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She whirled around as Matthew came up the internal staircase from his triple garage, carrying the by now crumpled photographs he had removed from her bag. She’d thought she had escaped him when she had broken away and made a dash for her car in the hospital car park, cramming her key into the nearside passenger door. But Matthew had foiled her by making an eye-opening leap across the sloping bonnet, sledding across the polished paintwork on his backside to land lightly on the other side and whip himself into the driver’s seat in the time it took her to get inside.
‘I always wanted to do that!’ he had crowed smugly, plucking her keys from her frozen hand.
‘You can’t do this!’ she spluttered, as he drove out of the car park with a cheerful wave of recognition to the amused security guard.
‘I just did,’ he pointed out, flicking on an indicator as he followed the sign for the motorway.
‘But what about your Porsche—’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll have someone pick it up for me. Right now we have more important things to worry about…’
‘Like my having you arrested for abduction?’
‘Go ahead. Bring on the cops with their sirens and flashing lights,’ he drawled sarcastically. ‘Let’s get as many people as possible involved in this sordid affair!’
She scowled. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Somewhere we won’t be interrupted…’
The place to which he had brought her was certainly secluded. It lay in the rural belt south of the city, surrounded by the flat green fields and timber-railed fences of famous racing studs and training stables. The large white aggressively modern house was well tucked back from the road, on tree-studded land enclosed by a high stone wall and guarded by a state of-the-art remote video and alarm system.
‘Not only does disarming it require a double code, but also a fingerprint ID,’ Matthew informed her now, as she stood in the bare, white-walled foyer, the intensely coloured light cascading down from the domed leaded-glass skylight high overhead turning her hair into a vibrant cap of jewel-green as she tilted her head to warily monitor his approach. He held up a splayed hand, palm towards her. ‘So, unless you’re wearing the approved loops and whorls, all hell will break loose if you open a door anywhere in the house.’
She looked at all the closed doors she could see down the wide, straight hallway which passed beneath the graceful white arch of a double staircase leading to the upper floor.
‘Then hadn’t you better turn it off?’ Even speaking softly, her voice echoed clearly in the empty space between the polished hardwood floors and the curving grained timber ceilings.
‘I’ve turned off the sub-network that controls the internal doors and sound and motion sensors; I think I might leave the rest of the bells and whistles in place until you feel a trifle more…secure with my hospitality.’
She tossed her head, drawing herself up to her full height. ‘May I at least have my car keys back?’
She fully expected him to refuse. Instead he took them out of his pocket and tossed them over.
‘The garage doors are also operated on a code system,’ he revealed as she snatched them out of the air. ‘Are you thirsty? You look hot.’ He turned on his heel and walked into the cool depths of the hallway, shedding his jacket and stripping off his tie. ‘Coming?’
Curiosity drove her to follow without further protest. Underfoot the smooth wood changed to plush oriental carpet runners, rich with glowing colours woven into complex geometric patterns. Through half-open doors Rachel glimpsed large white-walled rooms, with more jewelled carpets decorating the wooden floors and only a very occasional piece of furniture. There seemed to be plenty of furniture on the walls, however, and she guessed that the art, rather than an obsession with personal safety, was the reason for the excessive security system.
The huge room into which Matthew turned looked out over a deep blue swimming pool fed by a waterfall and surrounded by pale flagstones and boulders of white rock.
Apart from a floor-to-ceiling bookcase running the length of the back wall, the only furniture was a sinuously curved waist-high cabinet topped with a waxed slab of recycled native timber growing out of another wall, and the long, serpentine ripple of an armless couch facing the glass doors, edged in lead-lights, that opened onto the pool.
He threw his jacket and tie across the top of the cabinet and laid the envelope down on top of them. From a refrigerator concealed in the bottom half of the cabinet Matthew took a bottle of mineral water and one of lager, silently offering her a choice. He poured her requested water into a large goblet of hand-blown glass, pushing it towards her across the intricately veined slab of wood, and did the same with a beer for himself.
‘Isn’t it a bit early in the day for that?’ she attacked. ‘If you’re going to drink yourself into a stupor again I’d like to leave. In my experience you make an unpleasant drunk.’
He took a long draught of the icy liquid, watching her over the rim. ‘Really? That’s not what the pictures say.’
Her fingers clenched on her glass. ‘You think I enjoyed what I had to do that night?’ she said icily.
‘Had to do?’ he said, his narrow face hawkishly intent. ‘Did someone somehow force you to lure me into a compromising position?’
Her glass clashed with the wood as she set it down, glaring belligerently across the bar. ‘Of course not! And I didn’t lure you—’
‘But you did push me into that pool; there was never any oh-so-convenient cat, was there?’ He smiled grimly as her face reflected her guilt. ‘And I seem to remember you were the one who suggested the guest house…’
‘Merrilyn was incapable of doing anything but panic; you were bombed out of your mind and threatening to create havoc—somebody had to decide what to do.’
‘So it really was all your own idea,’ he concluded bitterly. ‘You still haven’t told me why—was it some twisted form of revenge for not getting the contracts you wanted? For money? Or just for the sake of some sick head-game?’
