by Susan Lewis
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Susan Lewis
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Everything can change in a moment…
Eva Montgomery is at the peak of her career when she is viciously attacked by a stalker. While still traumatised by the event, she makes the biggest mistake of her life – one she can never turn back from.
Sixteen years later, Eva has managed to rebuild her life in a way that seemed impossible after the attack. Her home in Dorset, high on the cliffs overlooking the sea, is as elegant as Eva herself, but bears none of the scars. The love she shares with her husband, Don, has become the very mainstay of her existence. Her beloved sister, Patty, lives nearby. To an outsider, Eva’s world seems perfect in every way. However, behind the facade there is more tragedy and deceit than even she is aware of.
It is when the past starts to invade the present that the greatest betrayal of all shatters Eva’s world, over and over. Hurt, frightened and confused, she struggles desperately to put right the terrible mistake she made sixteen years ago and finally break free from a past that nearly destroyed her …
About the Author
Susan Lewis is the bestselling author of A Class Apart, Dance While You Can, Stolen Beginnings, Darkest Longings, Obsession, Vengeance, Summer Madness, Last Resort, Wildfire, Chasing Dreams, Taking Chances, Cruel Venus, Strange Allure, Silent Truths, Wicked Beauty, Intimate Strangers, The Hornbeam Tree, The Mill House, A French Affair, Missing, Out of the Shadows, Lost Innocence, The Choice, Forgotten and, most recently, Stolen. She is also the author of Just One More Day, a moving memoir of her childhood in Bristol. She lives in Gloucestershire. Her website address is www.susanlewis.com
Also by Susan Lewis
A Class Apart
Dance While You Can
Stolen Beginnings
Darkest Longings
Obsession
Vengeance
Summer Madness
Last Resort
Wildfire
Chasing Dreams
Taking Chances
Cruel Venus
Strange Allure
Silent Truths
Wicked Beauty
Intimate Strangers
The Hornbeam Tree
The Mill House
A French Affair
Missing
Out of the Shadows
Lost Innocence
The Choice
Forgotten
Stolen
Just One More Day, A Memoir
For my gorgeous, glamorous friends, Alex and Sonia
‘Go away.’
Eva turned her face into the pillow, wincing at the pain that seared and crackled all over her, splintering her flesh, as though her entire self was trying to burn and bleed out through the wounds. There were so many of them, cruel, jagged gashes torn into the flawless fabric of her skin, grinning, grimacing, like silent, gruesome mouths. From her eye to her jaw, across her lips, slicing her ear, down into her neck and shoulders, gouging lethally into her chest and lungs. Each wound was held together by stitches now, or clamps, or grafts of gossamer-fine flesh that had been carefully harvested from tender places untouched by the maniac’s blade. Somebody else’s blood now ran through her veins, and perhaps it was someone else’s heart beating dully in her chest, and a stranger’s mind that had taken control of her senses.
Everything hurt.
There was nothing, not a single part of her that didn’t ache, throb or blaze with the kind of pain that was as relentless and cruel as the memories of that terrible night. She had no idea where he’d come from, how he’d got into her flat, or why he’d chosen her. She still didn’t know his name, nor did she want to. All she wanted was Nick.
Nick. Nick.
The screaming had stopped now; long shrill echoes of human torment that had filled the labour room for the past six hours, rushing out into the corridors, fleeing through open windows into the night. They stretched all the way into the past, contracting time, bringing the attack to now, taking her back to the horrific, unstoppable slashing of the blade.
She couldn’t breathe. Panic was overwhelming her.
‘It’s all right,’ someone whispered. ‘Everything’s fine.’
It was Patty, her sister. Patty was there, next to her, keeping her safe.
How could Patty say everything was fine when she knew that nothing ever could be again?
We have to put what happened behind us and move on.
Nick’s voice. The coldness and betrayal cut through her more cruelly than the knife.
Anger, fear, desperation surged out of nowhere. He knew what had happened; he’d been there. If it weren’t for him she wouldn’t even be alive now; she wished she wasn’t. What had been the point in saving her only to leave her like this?
‘Why don’t you hold him?’ Patty whispered gently.
She was talking about the baby.
I can’t. I can’t. Take him away.
‘He’s so sweet,’ Patty murmured softly. ‘He needs you to feed him.’
Eva’s breasts were full and disfigured as though someone had tried to slice them open for milk, and a careful hand had tried to stitch them together again.
The baby started to cry.
Eva turned her face more deeply into the pillow.
Patty looked at the nurse who was holding the infant, her eyes pleading and helpless. ‘She needs more time,’ she said, as though apologising. The nurse would understand. No one was surprised. ‘Perhaps later, or tomorrow,’ she added.
‘No! Never!’ Eva’s fury was muffled by the pillow. ‘Get out of here! Go away …’
‘Ssh,’ Patty tried to soothe.
‘I said go away.’
Afraid of the mounting hysteria, knowing what it would do to her sister’s wounds, as well as her mind, Patty obediently backed away.
Outside in the corridor she took the baby from the nurse and held him close to her face, inhaling the intoxicating scent of him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered brokenly, to him, not the nurse, ‘I wish there was something I could do, but there isn’t.’
‘It’ll change,’ the nurse assured her.
With all her heart Patty yearned to believe that, because she never wanted to let go of this tender little soul, not ever. He was her nephew, a living, breathing part of her, and she could already feel him burying himself deeply in her heart.
His mother would love him too, she reminded herself, given time. She hadn’t meant what she’d said, that she didn’t want him and never would, because Eva wasn’t cold-hearted and selfish, much less cruel or vindictive. This was only a temporary change in her character, brought on by shock and post-traumatic stress. Four months wasn’t nearly long enough to get over what she’d been through, so Patty must be patient and try to make the right decisions for her – for them all, especially this dear little boy.
Knowing what they were facing, how could she possibly fathom
what the right decisions should be?
‘Patty?’ a voice said behind her.
She turned to find the detective in charge of Eva’s case coming towards her. He’d visited often during these past few months, had actually come to feel like a friend, even a saviour in some ways.
As he drew closer she felt embarrassment warming her cheeks. The last time she’d seen him she’d broken down, spilling out her emotions as though they had no right to exist, and he’d been so kind, so sensitive. He hadn’t even backed away when she’d confessed her biggest fear.
Lowering his eyes from hers he looked at the sleeping baby, and put a finger to its cheek. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked quietly.
Knowing what he was referring to, what he was waiting for her to tell him, Patty tried to summon a smile of reassurance, but it wouldn’t come. She should never have told him. He wasn’t a relative, he shouldn’t be made to feel responsible or as though he had to carry any more burdens for her family.
He looked up at her, and held on to her gaze in a way that made her almost fearful of letting go. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked.
She nodded, and felt herself starting to fall apart.
Waving to a nurse, he waited until she’d taken the baby, then easing an arm through Patty’s he led her to a chair.
Patty didn’t want to talk; she didn’t have the courage to repeat what she’d been told that morning. So she simply watched the nurse walking away, listening to the soles of her shoes squealing quietly, following the rhythmic sway of her hips, while trying not think of herself, or anyone else, just that dear little baby and the fear that she might not live to see him again.
Chapter One
Eva Montgomery didn’t want to believe her eyes.
The sheer unexpectedness of it was making her light-headed. In the space of mere seconds she’d felt so many emotions struggling for recognition that she could hardly identify one. Then anger swooped in from the wings, clearing the muddle, with outrage barking at its heels.
Why had no one told her about this?
Going back to the beginning of the article she started to read it again, but found herself unable to focus on the words. It didn’t matter, she already knew what it said – how could she not, when it was exposing practically every triumph and tragedy of her life? From the photographs laid out amongst the paragraphs like colourful pieces of a jigsaw, she could be in no doubt that someone had not only trawled the archives, but had been watching her for at least a month, stealing secret moments of her day, her whereabouts, even her pets, to splash across this colour supplement and help answer the headline question: Where Are They Now?
It wasn’t as if she’d been hiding for the past sixteen years; however, since her life had been shattered in the most horrific way she’d chosen to shun the limelight, and had no wish to do otherwise. True, she’d been tracked down before, once by a producer who’d wanted her to judge a modelling talent show, and several magazines had written at one time or another to request interviews. However, on the whole, she’d been left to rebuild her world far from the flashing lights and glittering locations that had once filled every moment of her dazzling existence.
They’d called her Angelina then, or Angie.
Not even in her wildest teenage dreams had she imagined being so successful, but by the time she was twenty all the fame she could ever have wanted had been hers, and had only been set to grow. Talks had been under way to make her the next face of Dior; a perfume bearing the name ‘Angelina’ was in development; and a leading rock band of the time had produced a number one cover version of the Stones’ classic ‘Angie’. She’d even starred in the video, dancing about the set as high as the rest of them, and why not? They were young, famous and rich enough to do anything they pleased, so they would.
No one called her Angelina now – apart from here, in this article where they were retelling the story of the ‘beautiful and tragic’ twenty-one-year-old who’d disappeared from the catwalks and front covers after four sensational years of virtually dominating the scene. They’d given a good description of how, aged seventeen, she’d been discovered by the powerful agent, Bobbie Shilling, while shopping in Oxford Street with friends. Her first swagger down a Paris catwalk, when she’d tripped and crashed into the model in front, was given its usual airing – funny how she’d never managed to live that down. It was, she supposed, what had helped to make her a name, since the model she’d sent sprawling into the front row had already been at the very top of their profession. Amazingly, it had started one of her closest friendships of that time, and she occasionally saw Carrie-Anne now, but no one else from that world, apart from Bobbie, who’d resolutely and loyally stayed in touch, like a mother, yet not.
Unsurprisingly, the photograph that everyone said had launched her had been given an entire page to itself. Looking at it now made her heart ache with pride and sadness to remember how thrilled and excited she’d been the first time she’d seen it. Nick Jensen had taken the shot, capturing the smouldering challenge in her indigo-blue eyes and the exotic, even erotic curve of her lips. Even these many years later, the image still stirred her. The silhouette of her lithe, naked body beneath a shimmering, diaphanous wrap was a masterpiece of light and shadow, leaving nothing, yet everything to the eye of the beholder. Your eyes, his eyes, her eyes, their eyes … For her they’d been Nick’s eyes, only Nick’s, with whom she was already, at the tender age of eighteen, madly, recklessly in love. There was no mention of their relationship here, in this article, but there wouldn’t be, because no one, apart from Bobbie, had known, and Bobbie would never tell.
There were at least a dozen more shots of her from Vogue, Elle, Harper’s, wearing Galliano, or Lagerfeld, or McQueen. Shots from the gossip mags showed her partying on private yachts in St Tropez or Monaco; others captured thoughtful or hilarious moments, mostly unguarded, of her shopping, coming or going from her flat and occasionally with men she was rumoured to be seeing. ‘No matter how the camera caught her,’ the article said, ‘she never managed to look anything but ravishing and so infectiously happy that she brought smiles to even the grumpiest of hearts.’
She was thirty-seven now, still willowy and blonde, and with an aura of femininity that seemed to swathe her in as much sensuousness and mystique as the clinging silk in the most famous of her photographs. Her hair was thick and luxuriant and cascaded in a glossy sweep over one side of her face, almost like a curtain over one side of a stage. For a long time after the attack she’d dyed it, partly to disguise herself, partly to try to forget who she was. In recent years she’d allowed her own colour to return and had found herself feeling happier, even braver, for it. It had been like saying she was no longer a victim, or ashamed to be herself. Even so, she’d continued to style it so that it masked the disfiguring scars that had devastated the left side of her face. She was lucky not to have lost an eye, they’d told her, but not so lucky with her ear, which had been ripped in half by a single strike of the knife. The surgeons had performed miracles of course, not just on her face but her whole body, internally and externally, but there had only been so much they could do. The jagged, silvery lines that criss-crossed her tender skin like shadows of empty veins were constant reminders of how long she’d lain in a hospital bed fighting for her life.
Turning to the next page she found the famously moody shots Nick had taken of her for L’Oréal and later, Lancôme. Even after all this time it was still hard to look at how flawless and fresh her face had been then, how guileless and radiant her eyes, and exquisite her lips. Feeling herself caught for a moment in the time when she’d known nothing of the future, only the erotic romance of the present, she could almost feel Nick beside her, the magnetic force of his body as he tilted her chin or rearranged her hair, his elegant fingers sending frissons shooting between them like live currents.
Nick, she whispered silently to herself now, as though wherever he was he might hear her.
Everything was there, written with a typical reporter’s fr
ankness, but no lack of compassion. They didn’t know the entire story, thank God, but they didn’t hold back on the recorded events of that terrible June night when a psychopathic maniac by the name of Micky Bradshaw had managed to get into her apartment.
Skimming past the detail, for she had no desire to relive even a single moment of the nightmare ever again, she moved on to the final paragraph that accompanied the stolen shots of where she was now: living in Dorset and happily – they should have said blissfully, she thought – married to Don Montgomery. Many readers, it said, would remember that Don Montgomery’s previous life as a detective chief inspector with the Met had provided the inspiration for the highly rated cop drama In Depth that had kept the nation gripped, back in the days when Eva was modelling. It said that the attack was what had brought them together, and it was true, he had been involved in the investigation; however, they’d first met a year or so before that at a fund-raiser for Shelter, where he’d been a guest speaker and she was making her first appearance as the charity’s new patron. In spite of mixing with all kinds of celebrities and dignitaries on a daily basis she remembered how excited and nervous she’d been that night at the prospect of meeting the real-life DCI Ross, who by then was trying hard to escape the indignity of fame. He’d made her laugh so much with his drily told accounts of how DCI Ross was impinging on his world, that she couldn’t remember eating a thing, or even talking much to anyone else. When asked later to comment on how she’d found the high-ranking and famously outspoken police officer she’d given a cringe-making, typically twenty-year-old response. ‘He’s completely fab, really cool and nowhere near as scary as I’d imagined he’d be.’ When asked the same question he’d said he’d found her to be an exquisitely beautiful young lady who no doubt wished she’d rendered him foolishly tongue-tied rather than embarrassingly garrulous, as he had to confess he had been.
