Читать книгу Mistress Of The Groom - Susan Napier, Susan Napier - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

‘WHERE are you taking me?’

At that moment, judging by the expression on his face, she wouldn’t have put it past him to be spiriting her to some isolated spot with a quiet murder in mind.

He didn’t move, still crowding her, surrounding her with the heat of his physical menace as he purred:

‘Where would you like me to take you?’

Her breath caught in her throat, but he eased away and she found her wits again.

‘Home, of course,’ she said grittily.

Without looking away from her he sprawled back on his seat and picked up the phone at his elbow, giving the chauffeur her address. When her eyes flickered he said softly, ‘Oh, yes, I know where you live... I know what you eat, what you wear, who you see. Nothing escapes me.’

‘Except the occasional bride,’ said Jane unwisely, wiping the smug expression from his face.

The breath hissed between his teeth. ‘Ava didn’t escape... I let her go.’

It was a very fine distinction, but one Jane was beginning to fear might be true.

‘You had no choice,’ she protested.

After fainting at the altar Ava had successfully followed her subsequent fit of hysteria with a full-blown impression of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Any suggestion of reconciliation was clearly out of the question, and her parents had been forced to bundle her away on a quiet, stress-free holiday in order that they might sweep the whole embarrassing fiasco under the carpet.

‘There’s always a choice. I could have proved your lie, sued you for slander, paraded the whole sordid business through the courts and the newspapers, dragged a public apology out of you—’

‘Why didn’t you?’ She still felt a frisson of horror when she thought of all the things that could have gone wrong with her incredibly foolish plan. But she had been young enough to be fired by her own righteousness, rich enough to think that if the worst came to the worst she could buy her way out of trouble and arrogant enough to think that she was equal to anything he could throw at her...

His voice, like his cobalt stare, was riddled with contempt.

‘For Ava’s sake. I wasn’t going to compound her hurt and humiliation by broadcasting your vitriolic lies to an even greater audience, by exposing our intimate lives in open court. Ava hated being in the public eye—even the prospect of a big wedding was an ordeal for her. Exposing her to more ridicule and gossip wouldn’t have regained me her trust, or her parents’ respect.’

So he had known that Ava didn’t want an extravagant show on her wedding day but still hadn’t supported her against her mother. Given the choice of offending her parents or riding roughshod over the wishes of the woman he loved, he had chosen the latter. What did that say about his so-called love?

Jane summoned her most indifferent stare as he continued savagely, ‘You planned it very cunningly—I was damned whatever I did. A lie has no leg, but a scandal has wings, and no matter what penalty you were slapped with in court there would always be people who believed that there was foundation to the story. The only way to protect Ava was to remove myself from the scene. I was going to come back when the dust settled and quietly sort things out between us, but by then it was too late. Knowing how cautious she is, I certainly didn’t expect her to get married on the rebound...’

‘How very self-sacrificing of you,’ said Jane, crushing down a pang of sympathy. At some stage everyone involved in the sorry saga had modified their actions in order to protect Ava from cruel reality, when in actual fact the helpless little darling had been a clear-eyed pragmatist, operating on her own agenda!

‘A concept you wouldn’t understand...not with your heritage,’ he sliced back with razor-edged sharpness. ‘I wonder if old Mark is looking up from his seat in hell, cursing his only child for letting the worldly goods he sold his greedy soul for slip through her fingers...’

His insulting familiarity made Jane wary, prey to the ambivalent feelings that mention of her parentage always evoked. Mark Sherwood had been as crude as he was shrewd. Not many people had liked him. ‘You knew my father?’

He smiled unpleasantly. ‘By reputation only. Gone but not forgotten, you might say...’

His cryptic answer implied there was a great deal more, but as she tensed Jane bumped her sore hand against her thigh and a vicious jab of pain sent a fresh wash of nausea rolling over her, exacerbated by the motion of the car as it swayed around a corner.

She tried to localise the pain by consciously relaxing the rest of her body, closing her eyes and tipping her head back against the top of the seat, unaware that her sudden physical pliancy was viewed with cynical suspicion by the man opposite—especially as the slow rotation of her tense shoulders allowed the deep bodice of her gown to dip and tighten enticingly over her ripe breasts.

His big hands clenched at his sides, his blue eyes brooding over the gypsy-dark tumble of hair and the unmistakable signs of stress in the strong-boned face, the hollows shadowed by the thick fan of her lashes and the new prominence of her haughty cheekbones under the pale skin, translucent with tiredness. The lips, which were normally barely touched with discreet colour, were tonight a block of bright red gloss, now slightly smeared, that revealed a surprising fullness, the lush curve of her mouth a sensuous counterpoint to the straight, almost masculine slash of her thick ebony eyebrows. His eyes drifted back down to her breasts, to the long legs tilted away from his.

‘You have his looks.’

‘Whose? My father’s? I thought you said you didn’t know him,’ Jane said, without opening her eyes. She knew from his gravelly tone it wasn’t meant to be a compliment, even though her father had been considered extremely handsome in his heyday. A man who was attracted to Ava’s delicate, blonde, china-doll brand of femininity was bound to find Jane less than enchanting.

‘I know he was big. Dark. Chunky.’

She was in too much pain to take offence, as he clearly intended her to do. She was big-framed but she wasn’t fat, and in the last few stressful months she had actually dropped below optimum weight for her height.

‘So are you.’

She opened her eyes and found him contemplating the similarity with distaste, absently manipulating his bruised jaw with his blunt fingers.

‘Does it hurt?’ she asked involuntarily, jerking upright as she realised the vulnerability of her position.

‘Yes,’ he growled.

‘Good.’ There was a small silence as they measured glances, blue on blue. ‘You’ve still got blood on your mouth,’ she felt driven to add. ‘In the corner, on the right’

He probed the place with his tongue. ‘Sure it’s not your lipstick?’ he jeered, taking the immaculately folded white handkerchief out of his jacket pocket.

His answer caught her by surprise, and because she wasn’t sure she flushed. She felt again the hard, crushing grind of his mouth, the fierce stab of his tongue impaling her senses, filling her with the angry taste of him.

He studied her hectic colour for a moment before wiping the stain from his lips with a taunting slowness. ‘Better?’ He held out the handkerchief. ‘Your turn.’

‘For what?’ she said suspiciously.

‘Your lipstick’s smudged. It’s obviously not kiss-proof... not that it would need to be. You usually just freeze off any man who gets within touching distance, don’t you Lady Sherwood?’

Normally the snooty nickname didn’t bother her, but this man gave it an extra bite that made her snap. ‘If he’s anything like you—yes!’

‘You haven’t dated the same man more than twice in the last two years...they can’t all be like me!’ he said drily.

‘I’ve been too busy,’ she replied icily, and immediately regretted it as his eyes narrowed in sly triumph.

‘Have I been working you too hard? Were you afraid that I might sneak in and snatch your business while you were otherwise engaged? Too bad, since it happened anyway. Maybe you shouldn’t have cold-shouldered all those likely prospects that Daddy tried to set you up with... Oh, yes, Ava told me all about them. But none of them could compete with your ambition, could they? All work and no play...no wonder Jane is such a dull, lonely girl—’

‘Go to hell!’ she flashed for the second time that night, aware that in her inarticulate rage she sounded more like a sulky teenager than a seasoned businesswoman renowned for her acid wit. She should be immune to his insults by now—but her sense of self-worth was badly damaged and she no longer seemed able to maintain the icy, unemotional façade that had been her vital strength during the last two years of ceaseless pressure from Spectrum Developments and its charismatic owner.

‘Why, I do believe we’re already there,’ he murmured in mock surprise, looking out of the window as the car slowed down outside a strip of rundown wooden buildings. ‘Or someplace very much like it. Parkhouse Lane is a bit of a misnomer, isn’t it? I’d call it more of an alley than a lane. Quite a come-down from the Sherwood mansion. Who would have thought three years ago that Lady Jane would one day be living in a poky one-bedroomed flat above a greasy take-away joint?’

He looked at her sitting rigidly on the edge of her seat as the chauffeur turned into the kerb. ‘Still, it’s not as if it’s for much longer, is it...? Has your landlord given you your notice yet?’

She ignored him, trying to hide her growing panic as she fumbled for the doorhandle with her uninjured hand. The letter she had received the previous day had literally been the last straw. She had figured that she had nothing left to lose from one last, futile act of defiance.

Big mistake.

Ryan Blair evidently thought otherwise.

To date their battle had been conducted publicly, their poisonous exchanges filtered through clients, employees, lawyers, banks, formal letters, contracts and writs. Personal contact had been minimal. But, having won their public war, it seemed he was now preparing to transfer the battleground to the private arena, where Jane was frighteningly vulnerable.

‘I understand the poor man has been having a bit of trouble with council inspectors...something about fire regulations, I believe?’ he said, catching her by the left hand as she finally got the heavy door open and attempted to slide past him to the dubious freedom of her new and soon to be former neighbourhood. Jane almost screamed at the pressure of his iron fingers, vaguely aware of the chauffeur standing by the open door, a witness to Ryan’s oozing sympathy.

‘That’s something they’re very strict about, so I suppose your landlord has told you he won’t be able to give you the usual two weeks’ grace to find somewhere else to live. You don’t seem to be very lucky in your search for permanent accommodation since the bank sold up the old man’s pride, do you? Most places you enquire about you miss out on and those you do manage to get... Well, this is—what?—the third time in just over a month that you’ve had to move due to unforeseen circumstances arising with landlords or flatmates—’

Jane’s head whipped round, her hair swirling like a black storm around her pale face. The fact that the council inspections had been conducted on a secret tip-off and that her flat was the only one that couldn’t be occupied while being brought up to ‘complying standard’ had clearly borne the mark of Ryan Blair’s influence. But all those other times, when she had presumed she’d been simply unlucky...

Damn him!

‘Are you beginning to feel you might be jinxed, Jane?’ he enquired silkily. ‘That maybe you’re on a slippery downward slope to nowhere?’ He raised her throbbing hand to within a hair’s breadth of his mouth in a parody of polite salute. ‘It’s a long, dark, dirty, dangerous way...but perhaps someone’ll catch you before you hit rock bottom. Who knows? If I’m feeling generous, it could even be me...’

Jane twisted her hand away and stumbled out of the car on unsteady heels, his dark laughter following her into the ill-lit street.

‘Goodnight. Sweet dreams.’

Her dreams that night were anything but sweet. It took her ages to undress, and by the time she was ready for bed her hand was hurting so much that she had to take the last two aspirins in her medicine cabinet.

They didn’t seem to help much and she tossed and turned for hours on the hard sofa-bed that had come with the partly furnished apartment, worried about the stack of bills that she could only afford to pay if she used the bond her landlord was obliged by law to return. But that would mean she wouldn’t have the money to offer as bond on another flat. Even in shared accommodation one was expected to pay a lump sum up front.

Worse, her small reserve of cash was dwindling alarmingly fast, and the company was continuing to accumulate debts against her name even though it was no longer operating. Since she was directly responsible for all monies owed by Sherwood Properties, and lawyers’ and accountants’ fees had already eaten a huge hole in the surplus from the sale of the house and unhindered personal assets, the threat of bankruptcy loomed ever closer. Without a car it was going to take longer to get around the sprawling city, hampering her search for a job, but at least she would no longer have to contemplate skipping meals to pay for petrol!

When she finally fell into a troubled sleep Jane was tormented by lurid monsters who gnawed at her fingers, and when she woke in the morning she was horrified to find that her left hand had swollen like an overripe piece of fruit. The blade of her hand was blue and pulpy, her skin feeling as if it was stretched to bursting point and the fingers almost impossible to straighten. Moving carefully, she showered and searched her wardrobe for a dress that didn’t have a back fastening.

Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot of choice. Her former lifestyle had dictated very few casual clothes, and most of her custom-designed business suits and high-fashion dresses had been forfeited, along with her jewellery and extensive collection of shoes, when the bank’s valuers had swept through the Sherwood residence, spiriting off everything that was considered saleable. What was left would have fitted into two suitcases—except the matching leather luggage had gone too, and Jane had been forced to leave the house with her remaining possessions packed into plastic supermarket bags.

The black dress had fortunately been out for cleaning at the time and the valuers had been so ruthless in the execution of their duty that when Jane had later found the dry-cleaning receipt in her purse she had had no qualms about claiming it for herself. She looked on it as a symbol of hope, a small victory over the forces of darkness: a reminder that, even when the odds were stacked wildly against you, you could sometimes still win.

The black dress now hung shoulder to shoulder with off-the-peg skirts and blouses and the subdued dresses that the all-male valuers had considered ‘of insufficient interest’ to turn the quick profit the mortgagee was demanding. At least she had got to keep all her underwear, despite the famous French and Italian labels, but they had only left her three pairs of shoes, all of them flats.

Jane struggled into a simple shirt-waister with large buttons that were easy to do up one-handed and didn’t even bother trying to put up her hair.

Ever since she had moved in two weeks ago she had walked three blocks to a tiny pavement café where, for the price of a cup of breakfast tea, she could read the morning newspaper and copy out all the likely prospects from the Situations Vacant columns. Then she would return to the flat and write her application letters before starting the rounds of interviews and enquiries at the various employment bureaus. But today there didn’t seem to be much point. With her hand the way it was she wouldn’t present the image of flawless competence that she had glowingly described in her CV.

In an effort to relieve the swelling Jane tried bathing her hand in water chilled with ice-chunks chipped off the sides of the tiny freezer compartment of her fridge, but although the pain was numbed for a while it only seemed to get worse when the cold wore off, and by mid-morning she knew she was going to have to see a doctor.

When she returned the borrowed black high-heels to the girl who lived in the even pokier flat next door, Collette—she had admitted it wasn’t her real name but ‘guys think it’s sexy’—offered some gratuitous advice.

She shook her bleached head at the sight of the mangled hand, her crystal earrings clacking with outrage. ‘God, did that guy you were meeting last night do that? One of those, eh? Been there, done that, honey. Take my advice—dump him! And ignore any sob stuff—bastards like that never change...a few drinks and pow! They thump you and make you think it’s your fault.’

Jane smiled weakly. For all his ferocious temper Ryan Blair wasn’t a physically violent man. He was an expert at more sophisticated forms of intimidation...like kissing!

‘You should have used the shoes,’ Collette advised. ‘We don’t wear them just ’cos they make our legs look miles long, you know. A stiletto in the groin can give a man a whole new perspective on life, know what I mean?’

Jane nodded hastily, suspecting that the ‘we’ to whom Collette referred was a loose street-sisterhood engaged in a profession much more venerable than her own.

Having cheerfully targeted a few more choice portions of the male anatomy where application of a stiletto could produce instant indifference to the idea of violence and/ or sex, Collette gave Jane the address of the nearest emergency medical clinic. On the back of a dog-eared medical centre card, prominently promoting its STD clinic, she wrote down the numbers of the buses that Jane would have to catch there and back.

It was the first time Jane had been on a bus since her schooldays, but she was in too much pain to appreciate the novelty. The clinic’s crowded waiting room was also a first for her, and after a long, enervating wait Jane was relieved to be ushered into a bare office where a depressingly bouncy young doctor examined her and diagnosed a broken bone before sending her off to the X-Ray department ‘just to make sure I’m right’.

‘What does the other guy look like?’ he chirped forty-five minutes later, when Jane had come back with the X-Ray and he had clipped it to the light box to show her the thin, pale line unevenly bisecting one of the five long bones of her hand.

A fleeting vision of a dark, handsome face, inky hair and piercing blue eyes made her heart give a nervous skip. Thank goodness the doctor wasn’t taking her pulse. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘See this?’ He tapped the image. ‘You’ve broken the fifth metacarpal bone—the one that joins your wrist to your little finger—broken it right in the middle. Well, as far as I know there’s only one way to break this particular bone like that—with a blow. Ergo, you hit someone or something with real enthusiasm!’

‘Someone,’ admitted Jane, looking at the skeleton of her hand and wondering how such a tiny fracture could cause so much pain.

‘Any other injuries?’

‘No—I think I just split his lip. He roared like a wounded bull so I don’t think his jaw was broken or anything...’

‘I mean to you,’ the doctor said wryly. ‘Was it your husband? What did he do?’

‘Oh.’ Jane flushed at his assumption. ‘No, nothing like that...I mean, we hardly know each other. We’re just...’

The doctor’s grey eyes suddenly sparked with recognition. ‘Just good friends? Hang on a minute.’ He spun aside and walked over to pull a broadsheet newspaper out of the waste-paper basket beside his desk—a national daily. He leafed through the crumpled sections until he found the one he was looking for and smoothed it out.

‘I thought I recognised you when you walked in.’

There were two long photographs side-by-side—one a slightly blurred shot, obviously taken the moment after impact, showing Jane’s left arm at full extension and Ryan Blair, head snapped back, arms flung out, toppling across the restaurant table; the other, horribly crisp and clear, was a close-up of their seemingly steamy kiss in the street.

Some wag of a sub-editor had headlined the pictures:

SHE’S A KNOCKOUT!

And the story underneath was wittily couched as a boxing match... ‘Weighing-in’. ‘seconds out’, ‘round one’, ‘the final bell’...

Thank God the reporter obviously hadn’t bothered to go very far back in the files, for it was very much a ‘once-over lightly’ piece, dealing only with the tail-end of the Sherwood Blair feud and too full of deliberate boxing puns to be taken seriously.

As Ryan Blair had predicted there was much sly speculation about business turning into pleasure, but there was no mention of Jane being the veiled woman who had aborted his wedding—probably thanks to the Brandons, whose damage control at the time had consisted of smothering the intriguing, ‘disappearing mistress in the hat’ story with urgent bulletins on the life-threatening viral infection which had caused Ava’s untimely collapse and subsequent withdrawal from society for a lengthy period of convalescence.

Looking at the picture of herself wrapped in Ryan Blair’s bear-like embrace, her neck arched by the apparent passion of his kiss, her half-open eyes suggesting a dreamy bliss, Jane felt an unwelcome frisson of excitement.

‘Right, well...let’s fix that up, shall we...?’ The doctor became all efficiency again, directing her to sit on the edge of the examination table, drawing a wheeled trolley up beside him.

‘Do I have to have it in plaster?’ she asked, her heart sinking at the prospect.

‘Nope. Not this baby.’ He delicately lifted her hand. ‘It’s a fairly straightforward break so I’m just going to strap it to your ring finger to pull the bone straight while it heals.’

‘Just strap it up?’ It sounded too easy. ‘For how long?’

‘Probably three weeks.’ He touched her little finger and she winced. ‘Have you taken anything for the pain?’

‘Only a couple of aspirin last night...it was all I had in the flat.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘You’ll definitely need something stronger than that by the time I’ve finished with you. You’re going to have an uncomfortable few days until the local inflammation eases and the healing process starts. I’ll give you an injection of local anaesthetic now and a prescription for painkillers that you can have filled at the clinic pharmacy. They’re fairly strong, so don’t mix them with anything else.’

The anaesthetic was fast-acting, and Jane could watch in detachment as he tucked cotton wool between her little and ring fingers and firmly strapped them together, covering the adhesive with a short crepe bandage that encompassed her hand, leaving her thumb and other two fingers free.

‘That’ll protect the strapping and remind you and everyone else that you have an injury. Try to keep it dry and use the hand as little as possible. Don’t drive or do anything that puts a strain on the blade of your hand—the more you promote movement in the area the longer the bone’ll take to heal. And if the pain gets worse, or you’re worried for any reason, come back.’

Jane frowned. Her father had been a stoic, but she was a weakling when it came to physical suffering. Perhaps it was something she had inherited from her mother, who had walked out on her husband and child when Jane was only six because—according to Mark Sherwood—‘She didn’t have the guts to make a go of it. Typical woman—would rather snivel and run away than stand up for herself when the going gets tough.’

‘Why should the pain get worse?’ she asked the doctor warily.

‘The most likely reason is because the strapping is too tight. But...sometimes, if there are complications and the bone doesn’t heal properly, we might have to ask an orthopaedic surgeon to operate. But it’s highly improbable in your case—unless you intend to try for another knockout!’

Jane ignored this tactless attempt at a joke and studied her hand with its bulky wrapping. ‘Three weeks...’ she said gloomily.

‘Look on the bright side—at least it’s your left hand,’ he said.

Jane looked up at him. ‘I’m left-handed.’

‘Oh. Bad luck. What kind of work do you do?’

‘At the moment, none at all.’

He quickly recovered his irritating bounce. ‘Good. That’s good! It means you can rest that hand—’

‘It means I can starve,’ she corrected him. ‘If I don’t find a job soon I won’t be able to pay for food and rent, let alone medical bills.’

He put his hands up. ‘Hey, don’t shoot—this is covered by Accident Compensation; you’ll hardly have anything to pay. What kind of job are you looking for? What sort of qualifications do you have?’

If Jane hadn’t been tired, hungry and scraped raw by the previous night’s encounter she might have been amused at being patronised by an earnest young man no older than herself who was probably scarcely out of medical school.

‘Managerial,’ she said tersely. ‘But the sort of positions I’m interested in seem few and far between these days.’

Especially with Ryan Blair handing her the modern equivalent of the Black Spot—a red-flagged credit-rating.

‘So I’ve lowered my sights and lined up a few interviews for office jobs, sales, temping...the kind of thing that requires a certain manual dexterity, or at least an ability to write...’

‘You can still use a keyboard—’

‘Not very efficiently.’ She shrugged. ‘If I was doing the hiring I probably wouldn’t give me a job. You don’t take on someone if there’s a chance they’ll be applying for sick leave before they even get started!’

‘What about Social Welfare; will they help?’

She sighed, beginning to think that pride was another luxury she would have to learn to do without. ‘I’m involved in some heavy-duty financial wrangling...I’m not eligible for any government assistance until it’s straightened out.’

‘You’re certainly eligible for support payments if your injury prevents you from working,’ said the doctor, scribbling on his pad. ‘They’ll pay you a percentage of your weekly earnings averaged out over the past year. I’ll get the receptionist to give you an application form before you leave...’

Jane muttered an agreement as she accepted the prescription he had scrawled out, not wanting to get into a prolonged discussion of her depressing situation. The problem was she hadn’t earned any income in the last twelve months. So desperate had been the situation at Sherwood Properties that she had waived her salary and ploughed it back into the business, living off her various platinum credit cards in the expectation of better times ahead.

Over the next few days Jane saw several opportunities that she had managed to set up slip out of her bandaged grasp, just as she had predicted to the young doctor. She had done everything right—dressing smartly, if incredibly slowly, getting Collette to put her hair into its customary sleek roll, checking out the buses to make sure she wouldn’t be late for the widely dispersed interviews and presenting a pleasant, quietly confident demeanour no matter what the provocation. From her shrewd observations two of the rejections were genuine declines, the other three were because of her identity.

On the way back to the city bus terminal one lunchtime, aware of an empty afternoon stretching ahead of her, Jane impulsively called into the first employment bureau she had registered with, and the owner—a bluff, straightforward woman whom Jane knew slightly from her former life—was quietly blunt.

‘I’m telling you this, Jane, because I think it’s unfair for you to waste any more of your time...but I’ll deny every word I say outside this office. A bureau like mine depends on a lot of repeat business from the big companies. If we don’t deliver what the clients want and cater to their every whim someone else will get the business. The truth is, if I place Jane Sherwood in a job right now I risk losing several lucrative contracts, and I’m not prepared to do that. It’s probably the same at other agencies. There’s a lot of influence at work. I’m afraid you’re very much on your own...’

So what else is new? thought Jane that night as she decided on an omelette for dinner. The harsh reality was that she had always been more or less on her own. Even when her father had been alive their relationship had been more competitive than supportive.

A job wasn’t even her top priority any more. She had to move out in three days and she still hadn’t found a place to live.

There was a knock on the door and she nearly dropped an egg. It was the mousey man from the flat on the other side of Collette.

‘Telephone for you.’

‘Oh, thanks.’ She gave him a grave smile and nipped out into the hall, still holding the egg, to where the receiver dangled on its long grimy cord from the battered wall-phone. Eagerly she tipped the egg into the shallow cup of her bandaged hand and picked up the gently swinging receiver. ‘Hello?’

‘Miss Sherwood?’

Only one man said her name with that particular blend of menacing sibilance.