The Mistress Assignment. Penny Jordan

had been drinking in the busy Italian wine bar where they had gone for a drink after they had seen Beth off on her buying trip to Prague, the idea of revealing Julian Cox as the unpleasant and untrustworthy character they knew him to be seemed to have taken on the air of something of a crusade, a moral crusade.

      ‘Why should he be allowed to get away with what he’s done, to walk away from his guilt in the same manner he walked away from Beth?’ Dee had asked the others now.

      ‘Walk away! What he did was even worse than that,’ Kelly exploded. ‘He practically forced Beth to publicly humiliate herself. I can’t believe how many people seem to have fallen for the lies he’s been spreading about her, implying that not only did she misunderstand his intentions but that she also actively pursued him, to the point where he was supposedly thinking of taking legal action to stop her. Bunkum! I know which one of them was doing the lying and it wasn’t Beth. For goodness’ sake, I even heard him telling her how much he loved her, how much he couldn’t wait for them to be married.’

      ‘That would have been around the time when Beth’s grandfather was so seriously ill, I expect?’ Dee said grimly.

      Kelly looked at her in surprise, but it was Anna who answered her question first, exclaiming, ‘Yes, that’s right! It was when her grandfather was ill that Julian proposed.’

      At thirty-seven Anna was the oldest member of the quartet. As Beth’s mother’s younger cousin she had just missed out on being a bridesmaid at the wedding through a serious bout of German measles. In compensation Beth’s mother had asked her several years later to be one of her new baby’s godparents. Only a teenager, Anna had been awed and thrilled to be considered grown-up enough for such a responsibility and it was one she had taken very seriously, her relationship with Beth even more precious to her since she and her husband had not had any children of their own.

      ‘What’s the connection between Beth’s grandfather’s illness and Julian’s proposal of marriage?’ Kelly asked Dee curiously.

      ‘Can’t you guess?’ Dee responded. Think about it. The girl Julian dropped Beth for is known to have a substantial personal trust fund.’

      Kelly made a small moue of distaste and looked shocked.

      ‘You mean that Julian proposed to Beth because he thought...’

      ‘That her grandfather would die and Beth would inherit a lot of money,’ Dee finished for her. ‘Yes. Once he realised that Beth’s grandfather was going to recover he must have really panicked, but, of course, he met this other girl, whose inheritance is far more accessible...’

      ‘It sounds like something out of a bad melodrama,’ Kelly protested, her forehead puckering as she added, ‘Besides, I thought that Julian was wealthy in his own right. He certainly gives that impression.’

      ‘He certainly likes to give that impression,’ Dee agreed. ‘Needs to, in fact. That’s the way he draws the innocent and the naive into his web.’

      Kelly’s frown deepened as she listened to Dee.

      At thirty, Dee was older than Kelly and Beth but younger than Anna, and the two girls had originally met her after their estate agent had suggested that they might want to look at a shop property Dee owned and wanted to let.

      They had done so and had both been pleased and impressed with the swift and businesslike way in which Dee had handled the letting of her property to them. She was a woman who, although at first a little reserved and cool, and very choosy about her friends, on later acquaintance revealed a warmth and sense of humour that made her fun to be with.

      Anna, who had lived in the town for the last fifteen years following the tragic death of her young husband in a sailing accident off the coast of Cornwall, had known Dee a little before Beth and Kelly had arrived on the scene. After the death of her father Dee had taken over his business affairs as well as his position on several local charities, and so was quite a well-known figure in the town.

      Dee’s father had been an extremely successful entrepreneur, and others in her family were members of the local farming community, and the more Kelly and Beth had come to know her, the more it had astonished them that such a stunningly attractive woman, and one whose company the male sex quite plainly enjoyed should not have a man in her life.

      ‘Perhaps it’s because she’s so busy,’ Beth had ventured when she and Kelly had discussed it. ‘After all, neither of us have partners at the moment...’

      This had been in her pre-Julian days, and Kelly had raised her eyebrows a little, reminding Beth wryly, ‘We’ve only been in town a matter of weeks, and besides... I saw the look in Dee’s eyes the other day when we all went out to dinner and that little girl came trotting up to talk to her—the one from the other table. Do you remember? She made an immediate beeline for Dee and it was as though the pair of them were communicating on some special wavelength that blocked out the rest of us...’

      ‘Mmm... She does have a very definite rapport with children,’ Beth had agreed, adding helpfully, ‘Perhaps she’s just not met the right man yet. She strikes me very much as a woman who would only commit herself to a relationship if she was a hundred and fifty per cent sure it was right for her.’

      ‘Mmm...’ Kelly had agreed reluctantly. ‘Personally I think there must be rather more to it than that.’

      ‘Well, maybe,’ Beth had agreed. ‘But I wouldn’t like to be the one to pry into her past, would you?’

      ‘No,’ Kelly had agreed immediately.

      Friendly though the four of them had become, and well though they all got on, there was a certain reserve about Dee, a certain sense of distance, an invisible line over which one knew instinctively one would not be encouraged to cross.

      ‘You seem to know a lot more about Julian’s background than the rest of us,’ Kelly told Dee now.

      Dee gave a dismissive shrug.

      ‘He’s...he grew up locally, and in my position one...learns things.’

      Kelly’s frown deepened.

      ‘But surely if you knew his reputation was unsavoury you could have warned Beth?’

      ‘I was away when she originally met him,’ Dee reminded her, adding dryly, ‘And anyway, I doubt she would have listened...’

      ‘No, you’re probably right,’ Kelly agreed. ‘I never liked him, but Beth was so loyal to him she wouldn’t hear a word against him. It’s all very well saying that we ought to do something to show him up for the rat he really is, but how can we? He’s dumped poor Beth, humiliated her, and he’s got clean away with it.

      ‘I’d like to tell this new girlfriend of his just what he’s like...’ she continued darkly.

      ‘It wouldn’t work,’ Dee warned her. ‘She’s as besotted with him as Beth was. No, if we’re going to have any chance of getting any kind of restitution for Beth, any kind of public recognition of the way Julian lied about her as well as to her, we’re going to have to use his own weakness, his own greed against him.’

      ‘We are? But how...?’ Kelly asked her curiously. Beth was such a loving, gentle, kind person, the last thing she had needed was the kind of pain and humiliation Julian had handed out to her, never mind the potential damage it could do to their own just burgeoning business. The whispering campaign Julian had so carefully and cleverly instigated when he had dropped Beth, insinuating that she had been the one pursuing him, obsessed by him, was bound to have its repercussions.

      ‘I do hope that Beth will be all right on her own in Prague,’ Anna put in anxiously, joining the conversation. Fine-boned and very youthful-looking, Anna was, in many ways, so far as Kelly was concerned, the epitome of a slightly old-fashioned type of femininity and womanhood.

      Married young and then tragically widowed, in a medieval century she would have been the type of woman who would no doubt have withdrawn to the protective security of a small convent, or perhaps in the Georgian or Victorian age she would