She shook off the cruelly unproductive thoughts. ‘I just wish that Simon wasn’t coming back so soon and whisking you both so far away,’ she said lightly.
‘We’re only moving to Bangkok—not the moon,’ Robyn chided her bracingly. Simon, who worked for a multinational chemical company, was being transferred to Thailand to help build a new manufacturing plant. While he had flown out there to meet his new boss, choose their company-paid accommodation and register Bethany to attend the local International School, his wife and daughter had been packing up and selling their Auckland home and arranging to ship their belongings.
‘We get an annual home-leave, and, anyway, I hope you’ll come up and have a holiday with us. You did say that Westons had some huge contract in the offing that might let you give up your day job!’
Rachel gave a rueful laugh. Her work as a massage therapist and fitness trainer was actually carried out in the early morning or late afternoon and evening, so that she could devote the business hours to the security company which she had inherited from David. No one had been more astonished than herself when she had discovered that her fiancé of six months had altered his will to leave her not only his townhouse but also his fifty-one percent share of the security company which he and his brother Frank, a fellow ex-policeman, had bought.
Although Weston Security Services had possessed a loyal core of clients at the time of David’s death, it had also been carrying a heavy debt-load, and at first, woefully aware of her ignorance, Rachel had been content to remain a silent partner. But as the business had continued to struggle she had realised that it would be a betrayal of David’s trust to watch his cherished dream die without lifting a finger to help.
It hadn’t been an investment that he had given her in his will so much as a part of himself. She might doubt herself, but David had always had faith in her ability to tackle new challenges. To that end she had used her stake in the company to persuade Frank to give her an active role in managing the business. She had waived a salary, preferring to see the money invested in new staff and equipment, and lived off her freelance earnings from two city gyms and a physiotherapy practice.
It had been a steep learning curve, and although Rachel had made plenty of mistakes, her hands-on method of training wasn’t proving the disaster that Frank had feared it would be. In the last few months the company turn-over had shown a promising improvement, but a balloon repayment was looming on the loan, and meeting the debt was largely reliant on a major corporate contract which Frank seemed to be confident was already in the bag. Rachel was not so sanguine.
‘I think it’ll be a while before I can afford to do that,’ she sighed. ‘Frank says that trust and respect build slowly in the security business, and being a woman in a male-dominated industry makes it that much more difficult to get accepted—’
She was interrupted as her sister took another surreptitious look at her watch and dashed for the door with a squawk of dismay.
Rachel returned to ripping open the zip-lock bag. Her birthday wasn’t far away, and she wondered with a lift of her spirits whether someone had sent her an early present.
Her eager anticipation drained abruptly away as she withdrew some photographs paper-clipped to the back of a scrawled note in green ink which slanted across the page, arrogantly ignoring the ruled lines. She washed down her disappointment with her rapidly cooling coffee as she scanned the jolting words.
Did you really think I would let you use me as your free ride to riches?
Of the two of us you’re obviously the more photogenic—a fact which I’m sure the tabloid press will be quick to exploit if these, or any even more explicit, are put into circulation. I always knew you were centrefold material, but while the resultant notoriety might well annoy me, it won’t destroy me. Unlike you. What will happen to Westons’ reputation for probity and discretion when your corporate clients find out that their security rests in the whip-hand of a blowsy, over-blown dominatrix who looks as if she’d be more at home in a brothel than a boardroom?
Sorry, doll.
You lose.
A mouthful of lukewarm coffee was stranded in her mouth as her throat clogged with shock. Her cup crashed down into its saucer as she unclipped the photographs and fanned them out in her hands like oversized cards.
‘Oh, God!’ She choked, spewing coffee droplets across the table in her spluttering horror, dropping the photographs as if they were hot coals.
‘Oh, God!’ Rachel’s horror deepened to bone-bruising humiliation, the outrageous insults in the note suddenly making sickening sense. There was no signature, but she didn’t need one. She knew instantly who to blame for the outrage.
She shuddered, pressing her shaking hands to hot cheeks as she looked down at the shameful photographs. Yes, she had knelt between his legs to unfasten his trousers…but this picture gave the impression that she had been—that she had done it in order to pleasure him. The heavy-lidded smile on his face certainly seemed to suggest that she’d been succeeding, whereas in reality she had been cursing a blue streak that his formal trousers had buttons rather than a zip—which she would have cheerfully used to castrate him! If he had gained any pleasure from what she had been doing, then it was purely his own warped mind that had created it.
And the other one—God!…that didn’t look anything like the way it had actually happened, either. Why—these pictures made her look as if she had been a willing participant in some kind of disgusting sexual perversion, rather than the good Samaritan which she had been dragooned into playing.
But good Samaritans didn’t roll around naked on a bed with those they rescued, the devil whispered in her ear.
Rachel shook her head, still dazed by the shock of seeing herself portrayed in the role of sexual predator. It was so fundamentally at odds with her character that it would almost be funny if it wasn’t so humiliating. The photographs were slanderously misleading. The circumstantial evidence might trumpet otherwise, but the situation had actually been completely innocent.
Well, perhaps not completely, she forced herself to admit as her mind replayed the images of that night. It had definitely not been her finest hour, but Matthew Riordan was to blame for everything that had happened. The whole un-savoury incident had been entirely his own fault!
So how dared he? How dared he now turn around and threaten to slander her with the evidence of his indiscretion! She had never said a word to anyone—not even Frank or Merrilyn—about what had happened that night after they had left the party. In spite of the pressure to gossip she had uttered not a single, solitary syllable. For his sake!
And this was how he repaid her for her kindness! One feeble bunch of flowers and this…this outrage!
The blood boiled in her veins as she looked at the note and one word suddenly jumped out at her. Blowsy. Blowsy?
Her hazel eyes turned a ferocious green. She could shrug off his groundless accusation that she belonged in a brothel as sheer malice, but how dared he call her blowsy? He hadn’t had any objections to her over-blown ‘centrefold’ of a body when he’d been begging her to make love to him, had he?
She was infuriated to feel her breasts tighten at the memory of his words, of the uninhibited way that he had expressed his desire as they had wrestled on the bed. As drunk as he’d been she had thought that he would be incapable of physical arousal, and hadn’t he taken great delight in proving her wrong! But then, maybe he hadn’t been quite so drunk as he had made out. Maybe it had all been a big act in order to lure her into just such a compromising position while some sleazy photographer snapped away from the closet.
Her eyes went unwillingly back to the most explicit photograph and hot chills fizzled in her belly. It was her body which was flaunted centre-stage, but no one could deny that Matthew Riordan made a pretty impressive supporting act. He wasn’t quite as tall as Rachel, but with his clothes off he had been larger than she had expected, in all ways…His lean body had a ripped quality, all muscle with little