The Mistress Deception

by Susan Napier

  Rachel spun around to stare in guilty horror at the man who had prowled silently up behind her. There was a muted fury in the chocolate-brown eyes as he looked from the envelope in his hand to her stricken face.

  ‘Oh, Matt, there you are!’ said his mother happily. ‘Do you know Miss Blair, too?’

  Matthew showed his teeth. ‘Intimately.’

  His mother looked startled at the throaty purr, and Rachel flushed, edging back as he deliberately invaded her personal space.

  ‘She was just telling me she’s come to see how your dad is…’

  ‘Was she?’ Matthew’s cynical murmur made Rachel scramble to correct Mrs Riordan’s flattering misconception.

  ‘Actually, I’m—I was—’

  ‘Making a special delivery?’ Matthew suggested, saluting her with a taunting flick of the envelope now in his possession. In the austere grey suit and plain blue shirt and tie he presented a picture of civilised menace that made her nerves twitch.

  ‘Just passing…’ she finished lamely, casting Mrs Riordan an unconsciously pleading look.

  ‘I’ve brought all the morning mail from home, Matt.’ His mother showed him the rest of the collection in her hand. ‘I thought it might give your dad a nice boost to see some of the cards and letters that people have sent, wishing him well.’

  ‘Is that what this is, Rachel?’ asked Matthew silkily, turning over the envelope in his manicured hands. ‘Greetings from a fond well-wisher?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she said, grateful for his mother’s restraining presence.

  Her gratitude was premature.

  ‘Really? I thought you were a woman who liked to always be on top of everything,’ he said in that same low drawl. ‘A lady who prefers to be in a controlling position in all her dealings—holding the whip hand over the rest of us, so to speak…’

  Rachel glared levelly at him, her firm jaw clamped shut to contain her outrage. He was blatantly admitting it! He was virtually boasting about what he had done, in front of his own mother!

  Thankfully Mrs Riordan was looking curious but unenlightened by his innuendo-laden comments.

  ‘Goodness, it sounds positively frightening,’ she said innocently. ‘What is it you do, exactly, Miss Blair?’

  Rachel told her about Weston Security. Trying to keep her attention on the conversation was extremely difficult with Matthew subtly crowding her on the physical as well as psychological front. Her skin goose-pimpled where the polished fabric of his jacket sleeve brushed her bare arm too often for it to be accidental, and if she turned her head even slightly in his direction her senses swam with a heady masculine scent which struck a disturbing chord in her memory.

  ‘How fascinating! It must be a very exciting field.’ Mrs Riordan’s enthusiasm had the ring of genuine interest. ‘I suppose you need a lot of experience?’

  ‘Oh, Rachel is a highly experienced woman,’ supplied Matthew laconically. ‘She omitted to tell you that she also works as a masseuse, and I can personally testify that she’s extremely exciting in the field!’

  This piece of loaded sexual innuendo did not slip by unnoticed. ‘Matt!’ His mother’s pained surprise was a parental rap across the knuckles.

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Riordan.’ Rachel seized the chance to get some of her own back. ‘I’d already come to the conclusion before today that your son wasn’t spanked enough as a child.’

  His eyebrows rose above the wafer-thin tortoiseshell frames. ‘Are you offering to put me over your knee, Mistress Blair?’

  ‘Matt!’

  This time they both ignored his mother’s faint protest.

  ‘It would be a wasted effort—you’re obviously beyond any hope of redemption,’ snapped Rachel.

  ‘Is there ever any redemption to be gained through violence? And isn’t spanking considered a form of child abuse these days? Some mother you’d make…’

  Her eyes became molten pools of gold as his casual thrust penetrated deep into her guarded heart. Her hands and feet felt icy while her head swam.

  I’d make a wonderful mother, she wanted to scream back at him. I did make a wonderful mother…I did everything that a mother is supposed to do for her baby—suffered the pain, made the sacrifices, and created something supremely good out of a nightmare of hatred and fear…

  Shaken by the wounding ease with which he had pierced her defences, Rachel smothered the painful gush of bitter memories and lifted her chin, offering him a sullen, stoic stare so different from her usual antagonistic challenge that his expression sharpened with predatory interest.

  ‘Mum, why don’t you take those letters along to show Dad?’ he said suddenly, not taking his eyes off Rachel’s pale mask of self-control. ‘The cardiac surgeon is still with him, so you can ask him all the questions we were talking about last night…’

  Was this where he had been off to the previous evening? Rachel lacerated herself for overlooking the obvious. Some detective she was!

  ‘Are you ordering me to run along?’ Mrs Riordan’s wry question showed that she was no fool.

  Matthew turned a sweet smile on his mother that made Rachel catch her breath. This was Mrs Riordan’s ‘sensitive little boy’ in the full glory of his maturity. ‘Would you mind? I’ve already had a good chat to Dad. Rachel is too shy to admit it, but she’s actually here to see me…’

  ‘Oh?’ Dorothy Riordan raised pale, pencilled eyebrows.

  ‘Yes, she and I have some…’ He paused delicately, sliding his hand down Rachel’s forearm and entwining his warm fingers firmly with hers, stiffening his arm in order to hold them shoulder to shoulder as he looked into her flaring eyes. ‘Unfinished business…’

  ‘Oh, I see…’

  ‘What did you have to say it like that for?’ Rachel rounded on him as soon as his mother was out of earshot. ‘You know what she thinks now, don’t you?’

  ‘That we have some business to conduct?’

  ‘The only business implied by that suggestive little act of yours is monkey business!’ she snapped.

  ‘Better she thinks that than realises the truth,’ he returned with a bite. Jerking her by the hand, he began marching her back down the corridor.

  ‘What truth?’ Rachel scorned to fight his hold, defiantly matching him stride for stride.

  ‘That you’re willing to risk my father’s life to make a cheap score!’

  ‘What?’

  He suddenly stopped, pushed open a door that was slightly ajar and nudged her into a small room lined with crowded shelves. So distracted was she by his outrageous claim that she didn’t realise what was happening until it was too late.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she screeched as he kicked the door shut behind them. Her shoulder bumped against a shelf of folded sheets as she hastily tried to widen the distance between them in the narrowly confined space. The overhead light threw Matthew’s grim face into harsh relief as she protested shrilly, ‘This is a supply cupboard!’

  ‘I stand in awe of your powers of deduction,’ he sneered, leaning back against the door as he tore open the envelope in his hand.

  ‘That was addressed to your father, not you!’ she accused.

  ‘And what is it you’re so keen for him to see? Ahh, what have we here? Another episode of the Lifestyles of the Sick and Shameless?’ He flashed her a familiar set of images and she sucked in an appalled breath.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ She raised her bewildered gaze to his.

  ‘You bitch!’ He exploded away from the door. ‘You had to keep turning the screws, didn’t you? Even when you knew it wasn’t going to get you what you wanted!’

  She cracked her elbow on a ledge as he backed her into the nest of shelves in the corner. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  He brandished the photographs under her nose. ‘You were trying to foist these on a sick man—’

  She shook her head in confusion. ‘I wasn’t—’

  ‘The hell you weren’t!’ He slammed his hands flat down on the s
helves on either side of her hips, his breath hot on her face. ‘I saw you handing them to Mum. If I hadn’t stopped you she’d probably have taken them in and opened them in front of Dad.’

  ‘But I had nothing to do with those.’

  His eyes flamed behind their twin shields of precision glass. ‘So you’re a liar as well as being malicious!’

  The slap resounded as a sharp echo in the small room and Rachel watched in awful fascination as the white outline of her palm on his lean cheek filled up with blood. For a moment there was no sound but their mutually quickened breathing.

  ‘You looking to get physical with me?’ he growled, leaning closer.

  In the space between one heartbeat and the next his anger ripened into a different kind of passion.

  ‘I thought you only did that with men who were tied down…’

  Rachel’s body throbbed in recognition of his excitement, her skin drawing tight over her flesh, her breasts aching with the memory of what it felt like to be fondled in his eager hands. She remembered the smooth glide of his glossy skin, the hard flex of his muscles, the soft abrasion of hair on his thighs, the way his hips had surged between her spread legs. A soft, liquid warmth burst inside her belly and she shuddered.

  ‘Take your hands off me!’

  ‘I’m not touching you,’ he pointed out hoarsely, and she realised to her mortification that it was true. The tension that had underpinned their every encounter was suddenly laid starkly bare.

  She flushed.

  ‘How dare you get all self-righteous with me?’ she panted. ‘You were the one who opened up this particular Pandora’s box. You can’t blame me if the evils you let loose have come back to haunt you!’

  He was studying her mouth as it moved, and she knew from the sultry, bitter-chocolate gaze that it wasn’t her words in which he was interested.

  ‘The only thing that’s been haunting me is you,’ he murmured. ‘The memory of the touch and taste and smell of you…so real and yet so elusive. If it wasn’t for the pictures I might have believed it was all some wild dream…like the ones that I’ve been having nightly ever since…’

  His meaning sank like warm honey into her bones. She thought of all the nights that she had woken, hot and sweaty, from a faceless demon lover’s embrace; but faceless only because she had resolutely refused to see.

  ‘Stop looking at me like that!’ she demanded weakly, her bag sliding unnoticed off her shoulder to slump limply to the floor.

  ‘Like what?’

  She turned her head aside from the erotic intensity of his stare and felt his breath moist in her ear, feathering up into her hair as he leaned even closer, his legs crowding against hers, his tie sliding against the front of her tunic, settling lightly between her breasts. ‘Like what, Rachel? Tell me…how do I look at you?’ he asked as she tried to hold herself rigidly aloof from the tumult of fire in her blood.

  He nuzzled at the point of her jaw just below her ear and licked a hot trail back up to her soft lobe.

  ‘How do I look? As if I want to eat you?’ He nipped at the succulent flesh, keeping it captive between his teeth as she arched her neck away, then releasing it to press his open mouth into the sensitive hollow between the stem of her neck and her collarbone and drink in the taste and texture of her skin. ‘That’s because I do! God, how can someone so bad taste so damned good…?’ he groaned.

  Since she was fifteen Rachel’s worst nightmare had been to find herself pinned down by superior strength, trapped and helpless against a greedy male assault. But where was the revulsion, the fear and the fury to defend herself now? She was rendered helpless—not by the violence of Matthew’s sexual need, but the uncontrollable desires that raced recklessly through her own veins.

  Her hands, which should have been groping for a way to swiftly incapacitate him, were instead sliding around his waist underneath his jacket, her arms slowly contracting until her breasts were crushing satisfyingly tight against his crisp cotton shirt-front. Her knee, which should have been aimed in a punishing jab between his legs, was instead obeying a more primal instinct, slowly rubbing up and down the outside of his thigh as he worked his lower torso deeper into the fork of her body.

  His hair, soft and fragrant with natural musk, brushed her nose and cheek as his marauding mouth strayed over her throat, her chin, her cheekbones, her eyes, everywhere but where she desperately wanted it to be…Reason spun beyond her reach as she relinquished her fragile grasp on reality and cast herself adrift on a storm-tossed sea of pure emotion.

  ‘Matt…’ She tunnelled her hands up between his shoulder blades and raked her trim nails all the way down the length of his back, hard enough for him to feel the sharp scrape through the polished cotton.

  He arched and shuddered, sensation pooling at the base of his spine and spilling over into his loins. ‘Witch…!’ His hands, which had been gripping the edges of the shelf in a futile attempt at self-control, swooped down to her flanks, smoothing up her thighs and over her womanly hips, tracing the rounded shape of her full bottom through the filmy skirt, snagging his fingers in the soft gathers as he kneaded her against his growing hardness.

  Thready gasps mingled with whispered sighs and the rustle of cloth as their mutual excitement exploded into hungry passion. And still he had not kissed her…!

  Matthew’s rough-shaven jaw rasped tantalisingly across Rachel’s soft lips, and with a stifled sound of frustration she clenched her hands in his thick dark hair, holding his head still so that she could at last find the intimacy that she craved. He resisted only long enough to wrench off his spectacles and shove them blindly into his jacket pocket, then his mouth was settling hotly over hers.

  It was everything she had wished, everything her dream had promised…sinfully sweet and deliciously devouring; steamy, wet and wonderful. Her breasts grew heavy and her limbs weighted as his tongue stroked inside her, limber and strong, sliding against the slippery surfaces of her mouth, exploring the ripples in her arched palate and delving into the silky recesses beneath her tongue. He kissed and withdrew, kissed and withdrew, biting and sucking at her lips with each lingering withdrawal and slanting his head to make each invasion different…deeper, slower, longer…more flagrantly erotic…

  She revelled in the straining tension of Matthew’s body, time ceasing to matter as she felt his hands begin to move up her body, massaging it through the thin silk. When he came to her breasts, and found her nipples barricaded behind a wall of impenetrable lace, he uttered a whispered curse and kissed her with a punishing force that she returned in glorious measure, sinking her teeth into his lower lip and reaching down to draw teasing fingers across the taut bulge at the front of his trousers.

  A rattle on the door-handle was all the warning they received as a freckle-faced young nurse suddenly invaded their illusion of privacy. They wrenched apart, far too late for any polite pretence as to what they’d been doing.

  ‘Er…I just came in to get an extra pillow for a patient,’ the nurse stammered, her eyes rounding at the sight of their flushed faces and rumpled clothes. Matthew recovered first, reaching up to pull one off the shelf just above them.

  ‘Here, have this one.’ His reddened mouth curved sardonically. ‘We certainly weren’t going to need it.’

  He made it sound as if they had been about to make love standing up! Although goodness knows how far things would have gone if they hadn’t been interrupted, Rachel was forced to concede. With a muffled sound of horror she noticed the photographs which Matthew had knocked off the shelf face-up under her feet, and bent to snatch them up, shielding them with her bulky bag.

  ‘Thanks.’ The nurse hugged the pillow to her breast as she backed towards the door, summoning the courage to venture, ‘Umm…you’re really not supposed to be doing—uh—what you’re doing in here, you know…’

  ‘Honey,’ growled Matthew, ‘we’re not supposed to be doing it anywhere!’

  ‘She probably thinks we’re a pair of guilty adulterers,’ Rachel com
plained as they beat a hasty retreat. This time it didn’t matter if she took the lift. She had already been thoroughly rumbled.

  ‘Or a brother and sister,’ he said, replacing his glasses as they stepped into the empty lift.

  She looked at him in disgust, trying not to remember that only minutes ago she had been wax in his arms. ‘Trust you to think of something perverted!’

  He straightened his tie. ‘I’m sure you could match me in perversity. We do seem to be making a habit of being caught in flagrante delicto.’ He looked at her with a smile of grim satisfaction. ‘And this latest incident certainly alters the stakes between us, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the blackmail game seems a little unproductive. I think I’m ready to graduate to something more…stimulating.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Rachel, already guessing from his dangerous expression that she was going to hate his answer.

  ‘Like kidnapping!’

  CHAPTER SIX

  RACHEL’S fingers hovered over the electronic box set flush into the white plaster wall, itching to try out the keypad. Birthdate? Wedding day?

  ‘Forget it. It’s tamper-proof.’

  She whirled around as Matthew came up the internal staircase from his triple garage, carrying the by now crumpled photographs he had removed from her bag. She’d thought she had escaped him when she had broken away and made a dash for her car in the hospital car park, cramming her key into the nearside passenger door. But Matthew had foiled her by making an eye-opening leap across the sloping bonnet, sledding across the polished paintwork on his backside to land lightly on the other side and whip himself into the driver’s seat in the time it took her to get inside.

  ‘I always wanted to do that!’ he had crowed smugly, plucking her keys from her frozen hand.

  ‘You can’t do this!’ she spluttered, as he drove out of the car park with a cheerful wave of recognition to the amused security guard.

  ‘I just did,’ he pointed out, flicking on an indicator as he followed the sign for the motorway.