The Mirror Bride

Listlessly she opened the door, and to her utter astonishment there stood Drake Arundell—tall, broad-shouldered, his lean, heavily muscled body elegantly clad in a superbly tailored suit—almost blocking the narrow balcony that served as the access along the back of the flats.

On a sharp, indrawn breath she snatched the door back to shield her body, her eyes dilating endlessly as she looked up into a harshly contoured, expressionless face. Colour leached from her skin and a faint cold sweat slicked over her temples.

Quick as she was, he was quicker, and of course he was infinitely stronger. Without visibly exerting pressure he pushed the door open and walked into the room. Olivia fell back before him.

Foreboding washed through her, a hallow nausea caused by shock and dread. When her heart started up again she found it difficult to breathe.

Moving with the feline grace she remembered so well, he followed her across the room, his eyes revealing nothing but sardonic amusement. Even if she hadn’t seen the forceful features she would have recognised Drake Arundell by his gait alone. After all, she had known him all her life—although it wasn’t until she was fourteen and he was twenty-two that she’d noticed him with the inner eyes of her burgeoning womanhood.

He’d walked down the main street of a little town a lifetime away, and everyone in Springs Flat had watched him—some appreciatively, and some, the parents of young, impressionable daughters, with acute foreboding.

It was the sort of walk that had persuaded the elders of uncounted tribes the world over and down the centuries to look around for a war, or for big game to be hunted, or for an exploratory trip—anything to get that lean-hipped, lithely graceful saunterer out of the district and away from their wives and daughters.

Already famous, earning big money on the Formula One circuit, he was a certainty, her stepfather had said admiringly, to win the World Drivers’ Championship soon.

Brian Harley used to enjoy teasing Drake’s father, who worked in his accountancy firm, because Stan Arundell had resisted his son’s ambitions. A conventional, hardworking man, he’d wanted Drake to take law at university, and he had used Mrs Arundell’s long battle with illness to restrain his son. It had been Brian who had persuaded him to give Drake his blessing. Immediately Drake had left school, and within a remarkably few months had been racing his snarling monsters.

The situation was laden with ironic overtones; however, there was no irony in the expression of the man who was stalking her across her own room. All she could read in his face was a predatory, cold threat.

Compelled by some absurd conviction that the only way she’d retain control of the situation would be to stop retreating, Olivia came to a sudden, stubborn halt in the middle of the room, hands clenched stiffly at her sides.

He stopped too, just within her area of personal space.

Olivia’s eyes travelled reluctantly to his face. At twenty-two he had been amazingly magnetic in a potent, bad-boy way that had set the fourteen-year-old Olivia’s heart thumping erratically whenever her eyes had met those wicked grey-green ones. By the time she was seventeen the raffish appeal had altered to a tougher, more formidable fascination. Now time and experience had curbed and transmuted his raw intensity into a self-sufficient, hard-edged maturity.

He had always been disturbing; now he was dangerous.

Endeavouring to swallow her nervousness, she said crisply, ‘Hello, Drake.’

His unwavering eyes were instantly hooded by thick black lashes. The meagre light from the central bulb splintered into red-black sparks on his hair, refracting through the light mist of rain there; devil’s colouring, her mother used to say.

No, she wouldn’t think of her mother now.

‘Hello, Olivia.’ His deep voice was abraded by an attractively rough, sensual undemote that brought a world of memories flooding back—most of them tarnished by subsequent events.

Expediency dictated a polite response. ‘How are you?’

Distrusting his smile, resenting the leisurely survey that ranged the five feet six inches from her old slippers to the top of her honey-blonde head, Olivia had to suppress a swift angry reaction as he said suavely, ‘Curious, as you intended me to be. Your letter was practically guaranteed to bring me at a gallop.’

‘But it didn’t. I wrote over a fortnight ago.’

He smiled—not a nice smile. ‘I’ve been overseas. I came as soon as I could.’

She held out her hand, willing it not to tremble. After a taut moment his engulfed it. The brief, warm grip sent electricity up her arm and through every nerve cell in her body.

‘Thank you,’ she said simply, discovering that it was impossible to retrieve any composure while pinned by the steady, inimical gaze of those perceptive eyes, emotionless as quartz.

He looked around, his brows climbing as he took in the room. Stolidly Olivia suffered that unsettling scrutiny. She knew exactly what he was thinking: What on earth was Olivia Nicholls doing in a place like this?

Well, she’d done her best and she wasn’t ashamed of the flat. Nevertheless she braced herself for the comment she could see coming.

‘Sewing, Olivia?’

‘I’m very good at it,’ she said. ‘Until a couple of weeks ago I was a professional seamstress.’

‘What happened?’

‘The factory is moving to Fiji. It’s a lot cheaper to hire labour there.’ Losing her job had been the final straw; that was when she’d admitted she had no hope of saving the money she needed so desperately. Until then she’d thought she might make it. She tried not to let her bitterness and fear show in her voice, but his perceptive glance revealed that she hadn’t succeeded.

He continued his leisurely perusal of the room, and when she was so angry that she knew her cheeks were fiery, said evenly, ‘You still look just like a cheerleader.’

‘A—what?’

His mouth pulled up at the corners, but there was no amusement in his eyes. With a speculative irony that further ruffled her already shaky composure, he said, ‘A cheerleader. You must have seen them on television. In America they cheer the local teams on. Long-stemmed and open and vivacious, they look healthy and nice and sexy and athletic all at once. When you were seventeen I used to think you were cheerleader material.’

No cheerleader had a pale, thin face and hair that hung lankly around her neck because she couldn’t afford to get it cut.

‘It must be my Anglo-Saxon genes,’ she said, not hiding her resentment well enough. She hesitated, then went on without quite meeting his eyes, ‘Are you married?’

‘No,’ he said without expression, adding with suspicious gentleness, ‘But married or not, Olivia, I won’t easily be blackmailed.’

She shook her head indignantly. ‘That’s not what I—’

Something quick and ugly behind the screen of his lashes made her inhale sharply and lose the track of her reply. Although it took all of her courage she stood her ground, holding his gaze with a lifted chin and straight back, calling on a recklessness she hadn’t even known she possessed.

‘I’m not actually looking for a wife at the moment, if that’s what you had in mind.’ His tone was insulting, as was the look that accompanied it.

Of course she didn’t want to answer a slur like that, and of course the tide of colour that gave fleeting life to her pallor probably convinced him that that was exactly why she had written to him.

Since his sixteenth year Drake Arundell had been chased unmercifully—and not just by women his own age or impressionable adolescents. Now, with his potent, hard-edged appeal only slightly smoothed by superb clothes and an aura of power and sophistication, he probably had to shake women out of his sheets every night.

She was casting about for some suitable answer when he continued blandly, ‘What happened, Olivia?’

A meaningless smile pulled her lips tight. ‘My mother died.’

He displayed no emotion. All that could be said for him was that he was no hypocrite.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said distantly, the words a mere conventional expression of regret. ‘Why is Elizabeth Harley’s daughter, and Simon Brentshaw’s granddaughter, reduced to living like this?’

‘One of my grandfather’s pet hobbyhorses was his belief that it was extremely bad for young people to grow up knowing they had a cushion of money behind them. He thought it corrupted them. He told me right from the start that there wouldn’t be anything for me. I don’t know whether he left anything to my mother, but if he did none of it was handed on to me when she died,’ she said unemotionally.

He frowned. ‘I see. Well, it’s none of my business. Why did you write me that rather enigmatic letter?’

‘Simon was just over a year old when my mother died,’ she returned, leashing her anger and disillusion because she had to keep a cool head.

‘And who,’ he asked softly, ‘is Simon?’

She tamped down incipient hysteria. ‘Simon is your son.’