you have?’ she challenged.
He shrugged. ‘Since Dad has started telling people I’m thinking of standing for local body elections all sorts of cranks have come out of the woodwork. In my opinion anyone who isn’t a friend is potentially an enemy.’
She was appalled by such cynicism. ‘Why leave out your friends?’ she said cattily.
He laughed, and picked up the envelope and his beer. ‘Because they’re such a rare and precious breed. The only way to have a friend is to be one. Prosperity has plenty of glittering acquaintances—real friendship sticks around for trouble…like now…’
She faced him, arms akimbo. ‘I’m not your friend. I’m only here because you didn’t give me any choice.’
‘A friend in need is a friend indeed—we’re both in this together, Rachel, whether you like it or not. Come on, we have some homework to do…’
To Rachel’s embarrassment, “homework” consisted of comparing memories with Matthew, who lay on his stomach on the bare floor in a patch of sunlight minutely examining the latest photographs, which he proclaimed as identical to the first three.
‘So, we could conclude that there probably are no more—the photographer just managed to get these few shots, not a whole roll of film—otherwise why wouldn’t he have sent pictures progressively more explicit and therefore threatening—’
‘Because it didn’t get any more explicit!’ Rachel proclaimed, from her lofty perch on the couch.
He rolled on his side and propped his head on his hand. ‘Didn’t it?’
She looked suspiciously down into his narrow handsome face. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘I told you.’ He grinned. ‘My recollection gets a bit hazy after the bondage bit…My doctor said you told him I was delirious.’
She took a gulp of her water. ‘There was no bondage! I temporarily restrained you—gently—when you tried to pull down my dress—’
‘After you had undressed me…’
‘Your clothes were wet and you wouldn’t take them off for yourself. Your doctor said I did the right thing.’
‘So we didn’t make love?’ he asked wistfully.
All this time he had thought they might have been lovers?
‘No! What kind of woman do you think I am? No, don’t answer that,’ she said hastily as he opened his mouth. ‘Believe me, Matthew—nothing happened.’
‘But we wanted it to…I seem to remember—’
‘That you were confused—you had a fever,’ she reminded him.
‘Mmm, you look as if you were pretty hot yourself,’ he murmured, returning to his study.
Rachel felt that way now. ‘Matthew—’
‘Matt.’
She gritted her teeth. ‘Is it necessary to use a magnifying glass?’
‘How closely did you look at the photos I sent you?’
‘I didn’t drool over every minute detail with a magnifying glass, if that’s what you mean!’
‘Then you should have…come down and look at this.’
‘I’ve seen all I need to see—’
‘I doubt it. Come on, Rachel, it’s a bit too late for false modesty.’ He stretched over and laced his fingers around her ankle, giving it a little tug. ‘This is important.’
‘Oh, all right.’ She shook off his hand and reluctantly knelt down beside his prone figure, taking the magnifying glass he handed her.
‘Look, there…’
Her face went fiery red as she saw his finger tracing the curve of her bare hip where it joined her torso ‘You—’
‘Rachel…’ His hand clamped around hers on the handle of the glass, forcing it to remain poised over the glossy still. ‘Get over it! Try and forget for a moment that this is you and me. This photograph has been altered, so seamlessly it couldn’t have been done in a darkroom—it has to have been done on a computer.
‘I’m only guessing, but I doubt your bottom is really as slim as it appears to be here—and see the strange angle of your hips in relation to the position of your thighs? Look at the length from hip to knee—those legs don’t belong to a woman of your height—and where’s the muscle definition of a woman who works out as much as you do in the gym? Then there’s the evenness of the skin toning below your waist—is that natural, given the lighting in the room? I bet if you scanned this and looked at it pixel by pixel you’d be able to see the joins…’
‘My God—this isn’t me!’ Rachel realised gratefully, collapsing on her stomach beside him, leaning on her elbows, her hair brushing his cheek as she jostled him for a better look. ‘This is all a fake!’
‘Well, not all…the top half is pretty unmistakably you,’ he pointed out. ‘And that’s definitely me there underneath you…’
She was obeying his advice and concentrating fiercely on the details. ‘I didn’t think my dress had been dragged down that far, but I thought it must have slipped south in the struggle. I remember having to do a lot of wriggling and twisting to get it back up again…’
‘So do I,’ he sighed reminiscently, earning himself a sharp nudge in the shoulder.
‘Why didn’t it occur to me that this had to be a fake?’ she castigated herself.
‘Probably because, like me, you were initially too furious to think rationally, and also because the other two photographs are perfectly genuine—if misleading,’ he said. ‘Whoever did this is clever, and has all the right ingredients: a good digital scanner, some sophisticated computer software, a pile of porn, a lot of patience and a gutful of resentment.’
‘And the whip,’ she discovered, shifting the thick optic lens, ‘that’s been scanned in, too. Did you notice, Matt? It’s supposedly lying on the sheet, but it’s not making any dent in the folds…’
‘Well, on reflection, it did seem unlikely that a woman as forceful as yourself would need a whip to keep a man in line,’ he said. ‘Especially when you already have a tongue far more stinging than any lash.’
She glanced sideways to find his expression teasing. Their eyes met, and for the first time she found herself tempted to laugh over her ghastly predicament.
‘I gather you’ve changed your mind about my being a professional dominatrix?’ She referred sweetly to his coruscating note.
His eyelids flickered, and although he steadily held her gaze, his colour rose. ‘I doubt you’d want, or expect, abject submission from a man in your bed. I think you’re far more likely to demand an equal exchange of passion…’
He imagined she’d be demanding in bed! He probably thought of her as an experienced older woman, Rachel told herself, alarmed at how arousing she found the notion. She’d never been with a younger man—David had been eleven years her senior. She latched onto the memory in a desperate attempt to anchor herself to sober reality.
She cleared her throat and sat up. ‘What are we going to do about these?’ She indicated the photos.
‘I’m glad to hear you say “we”,’ he said, stacking them up and helping her to her feet with inbred politeness. ‘I take it you’re no more keen than I am to have the police involved?’
She shuddered
, and shook her head. ‘I may as well just tell Frank! The fewer people who know, the less chance of a leak.’
‘Then the first thing we need to do is to neutralise the threat those pictures represent by destroying their capacity to create a scandal. That’ll give us the freedom to organise a more thorough investigation.’
Rachel tensed suspiciously at the latter statement. ‘But no outsiders—and as far as I’m concerned that includes your security people.’
She continued to hammer the point as she followed him out of the room and across the hallway into a stunning white kitchen, where Matthew calmly busied himself making her a snack, after prying out of her that her lunch on stake-out had been a meagre sandwich and an apple.
‘Not nearly enough for someone who burns as much energy as you,’ he told her, opening the gigantic double-doored refrigerator.
Was that an oblique reference to her size? No—if Matthew wanted to comment on her curves he would do it frankly.
‘I haven’t really been very hungry the last few days—I’m still recovering from flu,’ she protested half-heartedly, her mouth watering as she watched him skilfully chop chicken, celery and a hard-boiled egg and deftly fold them into sour cream sprinkled with capers, fresh parsley and chives.
‘Which I take it is also my fault?’ he said, spooning the mixture into a cup of a lettuce and sliding the plate across the tiled breakfast bar where she sat. ‘But I can solemnly promise you, Rachel, that’s the only kind of infection you risk catching from me in bed.’ He smiled at her expression. ‘Surely by now you’ve guessed that’s how I hope we’re going to end up? By being upfront now we can enjoy the spontaneity later…’
While she was still gaping at his staggering presumption he forked up a morsel of salad and popped it between her parted lips. As her mouth closed and she automatically began to chew he handed her the implement and distracted her from the fact she was eating, with a string of amusing stories about his brash father’s cunning machinations to free Matthew from the social stigma of being a nouveau riche rubbish-man’s son.
Without realising it, Rachel allowed him to draw forth wry recollections of her far less privileged home background, and the impact her unplanned arrival had had on a mother and father who had already discovered the first time around that they were not natural parents. Their love had been strictly rationed according to behaviour; their expectations as low as Kevin Riordan’s had been high.
A fragrant cup of spiced tea eventually replaced her empty plate, and Rachel realised they had strayed far from the purpose of her enforced visit. She hurriedly returned to their discussion of tactics, and when he objected to her insistence on pursuing her own separate avenues of investigation, her heated accusations prompted him to frankly spell out exactly why Weston Security had lost its bids.
‘It was not because of my personal reaction to you.’ He refuted her bitter allegation with passionate conviction. ‘I wouldn’t survive very long at the head of a financial empire if I let my emotions, however intense, dictate my business decisions. Nor was it from any prejudice against women—some of my brightest executives are female.’
He listed a string of salient factors that forced Rachel to acknowledge that perhaps she had been the one guilty of prejudice, her hindsight coloured by the disparaging remarks that Neville had dripped in her ear.
She found herself agreeing that she would take no steps without full consultation, but made no promises that she would accept any resulting advice.
‘Let’s remember that I’m the professional in this field; you’re just a—’
‘Gifted amateur?’
‘Bumbling amateur,’ she corrected.
‘Oh, I get it. I’m Watson to your Holmes.’
She frowned. ‘This isn’t a game.’
‘No, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it.’
She felt a little tingle in her bones, not of foreboding but of illicit excitement. ‘You said something before about neutralising any scandal…’
She turned to watch him carry the dishes to the dishwasher and caught sight of the kitchen clock high on the wall. She checked it disbelievingly against her watch, appalled to see that the whole afternoon had slipped effortlessly away. She leapt to her feet, determined to assert herself, only to find her erstwhile kidnapper effusively helpful.
Quite how Matthew had persuaded her to allow him to drive her home in her own car she couldn’t afterwards remember, but she knew it was a mistake as soon as he introduced himself to Robyn on the doorstep and insinuated himself inside to accept an offer of a cup of tea and endure a sisterly interrogation.
Looking perfectly at ease in the modest drawing room, he sipped his tea and listened to Robyn chatter about her last day at work, and proved so charming that when Rachel reminded him for the fourth time about the taxi he had supposedly come inside to call it was Robyn who leapt up and rushed away to do it.
‘I suppose using your cellphone was out of the question,’ Rachel said, knowing that he probably never went anywhere without a lifeline to the financial markets.
‘I think the battery’s flat,’ he lied blatantly, as the front door slammed open and shut again, and feet pounded up the hall just ahead of an excited voice.
‘Hey, guess what—my class threw a farewell party for me at school today!’ Bethany skidded to a stop in the door, her hazel eyes and pink mouth rounding in recognition at the sight of the man rising politely to his feet. ‘Wow, it’s the babe!’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Matthew held out his hand, looking amused. ‘I’m Matt Riordan.’
Bethany laughed as she shook it. ‘You’re the man from the photo—the one who was kissing Rachel’s hand at that party.’
Only Rachel noticed the tip of his ears go pink. ‘You saw those photos?’
‘I opened them at the breakfast table,’ Rachel said cruelly.
‘I only looked at one—Rachel hid all the others. Were they horribly obscene or something?’ asked Bethany.
‘Utterly,’ he grinned, slanting Rachel a sly look.
Bethany was sharp-eyed. She tilted up her chin. ‘Are you and Rachel going out on a date?’ There was mingled curiosity and disappointment in her voice.
He shook his head. ‘I know this is your last night here, and you probably want to spend it together. Actually, I’m here to ask you for one.’
‘Me?’
‘I know Rachel is planning to see you and your mother off to Bangkok tomorrow evening, and I thought that you might allow me to take all three of you out to lunch and then run you over to the airport in my father’s limousine.’
‘Matt—’
‘You mean a proper black limo with a chauffeur—a stretch?’ The young girl cut eagerly across Rachel’s faint protest.
‘With a TV, video and computer in the back,’ Matthew confirmed. ‘You can e-mail your friends goodbye on the way to the airport.’
Bethany’s eyes gleamed. ‘We’ve got hu-mung-ous amounts of luggage!’ she warned. ‘We’re taking everything.’
‘Then I guess we’ll make that two limos—one for us and one for your luggage.’
Bethany giggled and flushed shyly. ‘Are you serious?’ He nodded, and she instantly beamed again. ‘That would be fabulous, wouldn’t it, Rachel? Some of the gang are coming to see me off—imagine their faces when I swan up in a limo! Does Mum know? Let me tell her!’
She bounced out of the room, only to pop her head back around the door and say mischievously, ‘I guess this means you’ve changed your mind about him being a slimy, scum-sucking slug, huh, Rachel?’
He stroked his lean jaw, studying her discomfiture. ‘A slug?’
‘It seemed apposite at the time,’ said Rachel stoutly. ‘About tomorrow—I don’t think—’
‘Come off it, Rachel, you know you aren’t going to disappoint her. This way you all get to have a good time instead of moping around here prolonging your goodbyes. And Robyn won’t have to worry about you being left on your own.’ He glanced towards the door
. ‘Bethany’s a very pretty girl.’
Rachel just stopped herself from saying thank you. ‘Yes, yes, she is.’
‘She’s the spitting image of you—same eyes, same shape of face, same challenging heft of the chin when she takes on a dare…She’s probably going to be as tall as you are, too,’ he said in idle speculation.
‘Yes…’
‘In fact she looks far more like you than she does Robyn—’ He stopped as he saw her face, and she hurriedly bent to put the empty teacups back onto the wooden tray.
‘Rachel?’
She didn’t answer him, and when she looked again he was standing by the window, looking at the little clutch of photographs on the side table, seeing the progression of Rachel from freckle-faced child stiffly posed between dour-faced parents to the laughing woman at David’s side. And looking at the photos of Robyn, Bethany and Simon.
‘Rachel?’ He looked across at her, the knowledge dawning in his brown eyes, his expression deeply shaken. ‘Bethany is your child, isn’t she, not Robyn’s?’
She nodded jerkily and he crossed the room, his voice low as he checked towards the door. ‘Does she know?’
‘Of course she does,’ said Rachel fiercely. ‘Robyn and Simon have always been honest with her about her adoption. She knows they can’t conceive a baby themselves and that I—I couldn’t look after the one that I’d conceived…’
His eyes darkened with turbulent emotion. ‘But, my God, you must have been only—’
‘Fifteen,’ she said, to save him the calculation. ‘The same age that Bethany is now…’
A freckle-faced half-child, half-woman, as delicate and fresh as a half-unfurled bud, thought Matthew.
To Rachel’s shock he didn’t ask about Bethany’s father, or the circumstances of her birth. Instead he touched a gentle finger to her pale lips in a gentle salute.
