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‘I didn’t drool over every minute detail with a magnifying glass, if that’s what you mean!’
‘Then you should have…come down and look at this.’
‘I’ve seen all I need to see—’
‘I doubt it. Come on, Rachel, it’s a bit too late for false modesty.’ He stretched over and laced his fingers around her ankle, giving it a little tug. ‘This is important.’
‘Oh, all right.’ She shook off his hand and reluctantly knelt down beside his prone figure, taking the magnifying glass he handed her.
‘Look, there…’
Her face went fiery red as she saw his finger tracing the curve of her bare hip where it joined her torso ‘You—’
‘Rachel…’ His hand clamped around hers on the handle of the glass, forcing it to remain poised over the glossy still. ‘Get over it! Try and forget for a moment that this is you and me. This photograph has been altered, so seamlessly it couldn’t have been done in a darkroom—it has to have been done on a computer.
‘I’m only guessing, but I doubt your bottom is really as slim as it appears to be here—and see the strange angle of your hips in relation to the position of your thighs? Look at the length from hip to knee—those legs don’t belong to a woman of your height—and where’s the muscle definition of a woman who works out as much as you do in the gym? Then there’s the evenness of the skin toning below your waist—is that natural, given the lighting in the room? I bet if you scanned this and looked at it pixel by pixel you’d be able to see the joins…’
‘My God—this isn’t me!’ Rachel realised gratefully, collapsing on her stomach beside him, leaning on her elbows, her hair brushing his cheek as she jostled him for a better look. ‘This is all a fake!’
‘Well, not all…the top half is pretty unmistakably you,’ he pointed out. ‘And that’s definitely me there underneath you…’
She was obeying his advice and concentrating fiercely on the details. ‘I didn’t think my dress had been dragged down that far, but I thought it must have slipped south in the struggle. I remember having to do a lot of wriggling and twisting to get it back up again…’
‘So do I,’ he sighed reminiscently, earning himself a sharp nudge in the shoulder.
‘Why didn’t it occur to me that this had to be a fake?’ she castigated herself.
‘Probably because, like me, you were initially too furious to think rationally, and also because the other two photographs are perfectly genuine—if misleading,’ he said. ‘Whoever did this is clever, and has all the right ingredients: a good digital scanner, some sophisticated computer software, a pile of porn, a lot of patience and a gutful of resentment.’
‘And the whip,’ she discovered, shifting the thick optic lens, ‘that’s been scanned in, too. Did you notice, Matt? It’s supposedly lying on the sheet, but it’s not making any dent in the folds…’
‘Well, on reflection, it did seem unlikely that a woman as forceful as yourself would need a whip to keep a man in line,’ he said. ‘Especially when you already have a tongue far more stinging than any lash.’
She glanced sideways to find his expression teasing. Their eyes met, and for the first time she found herself tempted to laugh over her ghastly predicament.
‘I gather you’ve changed your mind about my being a professional dominatrix?’ She referred sweetly to his coruscating note.
His eyelids flickered, and although he steadily held her gaze, his colour rose. ‘I doubt you’d want, or expect, abject submission from a man in your bed. I think you’re far more likely to demand an equal exchange of passion…’
He imagined she’d be demanding in bed! He probably thought of her as an experienced older woman, Rachel told herself, alarmed at how arousing she found the notion. She’d never been with a younger man—David had been eleven years her senior. She latched onto the memory in a desperate attempt to anchor herself to sober reality.
She cleared her throat and sat up. ‘What are we going to do about these?’ She indicated the photos.
‘I’m glad to hear you say “we”,’ he said, stacking them up and helping her to her feet with inbred politeness. ‘I take it you’re no more keen than I am to have the police involved?’
She shuddered
, and shook her head. ‘I may as well just tell Frank! The fewer people who know, the less chance of a leak.’
‘Then the first thing we need to do is to neutralise the threat those pictures represent by destroying their capacity to create a scandal. That’ll give us the freedom to organise a more thorough investigation.’
Rachel tensed suspiciously at the latter statement. ‘But no outsiders—and as far as I’m concerned that includes your security people.’
She continued to hammer the point as she followed him out of the room and across the hallway into a stunning white kitchen, where Matthew calmly busied himself making her a snack, after prying out of her that her lunch on stake-out had been a meagre sandwich and an apple.
‘Not nearly enough for someone who burns as much energy as you,’ he told her, opening the gigantic double-doored refrigerator.
Was that an oblique reference to her size? No—if Matthew wanted to comment on her curves he would do it frankly.
