Mistress Of The Groom

by Susan Napier

  But that was purely wishful thinking. The twenty-year-old scar that she had ripped open when she had sabotaged Ryan’s wedding could never be fully healed. To Ryan, she would always be the daughter of the man who had murdered his father.

  Oh, Mark Sherwood hadn’t wielded a knife or a gun, but the impact of his actions on his victim had been ultimately just as fatal as a killing blow.

  True to her word, Jane hadn’t been shocked by the tale of a crooked home-building deal which Mark Sherwood had set up two decades before; she knew all too well that her father had had little respect for the law where it interfered with his own interests and protected ‘fools and losers’.

  By his definition Charles Blair would have been a loser, even though as a carpenter and builder he had built up a respectable business, because Ryan’s father had been too honest to take his profits and run when the deal had inevitably collapsed. Instead he had tried to honour the promises he had made. As a result he had been bankrupted, and his reputation and means of livelihood destroyed when rumours that he had been using substandard building materials began to circulate. In desperation he had naïvely confronted Mark Sherwood, pleading for help, and Jane’s father had laughed in his face, threatening to produce documentary evidence that it was Charles’s embezzling that had caused the scheme to fail.

  Charles Blair had died not long afterwards, electrocuted in his home workshop, and rumours of suicide had thrown further shadows over his blackened reputation. His pregnant wife and thirteen-year-old son had been left homeless and destitute after the debts that he had assumed responsibility for had been paid.

  While Mark Sherwood had gone on to build a financial empire on his ill-gotten gains, Charles’s widow had been trapped in a cycle of poverty, supporting her son and new baby daughter in a hand-to-mouth existence, taking menial positions because of her lack of qualifications and often working two jobs to make ends meet. She was now remarried, but for fourteen years she had struggled alone, haunted by her husband’s undeserved legacy of shame, watching her son grow from a secure little boy into an angry young man who had sworn that one day he would be rich and powerful enough to destroy the company that had been built on the ruins of his father’s honour.

  But by the time Ryan had amassed a sufficient fortune and manoeuvred himself into a position to put his vengeful plan into action Mark Sherwood had been a dying man, no longer at the helm of Sherwood Properties. Unwilling to cause the innocent to suffer for someone else’s crimes, as he and his family had unjustly suffered, Ryan had reluctantly curbed his lust for revenge...until Jane had proved herself as treacherous, deceitful and lacking in moral conscience as her father.

  Jane shivered as the breeze whipped across the porch and she turned to enter the shabby kitchen.

  She had never had a chance. As soon as Ryan had been once more in a position to attack he had done so without hesitation and without mercy—and who could blame him?

  Not Jane.

  That was why she couldn’t believe that Ryan really wanted her in his life, except as the crowning achievement of his search for natural justice. Maybe it wasn’t even conscious. Maybe he genuinely thought that the attraction that had flared between them was worth burying his resentment to explore. But Jane didn’t flatter herself that she was so special that he could be persuaded to permanently relinquish the jealously guarded bitterness that had shaped his ambition.

  No, it was more likely that by making her his mistress he would be completing his revenge. He couldn’t make Mark Sherwood suffer, but he could spit on his grave by stamping both his company and his daughter as his own personal possessions.

  Jane had spent too much of her girlhood loving a man who had been incapable of appreciating the preciousness of her gift. She had no intention of wasting her adulthood in the same way.

  So, like the coward that she was, she had let Ryan leave the hotel that morning confident of his impression that she would fall in with his arrangements. Then, sitting on the unmade hotel bed in her tacky green dress, she had picked up the telephone and reluctantly called Ava.

  And, to her surprise, found her secret bolt-hole.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FOR breakfast Jane boiled herself an egg obligingly laid by one of the clutch of bantam hens that scratched a living in the bach’s huge back yard and set the kettle on top of the wood-burning stove. As she ate at the scrubbed kitchen table she inhaled the rich, yeasty scent of baking bread that swelled out of the oven.

  In two short weeks she had come to greatly appreciate the simple pleasures of life, just as she had begun to enjoy the challenge of bringing domestic order to the chaos that had greeted her on arrival.

  Ava, who had inherited the run-down property only a few weeks previously on the death of a curmudgeonly great-aunt, had told Jane that she could have the place as long as she needed it. She had warned her that a real-estate agent had told them they wouldn’t be able to rent the house out anyway, until it was cleaned up and repaired, so that the living might be rough, but Jane had grabbed at the chance to do something useful in her self-imposed exile, offering to earn her keep by giving the place a thorough clean-out and making a list of the maintenance work that was beyond the capabilities of her limited handyman skills.

  Not that she needed to earn her keep, for Ava had insisted that she and her husband already owed Jane more than they could ever repay. She had been understandably shocked by Jane’s telephone call begging for help in finding an inexpensive place to hide, for she had had no idea that her friend’s recent business problems had become so extreme, nor that they were directly related to Ryan Blair.

  Ava and Conrad Martin had moved to Wellington shortly after their wedding, and their decision to settle a comfortable few hundred kilometres away from Ava’s interfering parents had enabled Jane to make light of the catastrophic impact that Ryan’s return to Auckland had had on her life. She had seen no point in upsetting Ava when there was nothing that she could do to help.

  Conrad, who was a mechanic looking to own his own workshop, was too proud—or too wise—to accept financial assistance from his in-laws, so the couple, already with two young children to support, were in no position to rush to Jane’s aid either physically or financially. And, anyway, Jane had promised herself three years ago that she would never raise the spectre of the past as a test of their continuing friendship.

  Making that phone call was the hardest thing that she had ever done, but fortunately, and somewhat unexpectedly, Ava had risen magnificently to the occasion. She had instantly acceded to Jane’s strained plea that she ask no questions—even though she had obviously been bursting with curiosity—so Jane didn’t have to tell any awkward lies. To admit that she had become enmeshed in Ryan’s vengeful toils was one thing; to confess that she had also slept with Ava’s former fiancé was quite another!

  Even more fortunately, it turned out that Ava’s great-aunt Gertrude had harboured a distrust of authority, and had held gloomy opinions about the fate of civilisation that had turned her into something of a survivalist. Every bit of storage space in her house had been crammed with hoarded groceries and bulk supplies and there was a huge rambling vegetable patch which, along with the hens and fruit trees, supplied most of Jane’s dietary requirements.

  All she required to complete her self-sufficiency was a cow, thought Jane with a wry grin as she poured some of the hot water from the kettle over the dishes in a plastic bowl and the rest into a teapot. Milk and butter were the only staples she had to buy.

  Of course there were drawbacks to the simple life, especially to someone who had to cope with the inconveniences one-handed. Thankfully Ava had arranged for a relative of Conrad’s to give Jane and her cartons and plastic bags of possessions a lift out to Piha in his van, but once there she was effectively stranded by her need to eke out her funds for an indefinite period.

  There was an infrequent bus service to Auckland, but so far she hadn’t had to use it, and although the house was wired for electricity there was no p
hone, and Jane was minimising power bills by using the tilly lamps and candles that Great-Aunt Gertrude had stored in generous quantities.

  She had also turned off the hot-water cylinder, heating washing-up water on the wood stove in which she burned the rubbish she was gradually cleaning out of the crammed rooms and blessing the balmy summer as she took refreshingly cold showers. All Piha residences relied on tank water, so she was also careful to economise on her water usage, recycling washing water on the vegetable patch and placing a brick in the toilet cistern.

  At least she had one source of help to hand. Her present reading material was a number of battered ‘do-it-yourself’ books and old-fashioned housewifely tomes that she had found in a dusty carton under one of the sagging beds.

  Hence her fledgling bread-making skills. Jane glanced at the clock on the kitchen mantelpiece and decided it was time to see if she had yet conquered the problem of iron crusts. She opened the oven door and used a quilted oven-cloth to lift out the heavy loaf tin she had put in to bake while she went for her usual morning walk along the beach. Setting it carefully down on the work-scarred table, she pressed her finger into the raised crust, smiling at its springiness. Not perfect, but since she had been at Piha Jane had stopped trying to live up to impossible standards. She had even discovered that failing could be fun if you were willing to laugh at your mistakes instead of punishing yourself for them.

  ‘So this is your “better offer”!’

  Jane whirled, bumping the table with her hip, knocking the bread flying. Instinctively she reached out with her good hand to catch the tin before it hit the floor and spilled its contents, gaping at the man who filled the narrow doorway. Her confusion was such that it was several moments before she responded to the pain receptors screaming for attention. She yelped and threw the loaf back down on the table, gazing down at her seared palm in macabre fascination as a blister began to bubble up from the abused flesh.

  ‘What have you done?’ Ryan was by her side, his hand clamping on her wrist as he spun her over to the sink and turned on the cold tap, holding her hand steady under the gentle stream of water as he pushed in the plug.

  He made her stand there with her hand in the sinkful of water while he fetched the cellphone from his car and made a call to Dr Frey.

  ‘Yes. Yes, she does, doesn’t she? No, no skin broken—blisters, though, on her palm and the pads of her fingers. Yes. Fine—I can do that. Yes, yes I will. Thanks Graham—just add it to my bill.’

  As he flipped his portable phone closed and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans Jane, still leaning over the sink, said weakly, ‘You didn’t have to do that.’

  He should have looked less intimidating in casual clothes than he did in a suit, but somehow they just made him look tougher.

  ‘You should know by now that I never do anything because I have to,’ he told her. ‘How’s it feeling?’

  She grimaced. ‘Not too bad.’ It was only a half-lie— the cold water was having an anaesthetic effect on the fierce stinging. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That there might be some psychological reason you’re so accident-prone around me.’

  Jane swung to face him, sending splashes across the white polo shirt he wore under an unzipped navy cotton jacket. ‘I am not! It was your fault. You shouldn’t have crept up on me!’

  ‘That’s right, blame someone else for the trouble you’re in.’ He dunked her hand back in the water. ‘You need to keep it there for at least ten minutes to draw the heat out of the skin and ease the pain. Where’s your first-aid kit?’

  ‘I—I suppose there must be one around here somewhere,’ she said vaguely, fighting to think of something other than the solid warmth of his body as it had pressed against her spine. Why did he have to arrive when she was in shorts and a T-shirt with her hair scraped into a childish pony-tail?

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’ Ryan’s gaze swept disapprovingly around the cluttered kitchen, noting the holes in the discoloured linoleum floor and the crack in the window. His mouth thinned. ‘I’ve got one in the boot of the car. And here—sit down before you fall down!’

  He pushed one of the stout kitchen chairs up against the back of her knees and waited until she had slumped down on it before he slammed out of the door.

  Jane’s eyes began to sting in sympathy with the raw, stinging redness of her right hand. She had learned the value of a good cry since she had been down at Piha. There had been no need to keep a stiff upper lip when there had been no one around to jeer at her tears, so she had shamelessly indulged herself. In just two weeks she had cried out years of repressed emotion. The sense of release had been enormous and now she was finding it difficult to stuff all those wayward feelings back into the tight little box of self-control where they had always belonged.

  She was shivering when Ryan got back, and without a word he disappeared into the back rooms. He was gone for a few minutes and she could hear him poking around the chaos before he returned with a blanket which he tucked around her shoulders and over her bare knees. He made her try and take her hand out of the water several times before she could do so without an increase in pain. Then he sat her at the table and carefully dried off the affected area with sterile swabs and applied a large, dry non-stick dressing which he covered with a thick pad of cotton wool before bandaging it firmly.

  ‘You should have been a doctor,’ she joked into the thick silence as her slender hand was turned into an unwieldy fin. This was the second time he had handled her wounded person with a gentleness that belied his intimidating size and ruthless demeanour. In spite of the violence Ryan had brought into her life it wasn’t difficult to visualise him in the role of healer.

  He flashed her an unsmiling look. ‘I wanted to be, but we couldn’t have afforded what it would have cost to send me to med school. I went into the building sector because I needed to get a full paying job to help Mum out. She tried to be tough but she had health problems, and working at more than one job became too much for her. I didn’t do a formal apprenticeship because the wages were too low, but I learnt enough about all aspects of the building business to know a good deal when I saw one.’

  ‘Oh.’ So, he had become a successful, self-made tycoon, but it was because of her father that he hadn’t been able to pursue his original dream. That made two of them.

  ‘I wanted to become a dress designer,’ she blurted out, and immediately felt stupid. There was no comparison between being thwarted of entering a noble profession and one based on the frivolities of fashion.

  To her surprise he didn’t scoff. He glanced at her freshly scrubbed face, her plainness emphasised by the pale mouth and dragged back hair, the frowning expression. ‘So why didn’t you?’

  She shrugged and looked away from the fingers securing the bandage, ignoring a faint ringing in her ears. She had excelled at design classes at high school but had dropped them because of her father’s scorn of ‘soft’ subjects. Her artistic imagination had been stifled by years of trying to live up to what was expected of her, rather than asking herself what she wanted. But here at Piha the old, creative impulses had begun to stir again.

  ‘Because you didn’t have the guts to go against your father’s wishes in case he disinherited you?’ Ryan supplied when she didn’t answer.

  He was still kneeling by the chair, in the perfect position to see the flaring temper in her blue eyes before she abruptly doused it. ‘Yes, I suppose that was it,’ she said, her voice tight with the effort of not defending herself.

  ‘Or was he withholding something else you wanted even more?’ he asked softly, refusing to allow her to close herself off from him. ‘Like love... Was Jane Sherwood a poor little rich girl desperately trying to earn Daddy’s love...?’ His jeering grin burrowed under her control. ‘Or should I say a poor big rich girl...?’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ she snarled, embarrassed at the pathetic picture of herself he had sketched. That might have been her at sixteen, but at twenty-six she had a lot more confidence i
n herself.

  ‘Whatever else I might have wanted to do, I was damned good at managing Sherwood’s. It would have been a good career for me if you hadn’t come along and bulldozed it!’

  He got up. ‘That’s better. You were looking a little pale and shocky there for a moment. We’d better get some fluids into you.’

  Jane watched him pour the tea, moving about the kitchen as if it was his own, and suddenly remembered what she would have preferred to forget.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  He spooned several sugars into her cup, ignoring her protest that she didn’t like sweetened tea.

  ‘You made a toll call from the hotel room just after I left. It conveniently appeared on the printout that accompanied the receipt they posted me—time, duration and the number that you called. Certainly it proved more informative than that polite little note you sent to my office thanking me for my generosity but saying you preferred to accept another offer.’

  Jane put a bandaged hand over her mouth. She had forgotten about payment for the long-distance call. ‘Oh, God—you phoned the number—’

  ‘I find it astonishing that you’ve remained such good friends with the woman you humiliated and lied to at the altar, but then, as Ava said herself, she has a very forgiving nature. A pity she didn’t exhibit that forgiving side of herself where I was concerned...’

  He set the tea before her and poured a sugarless cup for himself as he sat down opposite. ‘She said you were more like sisters than friends, and sisters stick together even through the bad times—that once she knew the truth she accepted that you believed you were protecting her. Quite from what, she didn’t explain, but then she wasn’t very coherent...’

  Jane’s hand fell to the base of her throat in a classic gesture of shocked dismay. Poor Ava, she must have nearly had heart failure when she picked up the phone! And no wonder, if Ryan had wrapped his questions in those dark tones of silken suspicion.