The Price of Deceit

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Who else? She used to mention him, now she doesn’t. Are you seeing him?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ she said uncomfortably. ‘Anyway, why would David be a threat to her? Or, for that matter, any upright, dependable type like him?’

  ‘No one’s dependable when it comes to money,’ he answered scathingly. ‘I want to know whether he’s seeing my sister.’

  ‘Ask him,’ she replied, which made his face darken with fury.

  ‘I’m asking you!’

  ‘And I am not a child to be bullied!’ she replied in a high, angry voice. ‘David and I are still very close.’ Oh, God, why have I been dragged into this? ‘And he’s not the sort to play the field with more than one woman at a time.’ That, as it went, and taken out of context, was the truth. Technically, she said to herself, I’m not lying.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘I’m not about to argue with you.’ She jumped up from where she was sitting and walked towards the front door. ‘Thank you for a very nice meal. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d be grateful if you leave.’

  She positioned herself by the front door and he sauntered up to her and lounged against the wall, staring down at her.

  ‘Are you so sure that you know this David chap of yours?’ he asked silkily. ‘The last time I laid eyes on him he was vanishing with my sister and assuring everyone within hearing distance that the two of you were only good friends.’

  ‘That’s an exaggeration,’ Katherine replied uneasily.

  ‘Or maybe you prefer to pretend to yourself that it is? Maybe you just don’t want to face the unpalatable truth that your success with the opposite sex leaves something to be desired. Six months of game-playing with me years ago, only to discover that it was all in vain and the response you wanted from your lover never materialised. He vanished, and now David. It must be frustrating for you.’

  ‘David hasn’t vanished,’ she snapped, knowing that angry, embarrassed colour had flooded into her face.

  ‘So you’re still seeing each other, are you? He has nothing to do with my sister?’

  ‘Stop trying to squeeze answers out of me.’

  ‘Face facts. He’s not interested in you, Katherine. He’s probably cavorting who knows where even as was speak with Jack.’

  His voice was cold and merciless and she could feel herself drowning in the depths of his eyes, floundering about like a fish out of water.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ she asked shakily. ‘That everything you say is true? That I’m a desperate woman who will do anything to believe that the man she loves isn’t seeing someone else?’

  ‘You love him, do you?’

  ‘Of course I love him.’ But not in the way you think. I love him the way I would love a brother, the brother I never had. I love him the way I would love a friend, someone who has been around for years and has taken the trouble to listen when I had something to say. Yes, that’s how I love him. But I don’t love him as a man. I don’t love him with the burning, painful, driving passion that makes sense of everything and yet still manages to turn everything upside-down. No, that love isn’t for David. That love is all for you.

  The recognition didn’t surprise her. It wasn’t something that had crept up on her slowly until she was forced to acknowledge it. No, she had loved him then, and she had never stopped, and deep down she had known that.

  From the minute he had walked into that schoolroom, and she had looked up to see the face that had haunted her dreams for six years, she had known.

  She looked away with deep misery and he caught her face between his hands. There was a blazing anger in his eyes.

  ‘Stop lying to yourself, Katherine,’ he said sharply. ‘You don’t love him any more than he loves you.’

  ‘And you’re suddenly a mind-reader, are you?’

  ‘You forget that I know you.’

  ‘You only think you do.’ She drew a deep breath and tried not to let her face reflect her thoughts. Everything was so muddled, so horribly confused. The only clear, unalterable fact shining through was that her love for Dominic Duvall was not part of any equation. ‘What would you do, anyway? If David was seeing your sister?’

  ‘It would depend on how serious it was.’

  He was still staring at her, thinking thoughts she could not begin to guess at. There was something savage and intense in his eyes, an angry stillness in his body that alarmed and excited her. She looked down, shaking.

  ‘And if it was very serious?’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’

  ‘I am only speaking hypothetically.’

  ‘Then,’ he said, without a shade of uncertainty, ‘hypothetically speaking, I would be obliged to do everything in my power to end it. I intend to protect my sister from fortune-hunters, and an impoverished schoolteacher, unhappy in his job, would fit that description with no trouble at all.’ He straightened up, and when he looked at her his face was dark with menace. ‘So, if you’re protecting him for some reason, then you’re a fool. And if you’re not, if you actually believe that the two of you have any sort of future together, then you, my dear Katherine, are an even bigger fool.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OF COURSE, and with an ever-increasing feeling of sinking into a quagmire, Katherine told David about Dominic’s visit and, with untypical jauntiness, he dismissed everything she said with a flourish.

  In fact, and she thought about this later, there was a worrying excitement about him. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought that he was coming down with something. Flu, perhaps, or maybe a bout of temporary insanity, if temporary insanity manifested itself in a disturbing, feverish brightness.

  When she told him that perhaps he should be sensible, try and make sure that Jack was more at home with Dominic, he laughed. When she told him that Dominic could be a formidable opponent, he laughed even harder and told her to stop worrying, to stop acting like an old woman, which hurt her more than she let him see.

  Well, she silently informed the exercise book, staring at her with its gay drawing of a lop-sided Christmas tree and a Santa Claus who defied the rules of gravity and appeared to be suspended somewhere in mid-air, don’t say that I didn’t try. I hereby wash my hands of the whole sorry matter.

  Except that she had an uneasy feeling that the whole sorry matter hadn’t washed its hands of her. Not yet. And she was right, because two days later, not fifteen minutes after she had arrived back, and just as she was thinking about fixing herself something to eat, the doorbell went, and she knew, with a feeling of resignation, that the sorry matter was about to appear on her doorstep.

  She knew that it would be David even before she opened the door. Or maybe Jack. Or more likely both of them, with more plans to ensconce her in their convoluted love-affair.

  She would refuse, she decided. She would put her foot down, and to hell with it if they thought that she was a fuddy-duddy.

  She yanked open the door and froze when she saw Dominic standing outside, dressed in a dinner jacket, complete with a bow tie.

  ‘Stop looking as though I’m from another planet,’ he said, with his usual endearing lack of preliminaries, ‘and let me in.’

  ‘You’ve come to the wrong house,’ Katherine told him, not budging. ‘There’s no party here.’

  ‘I have no time for amusing games,’ he said, brushing past her and then shutting the door before she could say anything. ‘I need a favour from you. And don’t,’ he added, ‘even think about listing excuses.’

  ‘What favour?’ She was trying hard not to stare, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Dressed like that, his sexuality was overpowering. She couldn’t remember a time when she had ever seen a man look quite so devastatingly handsome.

  ‘I have a client do tonight and Jack has let me down.’ His voice was flat and grim. ‘When I get my hands on her, I am personally going to wring her neck.’

  ‘You want me to go in her place?’ Was that her voice? It sounded more like a squeak.

&nb
sp; ‘Right the first time.’

  ‘But why me?’ she asked, staring at him with horror. ‘Haven’t you got anyone else you could ask? Anyone suitable?’

  ‘You are eminently suitable. Now, I know that this is an invasion of your privacy, and for that I apologise, but Jack’s sudden disappearance has left me no choice.’ He didn’t sound in the slightest apologetic, and she felt the sharp tang of tears well up. Why was it that everyone took her for granted? Now even he was assuming that she would have no hesitation in helping him out of a difficult situation.

  ‘I’m afraid I have nothing to wear,’ she said, not even bothering with the charade of pretending that she had other things on her agenda. ‘I really haven’t, Dominic.’

  He looked at her for a while, a long look that made her want to die of embarrassment.

  What was he seeing? she wondered. A woman, not so young any more, living a life so devoid of high excitement that there was nothing in her wardrobe that could take her anywhere really dressy. He was probably measuring her up against the woman he had known, in her borrowed plumage, who had danced till dawn and laughed until her eyes watered.

  ‘Let me have a look,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘I’m not lying to you.’

  ‘Where is your bedroom?’

  She glanced up the stairs and hesitated, and in that fleeting second of hesitation he started up, with her following behind and feeling thoroughly sorry for herself.

  He pulled open the doors of the wardrobe while she hovered miserably in the background, feeling ashamed rather than enraged.

  It was funny, she knew, but when she had spent those six months in London, she had dressed in clothes she would never have dreamt of buying for herself, and she hadn’t felt at all uncomfortable because it had all been like an extended version of play-acting. And, in an odd way, the clothes had dictated her personality to some extent. They had made her look vivacious and self-confident, and she had behaved accordingly.

  But the minute she had left that all behind it had been as though she had returned to being Cinderella without her finery. She had invested in plain, unexciting clothes. She had, she realised, resumed the character which had been moulded by her mother, who had only ever bought her plain, unexciting clothes.

  Dominic flicked through the wardrobe, pulled out a black skirt and jacket and then turned to her and asked if she had any lacy black camisoles.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Katherine stammered, red-faced.

  ‘Wear one.’

  ‘With what over it?’

  ‘Nothing. Just your jacket.’ He smiled a smile of utter charm, and when she emerged half an hour later she had to admit that she felt very different from what she had imagined. She had also left her hair loose, and it hung down her back in a straight, glossy sheet. She had looked in the mirror in her bedroom and had found it difficult to believe that this was really her.

  ‘That’s better.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘Now, if you could just look a little more relaxed, then we might be getting somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t normally dress like this,’ she told him in the car, which was chauffeur-driven so that he could drink without having to think about driving back.

  ‘I won’t bother to remind you that you did. Once.’ She knew that he was looking at her averted face. ‘For some reason you believe that that was not really you, that you are a thoroughly unadventurous woman.’

  ‘I am,’ she said stubbornly. Her hands were balled into clenched fists and she could feel her naked breasts pushing against the lacy material.

  ‘And I take it that this all harks back to the mother who made you feel responsible for her own failure to make her marriage work?’

  Katherine shot him an astonished, nervous glance out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘I was a mousy child,’ she whispered, thinking that this was hardly a conversation they should be having, least of all in a car.

  He wasn’t interested in her, she knew that, and she wished that he wouldn’t ask her questions.

  ‘Is that what your mother said?’

  ‘In combination with the bedroom mirror,’ Katherine said with a laugh, but he didn’t laugh back. The angular lines of his face were hard.

  ‘And what did it feel like when you finally did let your hair down in London?’

  It was the first time he had mentioned their time together without that angry edge of bitterness, or else cold indifference, and she said thoughtfully, looking at him, ‘Wonderful.’ She could remember the recklessness that had taken her over the minute she had made her decision. All her fear and bewilderment and rage had left, and she had thrown herself into that life with a demonic, driving intensity which she had never felt before.

  ‘It was liberating,’ she continued, watching him but not really seeing him because she was too wrapped up in seeing back into herself. ‘It was as though someone had waved a magic wand and released me from a cage. Well, no, that sounds as though I had been desperately unhappy before, but I hadn’t.’ She gave a self-conscious laugh under her breath. ‘It was as though a door had been opened.’

  ‘I rest my case,’ Dominic said brusquely, and she looked at him, puzzled.

  ‘What case?’

  ‘Figure it out for yourself.’ The car was pulling up outside a hotel, and Katherine felt a fluttering of nerves. She sneaked a quick look at Dominic, who was leaning forward to say something to the chauffeur, and who looked as though any nerves he might ever have possessed had long since solidified into steel.

  This whole situation, she thought, was peculiar. What was she doing, going along with Dominic Duvall to an expensive hotel in the centre of Birmingham to entertain clients? She was neither his employee nor his mistress. Come to think of it, she was hard-pressed to describe precisely what she was.

  A last resort, she told herself. Which was fine for him, but not for her, because whereas he had nothing to lose in casually turning up on her doorstep and asking her a favour, she had a great deal to lose.

  He ushered her into the hotel, his hand lightly resting under her elbow, and she soon realised that the nerve-racking party she had expected was in fact only a group of six—three high-powered businessmen and their wives.

  The businessmen, financiers of the highest order, were impeccably well-bred and looked slightly tired, as though being at the top of the pecking order was a wearying business indeed. Their wives, attired in very expensive clothes, with very expensive jewellery, instinctively broke away from their husbands, who discussed business over their pre-dinner drinks. They smiled a lot at Katherine, and asked her questions about herself, and wondered, she knew, what her relationship with Dominic Duvall was, although they were all too polite to ask outright.

  It was, as it happened, a very pleasant evening. Her nerves fizzled out before they even sat down at the table, and she found herself talking about her job honestly and engagingly. They all seemed to think that she was doing something really rather useful with her life, which made her laugh, but not without some pleasure.

  The three other women there didn’t have jobs. They appeared to spend their time doing various charitable deeds, decorating their houses, bringing up children and spending their husbands’ hard-earned money.

  ‘It wouldn’t suit me at all,’ Katherine murmured later, drowsily, when they were driving back in the car. She hadn’t drunk a great deal, but she felt quite light-headed nevertheless, pleasantly light-headed. She had expected to spend the evening fraught with nerves but, although she was constantly aware of Dominic’s presence at the table across from her, she had been too busy talking to let that worry away at her. It was so easy to let herself slip back into this love, she thought, and it would be all too dangerously easy to let him sense that.

  She closed her eyes with a little sigh.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘I suppose I’ve become used to being a work-horse,’ she said, laughing. ‘Being at the beck and call of demanding children. I’ve become addicted to the exhaustion tha
t comes with it.’

  ‘You must have time off,’ Dominic said with a trace of astonishment. ‘What do you do during the school holidays? Do you go abroad?’

  That made her laugh again. ‘I went to Italy a couple of years ago. David and I stayed with a friend of a friend of a friend.’ She smiled at the memory. It had been a good holiday, her first since she had walked out on Dominic, and although David had tried to persuade her to sleep with him she had been adamant, and he had obligingly conceded.

  In retrospect, she could see now that his acquiescence had had more to do with a basic lack of attraction than with a polite respect for her refusals. They had always enjoyed the good friendship of two basically compatible, basically lonely people, who had interests in common.

  ‘Oh, yes, David.’ There was thick disapproval in his voice and she wondered whether she should try and elaborate on David’s good points, because really, sooner or later, if he and Jack continued their romance, Dominic would have no choice but to accept him.

  ‘Apart from Italy,’ she said, deciding to change the subject, ‘I haven’t been on holiday anywhere. I don’t get paid the earth,’ she continued without rancour, ‘and there always seems to be something more worth while to spend my money on rather than a two-week vacation.’ Her eyes were closed but she knew that he was staring at her.

  ‘And you don’t crave the attraction of foreign shores?’ he drawled.

  ‘Not crave, no.’ She looked out of the window and saw that it was beginning to snow, light feathery flakes that fell like powder from the sky. Maybe it would be a white Christmas. ‘I’d like to see places, of course I would—who wouldn’t? But I can’t see the point in craving for what I can’t have.’ In the darkness of the car she smiled an ironic little smile and wished that her heart could take that piece of sensible advice and apply it to the man sitting alongside her. ‘Besides—’ she slanted her eyes across to him ‘—I grew up without holidays abroad. There was never the money to spare, and even if there was, Mother would probably have seen that as a waste.’

  ‘What an austere view of life.’