by Lynne Graham
‘I don’t care if you’ve got your entire filing cabinet in your pocket!’ Lily slung back an entire octave higher, her temper flaring without warning because nothing he had said or done since the helicopter had landed had made sense to her. ‘I have photographs of the villas when they were almost complete and the view from the front of the villas was fantastic…there was no wretched coalmine in it!’
‘You couldn’t possibly have photographs.’ Rauf subjected her to a raking appraisal, furious at her stubborn refusal to stop lying even in the face of the overwhelming evidence confronting her.
The driveway had petered out on the brow of the hill, Lily noted somewhat belatedly. A driveway that led to nowhere and nothing? In the act of fumbling in her bag for the wallet of photos that Hilary had told her Brett had brought back from his final visit to Turkey the previous winter, Lily stilled in momentary bewilderment to scan the empty, overgrown ground surrounding her on all sides.
Suddenly Lily laughed, relief coiling through her. ‘There are no villas here even to make a mistake about! Why won’t you just admit that we’re in the wrong place?’
While Rauf continued to watch her much as though she had made a sudden claim that she could fly without wings, Lily walked over to him with some satisfaction to extend the photos. ‘Our villas, Rauf.’
In seething frustration, Rauf gave the half dozen snaps a cursory appraisal. ‘Which proves what, Lily? That someone with a camera can take pretty pictures of someone else’s building site? Now either you start telling the truth or I let the police handle this investigation.’
Freezing where she stood at that threat, Lily gazed back at him wide-eyed. ‘The…police?’
‘Harris Travel ripped off the local builders and suppliers. The builders were given a fake name and address for the firm and a fake phone number.’
Pale as she stood there under the relentless sun, a trickle of nervous perspiration running down between her breasts, Lily parted her soft lips, but it was a second or two before her voice picked up sufficient strength to emerge. ‘Harris Travel ripped off people? I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Rauf expelled his breath in an impatient hiss. ‘There are no villas. Nothing was ever built beyond that entrance and you have to know that.’
Lily gulped. Only then did she recall him saying that he had a copy of the land purchase agreement. Surely that was indisputable proof that she was standing on the site that Brett had bought? But this was not the land that Brett had photographed and there were no buildings within view.
‘Are you sure the villas aren’t just down the road?’ she mumbled, peering round herself with frowning incomprehension. ‘I want to see that purchase agreement.’
Rauf extended it and Lily grabbed at it. The document trembled along with her hand. It was written in Turkish but when she scanned down the sheet she recognised Brett’s signature and an official seal. Her brain was now functioning in very slow motion. Shock was setting in hard and she could not accept the enormity of what Rauf was telling her. ‘I still think these villas have got to be around here somewhere…if we look. I mean, maybe we’re on the wrong road or something,’ she suggested shakily. ‘You were always telling me how vast this country is…you can’t know every road around here!’
She was shaking like a leaf in a high wind. But Rauf was determined not to fall victim to what innate cynicism warned was most likely to be a performance aimed at convincing him that she was a misunderstood innocent. At the same time, however, he could not help but be impressed by the rendering of stupefied shock and disbelief that Lily was giving him.
‘There are no villas,’ he said again.
‘There’s got to be!’ Lily launched at him in feverish protest.
‘The land was bought, the builders engaged,’ Rauf advanced in a grim undertone. ‘But after a small first-stage payment was received, they neither heard from your sister’s ex-husband again, nor were they able to establish contact with him.’
Lily tottered backwards and sank down on a low rock in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree. Her legs felt all wobbly and hollow.
‘Before the builders discovered that they had been had, they put in the driveway and the foundations. Since the mine shut down, there isn’t much employment round here and the builders were promised bonuses for fast results. Gilman had a big car and they thought he was rich, so they went ahead and bought more supplies on credit with a relative, trusting that the next, much larger payment was in the pipeline. Two families were plunged into poverty and debt by this.’
Lily’s tummy gave a sick lurch, shame enveloping her. What had happened? What had Brett done? Could he have used the cash earmarked for the villas just to keep the agency in business? She hated Brett, could not initially comprehend her own reluctance to accept the obvious until she acknowledged that the security of her entire family rested in that same balance.
Evidently, Brett had lied over and over again about the villas. He had shown Hilary and their father photographs of another site and had later given them more pictures of that same site and the two big villas that had been erected there. Neither her sister nor her father could have had any suspicion that there was anything suspect about the enterprise because that building project had been Brett’s baby from the outset. By then, her father had retired and Hilary had only gone back to work in Harris Travel after Brett had stepped down from managing it just a few months ago…until then, Brett had had an entirely free hand.
So what had happened to all the money that should have gone into building the villas? Brett could only have taken all those thousands of pounds for himself. There were no villas, just a piece of scrubby land with no outlook in the back end of nowhere. Yet Brett had contrived to argue during his divorce settlement with her sister that he was entitled to half of the marital home because Harris Travel would be retaining the sizeable asset of two luxury villas abroad. In addition, Brett had managed to satisfy an admittedly unsuspicious pair of solicitors that those two villas did exist. Her poor sister had ended up being grateful that her estranged husband had not also claimed a right to a share of the family firm after all his years working there!
Lily stared into space with shattered eyes. There were no villas. That meant that Rauf’s investment had gone missing altogether. What chance now was there that that supposed mix-up over those bank account names was genuine? She shuddered and, lifting nerveless hands, she pressed them to her clammy face. Brett had been embezzling from the business and, by the looks of it, he had sucked Harris Travel dry. Her family was going to be left penniless and in debt.
Rauf studied Lily, who was seated like a traumatised pixie on her rock, transfixed by shock. She kept on looking at the overgrown foundations as if she were still hoping that two villas would spring into literal being right there before her very eyes.
‘I can’t credit this…’ she muttered, shaking her head. ‘How could Brett do this to his own family? I mean, they’ve already lost so much since the divorce.’
Smouldering dark golden eyes pinned to her ashen face as she uttered that first-ever disparaging comment on Brett Gilman, Rauf growled, ‘You had no idea?’
Blinking, Lily lifted her golden head and looked at him for the first time in several minutes, blue eyes stricken pools as she endeavoured to come to terms with the sheer scale of Brett’s lies. ‘How can you ask me that? One of the main reasons I’m here in Turkey was to sell those villas! I can hardly get my mind round the concept that they were never built in the first place…’
‘That’s understandable.’ So, on the count of the nonexistent villas at least, he had misjudged her, Rauf conceded grudgingly, his wide, taut shoulders squaring below the fine, expensive cloth of his jacket. It seemed that Brett Gilman, regardless of his former liaison with Lily, had acted alone and without her knowledge. That would be a shock for her too though: the wounding discovery that her one-time secret lover had lied to her as well, while he’d plunged the family business into fraudulent dealings. But
then over the past year, Lily had already suffered a certain amount of punishment, he reminded himself grimly. Brett choosing to divorce her sister for a woman other than herself must have been quite a slap in the face too. But a very well-deserved slap, Rauf reflected without hesitation.
The thick fullness of tears in her throat, Lily compressed her tremulous lips. ‘But you knew, didn’t you? You knew there were no villas when we met up yesterday.’
‘I only learned of this scandalous affair forty-eight hours ago when my investment consultant finally brought it to my attention. As I too have a stake in Harris Travel, I have already instructed that the two Turkish families who sustained losses through this venture are to be fully compensated.’
Lily stared at him through swimming eyes. He was so detached from her, so controlled. A helpless sob bubbled in her throat. ‘That’s good,’ she said in a wobbly voice. ‘But I doubt very much that you’re about to compensate my family for their losses!’
Striding forward, Rauf bent down to curve his lean hands round her shaking shoulders and raise her upright. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘I feel so awful…like it’s somehow my fault!’ Lily sobbed, her distress taking her over for a couple of seconds before she contrived to get a grip on herself again. ‘But I’ve never had anything much to do with the business and I still can’t understand how Brett could literally steal from his own kids. Goodness knows, I hate him, but Hilary and Dad always had a very high opinion of his business acumen!’
Rauf smiled a not very nice smile above her down-bent golden head and closed a supportive arm round her slender back. Her tears would not soften him. Having cracked her façade, he had her on the run and he would keep up the pressure until he knew everything there was to know. He supposed a lot of women would embrace a selective memory when it came to an indefensible affair that should never have happened, but he felt that she owed him, at least, the truth. ‘You didn’t always hate your brother-in-law—’
‘Not when he and Hilary first married—’
‘And not when you brought me home to invest in the family firm at Brett’s instigation either,’ Rauf slotted in with harsh clarity.
‘Sorry?’ Lily whipped round to throw him a startled glance. Brett’s instigation? How had he known that Brett had played a part in her decision to finally take Rauf home to meet her family? But what Rauf said next soon wiped that seeming irrelevancy back out of her mind again.
‘Do you think I didn’t eventually work out that that was a set-up?’ Rauf dealt her contemptuous appraisal from shimmering golden eyes. ‘Harris Travel needed an investor and I was rich. Are you trying to say that it was pure coincidence that you decided to introduce me to your family at that particular time? I don’t think so!’
‘Is that what you believed?’ Lily was appalled at that accusation coming out of nowhere at her. How could he have thought that she could be that mercenary and calculating?
‘Despite what you seem to think, I didn’t come down in the last shower of rain,’ Rauf derided, utilising the colloquial speech he had acquired attending an English public school.
‘Back then I had no idea how wealthy you were!’ Lily slung at him in angry reproach. ‘Nor did I find out about the expansion plans for the business until after we arrived that weekend and we both heard Brett and Dad talking. The only reason I took you home was because my sister was dying to meet you!’
‘I wish I could believe you,’ Rauf breathed in a fierce undertone.
‘So you decided that I had been after your money all along…’ Lily framed shakily, stinging tears burning in her darkened eyes. ‘And how do you justify believing that when that same weekend I took you aside and suggested you think very carefully before you invested in Harris Travel? And what did you tell me? “This is business, Lily, not something you know much about”!’
Thrown by that unsettling reminder, Rauf opened his mouth to point out that her apparent lack of self-interest might also have been a very effective means of spurring him on to demonstrate his generosity towards her family. But in the end, he said nothing. After all, he was seeing a side of Lily that she had never allowed him to see before and he had no desire to silence her. There she was, practically jumping up and down with rage in front of him, the ultra-feminine, vulnerable front nowhere to be seen, and he was fascinated by that sight.
‘You knew it all, didn’t you?’ Lily accused in her furious turmoil, little pearly teeth visibly gritted. ‘But now it’s all gone wrong, you’re blaming me! Well, I’m sorry, but the only mistake I ever made with you, the only thing I have to regret, is that I was ever stupid enough to fall in love with you!’
Brushing past him on that final ringing assurance, Lily sped back across the dust road and fairly leapt into the helicopter, no assistance required. She turned her head away when Rauf boarded. She was convinced that she would never look him in the face again after losing control to the extent of admitting that she had been in love with him that summer. How could she have lowered herself to that level? He hadn’t been entitled to that ego-boosting confession.
The helicopter lifted into the air. Rauf snatched in a slow, steadying breath. No way could he have got everything so wrong. He was too clever to have misread the evidence. But maybe Lily’s tacky affair with Gilman had been on the wane by the time he himself had entered her life, maybe it had even been over…yeah, sure, she had been slinking shiftily out of that hotel with Gilman that afternoon for entirely innocent reasons and had lied about where she had been for entirely innocent reasons too? That was about as likely a possibility as her being the virgin she had sworn she was at the time!
His lean, devastating features set into aggressive lines. He was furious with himself. He was letting her get to him and work her wiles on him again. All she had had to do was tell him she had been in love with him and he had started doubting his own intelligence! But not for nothing had Rauf’s own mother deemed her son to be as stubborn in his convictions as a steel-wrapped rock set in concrete. Rauf knew exactly why Lily was tempting him again. His hormones had no discrimination and her draw was pure sex. Even in that prim cardigan, she sent his temperature rocketing!
But then Lily still had that pulling power only because she was incredibly beautiful and he had never been her lover. While she had been screaming at him through gritted teeth, he had been watching the sun gild her glorious hair, noting the delectable prominence of her breasts when she threw her slim shoulders back and wondering if she would unleash that same passion in his bed. Shifting in an effort to ease the tormenting ache of his lingering arousal, Rauf veiled reflective dark golden eyes. Why shouldn’t he find out?
After all, it was pretty obvious that if she was innocent of all blame when it came to the villas that never were, she was hardly likely to be involved in the accounts scam either. Gilman had moved on and doubtless taken his ill-gotten gains with him and Rauf would track him down and hang him high with pleasure for his sins…
CHAPTER FOUR
WITH pointed deliberation, Lily ignored Rauf’s proffered hand when the helicopter landed for the second time and stepped out alone.
Lily wouldn’t look at Rauf either, felt she couldn’t trust herself that far. That unfamiliar rage had emptied her, shaking her to her very depths with its ferocity. Yet after the revelations that Rauf had dropped on her without warning, she was only reeling into a state of deeper shock.
‘Where are we?’ she asked, focusing on his blue silk tie, and her mind in such conflict that she was thinking half a dozen other thoughts all at once. That he had decided she was a gold-digger without any justification. That, with even less reason, he had been prepared to believe she and presumably her entire family had conspired to defraud him along with Brett. That he had with a cool deliberation that chilled her to the marrow flown her out to that abandoned building site to confront her with Brett’s crooked dealings. That he also seemed to believe not a single word that she said.
Therefore she didn’t need to ask, indeed s
he already knew without being told that Rauf Kasabian had not the tiniest shred of sympathy for her or her sister or her sister’s children or her father.
‘Sonngul, my country estate…and I don’t know about you,’ Rauf imparted, ‘but I could do with a drink.’
A slight tremor ran through Lily’s whip-taut frame. She was terrified of breaking down in tears. She knew that that was the natural outcome of shock but she didn’t want to let herself down in front of him. In every way that mattered, Rauf seemed to be the enemy and a very ruthless one too. He would set the police on Brett and, although Lily would have loved to see Brett banged up in a prison cell, she could only shudder at the prospect of what that same reality would mean to Hilary and her daughters.
Her family lived in a small town and people were never kind when it came to fraud or bankruptcy. Hilary might be divorced from Brett but Harris Travel was still their father’s business and that was what people would remember longest. Having been betrayed by her husband and lost her former home into the bargain, Hilary would now have to face not only the scandal and shame of Brett’s prosecution, but also the loss of her family’s only means of support. It would break Lily’s father too, for the sole source of pride the older man still possessed was his good name. They would all be lambs to the slaughter.
As Lily accompanied Rauf down a path screened in and shaded by a wealth of lush overhanging foliage she broke the silence. ‘I must phone Hilary. She needs to be told about the villas.’
‘I can’t agree to you informing your sister at this point. In fact I don’t want you communicating with anyone back in England.’
Glancing up in astonishment at that forbidding assurance, Lily met the unashamed challenge in Rauf’s steady gaze.
‘Your sister may be divorced from Gilman but I doubt that she could be trusted to keep so much bad news to herself. She’s much more likely to demand an explanation from Gilman and I don’t want him to realise that he’s been found out until all the facts have been established,’ Rauf explained.