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The breath stuttered in Rachel’s chest. ‘What are you doing here? Did you follow me?’ She tried to summon some outrage, but all she could achieve was a faint echo of reproach.
Matt’s silver-rimmed spectacles glinted in the gloom as he turned his face to hers, his expression sober.
‘Lucky for you that I don’t take orders well. Were you planning to confront a blackmailer without any back-up?’
She raised her hand to her tight throat. ‘You know?’
‘It’s no real big surprise. I’ve had feelers out with a few contacts—and found out that Frank’s the one who’s been causing all your petty problems with bureaucracy. It seems that he’s been trying to make your private life more stressful on top of loading you up with unnecessary business worries—’
‘I went through some back files—found that he’d padded out the quotes on some of the jobs we missed out on in the past couple of years, deliberately pricing us out of contention,’ Rachel interrupted numbly. ‘But I had no idea that he was behind all that other stuff…’ No wonder Frank had been so keen to investigate her mysterious harasser—he never would have tracked down himself!
Matt continued implacably, ‘After you left me I called Neville—I threatened to tell Mum and Dad about the real reason Leigh married me if he didn’t lay off. He knows that would seriously damage his image with Dad, so he threw me the bone about Frank—said Weston had told him he had compromising photos of you and me but he’d considered it too risky to get involved other than to make an under-the-table agreement that he would hold off granting the security contract he intended to give to WSS until Frank had stirred up sufficient trouble to ease you out of the company. Neville didn’t care about Frank’s motive—all he was interested in was the by-product: me being humiliated in front of my father, and anyone else he could leak the juicy details to…’
Rachel hunched her shoulders, shivering in the light summer shirt-dress she had donned with such joyous anticipation that morning. ‘But…it always seemed so generous of Frank to be willing to buy me out if things went wrong…’
‘What appears to be generosity is sometimes only ambition disguised. He obviously didn’t want to alienate you into a costly open fight over ownership of the business. Instead he kept the value of it carefully depressed. You’d probably have found that after you’d sold out business suddenly picked up again…’
Rachel looked straight ahead, her hands clenched in her lap. She wanted nothing more than to bury her face in Matt’s shoulder and bawl out her compound misery. ‘I can’t put this off. I have to have it out with him.’
‘I know. But you’re not going in there alone.’
Matt was offering her the kind of bedrock support that she had denied him. She was stricken with shame. ‘Thanks, but I don’t need you—’
‘Oh, yes, you do, Rachel,’ he said, with a quiet certainty that skewered her heart. ‘You just don’t want to admit it yet…’
She turned her head jerkily. He had been brave enough to seek her out after her betrayal of faith; she owed him a similar courage in return. ‘I’m sorry,’ she choked. ‘I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did. I know you didn’t rape that girl.’
The gravity of his smile was challenging. ‘Know? You’ve discovered some fresh evidence in the last half-hour?’
Yes, the irrefutable evidence of her love. ‘Believe, then…’
She searched for the words to convince him. ‘Matt, I don’t have to know the details, I—’
He stopped her with a slight gesture of his hand. ‘Wait. Let’s tackle one problem at a time. First, let’s tidy away this business with Frank…’
Her partner took one look at the two of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the doorstep and grimaced.
‘So you were the hang-up,’ he said to Rachel, his blue eyes cynical. ‘Checking I was home?’
‘Can we come in?’ she asked, ignoring his redundant remark. ‘We’d like to talk to you about a communication problem you and I seem to be having.’
Frank looked as if he was debating refusing, but he eventually stood back and let them in, following them through to the cramped lounge.
Rachel indicated the computer, scanner and printer in one corner. ‘I suppose that would be the gear you used to alter the photos Armstrong gave you. I noticed you purchased some pretty sophisticated image-handling software through the company a few months ago…’
To make sure there was no misunderstanding, she angrily challenged him with th
e discoveries that she and Matt had made.
To her shock Frank produced no belligerent bluster to dispute the facts. If anything he looked relieved to have it out in the open.
‘I guess you’re a better detective than either of us ever thought, then, huh?’ he said.
‘You’re not even going to try to deny it?’ Rachel asked painfully, aware of Matt’s solid warmth at her back.
‘What’s the point? To tell you the truth, I’m sick of the whole mess,’ he said, running his hand through his sun-streaked blond hair. ‘I never expected to go this far…things just seemed to escalate when you wouldn’t bloody well give up the notion of being a full partner…’
Rachel groped for Matt’s hand behind her back and held it tightly as Frank continued his self-derisive monologue.
