The Ultimate Betrayal. Michelle Reid

afterwards…

      God…!

      ‘Rachel…’

      No! She couldn’t listen to any more. ‘I have to go,’ she said huskily. ‘Michael needs me.’ Couldn’t, because she was remembering one other pointer that was far more damning than any weak points of irritability or even poor sexual performances! She was remembering the delicate scent of an expensive perfume emanating from one of his shirts one morning as she prepared it for washing. It had clung to the fine white cotton, all over it. The collar, the shoulders, the two front sections. It had been the same delicate scent she had smelled but not quite picked up on each time she had kissed him when he came home at night—on his late nights. On his lean cheek. In his hair.

      Fool!

      ‘No—Rachel, please wait. I—’

      The receiver dropped noisily on to its rest and she sank, leaden-bodied, back on to the stairs. Seeing Daniel. Daniel with another woman. Daniel having an affair. Daniel making love, drowning in another woman’s…

      She retched nauseously, a hand going up to cover her mouth, turning into a white-knuckled fist to press her cold and trembling lips painfully against her clenched teeth.

      The phone began ringing again. A tired cry coming from the kitchen joined the shrill sound, and she stood up, a strange kind of calmness settling over her as she first picked up the receiver, then dropped it immediately back on its rest. Then, with that same odd calmness which actually spoke of reeling shock, she lifted it off again and left it off, then walked towards the kitchen.

      Michael went straight to sleep after his feed. He curled himself up into his habitual ball with his padded bottom stuck up in the air and his small teddy tucked beneath his chubby cheek. Rachel stood for a long time just staring down at him—not really seeing him, not seeing anything much.

      Her mind seemed to have gone a complete blank.

      She checked the twins’ rooms as she passed by. Sammy was fast asleep with his covers kicked off as usual, arms thrown out across his pillow in abandonment. She bent to drop a soft kiss on her eldest son’s cheek before gently pulling the covers over him. Sam was more like his father than the other two, dark-haired and determined-chinned. Tall for his age, too, and sturdy. Daniel had looked like him at that age; she had seen snaps of him in his mother’s photograph album. And Sam showed a stubbornness of purpose in that six-year-old face—just like his adored father.

      Her heart wrenched, but she ignored the ugly feeling, turning instead to go to the other room where she stood staring down at the sleeping figure of her daughter. Kate was a different proposition entirely from her twin. You could come into this room in the morning almost guaranteed to find her sleeping in exactly the same position you had left her in the night before. Kate, with her silky hair like sunshine on her pillow. The apple of her father’s eye. She could wheedle more out of Daniel than anyone else in the family could. He openly and unashamedly adored his blue-eyed princess. And the precocious little madam knew it—and exploited it to its fullest degree.

      Would Daniel so much as consider doing anything which could hurt his little girl? Or lower his stature in the eyes of his adoring eldest son? Would he dare place all of this in jeopardy over something so basic as sex?

      Sex? A terrifying shiver went skittering down her spine. Maybe it was more than sex. Maybe he couldn’t help himself. Maybe it was love—the real thing. Love. The kind of love men were willing to betray everything for.

      Maybe this was all just a stupid lie. A dark and cancerous bloody lie! And she was doing him the worst indignity of all by even considering it as the truth!

      Then she remembered the perfume. And the times he had stayed out all night—blaming it on the Harvey contract.

      The damned Harvey contract.

      She reeled away and walked blindly out of Kate’s room and across the landing into their bedroom where, only last week, they had found each other again. Made love beautifully for the first time in months.

      Last week. So what had happened last week to make him suddenly turn to her again? She had made an effort; that was what had happened. She’d been worried about the way their relationship was going, and she’d made an effort. Sent the children to stay with his mother for the night. Cooked his favourite meal, laid the table with their best china and lit candles, and greeted him home in a slinky black dress and with a kiss that promised so much…

      So much, in fact, that she’d not even noticed the clenching of his jaw and the sudden twitch of that little nerve beside his mouth which was always a dead giveaway that he was labouring under severe stress. But she noticed it now, with aching hindsight. She closed her eyes tightly in the silence of their bedroom and saw his lean face clench, his tanned skin pale, that little nerve begin to work as she wound her arms around his neck and leaned provocatively against him.

      God. The nausea came back, almost overwhelming her, and she stumbled blindly out of the room and down the stairs to their sitting-room, seeing so much—so much that she had been foolishly blind to until now—that she was barely aware of what she was doing.

      The tension with which he had held her shoulders, trying to put some distance between them. The pained bleak look in his grey eyes as he had stared down at her inviting mouth. The sigh which had rasped from him and the shudder which had shaken him when she’d murmured, ‘I love you, Daniel. I’m so sorry I’ve been such a pain to live with.’

      He’d closed his eyes tightly, swallowed tightly, clenched his lips, and clenched his hands on her shoulders until she’d actually winced in pain. Then he’d pulled her close, hugged her to him, burying his face in her throat, and said not a word, not a single word. No answering apology, no answering declaration of love. Nothing.

      But they had made love beautifully, she remembered now, with an ache which echoed deep into her being. Whatever else Daniel was getting from this other woman, he could still want her with a passion no man could fake—surely?

      Or could he? she wondered now. What did she know of men and how their sex-drives worked? She had been just seventeen when she met Daniel. He had been her first lover—her only lover. She knew nothing—nothing about men.

      Not even her own husband, seemingly.

      Her eye was caught by her own reflection in the mirror set above the white marble fireplace, and she stared numbly at herself. She looked pale, she noted, a trifle tense around the mouth, but otherwise normal. No blood evident. No scars. Just Rachel Masterson nee James. Twenty-four years old. Mother. Wife—in that order. She smiled bitterly at that. Facing the truth of it in a way she had never allowed herself to do before.

      You wanted him, she told her reflection. And my God, you got him—and all in the space of six short months, too! Not bad going for a sweet naive seventeen-year-old. Daniel had been all of twenty-four. Far too worldly-wise, surely, she mocked her reflection cynically, to be caught out by the oldest trick in the book!

      Then the cynicism left her, because it had not been a trick, and she had no right denigrating herself by calling it one. She had been seventeen and utterly innocent when she met Daniel at her very first visit to a real nightclub, with a crowd of girls from school who thought it hilarious that she was frightened they would ask her her age and discover she was not old enough to enter their establishment.

      ‘Come on, Rachel!’ they’d mocked her. ‘If they ask you, you lie, like we do!’ And they had given her a new date of birth which she repeated over and over to herself until she was safely inside the glittering dimness of the nightclub. And even then she had jumped like a terrified rabbit every time someone so much as brushed by her, half-expecting to be thrown out by one of the big burly bouncers dotted around the place. Then, slowly, she had relaxed, begun to enjoy herself along with the rest of them, dancing to the disco music and sipping white wine and feeling less inhibited as the evening went on.

      She was aware of Daniel from the moment he stepped into the club. He carried that kind of charisma with him. A big, lean man with neat dark hair and the kind of clean good looks film stars were made of. The others noticed him