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He was making no sense. ‘You’re the one playing the games,’ she flung at him. ‘You tell me!’
He pushed away his unfinished beer and placed his hands flat on the bar. ‘You’re saying I get to make the first move?’ he asked savagely. ‘OK. How much?’
‘How much what?’
‘For the photographs—all prints and negatives. How much?’
She felt a sharp wrench in her chest. Foolishly she had somehow thought that he would relent, that he wouldn’t let it go this far…
‘You mean…how much money?’ Her head whirled. He was asking her how much blackmail she was willing to pay?
‘What do you think they’re worth? Ten thousand?’
‘Ten thousand dollars!’ she echoed with an incredulous shrill.
‘You think it should be more?’ he asked sardonically ‘How much? Twenty? Fifty grand? A hundred?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she cried. He might as well ask for the moon. ‘You’re a millionaire, for God’s sake. You don’t need the money—’
‘But you do? Why? To prop up that ailing business of yours?’
His scathing tone made her see red. ‘It’s not ailing. It’s just a matter of smoothing out the cash flows.’
‘And the way to do this is by indulging in a spot of blackmail? Hardly a good advertisement for your professional integrity.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—my integrity has never been in question!’ she defended herself hotly. ‘They’re your photos. You’re the blackmailer!’
‘The hell I am!’ He stared at her, feigning a thunderstruck innocence that made her blood boil.
She fished in her bag for her wallet and held up the green-inked note, now folded and angrily refolded many times. ‘Then what’s this? And don’t tell me that you didn’t write it, because—’ she took another piece of paper from her wallet and held them side by side ‘—I compared it to this—the handwriting is identical.’
He looked at the formal apology he had sent with his flowers, briefly diverted. ‘You kept this? Did you press one of my flowers, too?’
She flushed. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ She withered him with a lie. ‘The roses went straight into the bin!’
He reached for the other note and she retracted it sharply. ‘Oh, no, you don’t—this is evidence. You mailed me those photographs and threatened to release them to the tabloids. You accused me of being a prostitute! And you have the nerve to accuse me of being somehow to blame!’
Dark blood began edging along the top of his cheekbones as he began to register the extent his error. ‘But you sent them to me first—’
‘I never saw them before in my life,’ she blazed in righteous indignation. ‘Not until you sent them to me with your sleazy note attached. And that envelope I gave your mother at the hospital she had just dropped. All I did was pick it up off the floor for h
er. If you think you can force us to withdraw Westons’ bid for the KR contract without you having appeared to have interfered, you can think again! I have no idea where the photos came from, but if you have any more of them—’
‘I don’t, and I have no idea where they came from, either.’
‘You can forget about trying—’ She broke off her harangue. ‘What did you say?’
He succinctly described the arrival of the envelope, addressed to his father at KR Industries, into his hands. ‘There was no message, but I naturally assumed they were from you,’ he said, rubbing his lean cheek, as if anticipating another well-deserved slap. ‘I thought it was some kind of shakedown—’
‘You naturally assumed?’ Rachel was even more outraged. Her bosom heaved. ‘Why was I the natural culprit? What made you even think I was capable of such a despicable thing?’
‘I don’t know…maybe it was my subconscious.’
‘Your subconscious told you I was a blackmailing bitch?’ Her outraged voice bounced off the pitched ceiling.
Instead of flinching, he looked her straight in the eye and said with devastating honesty, ‘No, my subconscious was telling me that you were a gorgeous, earthy, incredibly sexy woman to whom I was dangerously attracted. I say “dangerously” because all my logical thought-processes went completely haywire whenever you were in the vicinity. In trying to hide it I guess I might have overcompensated. You may have noticed that I hardly managed to address a single coherent sentence to you whenever we were in a room together…’
Rachel felt as if she had been hit on the head, dazed by this insight—so totally at odds with her own interpretation of his dismissive behaviour.
