by Penny Jordan
‘Of course it isn’t your fault. How could it be? I was the one... Tell me exactly what has happened, Anna.’
Anna took another deep breath.
‘Well, I did as you’d said, and I told Julian that I’d got fifty thousand pounds to invest and that I wanted a good return on it. He said he knew just the right kind of investment for me. He also suggested that we keep things very informal. He said that the deal he had in mind was an off-shore thing—something to do with Hong Kong—and he said that the less paperwork involved, the better the profit would be for both of us.
‘I did try to ring you to get your advice but you...’
‘I was in London on business. I know. I picked up your message, but even if I’d been here it wouldn’t have made any difference because I would most certainly have told you to go ahead.’
‘Well, I agreed to what Julian was suggesting and wrote him the cheque. I thought that the mere fact that it would have to go through my bank account and his would be proof that he had had the money. He said he’d be in touch. I hadn’t really intended to ring him at all—after all, it was only last week that I gave him the cheque—but then I bumped into Brough’s sister Eve with your cousin Harry and she just happened to mention that she had seen Julian at the airport. Apparently he was just getting out of a taxi as they were getting into one. She said that he didn’t see them and...
‘Anyway, I don’t know why, but I just got a feeling that something wasn’t quite right so I rang Julian. His telephone had been cut off and when I went round to his address his place was up to let. I tried his bank and all they would tell me was that they had no knowledge of his whereabouts. Brough’s made some enquiries, though, and he’s discovered that Julian has closed his account.
‘No one seems to know where he’s gone, Dee, or when he’s coming back and I’m very much afraid...’
‘That he won’t be coming back,’ Dee finished grimly for her.
‘I think you’re probably right, given what we know about his precarious finances. With fifty thousand pounds in his pocket he could quite easily have decided to cut his losses here, and dodge his debts, and simply start the whole dishonest game afresh somewhere else.’ Anna bit her lip.
‘Dee, I’m so sorry...’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Dee assured her immediately. ‘If anyone’s to blame, it has to be me.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Anna asked her anxiously.
‘What you are going to do is relax and stop worrying,’ Dee told her gently. ‘As for what I shall do...I’m not sure yet, Anna. God, but it makes me so angry to think he’s getting away with what he’s done absolutely scot-free. The man’s only a hair’s breadth away from being a criminal, if indeed he isn’t legally one, but it isn’t so much the actual money he’s cheated other people out of that—’
Dee broke off and Anna could hear the emotion in her husky voice as she continued shakily, ‘It’s the damage he’s done to other people, the hurt and harm he’s caused.’
‘Well, Beth seems to be recovering from her heartbreak over him now.’ Anna tried to console her.
‘Yes,’ Dee agreed. ‘But it isn’t just—’ She stopped abruptly, and not for the first time Anna had the distinct impression that there was much, much more to Dee’s determination to unmask Julian Cox than just the heartache he had caused Beth. She knew better than to pry, though. Dee was an extremely proud woman, and a rather vulnerable one behind that pride. If she wanted to confide in her Anna knew that she would do so, and until, or unless, she did so Anna felt that she had no right to probe into what she guessed was an extremely sensitive issue.
‘Perhaps Dee and Julian were an item once,’ Kelly had once mused to Anna when they were discussing the subject. ‘Perhaps he dropped her in the same way he did Beth.’
But Anna had immediately shaken her head in denial.
‘No. Never. Dee would never be attracted to a man like Julian,’ she had told Kelly firmly. ‘Never.’
‘No. No, you’re right,’ Kelly had agreed. ‘But there must be something.’
‘If there is and if she wants to tell us about it then I’m sure she knows she can,’ Anna had pointed out gently then, and a little shamefacedly Kelly had agreed that Dee was entitled to her privacy and her past.
‘Dee, I feel so guilty about your money,’ Anna repeated unhappily now. ‘I should have realised...suspected...’
‘There’s no way I want you to feel guilty, Anna. In fact...’
Dee paused and then continued quietly, ‘I rather suspected that something like this might happen, or I thought he might be tempted to try to abscond with the money. What I didn’t allow for was that he would do it so openly or so fast. You aren’t in any way to blame,’ she added firmly. ‘His situation must be even more desperate than I thought for him to have behaved so recklessly. After this there’s no way he can come back, not to Rye. No way at all.
‘What are you doing this weekend?’ Dee asked, changing the subject.
‘Nothing special. Beth’s going down to Cornwall to see her parents. Kelly and Brough are away. What about you?’
‘My aunt in Northumberland hasn’t been too well again so I’m going to go up and see her. Her doctor wants her to have an operation but she’s afraid that if she does she might not recover, so I thought I’d try to talk to her and make her see sense.’
‘Dee, do you think we’ll be able to track Julian down?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Dee told her soberly. ‘If I know Julian he’ll have gone somewhere where he can’t be touched by European law and it probably isn’t just our fifty thousand pounds he’s taken with him.’
For a long time after she had said goodbye to Dee and replaced her telephone receiver, Anna stood silently in her conservatory, ignoring the indignant miaows of her cat, Whittaker, as he wove round her legs. Beth’s mother, her cousin, had suggested that it was high time she paid a visit home to Cornwall. Perhaps she should, Anna acknowledged. The time was past now when the hurt of going back to the place she had once loved so much, knowing it had taken the life of the man she loved, had been too much for her to bear.
Their love had been a gentle, very young and idealistic kind of love, the intimacy between them a little awkward and hesitant, both of them learning the art of loving together, and what hurt more than anything else now was knowing that Ralph had never been allowed to reach his full potential, to grow from the boy he had in reality still been to the man he would have become.
She could barely remember now how it had felt to love him, how it had felt to be loved by him. Try as she might she could hardly conjure up now those nights they had lain in one another’s arms. They seemed to belong to a different life, a different Anna.
No, there was no reason really why she shouldn’t go back. She had forgiven the sea a long time ago for stealing her love. But had she forgiven herself for going on living without him?
She might not be able to recall his image very clearly any more but she could still vividly recall the look of anguish and resentment in his mother’s eyes on the day of his funeral. It had told her, without the words being spoken, how bitterly his mother resented the fact that she was still alive whilst her beloved son was dead. How distressed, how guilt-ridden that look had made Anna feel. Now her guilt was caused by the fact that her memories of Ralph and their love were so distant that they might have belonged to someone else. She had loved him, yes, but it had been a girl’s love for a boy. Now she was a woman, and if the vague but so sharply disturbing longings that sometimes woke her from her sleep were anything to go by she was increasingly becoming a woman whose body felt cheated of its rightful role, its capacity for pleasure, its need for love...
Anna drew in a distressed, sharp breath. She knew quite well that it was her ongoing training as a counsellor that was bringing to the fore all these unfamiliar and uncomfortable feeli
ngs, but that didn’t make them any easier to bear.
Watching as Brough kissed his fiancée, Kelly, she had actually experienced the most shockingly sharp pang of envy. Not because Brough loved Kelly. That couldn’t be the reason. Brough, much as she liked him, was simply not her type. No, her envy had been caused by the most basic feminine kind of awareness that her womanhood, her sexuality, was being deprived of expression.
But what did that mean? That she was turning into some kind of sex-starved middle-aged stereotype? Her body stiffened at the very thought, pride lifting her chin. That she most certainly was not. No way!
Her cat, seeing that his mistress wasn’t going to respond to his overtures, stalked away in indignation. As she continued to stare out of the window Anna’s soft blue-grey eyes misted a little.
At thirty-seven she still had the lithe, slender figure she had had at eighteen, and her hair was still as soft and silky, its honey-coloured warmth cut to shoulder-length now instead of worn halfway down her back. Ralph had used to run his fingers down its shiny length before he kissed her.
Anna gave a small, distraught shudder. What was the matter with her? She had met men, plenty of them—nice men, good men—in the years of her widowhood, and not once had she ever come anywhere near desiring any of them.
How irrational and unsolicited it was that her body should suddenly so keenly remember what desire was, how it felt, how it ached and urged, when her mind, her emotions, remained stubbornly resolute that they wanted no part in such a dangerous resurgence of her youthful sensuality.
‘Yes. I’m sorry, I’m coming,’ she acknowledged as Whittaker’s protesting wails suddenly intruded on her thoughts.
CHAPTER THREE
HUMMING EXULTANTLY BENEATH his breath, Ward checked the last signpost before his ultimate destination. Rye-on-Averton.
It sounded such a middle England, respectable sort of place, but at least one of its inhabitants was anything but honest and trustworthy.
He hadn’t been able to believe his luck when the agents he had employed had informed him that, whilst they could find no trace of Julian Cox, who according to their enquiries had, in fact, left the country and apparently disappeared, his partner, Anna Trewayne, had been traced to the small English town of Rye.
They had even been able to supply Ward with an address and a telephone number, as well as a considerable amount of other pertinent information about Ms Trewayne.
Widowed, childless, outwardly she appeared to live a life of almost boring propriety and respectability. Ward knew otherwise, of course. He could picture her now. She was in her late thirties and no doubt struggling to hold onto her youth. She probably possessed a certain amount of surface charm—a useful tool for helping to persuade vulnerable men to part with their money. Her make-up would be too heavy and her skirts too short. She would have sharp eyes and a keen interest in a man’s bank account and, of course, a very shrewd business brain—but not, it seemed, shrewd enough to warn her to do what her erstwhile partner had done and disappear whilst the going was good. Perhaps she even had plans to continue with their ‘business’ on her own.
Perhaps he was a chauvinist but for some reason Ward felt an even greater sense of revulsion and outrage towards the woman who had cheated his half-brother than he had done the man. An avaricious, heartless woman. Ward had a deep sense of loathing for the breed. His ex-wife had, after all, been one of them.
He dropped the speed of his powerful, top-of-the-range Mercedes to turn off the bypass and into the town.
Nestled in a pretty green valley, it had an almost picture-book quaintness. Mentally he compared it to the grimy, run-down, inner-city area where he had grown up and then grimaced. No haggard-faced, old-before-their-time, out-of-work men gathered on the corners of this place. No gangs of testosterone-driven youths with nothing in front of them, no way out of the underclass environment that trapped them, roamed these clean, tree-lined streets.
Ward saw a parking area up ahead of him alongside the river and he pulled into it. Time to study his map. As he switched off the engine he was conscious of the beginnings of a tension headache. He picked up the street directory map he had brought with him. A few seconds later Ward jabbed his forefinger triumphantly onto the map as he found the place he was looking for.
Anna Trewayne lived a little way out of town, her house solitary, without any neighbours, but then, no doubt, a woman of her ilk would not want the complications that curious neighbours could bring.
As he reversed his car back into the traffic Ward’s expression was bleak.
* * *
ANNA WAS IN the garden when Ward arrived, the sound of his car stopping on the gravel drive causing her to put down the basket she had been filling with flowers for the house and frown a little anxiously.
She wasn’t expecting any visitors, and the car, like the man emerging from it, was unfamiliar to her.
Expecting her visitor to announce himself at the front door, Anna turned to slip into the house through the still open conservatory door, but Ward just caught sight of her flurried movement out of the corner of his eye and, wheeling round, started to walk swiftly towards her, calling out to her, ‘Just a minute, if you please, Mrs Trewayne; I want a word with you.’
Instinctively Anna panicked. Both the way he was walking and the tone of his voice were distinctly threatening and she started to run towards the protection of the conservatory, but she wasn’t quite fast enough and Ward caught up with her just as she reached the door, grabbing hold of her wrist in a grip that almost made her flinch at its strength.
‘Let me go... I...I have a dog...’ Anna told him, issuing the first threat that came into her mind, but just as she felt his grip starting to slacken Missie came trotting round the corner, her small, furry body quivering with welcome as she rushed happily towards Anna’s captor.
‘So I see,’ he agreed sardonically. He started to lift his free hand and immediately Anna reacted, her fear for her little dog far, far greater than her fear for herself.
‘Don’t you dare hurt her,’ she told him fiercely, holding out her own free arm protectively to Missie.
The little dog, a bundle of white fluff, had been a rescue dog, bought as a puppy and then abandoned when the family who’d owned her had decided that her small, sharp teeth were doing too much damage to their home.
Anna had taken her in, trained and loved her, and Missie adored her.
Ward frowned his surprise. Odd that a woman of her type should ignore her own danger just to protect her dog. Not that he had intended to hurt the little creature, and Missie seemed to know it.
Ignoring her mistress’s frantic attempts to shoo her away, she was happily investigating the stranger’s shoes, and then, as Ward extended his hand towards her, she jumped up and licked it, wagging her small tail approvingly.
‘Look, I don’t know who you are or what you want,’ Anna began nervously, ‘but—’
‘But you do know Julian Cox, don’t you?’ Ward slipped in quietly.
‘Julian.’ Anna went pale. Was this man someone Julian had sent to demand more money from her? Had he perhaps guessed what they were doing?
As he watched the blood drain from her face Ward experienced a disturbingly unfamiliar—and unwanted—sensation. All right, she might not look anything like he had imagined. Her skirt was calf-length, all soft and floaty, and as for her make-up—well, she had to be wearing some, surely? No woman of her age could have such a soft, pink, kissable-looking mouth naturally, could she? And her hair had to be dyed, he decided triumphantly, whilst as for that air of frightened vulnerability she was projecting—well, that was, no doubt, as false as the colour of her hair.
‘Don’t bother lying to me,’ Ward announced sternly. ‘I know you know him and know something else as well. I know just what the pair of you have been up to...’
‘Th
e p-pair of us...?’ Anna repeated, stammering a little. ‘I...’
‘I’ve got the evidence here,’ Ward told her curtly, releasing Anna’s wrist as he reached into the inside pocket of his suit.
As she rubbed her tender wrist Anna wished that she had the courage to risk slamming the conservatory door and locking him on the outside of it, but a quick, fleeting glance at him warned her of the danger of doing anything so reckless. For a start there was the size of him. He was...he was huge, she decided. So tall, over six feet, and so...so big. Not fat...no, not that. She could feel her face growing hot as her feminine instincts conveyed the message to her that the male body, under its quietly dignified suiting, owed its size to hard-packed male muscle and the kind of physique one might normally associate with a man who spent a lot of his time working physically hard. His hair was thick and dark brown, tinged unexpectedly with gold at the ends where the sun had caught it, giving him an almost leonine look.
‘This is you, isn’t it?’ he demanded as he turned the paper he was holding towards Anna, jabbing his forefinger at a name printed on it.
Anna’s eyes widened as she saw that it was her own.
‘Yes. Yes...it is...’ she admitted, her face burning hotly as she saw from the look he was giving her that he hadn’t, after all, missed the discreet female inspection she had been giving him. Trying to ignore him, she forced herself to read the document. What on earth was it?
Anna blinked and stared hard at what he was holding, her heart starting to pound heavily. In front of her on the paper she could see her own name quite plainly, and just as plainly beneath it was written the word ‘partner.’ What on earth did it mean? Why on earth had Julian Cox untruthfully and surely illegally claimed her as his partner? Anna had no idea. All she could assume was that he had done it because he’d felt it added weight and credibility to whatever he had been planning. Or had he perhaps known that something like this could happen and, in that knowledge, had deliberately set her up to act as a fall guy? Anna wondered queasily. He was, she knew, perfectly capable of that kind of deliberately dishonest behaviour.