Lover By Deception

‘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 feelings, 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 parmer 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.’