‘Do you attend classes at this college?’
Her eyes widened. ‘No!’ she denied, flushing a little because it had never occurred to her that he would make such an assumption. But then she realised how she must look tonight in faded jeans and a casual duffle coat, her face completely free of make-up.
Nothing like the woman he had met as the wife of the dynamic Daniel Masterson, anyway. And probably more like a student.
‘We live not far from here,’ she explained. ‘I read about tonight in the local newspaper and decided to come along on impulse.’
‘By yourself?’
‘Yes.’ The flush deepened, why, she wasn’t sure, since this man could have no idea that this was an unusual diversion for the stay-at-home Rachel to make. ‘Daniel is away on business.’
‘Ah.’ As if that seemed to say it all, he sent her a strange look. ‘Interested in politics?’
She shook her pale head. ‘Art,’ she corrected. ‘Caricature, anyway. I used to have quite a flair for it myself, believe it or not,’ she shyly admitted, ‘before being a wife and mother took up most of my—time.’
Oh, damn. Her heart sank to her feet when she realised what she had just said. Zac Callum believed her and Daniel to be newly-weds; now he was frowning at her in confusion, and her teeth bit guiltily down on her full bottom lip at being caught out in the lie.
Luckily they were interrupted by someone who wanted to ask Zac questions. Deciding to take her chance and slip away while he was busy, and before she could drop herself and Daniel further in it, Rachel pushed her hands into her duffle coat pockets and turned to leave. But his hand coming out to catch her arm stopped her.
‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘I need to say goodbye to the people who organised this, but if you’ll wait for me, I would love your company for a drink in the pub I saw over the road.’
She hesitated as something close to temptation fizzed up inside her. Having a drink, in a pub, with a man who wasn’t Daniel, constituted crossing that invisible line drawn by marriage. Or did it? she then asked herself defiantly. People did it all the time! Daniel did it all the time! The modern-day line was surely drawn much further down the page on morality. What harm could it do to anyone if she did accept? What business was it of anyone’s if she did accept?
Daniel’s business, she answered her own question. But ignored it. And ignored too the deep-seated knowledge that it was defiance making her ignore it. She liked Zac, she defended the temptation. She was interested in what he did.
‘Thank you,’ she heard herself accept. ‘That would be nice.’
Funnily enough, he hesitated now, that shrewd speculative look she remembered from the first time she met him entering his eyes again.
Then he nodded and let go of her arm. ‘Five minutes,’ he promised, and walked away, leaving her standing there doing battle with whatever was niggling at her conscience.
Still, she enjoyed the hour they spent in the pub. The place was crowded because more than half the people who had been to the talk had crossed the road into it, and she and Zac stood leaning against two bar-stools with a glass of lager each.
It was nice, she decided, being here like this, being at ease and talked to as a reasonably intelligent human being rather than as a housewife or mother. She liked his relaxed manner, and the way he listened intently when— shyly at first, then with more enthusiasm when he didn’t immediately shoot her down—she put her own ideas forward, surprising herself by what she had retained from her school days.
Daniel’s name did not come into things until they were just about to part company, when Zac asked quietly, ‘How long have you and Daniel been married, Rachel?’
She sighed, feeling the pleasure of the evening seep out of her. ‘Seven years,’ she answered, then, with a defiant lift of her small chin, ‘We have three children. Two boys and a girl. And no, he doesn’t keep me barefoot and pregnant. Sammy and Kate are twins.’
He smiled at the quip, but not with any humour. ‘I think I owe you an apology for the first time we met,’ he said.
He meant his references to Daniel’s other women. Rachel felt an ache clench at her chest, but shrugged it and his apology away. ‘No, you don’t,’ she answered. ‘You were just being open and honest. It was Daniel and I who were being deceitful. Goodnight, Zac,’ she added, before he could say anything else. She didn’t want to talk about that night. She didn’t want to know what else must be running through his mind right now. ‘I enjoyed tonight very much. Thank you.’
Turning away, she went to unlock her car door when his voice stalled her. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of doing a twelve-week course on Caricature here at this college one evening a week. Would you be interested in coming along to it?’
Would she? Rachel took her time turning back to face him, suspicious—well, half-suspicious—that he’d just thought of that on the spur of the moment.
Which meant—what exactly?
‘I don’t know,’ she therefore answered warily. ‘Is there enough interest here to make it worth your while?’
His cynical smile mocked her naivet6. He was, after all, a celebrity. People didn’t need to be interested in what he did. Who he was would be enough to have them flocking to his class.
‘You would enjoy it, Rachel,’ he added softly when she said nothing. ‘I can certainly promise you that.’
A small fizz of sensation erupted low down in her stomach, warning her that there was more to his promise than he was actually saying.
He was attracted to her. He had, in fact, made no effort to hide it.
The thing was, did she want to encourage something she knew had the potential to become very dangerous?
No, she answered herself flatly. Her life was complicated enough at the present without further complicating it with a man of Zac Callum’s ilk.
Which was a shame, really, because if the man himself didn’t appeal, the idea of taking up a sketch-pad and pencil again did.
‘Let me know what you decide,’ she prevaricated in the end, ‘and I’ll think about it.’
‘Zac Callum teaching at a local art college?’ Daniel was scornful to say the least. ‘Why should he be bothered with small fry like that?’
‘Maybe because he cares,’ Rachel said, offended on Zac’s behalf by Daniel’s deriding tone.
He wasn’t pleased that she’d gone out that night without his knowledge, but discovering that it was none other than Zac Callum who had tempted her out had turned him into a rather intriguingly surly brute!
‘How did you know he was giving a talk?’ he demanded.
‘Local Gazette,’ she replied. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked, diplomatically changing the subject. ‘Or do you want me to get you something?’
‘No! I want to talk about you going out with Zac Callum!’ he barked at her.
‘I didn’t go out with him!’ she denied. ‘I went to listen to him!’ There was an ocean of difference between that and what Daniel was implying. ‘What the hell are you trying to say, Daniel?’ she demanded, beginning to lose patience. ‘That we arranged some kind of elaborate setup just so we could meet each other?’
The sudden flash of dark heat in his cheeks told her that that was exactly what he was thinking. ‘He’s capable of it,’ he grunted. ‘He fancied you from the first moment he laid eyes on you!’
My God, she thought, as an angry sense of elation whistled through her blood, the invincible Daniel Masterson was frightened that his little wife was considering taking on another man!
‘It’s you who is the untrustworthy person in this marriage, Daniel,’ she reminded him bluntly. ‘Not me.’
‘But you could be out for revenge.’
‘And you could be getting paranoid inside your guilty conscience,’ she threw back. ‘Don’t tar me with the same brush as yourself.’ And once again she deliberately ignored that little voice that was telling her she wasn’t being entirely truthful.
‘I wasn’t doing that,’ he sighed, going over t
o pour himself a stiff drink.
‘Then what were you doing?’ she snapped.
‘Actually—’ on another sigh, he shook his dark head wearily ‘—actually, I don’t know what I’m doing,’ he confessed. ‘Are you going to take the course?’
‘Are you going to play the domineering husband by telling me I can’t if I decide I want to?’ she countered, small chin coming up.
‘Will you listen to me if I do try to talk you out of it?’ he parried drily.
‘No.’
He shrugged. ‘Then it isn’t worth my trying, is it?’ he said, and walked out of the room, leaving her sitting there feeling angry and frustrated and a hundred other things that revolved almost entirely around one emotion. Hurt. Whether she fought with him or made love with him or simply ignored his very existence, she still hurt like a love-lost child whenever he walked away from her.
The trouble with you, Rachel, is you’ve gone so long living for him, you have no idea how to live for yourself!
Which was why she decided to go on the course when Zac rang to tell her it was all set up.
Daniel didn’t say a word—not a single word. But, good grief, she knew his opinion by the time she left the house for her first class a couple of weeks later. And when she came back he didn’t wait for the darkness to shroud their marriage-bed before he reached for her. He grabbed her hand almost as soon as she walked through the door and hauled her up to bed, staking claim over her senses in a way that left them both bitterly frustrated, because even while she went eagerly with him through the blistering avenues of sensuality, he still reached heaven alone.
Which, in the end, satisfied neither of them.
But at least her flair for caricature blossomed through the ensuing weeks. And even Daniel had to smile at the fun she made of them all with her pencil.
Zac was quietly encouraging. It helped that he never made any personal reference during the classes themselves but later, when they all retired to the pub across the road for a drink before going home, he would always make sure he sat next to her, his interest in her more than clear then. She tried to ignore it most of the time, wanting to learn all he had to teach her about drawing and frightened that, if he came on too strong with her, she would have to give it all up.
December loomed on the horizon: Rachel became engrossed in Christmas preparations. Shopping, planning, mad bursts of cooking and baking that filled the freezer to its limits and made everyone’s mouth water as the different rich and spicy smells permeated the house.
Daniel became even busier—and more preoccupied. His one real concession to Rachel’s restless need to be seen as an individual in her own right was to take her out on a regular basis. They went to the theatre, the cinema, to clubs and restaurants. Her wardrobe, by necessity, became filled with yet more elegant clothes, although she’d soon returned to wearing her casual stuff for the more mundane areas of her life. But she kept the new hairstyle because she liked it, and she found it easier to manage than the long, thick swath she used to have.
But the strain their marriage was putting on her began to tell in other ways. She tired easily, became fractious over the silliest things, and would burst into fits of weeping for no apparent reason, which troubled her family and made them yearn for the other sunnier Rachel they used to know.
Growing pains, she ruefully diagnosed her problem, after one such uncalled-for outburst had the children creeping around her warily and Daniel studying her through those hooded eyes which rarely looked directly at her these days.
Her car wouldn’t start one evening when she was about to go to her evening class. Daniel was in Huddersfield and not expected back until very late that night. Jenny was baby-sitting. It was sleeting heavily outside, and Rachel looked reluctantly towards the house she had just left, knowing she should go back inside and call a taxi but oddly unwilling to do so now she had escaped.
Escaped! It hit her, then, that she was beginning to see her home as some kind of emotional prison.
On a heavy sigh, she pulled her warm coat up around her ears and walked off down the drive to catch the bus.
She arrived at the centre soaked through to her skin, her hair plastered to her head and her face white with cold. The rotten weather had found its way right through to her clothes beneath and, on a mass cry of concern, the class set about helping her to get dry. Someone began rubbing at her hair with a paper towel while someone else pulled off her boots and wet woollen socks.
‘Socks!’ someone cried in mock horror. ‘The lady wears men’s woolly socks inside her dainty boots!’
Everyone laughed, and so did Rachel, light-hearted and suddenly feeling set free from something she had been dragging around with her for weeks now. Her blouse was wet, and Zac pulled off his own black woollen sweater for her to use. She took off her blouse and put it on while the other women in the class shielded her from interested male eyes.
By the time they had all finished with her her wet clothes lay across the warm radiators drying, and she was dressed in nothing more than her underwear beneath Zac’s big sweater which came down to her knees.
But her clothes were still very damp when it was time to leave, and swapping the warm sweater for her damp shirt and jeans gave her no pleasure. When Zac offered to give her a lift straight home, instead of going with the rest of them to the local pub, Rachel read the expression in his eyes but accepted anyway, stubbornly ignoring what the warning bells going off in her head were telling her.
He drove a new model Porsche which gripped the icy wet road like glue and surged off with a growling show of power. ‘Mmm,’ she murmured luxuriously as the car’s heater began to warm her cold legs.
Zac glanced at her and smiled. She had her eyes closed, a contented smile playing about her mouth. ‘Better?’ he asked.
‘Mmm,’ she murmured again. ‘Sorry you had to miss your pint.’
‘No bother,’ he dismissed, then added softly, ‘I’d rather be here with you.’
Rachel’s eyes flicked open, a warning frisson skipping down her spine. ‘Next left,’ she directed.
Dutifully, he made the turn. ‘What does Daniel think of your being with me every Wednesday night?’ he enquired smoothly then.
Rachel shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about Daniel—she didn’t want to hoist up her guard either. ‘He’s very encouraging,’ she said, then grimaced at the lie. Daniel hated it and, because he hated it, she rubbed his nose in it. He rarely saw her without a sketch-pad in her hands these days—reminding him of who had helped her rediscover her love of drawing.
‘Yet you never draw him, do you?’ Zac prodded quietly. ‘You poke fun at every other member of your family, but never him.’
‘He isn’t a good subject,’ she said. ‘Go right at the next junction.’
‘Daniel?’ His tone was filled with mockery. ‘I would have thought him an ideal subject, being the hard-hitting, ruthless devil he is at work and the ordinary family man he is at home. Real scope for humour there by mixing the two, I would say.’
But Rachel didn’t agree. She saw nothing funny in Daniel any more. Once, maybe, she would have delighted in drawing him in cartoon form. But not any more. ‘Then maybe I’ll have a go one day,’ she said lightly, knowing she would not. ‘This is it,’ she told him. ‘The white rendered one with the black BMW parked outside.’
So Daniel was home. She shivered slightly, but not with the cold.
Zac drew the car to a halt at the bottom of the drive. The engine died, and they both sat there listening to the rain thunder against the glass. He turned in his seat to look at her, and Rachel made herself return the look.
‘Well—thank you for the lift,’ she said, without making a single move to get out of the car. She felt trapped, by Zac’s expression, by the warmth inside the car, by her own breathlessness caused by the darkened look in his eyes.
‘My pleasure,’ he said, but absently. His mind was elsewhere, searching her face for something she wasn’t sure whether she was showi
ng him or not. Then she found she was, because he leaned across the gap separating them and kissed her gently on the mouth. She didn’t respond, but nor did she pull away. Her heart gave a small leap, then began thundering in her breast, but she wasn’t certain whether that was because she was playing with fire here, or because she was genuinely attracted to him.
His hand covered her cheek, long artistic fingers running into her hair, and as the kiss continued he moved his thumb until it rested against the corner of her mouth and began stroking gently, urging it to respond.
But even as he did so she was pulling away, suddenly very sure that this was not what she wanted to do. He let her go, sitting back to study her through lazy, glittering eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled awkwardly—why, she wasn’t sure.
‘What for?’
She didn’t answer—couldn’t. All she wanted to do now was to get out of this car. And her hand fumbled for the door-catch again, trembling in its urgency to get away.
‘You wanted me to kiss you, Rachel,’ Zac murmured softly. ‘Whatever else is going through your mind right now, remember you wanted it as much as I did.’
He was right, and her cheeks flushed with guilt. She had wanted him to kiss her—had wanted to know what it was like to feel another man’s lips besides Daniel’s against her own.
But now she just felt foolish, and angry with herself for allowing it to happen, because it had encouraged Zac to think there might be a place for him in her life, when there never could be. Daniel was everything she wanted, damn him. Damn him to hell.
It was only as she ran through the driving rain towards the house that she wondered suddenly if Daniel had heard them arrive. She sent a sharp glance at the curtained windows, but there was no revealing twitching of velvet. He hadn’t seen her kissing Zac, she decided with relief. He would be expecting her to come home by bus, so even if he’d heard the car, he would not have associated the deep sound of Zac’s Porsche with her arrival home.
He wasn’t in the sitting-room. The study door was ajar and she glanced in but there was no sign of him there either. She found him in the kitchen.
The Ultimate Betrayal Page 10