AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Frank!’ Rachel was startled to see her partner on her front doorstep, a folded newspaper clutched in his fist. After David died their social contact had dwindled sharply, and since she had been working full-time at WSS they rarely met outside the office. She knew Frank usually spent his Saturdays catching up with paperwork, on call for any problems with the weekend roster.
‘Uh, come in,’ she invited belatedly as he brushed past her. ‘Robyn and Bethany have just gone out to say goodbye to Simon’s mother—’ she began, wondering if he had come to make his farewells.
Frank swung around just inside the door, his fair skin flushed with anger. ‘Since when have you been seeing Matthew Riordan?’ he interrupted harshly. ‘I thought we were supposed to be on the same side? You let me run off my mouth about him—you even agreed that he was a stiff-necked bastard who had it in for us—and now I find out that you two are secretly an item! Do you know what a bloody fool this makes me look?’
He didn’t wait for an answer, bulldozing on in a fury. ‘I can’t believe you let things go this far without telling me. Instead I had to read it in the morning paper along with everybody else!’ he spat, thrusting the newspaper under her nose.
Rachel’s heart plunged as she took it with shaking fingers. ‘What’re you talking about? I don’t get the weekend papers—’
‘I’m talking about that!’ Frank’s thick finger stabbed forcefully at the article folded uppermost—a few paragraphs under a small photograph of Matt wearing a faint social smile that made him look flatteringly enigmatic. ‘It says a lot of crap about your engagement being the result of a “whirlwind romance”—it must have been one hell of a whirlwind since you only met couple of months ago and you always acted like you couldn’t stand him. I thought Riordan was supposed to be getting married to some snotty society woman!’
Jolted by his angry crudity, Rachel blinked with eyes that refused to focus, her brain scrambling to sort out the black and white print.
‘I—I don’t know where they got this—’ she faltered.
‘I do. I rang the paper as soon as I saw it,’ Frank rapped. ‘That was a press release from Riordan’s publicist. The whole world knows you’re engaged to the man—didn’t you think you owed me even a hint?’
His words hit Rachel between the eyes.
The whole world knows you’re engaged…What scandal was there in a man playing sex games with his fiancé in the privacy of their own bedroom?
This was how Matt planned to ‘neutralise’ any blackmail threat? Without even warning her?
‘But I—this isn’t right…’
His blue eyes were pebble-hard. ‘You’re telling me it’s not true?’ he snapped. ‘That you didn’t leap at the chance to investigate him so you could spend more time with your lover?
‘I—’
‘Where were you yesterday afternoon, anyway? I couldn’t get you on your cellphone.’
She remembered the posters in the coronary ward, warning that portable phones could interfere with monitoring equipment. ‘I’m sorry. I turned it off and forgot to switch it back on.’
He was quick to pounce on the hint of guilt. ‘You were with him, weren’t you?’ And as her flush deepened he swore. ‘So it is true!’
‘I’m sorry, Frank.’ She indicated the paper. ‘But I didn’t know he was going to do this—’
‘So that makes it all right? Is there anything else you should have told me?’
She had said she wasn’t frightened of him, but she hesitated to add further fuel to his blazing fury. She shook her head helplessly and that seemed to uncork the full force of his rage.
‘You really think you can have it all, don’t you, Rachel? You’re living here in Dave’s house, on the back of his business, and you’re sneaking around with a guy who’s threatening everything that Dave and I built up! You didn’t utter a peep when I told you about Riordan taking over at KR. Maybe you already knew! I guess sleeping with the enemy means that your loyalty counts for nothing any more.’
Rachel was winded by his punches. ‘This has nothing to do with David. And I haven’t slept with Matthew—’
‘Oh, been holding out for marriage, have you?’ he sneered. ‘And now you’ve had a taste of the high life with Mr Moneybags, I suppose you’d like to conveniently forget Dave ever existed. He always said you were hard-headed and practical—I call it having an eye out for the main chance. But just remember there’s no profit in being dead! Ask yourself why, if he was such a crash-hot husband, the first Mrs Riordan topped herself!’
There was more, bitter, personal invective that left Rachel pale and shaken.
‘I think you’ll find that getting engaged to Riordan and getting him to marry you are two entirely different things. He’s just amusing himself with you. You haven’t got the right connections. He may be loaded, but he comes from trash and he knows it. Men like him always marry up, not down!’
Robyn and Bethany arrived back just as he was delivering his parting shot, almost bumped off the garden path by his headlong rush.
‘What’s his problem?’ Robyn watched him roar off in his car and frowned at Rachel’s pale cheeks. ‘What’s he been saying?’
Rachel managed to summon a thin smile. ‘Nothing he hasn’t been thinking for a long time, I suppose. Maybe it was just temper talking,’ she said generously, trying to put the ugly accusations into perspective. ‘I always knew he didn’t think I was good enough for David; I just didn’t expect him to throw it up at me again after all this time. I thought we’d at least learned to respect each other.’
‘I never did like Frank very much,’ said Robyn flatly. ‘I don’t think he’s capable of trusting anyone—he never even trusted David to decide what was best for himself, did he? It never occurred to him that his precious brother was lucky to find a woman who loved him as much as you did! What put him in such a temper, anyway?’
