Читать книгу The Mistress Assignment - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

‘WELL, here’s to Beth; let’s hope that this trip to Prague is a success and that it helps her to get over that rat Julian,’ Kelly Harris announced, picking up her glass of wine.

‘Well, she certainly deserves some good luck after all that’s happened,’ Anna Trewayne, Beth’s godmother, sighed, following suit and pausing before drinking her wine to add worriedly, ‘I must admit that I feel partly to blame. If I hadn’t persuaded the two of you to open your shop here in Rye-on-Averton, Beth would never have met Julian Cox in the first place.’

‘There’s only one person to blame for Beth’s unhappiness,’ the third member of the trio, Dee Lawson, Beth and Kelly’s landlady, announced starkly, ‘and that’s Julian Cox. The man is a complete and utter...’

She stopped speaking momentarily, lifting her glass to her lips, her eyes darkening painfully as she quickly hid her expression from the others.

‘We all know what he’s done to Beth, how much he’s hurt and humiliated her, telling her that he wanted to get engaged, encouraging her to make all those plans for their engagement party and then telling her the night before that he’d met someone else, making out that she’d misunderstood him and imagined that he’d proposed. Personally, I think that instead of bemoaning what’s happened what we should be doing is thinking of some way we can punish Julian Cox for what he’s done to her and make sure he can never do it again.’

‘Punish him...?’ Kelly enquired doubtfully. She and Beth had been friends from their first days together at university and Kelly had enthusiastically agreed to her friend’s suggestion that they set up in business together.

‘Rye-on-Averton is the kind of pretty rural English town that artists and tourists dream about, and my godmother was only saying the last time I was there that the town lacked a shop selling good-quality crystal and chinaware.’

‘Us...open a shop...?’ Kelly had protested a little uncertainly.

‘Why not?’ Beth had pressed enthusiastically, ‘You were saying only last week that you weren’t particularly enjoying your job. If we found the right kind of property there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to make your own designs to sell in the shop. With my retail experience I could be responsible for the buying and we could share the work in the shop.’

‘It sounds wonderful...’ Kelly had admitted, adding wryly, ‘Too wonderful... We’d need to find the right kind of premises, and it would only be on the strict understanding that we share the finances of the business equally,’ she had warned her friend, knowing that although Beth had no real money of her own her grandparents were rather wealthy and Beth was their adored and adoring only grandchild.

But Beth had swept aside all her objections, and in the end Kelly had been as enthusiastic about their shared project as Beth herself.

Over the last twelve months since the shop had first opened they had gone from strength to strength and then, just over eight months ago, Beth had met Julian Cox.

He had pursued her relentlessly whilst Kelly had stood helplessly to one side and watched as her friend became more and more emotionally dependent on a man whom Kelly had never liked right from the start.

‘Don’t you think you’re letting him rush things a little bit?’ she had suggested gently, just after Beth had announced that they were getting engaged. But Beth’s face had clouded and they had had their first real quarrel when she had responded uncomfortably, ‘Jules said you’d say something like that... He...he thinks that you’re...that you’re jealous of us, Kelly... I told him that just wasn’t possible, of course...’

Jealous of them! With that comment Kelly had been forced to acknowledge that Julian Cox had very skilfully robbed her of the chance to pass on to her friend a piece of information she ought to have given her weeks before. But right now, under the influence of her second glass of the strong Italian wine the three of them had been drinking in the busy Italian wine bar where they had gone for a drink after they had seen Beth off on her buying trip to Prague, the idea of revealing Julian Cox as the unpleasant and untrustworthy character they knew him to be seemed to have taken on the air of something of a crusade, a moral crusade.

‘Why should he be allowed to get away with what he’s done, to walk away from his guilt in the same manner he walked away from Beth?’ Dee had asked the others now.

‘Walk away! What he did was even worse than that,’ Kelly exploded. ‘He practically forced Beth to publicly humiliate herself. I can’t believe how many people seem to have fallen for the lies he’s been spreading about her, implying that not only did she misunderstand his intentions but that she also actively pursued him, to the point where he was supposedly thinking of taking legal action to stop her. Bunkum! I know which one of them was doing the lying and it wasn’t Beth. For goodness’ sake, I even heard him telling her how much he loved her, how much he couldn’t wait for them to be married.’

‘That would have been around the time when Beth’s grandfather was so seriously ill, I expect?’ Dee said grimly.

Kelly looked at her in surprise, but it was Anna who answered her question first, exclaiming, ‘Yes, that’s right! It was when her grandfather was ill that Julian proposed.’

At thirty-seven Anna was the oldest member of the quartet. As Beth’s mother’s younger cousin she had just missed out on being a bridesmaid at the wedding through a serious bout of German measles. In compensation Beth’s mother had asked her several years later to be one of her new baby’s godparents. Only a teenager, Anna had been awed and thrilled to be considered grown-up enough for such a responsibility and it was one she had taken very seriously, her relationship with Beth even more precious to her since she and her husband had not had any children of their own.

‘What’s the connection between Beth’s grandfather’s illness and Julian’s proposal of marriage?’ Kelly asked Dee curiously.

‘Can’t you guess?’ Dee responded. Think about it. The girl Julian dropped Beth for is known to have a substantial personal trust fund.’

Kelly made a small moue of distaste and looked shocked.

‘You mean that Julian proposed to Beth because he thought...’

‘That her grandfather would die and Beth would inherit a lot of money,’ Dee finished for her. ‘Yes. Once he realised that Beth’s grandfather was going to recover he must have really panicked, but, of course, he met this other girl, whose inheritance is far more accessible...’

‘It sounds like something out of a bad melodrama,’ Kelly protested, her forehead puckering as she added, ‘Besides, I thought that Julian was wealthy in his own right. He certainly gives that impression.’

‘He certainly likes to give that impression,’ Dee agreed. ‘Needs to, in fact. That’s the way he draws the innocent and the naive into his web.’

Kelly’s frown deepened as she listened to Dee.

At thirty, Dee was older than Kelly and Beth but younger than Anna, and the two girls had originally met her after their estate agent had suggested that they might want to look at a shop property Dee owned and wanted to let.

They had done so and had both been pleased and impressed with the swift and businesslike way in which Dee had handled the letting of her property to them. She was a woman who, although at first a little reserved and cool, and very choosy about her friends, on later acquaintance revealed a warmth and sense of humour that made her fun to be with.

Anna, who had lived in the town for the last fifteen years following the tragic death of her young husband in a sailing accident off the coast of Cornwall, had known Dee a little before Beth and Kelly had arrived on the scene. After the death of her father Dee had taken over his business affairs as well as his position on several local charities, and so was quite a well-known figure in the town.

Dee’s father had been an extremely successful entrepreneur, and others in her family were members of the local farming community, and the more Kelly and Beth had come to know her, the more it had astonished them that such a stunningly attractive woman, and one whose company the male sex quite plainly enjoyed should not have a man in her life.

‘Perhaps it’s because she’s so busy,’ Beth had ventured when she and Kelly had discussed it. ‘After all, neither of us have partners at the moment...’

This had been in her pre-Julian days, and Kelly had raised her eyebrows a little, reminding Beth wryly, ‘We’ve only been in town a matter of weeks, and besides... I saw the look in Dee’s eyes the other day when we all went out to dinner and that little girl came trotting up to talk to her—the one from the other table. Do you remember? She made an immediate beeline for Dee and it was as though the pair of them were communicating on some special wavelength that blocked out the rest of us...’

‘Mmm... She does have a very definite rapport with children,’ Beth had agreed, adding helpfully, ‘Perhaps she’s just not met the right man yet. She strikes me very much as a woman who would only commit herself to a relationship if she was a hundred and fifty per cent sure it was right for her.’

‘Mmm...’ Kelly had agreed reluctantly. ‘Personally I think there must be rather more to it than that.’

‘Well, maybe,’ Beth had agreed. ‘But I wouldn’t like to be the one to pry into her past, would you?’

‘No,’ Kelly had agreed immediately.

Friendly though the four of them had become, and well though they all got on, there was a certain reserve about Dee, a certain sense of distance, an invisible line over which one knew instinctively one would not be encouraged to cross.

‘You seem to know a lot more about Julian’s background than the rest of us,’ Kelly told Dee now.

Dee gave a dismissive shrug.

‘He’s...he grew up locally, and in my position one...learns things.’

Kelly’s frown deepened.

‘But surely if you knew his reputation was unsavoury you could have warned Beth?’

‘I was away when she originally met him,’ Dee reminded her, adding dryly, ‘And anyway, I doubt she would have listened...’

‘No, you’re probably right,’ Kelly agreed. ‘I never liked him, but Beth was so loyal to him she wouldn’t hear a word against him. It’s all very well saying that we ought to do something to show him up for the rat he really is, but how can we? He’s dumped poor Beth, humiliated her, and he’s got clean away with it.

‘I’d like to tell this new girlfriend of his just what he’s like...’ she continued darkly.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ Dee warned her. ‘She’s as besotted with him as Beth was. No, if we’re going to have any chance of getting any kind of restitution for Beth, any kind of public recognition of the way Julian lied about her as well as to her, we’re going to have to use his own weakness, his own greed against him.’

‘We are? But how...?’ Kelly asked her curiously. Beth was such a loving, gentle, kind person, the last thing she had needed was the kind of pain and humiliation Julian had handed out to her, never mind the potential damage it could do to their own just burgeoning business. The whispering campaign Julian had so carefully and cleverly instigated when he had dropped Beth, insinuating that she had been the one pursuing him, obsessed by him, was bound to have its repercussions.

‘I do hope that Beth will be all right on her own in Prague,’ Anna put in anxiously, joining the conversation. Fine-boned and very youthful-looking, Anna was, in many ways, so far as Kelly was concerned, the epitome of a slightly old-fashioned type of femininity and womanhood.

Married young and then tragically widowed, in a medieval century she would have been the type of woman who would no doubt have withdrawn to the protective security of a small convent, or perhaps in the Georgian or Victorian age she would have been the doting aunt to her siblings’ large broods of noisy children.

As it was, she was apparently content with her single life, her pretty little house and her pets—a large fluffy cat and a smaller but just as fluffy dog. Her home had become for both Kelly and Beth a surrogate home from home since they had moved into the area and, whilst Kelly could never for a minute imagine Anna ever stepping into the role so vigorously occupied by her own energetic and feisty mother, there was still something very comforting and special about the gentle concern Anna showered on them both.

It was a pity she had never remarried, in Kelly’s opinion, and she knew that Beth agreed with her.

‘She adored Uncle Ralph; they were childhood sweethearts and they had only been married a few months when he died,’ Beth had told her.

‘Beth will have a wonderful time,’ Dee responded robustly now. ‘Prague is the most beautiful city.’

‘I’ve heard that it’s a very romantic city,’ Anna agreed a little wistfully, or so it seemed to Kelly. ‘I just hope it doesn’t make her feel even worse. She’s lost so much weight and looks so unhappy.’

‘She’ll be far too busy going round glass factories to think about anything other than business,’ Dee predicted firmly.

‘Mmm... It’s a godsend that this trip came up when it did,’ Kelly agreed. ‘And that’s all thanks to you, Dee. That was a brilliant idea of yours to suggest to her that we should think about buying some crystal from the Czech Republic. It’s been so awful for her.

‘You’d think that after what he’s done to her and the way he’s let her down Julian would at least have the decency to keep a low profile with his new girlfriend, but he actually seems to enjoy flaunting their relationship.’

‘Like I said, the man needs teaching a lesson and being given a taste of his own medicine,’ Dee reiterated. ‘And if you want my opinion we’re just the ones to do it.’

‘Us... ? But...’ Anna started to protest uneasily.

‘Why not?’ Dee overruled her. ‘After all, you are Beth’s godmother, Kelly here is her best friend... If the three of us can’t be relied upon to do the right thing by her...if she can’t depend on us...then who can she depend on?’ Dee said firmly.

‘It sounds a good idea in theory,’ Kelly allowed, moved by Dee’s obvious emotion. ‘But—’

‘Have some more wine,’ Dee interrupted her. ‘There’s still over half a bottle left.’

Deftly she refilled both Kelly’s glass and Anna’s.

‘I—’ Kelly started to protest but Dee cut her off.

‘It’s got to be finished and I can’t have any more; I’m driving.’

It was true. It had been Dee who had taken charge when Beth had virtually collapsed after Julian had callously told her that he no longer wanted her, just as it had been Dee who had come up with the suggestion that Beth travel to Prague on a buying trip that would also hopefully take her mind off Julian and her unhappiness. And it was Dee who had driven them all to the airport so that they could see Beth off on her journey, and now it seemed that Dee was still taking charge and making plans for them.

‘So, now that we’ve agreed that Julian has to be punished and exposed for what he is, what we need to decide is how we’re going to put our plans into action.’

She paused and then looked at Kelly before saying slowly, ‘What I think would be best would be for us to punish him through his greed. You mentioned the other week, Kelly, that almost right from the first time you met him Julian was coming on to you, making overtures to you, trying to encourage you to date him behind Beth’s back...’

‘Yes. It’s true, he was,’ Kelly agreed. ‘I didn’t tell Beth at the time because I didn’t want to hurt her and then, when it was too late, I wished I had...’ She paused and then added uncertainly, ‘Dee, it’s all very well to talk about us punishing Julian for the way he’s hurt her so badly, but realistically what can we do?’

Dee smiled grimly at her before turning to Anna. ‘Anna, you’ve told us how Julian approached you for a loan, claiming that he wanted the money to use as a deposit on a house he was planning to buy for Beth and himself...’

‘Yes...’ Anna agreed. ‘He called round out of the blue one afternoon. He said that all his cash was tied up in various investments, but that Beth had seen this house she was desperate for them to buy and he didn’t want to disappoint her. He said he’d only need the money for a few months—’

‘Yes, no doubt because he was expecting that by then Beth would have received her share of her grandfather’s estate,’ Kelly cut in angrily. ‘How could anyone be so despicable?’

‘We aren’t talking about anyone,’ Dee pointed out acidly. ‘We’re talking about Julian Cox, and Julian has a long record of very skilfully and deceitfully depriving the innocent and naive of their money—and not just their money,’ Dee concluded quietly.

There was a look in her eyes that made Kelly check and study her a little woozily. The wine Kelly had drunk was beginning to make her feel distinctly light-headed, no doubt due to the fact that she hadn’t had very much to eat, but she knew she was not imagining that unfamiliar combination of vulnerability and haunted pain in Dee’s distinctive tortoiseshell-coloured eyes. Even so, there was something she still felt bound to pursue.

‘If you knew just what kind of man Julian is, why didn’t you say something to Beth?’ she asked Dee for a second time.

‘I told you why—because quite simply, when she first became involved with him, if you remember, I was in Northumberland nursing my aunt. By the time I’d come back and realised what was going on, how deeply she was involved with him, it was too late; she was on the verge of announcing their engagement.’

‘Yes, I remember now,’ Kelly acknowledged. It was true—Dee had been away for several months earlier in the year, looking after an elderly relative who had undergone a serious operation.

‘It seems so unfair that Julian should get away with convincing everyone that poor Beth is some kind of compulsive liar as well as breaking her heart,’ Anna put in quietly. ‘I know her and I know she would never, could never behave in the way he’s trying to imply.’

‘He’s very adept at maintaining a whiter than white reputation for himself whilst destroying the reputations of those who are unfortunate enough to become innocently involved with him,’ Dee informed them bitterly.

Kelly was feeling far too muzzy with wine to take Dee up on what she had said, but she sensed that there was some kind of past history between Julian Cox and Dee, even if she knew that Dee would not welcome any probing into it on her part.

‘What we need to do,’ Dee was telling them both firmly, ‘is to use his own tactics against him and lure him into a position where his true nature can be exposed. It’s no secret now to any of us that the reason he dropped Beth is because he realised that there wasn’t going to be any financial benefit to him in marrying her.’

‘Since we do know that, I can’t help but agree with Kelly that we ought to do something to warn his new girlfriend and her family just what kind of man he is,’ Anna suggested gently.

Dee shook her head. ‘We know how blindly in love Beth was, and, although I hate to say this, we could all be done an untold amount of harm if Julian Cox started trying to tar us with the same brush he’s used against Beth to such good effect. The last thing any of us needs is to be publicly branded as hysterical, over-emotional women, obsessed by some imaginary sense of injustice.’

She was right, Kelly had to acknowledge.

‘Besides, if my plan works successfully, and it will, then he’ll drop his current victim just as swiftly as he dropped Beth, and for very much the same reason.’

‘Your plan? What plan?’ Kelly asked her uneasily.

‘This plan. Listen,’ Dee commanded. ‘We are going to mount a two-pronged attack against Julian where he’s most vulnerable.

‘I happen to know that one of Julian’s clever little ways of funding his expensive lifestyle is to persuade gullible people to invest in his apparently initially sound financial schemes. By the time they realise that they are anything but sound, it’s too late and their money has gone.’

‘But surely that’s fraud?’ Kelly protested. Dee shrugged her shoulders.

‘Technically, yes, but Julian relies on the fact that his victims feel too embarrassed or are too timid to complain. For that reason he tends to prey on the elderly and the vulnerable, the innocently naive, too trusting and honest themselves to see what he really is until it’s too late.’

‘The man’s a menace,’ Kelly complained sharply.

‘Yes, he is, and we’re going to expose him as he fully deserves to be exposed,’ Dee told her. ‘You, Kelly, are suddenly going to become an extremely rich young woman. You have a great-uncle, previously unknown and now deceased, who has left you a considerable amount of money. This inheritance isn’t something you yourself have made public, of course; in fact you refuse to talk about it—its existence is something you wish to keep a secret—but its existence has subtly filtered through the town’s grapevine, at least as far as Julian’s ears.

‘We already know that he finds you attractive; you’ve told us both that he made advances to you whilst he was pretending to Beth that he loved her... All you have to do is let him believe that you’re prepared to commit yourself, and, more importantly, your future to him. His own ego and greed will do the rest.’

‘But I can’t pretend that I’ve inherited money...I can’t lie about something like that,’ Kelly said. ‘What. will people think when they know?’

‘Only Julian will ever know about your supposed inheritance,’ Dee assured her. ‘Just as only Julian will ever know that you are a wealthy widow and have money to spare for investment,’ she told Anna.

Anna looked at her uncertainly.

‘He has already tried to borrow money from me, Dee, it’s true, as I’ve just told you both, but I’m certainly not a wealthy woman and...’

‘Look, when it comes to convincing Julian that you both have financial assets that we all know simply don’t exist, you can leave everything to me. I promise you that Julian is the only person who will be made aware of these imaginary fortunes.’

‘But will he believe it? Surely he’ll...’

‘He’ll believe it,’ Dee assured Kelly. ‘He’ll believe it because he’ll want to believe it. He needs to believe it,’ she told them grimly. ‘From what I’ve learned, his own financial position is so perilous at the moment that he’ll grasp just about any straw he can to save himself.

‘Once he switches his allegiance from his current girlfriend to you, Kelly, and once he tries to draw you, Anna, into one of his financial scams, we’ll be able to publicly reveal him for the cheat and liar that he genuinely is...’

‘It sounds plausible,’ Kelly acknowledged. ‘And it would certainly exonerate Beth if we could pull it off.’

‘As well as preventing his current girlfriend from suffering a potential broken heart and losing her inheritance,’ Anna supplied protectively.

‘So it’s agreed,’ Dee slipped in quickly. ‘We don’t have any option but to go ahead and bring him to book.’

‘No, I suppose we don’t,’ Kelly acknowledged.

She still wasn’t totally convinced that she was going to be able to carry off the role Dee had apparently cast for her as a wealthy heiress, but her head felt too muzzy for her to protest properly.

There was one thing she had to say, though.

‘How can you be so sure that Julian will drop his current girlfriend for me?’

‘He wants you, we already know that,’ Dee told her forthrightly, ‘and besides, you’re on your own, unprotected... It’s your money...yours to do with as you please... His current girlfriend isn’t; she’s got a brother who stands between Julian and her inheritance. Julian is running out of credit and credibility. He won’t be able to resist the bait you’re dangling, Kelly. He can’t afford to resist it.’

“The bait...’ Kelly swallowed shakily. The bait Dee was referring to, as she knew only too well, wasn’t just her imagined fortune, it was Kelly herself, and since she personally thought that Julian Cox was the most loathsome, obnoxious, revolting and undesirable man she had ever met...

‘But if Kelly’s going to pose as a wealthy heiress, then surely Julian won’t be interested in my money as well,’ Anna protested.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Dee corrected her. ‘Julian is greedy and avaricious; he won’t pass up any opportunity to get his hands on some extra cash.’

‘But I’ve already refused to help him once,’ Anna pointed out.

‘You’re a woman; you can change your mind,’ Dee told her mock-sweetly. ‘Look, you can both leave all the details of putting our plans into action to me. All I want from you is your agreement, your commitment, to help Beth, and I know I can rely on both of you completely for that... Can’t I?’

Kelly and Anna exchanged uncertain looks.

‘Beth is very dear to us,’ Dee reminded them, looking first at Kelly and then at Anna.

‘Yes. Of course...of course you can,’ Anna agreed immediately.

‘Yes. Of course you can,’ Kelly agreed a little less confidently. Something warned her that, foolproof though Dee’s plan sounded, things might not fall into place just as easily as she assumed, but her brain felt too clouded by the wine she had drunk for her to be able to formulate any determined assault on Dee’s confident arguments and besides, Dee was right about one thing—she did feel that Julian deserved to be exposed for what he was...

For the next few minutes they continued their discussion, and as they did so Kelly’s doubts as to the feasibility of Dee’s plan resurfaced.

‘I’ve got an early start in the morning, so if you don’t mind we really ought to make a move,’ Dee announced finally, checking her watch.

As she stood up Kelly realised dizzily just how strong the red wine she had been drinking actually was. To her relief Anna seemed equally affected by it. Of the three of them, Dee was the only one who seemed to have a properly clear head, which was just as well since she was the one doing the driving.

As she shepherded her two slightly inebriated charges out into the car park and to her car, Dee acknowledged ruefully that she would thoroughly deserve it if both of them blamed her in the morning for their thick heads—she, after all, had been the one who had kept on refilling their glasses—but she comforted herself with the knowledge that what she was doing was right; she owed it to—Her eyes closed. She must not think of the past, only the future—a future in which Julian Cox would meet the fate he so richly deserved!

She hadn’t been able to believe it when she had discovered that Julian was up to his old tricks, but this time he wasn’t going to get away with it. This time...this time he was going to discover to his cost just how strong and powerful a woman’s desire for justice could be.

With an almost maternal concern she helped her two friends and fellow conspirators into her car. She intended to take very good care of them from now on, very good care... As they settled a little woozily into the rear seat Dee reflected that it was just as well that they couldn’t read her mind and that they didn’t know the truth. There had been one or two decidedly awkward moments back in the restaurant when Kelly had tried to question her, to dig a little deeper into the past, but fortunately she had managed to sidetrack her.

‘Poor Beth...’ Anna hiccuped mournfully as Dee started the car engine.

‘Poor Beth,’ Kelly agreed, blinking as she tried to clear her increasingly blurry vision.

‘No, not poor Beth,’ Dee corrected them sternly. ‘Lucky Beth. Just think how much more unhappy he could have made her if he’d waited until after they were engaged, or, even worse, until after they were married before betraying her,’ Dee pointed out to them.

‘It’s going to be easier for her this way. If she had married him...’

Instinctively she glanced down at her own wedding ring finger. It was slightly thinner than its fellows as if once...? Then determinedly she looked away.

In the rear of the car her two fellow conspirators were succumbing to the effects of the extremely potent red wine she had deliberately fed them, their eyes closing.

She knew she ought to feel guilty about what she was doing—they were both so innocent and unaware, so unsuspicious...