The Ultimate Betrayal

by Michelle Reid

  Then Daniel did a strange thing. He reached out for her, capturing her chin with a hand as he suddenly bent his own dark head towards her. And there, among London’s best and most sophisticated, he kissed her, hot and possessively. And when he released her surprised mouth his eyes were so darkened by pain that it brought tears springing into Rachel’s own.

  ‘The honeymoon is obviously not over,’ mocked Zac Callum. ‘Come on, Claire. I think we should leave these two love-birds.alone.’

  ‘What do you want to eat?’

  Miles away, feeling hot and flustered by Daniel’s unexpected kiss, and unbearably moved by that revealing expression in his eyes, Rachel had to force herself to concentrate on what he had said. He was back in his seat, guarded eyes watching her intently.

  ‘I…’ She looked down at the menu in front of her, the list of dishes blurring into illegibility. ‘I…’ Her heart was stammering in her breast, the nervous tip of her pink tongue desperate to flick around lips still burning from his kiss. ‘You order for me,’ she invited in the end, tossing the menu aside because it was no use her trying to make sense of it feeling as she did.

  Grimly he made a small gesture that brought the waiter scuttling over, then ordered in a curt clipped voice that had the waiter nodding nervously before scuttling away again as if the tension at the table was too much to stand near for long.

  Had the waiter seen Daniel kiss her? Had the whole room? Cheeks heating, Rachel cast a furtive glance around her to find everyone seemingly engrossed in their own interests rather than theirs. Knotting her hands together beneath the cover of the oyster-pink tablecloth, she made herself speak normally.

  ‘How do you know Zac Callum?’ she asked.

  He gave an indifferent shrug. ‘He inherited a couple of small companies from his father,’ he explained. ‘He didn’t want them, so he sold them to me.’

  ‘I like his work,’ she remarked. ‘It was a medium I was rather good at myself, so I find I can appreciate the gift he has.’

  ‘Appreciate his charm, too, did you?’ Daniel clipped out tightly.

  Rachel’s eyes widened, surprised by the unveiled greeneyed jealousy she heard in his tone.

  Daniel—jealous of another man looking at her? The mind boggled on the concept. ‘Is that why you kissed me like that?’ she demanded.

  A sudden blindingly bitter look shot across his gaze. ‘He was eyeing you up like a tasty new dish on the damned menu,’ he gritted. ‘I wanted there to be no mistake about who you belonged to.’

  Belonged? She belonged to Daniel, but Daniel apparently did not belong to her, if Lydia was a gauge in belonging. ‘Does anyone in this other world you move in know about me and the children?’ she asked heavily then.

  He took exception to her reference to his other world, but bit the bullet on it. ‘My private life is none of their business,’ he said brusquely. ‘I mix with them purely for business’ sake, that’s all. Now can we drop the subject?’ he snapped. ‘Unless of course you found Zac Callum’s charm more appealing than my company, in which case I’ll call him back if you like, and you can both flatter each other’s egos a little bit more!’

  Oh, he was jealous! The idea certainly gave her flagging ego an enormous boost. ‘Well, at least he didn’t snap his dining companion’s head off every time she opened her mouth,’ she taunted sweetly, watching with a growing sense of pleased triumph as dark colour slid across his cheeks at the rebuke.

  Their first course arrived then, thankfully, because sitting here in public with him like this, when really all they both seemed to want to do was snap out taunts at each other, made eating the better option.

  He’d ordered her a light salmon mousse that made her mouth water when she had believed she wouldn’t be able to eat a single morsel of food. And she was halfway through when Daniel reached across the table and touched her gently on the back of her hand.

  ‘Rachel,’ he murmured huskily, bringing her wary gaze up to clash with his. ‘Can we at least try to make this a pleasant evening for us both?’ he pleaded. ‘I don’t want to fight with you. I want—’

  ‘Daniel—how nice to see you!’

  His face darkened with irritation, and Rachel herself felt a stab of disappointment at the new interruption because she had been allowing herself the rare pleasure of drowning in the smoky urgency of his beautiful eyes.

  This time he didn’t get up to greet the middle-aged couple who had stopped by their table. Nor did he introduce her. He just made all the right polite noises, but in a way that had them quickly moving on.

  ‘Now you know why I don’t like bringing you to places like this,’ he grimaced. ‘We are destined to be interrupted like this all evening.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ she asked, bristling because she saw his impatience as reluctance to acknowledge her here for what she was to him.

  ‘Because when I take you out, I like to have you to myself!’ he said, and that look was back in his eyes, that darkly smouldering, intensely possessive one that turned her stomach inside out and made eating anything else a near-impossibility.

  But he was right. They were interrupted no less than three more times during the course of their meal, and in the end Daniel sighed and reached across the table for her hand to draw her with him as he stood up.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We may as well go through to the club and dance. At least while we’re dancing people will be reluctant to interrupt.’

  Keeping hold of her hand, he threaded his way through the tables towards a pair of closed doors that swung open at the touch of his free hand. It was darker in here; from the entrance she could just see through the gloom to the opposite side of the room, which had its own bar and a small raised stage where a group of musicians sat playing slow, easy jazz.

  Daniel drew her on to the dance-floor and turned her into his arms. Instantly she was assailed by a weird feeling of nervous uncertainty—as if he were a stranger, the kind of tall, dark stranger that appealed to her senses and made her excruciatingly aware of herself as a woman.

  This is Daniel, she reminded herself fiercely as he began to sway with her to the music. No stranger, but the man you’ve been married to for seven years.

  But this Daniel was a stranger to her, she acknowledged heavily. And not only because she was here with him in his other world, so to speak. They had become strangers weeks ago—estranged while still living together as man and wife.

  A sigh broke from her. The sadness in it must have reached Daniel, because the hand covering hers where it lay against the smooth lapel of his dinner-jacket squeezed, and his other moved on her waist, sliding up and beneath her black bolero with the intention of pressing her closer—then stopped, a sudden breathless stillness assailing both of them as his fingers made surprised contact with warm bare flesh.

  She’d forgotten the backless design of the dress until that moment, had been uptight about too many other things to care about something she’d had no intention of revealing. But she remembered now and had to close her eyes as a wild wave of sensation rippled right through her.

  She tried to fight it, moving her head in an effort to take in air that was not filled with the musky sensual smell of him emanating up from his warm throat. But he stopped her, the hand holding hers lifting to curve her nape, pressing her back against him.

  ‘Déjà vu,’ Daniel whispered, and she gasped out an unsteady breath when she realised what he meant.

  The first time they’d ever danced together she’d been wearing a little cropped T-shirt that he’d slipped his fingers beneath. This time it was a velvet bolero, more elegant, more sophisticated, but her reaction was the same.

  Hot and drenching, a sexual awareness that sizzled like liquid on burning coals. Her heart hammered in response, and as she stiffened on a fizz of sensation his fingertips began to graze lightly along her spine.

  No, she told herself breathlessly. Don’t let him do this to you!

  But the fine hairs covering her body began to ting
le in pleasurable response to his caress, forcing her eyes to close and her spine to move into a supple arch that sent the sensitive tips of her breasts brushing against the heated wall of his chest. She felt Daniel’s body tighten against her, harden, begin to throb with a need older than time itself, and let out a shakily helpless sigh.

  His dark head lowered to nuzzle her throat. ‘It hasn’t changed one iota, has it?’ he breathed. ‘We still have this amazing effect on each other.’

  He was, oh, so right. And on a final sigh that came from deep, deep inside her, she surrendered to it all, letting herself do what she was desperate to do, and stretched up to brush her mouth softly against his.

  It was the first time in long weeks that she had made a voluntary move towards him, and he acknowledged it with a rasping intake of air, his lean body shuddering as he released the air again.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he said hoarsely. ‘This isn’t what I want to be doing with you.’

  ‘I…’ All right, she was about to concede, feeling as if she had nothing left to fight him with. But then another acidly mocking, shudderingly familiar voice intruded, and everything within her seemed to shatter into a thousand broken pieces.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Don Juan himself. And with a brandnew conquest too…’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  RACHEL closed her eyes, a dark wave of recognition making her blonde head drop wearily on to Daniel’s shoulder while he stiffened like a board.

  ‘You do know he’s married, don’t you, dear?’ the cruel voice taunted.

  Obviously Mandy had not recognised the new Rachel in the woman Daniel was holding in his arms.

  ‘For seven long years, no less,’ she went on regardless. ‘To a pretty, if insipid, little thing, who will be sitting at home at this very moment, taking care of their three sweet children while her darling husband plays lover to any woman who will have him.’

  ‘Oh, not just anyone, Amanda,’ Daniel countered coldly. ‘I always found it very easy to turn you down, after all.’

  Mandy wanted Daniel? Lifting her face, Rachel stared into his harshly cynical eyes and felt something else rend apart inside her as yet another veil was ripped from her blind, trusting eyes. Daniel watched it happen with a grim clenching of his jaw.

  Daniel and Mandy did not get on; she had always accepted that as one of those things, without bothering to question why they were so hostile towards each other. Well, now she knew, and she felt sick with the knowledge.

  ‘Man must always beware of a woman scorned, Daniel,’ Mandy cautioned sagely. ‘It is one of our mostdestructive little weapons, after all.’

  ‘And you used it so well, didn’t you?’ Daniel drawled. ‘Aiming directly at the weakest point.’

  ‘How is Rachel, by the way?’ she drawled. ‘Has the poor thing any idea how quickly you’ve found a replacement for the ousted Lydia?’

  Enough. Rachel had heard enough. Twisting within the constricting grasp of Daniel’s arms, she turned to look at her once-best friend, watching with a complete lack of expression as all the colour left Mandy’s face; without saying a word, Mandy spun gracefully on her heel and walked away.

  The mood was shot, the evening a disaster. Neither spoke as they left the club and walked the short distance to where Daniel had parked the car.

  Then, ‘How long?’ she asked, once he’d slid the car into the steady stream of traffic leaving London.

  ‘Years,’ he shrugged, not even trying to misunderstand her.

  ‘Did you ever take her up on it?’

  As she watched him she saw his fingers take a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, his mouth tightening because the question offended his dignity, but he had to accept her right to ask it. ‘No,’ he answered flatly. ‘Never even considered it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She leaves me cold,’ he replied dismissively.

  And it was a dismissal, one Rachel had to believe simply by the sheer lack of feeling with which he said it.

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me what she was trying to do?’

  ‘And ruin your faith in someone you cared a great deal for?’ He sent her a sombre glance. ‘I never hid the fact that I thoroughly disliked her, Rachel,’ he reminded her grimly.

  ‘But you never went out of your way to discourage the friendship either,’ she pointed out. ‘One word—one word, Daniel,’ she emphasised tightly, ‘that she was only using me to get to you, and tonight’s little scene could have been avoided.’

  ‘Knowing how deeply the truth would hurt you?’ His expression was harsh in the dim light inside the car. ‘I would have had to be some kind of heel to do that to you, Rachel.’

  ‘True,’ she conceded, and left that single word hanging in the air between them, knowing he had read the other meaning it offered—and knowing he had no defence against it.

  She entered the house first, making directly for the stairs without bothering to go in and speak to Jenny. ‘I have a headache,’ she mumbled, which was not exactly a lie. There were a lot of different bits aching inside her, her head only one of them. ‘Please apologise to your mother for me.’

  She was not asleep when Daniel eventually came to bed after taking his mother home. But she pretended to be, while intensely aware of every move he made around the quiet room as he prepared for bed. He came into it naked as he always did, lying on his back with his head supported on his arms, staring at the darkened ceiling while she lay very still beside him, wishing with all her aching heart that fate would just wave a hand across them and dismiss the last few weeks as if they had not happened.

  But of course fate was not that kind or that forgiving, and they lay there like that for ages, the tension so thick in the darkened room that Rachel began to feel suffocated by it. Then Daniel let out a sigh and reached for her. She went unresistingly into his arms, needing what he was going to offer with probably as much desperation as he did. And their loving took on a silent frenzy which was almost as unbearable as the tense silence had been.

  Lydia came to visit her again that night, stiffening her passion-racked body just at the point where she’d begun to believe she was going to gain release form her pent-up desires at last. Daniel felt the change in her, and went very still while he watched her fight the devils which were haunting her.

  And she did fight, eyes closed over wretched tears, kiss-softened mouth quivering, her fingers biting into his muscle-locked shoulders.

  Another obstacle climbed, she thought, with no sense of triumph when, for once, she managed to thrust Lydia away. And, on a shaky sigh, she pulled Daniel’s mouth down to hers.

  ‘Rachel,’ he whispered as he entered her. Just, ‘Rachel,’ over and over again in a raw shaken way which said he had understood the battle she had just fought and won, and knew too that she had done it for his sake. For him.

  Yet though they climbed together, and although their bodies throbbed to a mutual drum-beat of growing fulfilment, when it came to it Daniel leaped alone, leaving her feeling lost and empty. A failure in so many ways she did not dare count them.

  Daniel became very busy—another take-over deal—and he had to spend nights away from home in negotiation with a small engineering company near Huddersfield. Rachel accepted his word with a tight-lipped refusal to comment, which sent him off tense-faced with angry frustration while she sat at home and tormented herself with suspicions she knew were unfair even while she allowed them free rein in her wretched aching soul. That Daniel in turn refused to comment on what he knew she was thinking told her that he had decided not to justify his every move to her. He was, in short, demanding that she trust him. But she couldn’t, which only helped to pile the strain on their marriage. And life became hardly bearable over the next few weeks.

  Then one afternoon she happened to be glancing through the local paper that dropped through her letterbox once a week, and saw something there that set her pulses humming.

  Zac Callum was giving a talk about his work at the local college of art that ev
ening, and anyone who was interested was invited to go along.

  Daniel was away. But if she got his mother in to baby-sit, then it wouldn’t hurt anyone if she went along, would it?

  But, deep down, she knew she was only going out of a rebellious need to hit Daniel on the raw.

  His own fault, she defended her reasoning as she guided her white Escort into a vacant parking slot outside the centre. He shouldn’t have let her see that he could be jealous of someone like Zac Callum. It was only knowing that which had given her the incentive to come at all!

  Slipping into the small assembly hall where the talk was going to be held, she took a seat close to the back, not expecting Zac to notice her or, even if he did, to recognise her. They had met only briefly, after all.

  Yet he did notice her—and recognised her instantly. He walked on to the raised podium, glanced smilingly around the three-quarters-full room, saw her, paused, focused on her again, then made her blush by widening his smile so that everyone present turned to see whom he was personally acknowledging.

  Her answering smile was shy and self-conscious, and she sank herself deeper into her pale blue duffle coat with a wish to fade away completely.

  But once he began talking she started to relax again, finding herself caught up in the clever, quick, witty way he explained how he homed in on the weaknesses of his victims. He was relaxed and generous with his smiles, easy to laugh with, a clever entertainer as well as a good speaker.

  Several times he caught her laughing with everyone else and winked at her, his familiarity giving a boost to an ego that had been sadly flagging over the last few weeks.

  Afterwards he came straight to her, lightly fielding any remarks made to him as he made his way down the aisle to where she was standing preparing to leave.

  ‘Rachel—’ his warm fingers made a light clasp around her own ‘—how nice of you to come.’

  ‘I’m glad I did.’ She smiled, feeling stupidly shy and self-conscious again. ‘You made it all sound so interesting.’