The Mistress Deception

Rachel continued, “Anyone would think you’re vetting me as a potential mistress.” She’d been so busy keeping tabs on Matthew that it had never occurred to her to look over her shoulder!

“Lover.” The soft word caressed her senses like a fur glove. “You could only be my mistress if I was already married. Since I’m not, that would make you my prospective lover rather than my kept woman.”

As Rachel scrabbled for a sufficiently devastating answer, Matthew added, “But why set your sights so low? I could be checking out your suitability as a potential wife….”

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The Mistress Deception

Susan Napier

MILLS & BOON

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

‘EXCUSE me—Mr Riordan…?’

Matthew Riordan’s dark head jerked up at the interruption and he directed an impatient frown at the middle-aged woman hovering in the doorway of his borrowed office.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you…’ she said, undeterred by the scowl on his narrow, long-boned face. She advanced towards his desk, a large manila envelope held out between her fingertips. ‘I know you asked me to deal with your father’s personal correspondence until he’s well enough to do it himself, but—well…I think this is probably something that you would prefer to handle yourself…’

Matt’s abstraction was banished as he rocked back in his leather chair, his thick eyebrows rising at the sight of his father’s unflappable secretary looking so ill at ease.

Was that a blush on those leathery cheeks? he wondered incredulously, his dark brown eyes sharpening behind the lenses of his round gold and tortoiseshell spectacles.

For over three decades—since before Matt was born—she had serenely guarded his father’s Auckland office, more than a match for Kevin Riordan’s rough-and-tumble personality and the raffish nature of many of his employees and customers in the early years of his company. The former rubbish-man turned scrap-dealer and recycling mogul, now owner of New Zealand’s largest waste-disposal conglomerate, had rewarded her mental toughness and unflagging loyalty with his boisterous respect, smugly boasting to all and sundry that nothing could fluster his redoubtable Mary.

His confidence had proved justified two days earlier, when Mary had investigated a thud from his office and discovered her employer in the throes of a heart attack. Instantly conquering her shock, she had phoned for an ambulance and proceeded to calmly administer CPR until the medical team arrived. Then she had busied herself telephoning his wife and son, faxing his second-in-command, who was in Tokyo on business, and discreetly fending off speculation and rumours as she postponed appointments and rearranged meetings.

Now, she gingerly placed the neatly slit foolscap envelope on the desk in front of Matt and scuttled backwards.

‘What is it—a letter-bomb?’ he commented drily, and Mary regained enough of her steely poise to give him a stern look, admonishing him for his flippancy.

Matt laid down his pen and pulled off his glasses, tossing them onto the blotter. His eyes felt gritty with fatigue as he picked up the envelope, noting the plainly typed address with the words ‘Strictly Personal’ thickly underlined several times. He tipped it up by one corner and three glossy photographs slid face-down across the desk.

He flipped one over and his eyebrows scooted up in puzzled surprise.

The glossy black and white photograph had been taken at a party two weeks ago—a profile shot of Matt leaning over the hand of a tall, voluptuous woman whose long, strapless glittering white gown looked as if it had been applied to her pneumatic curves with a spray gun.

He and the woman were both holding champagne glasses and smiling brilliantly, but the flattering picture didn’t tell the full story.

The photograph didn’t show the long, painted nails digging painfully into his skin, punishing him for the parody of a kiss he had just planted on the back of her hand. Nor did it reveal that Matt had been dangerously drunk, sullen and obstreperous.

He hadn’t been aware that there was anyone taking photographs that night, although in the circumstances that was hardly surprising, but he doubted that Merrilyn Freeman, their over-anxious hostess, would have jeopardised the exclusivity of her private dinner party by inviting a professional photographer along. The harsh contrasts and grainy texture suggested the print had been blown up from a much smaller negative.

It was also perfectly innocuous—nothing to give Mary Marcus reason to treat the envelope as if it was an unexploded bomb.

In the course of his business and social life Matt had been photographed in similar poses with numerous women of his acquaintance. He could see no reason why anyone would want to mail this one to his father, except, perhaps, as an attempt to curry favour…

Matt flipped over the other photographs and his complacent assumption exploded in his face. He stiffened, the breath hissing between his clenched teeth.

To his intense chagrin he could feel the warmth flooding into his face. Although he didn’t look up he was excruciatingly aware of Mary’s disapproving gaze as she made good her escape, closing the door behind her with a definitive snap that sealed him in with the smoking ruins of his reputation as a gentleman.

Thank God he could rely on her to keep her mouth shut!

His mouth compressed into a thin line, Matt studied the evidence of his betrayal.

In the first photograph Matt was sitting bare-chested on the edge of a rumpled bed, facing towards the camera, his smooth torso sculpted by the soft light from a bedside lamp. The woman in the strapless dress was kneeling on the floor between his splayed legs, the white sequins of her gown a glittering contrast to the black fabric of Matt’s formal trousers where his knees pressed against her flanks, trapping her in the quintessential pose of female sexual submission. He was looking down at her bent head, his palms cupping her skull, fingers threaded into her feathery, short-cropped hair, while hers were out of sight of the camera’s intrusive eye…from the position of her bent elbows, obviously busy in his lap!

God!

Matt’s flush deepened, his blood pressure spiking as he transferred his stunned gaze to the second picture. Here the roles of submission and domination were dramatically reversed. This time Matt was lying flat on his back on the bed, the muscles of his deep chest straining against the pull of his arms stretched over his head, his crossed wrists bound to the head of the brass bedstead with the narrow silk cummerbund he had been wearing in the earlier photo. Straddling his lower belly was the Valkyrie, flaunting a vast expanse of smooth, creamy skin unmarked by tan-lines, her knees digging into his lower ribcage, her spectacular breasts hovering invitingly above his pillowed head as she arched up to secure his bonds. The crowning salacious touch was the thin black leather whip which lay coiled on the bed beside them.

Matt cursed, his alcohol-hazed memories warring with the erotic images before him. His expression tightened as he shifted uncomfortably in his chair, trying to ease the treacherous tautening in another part of his anatomy.

He was furious, and aroused—and furious at himself for being aroused. He had been manipulated—his pride scraped raw, his privacy violated—and instead of being disgusted he was getting turned on!

He raked his fingers inside the empty envelope, grimly unsurprised to find that there was no accompanying message.

No message was needed. Matt knew exactly what form the blackmail would take.

The bitch had set him up!

And to think that he had sent her flowers afterwards, to thank her for preventing him from making a complete drunken ass of himself at the party…an expensive sheaf of yellow roses and a polite, handwritten note which had skilfully disguised his chagrin that she should be his rescuer and, later in that guest-house bedroom, sole witness to his humiliating weakness.

Except it was now painfully obvious that she had not been the sole witness!

Matt pinched the narrow bridge of his nose, castigating himself for his gullibility. How could he have allowed himself to trust her? He had been suspicious of her from the first day they had ever met, and even tanked to the eyeballs he had recognised the cool antipathy she had exuded when Merrilyn had anxiously thrust them into each other’s company. It had been partly the desire to smash through that frigid aloofness which had goaded him into baiting her the way that he had.

And now she thought she had it within her grasp to extract the perfect revenge.

Well, he might have been an easy target drunk, but—sober—he was going to show her how very difficult he could be!

He glanced at the smudged date-stamp on the manila envelope, his eyebrows snapping together when he realised what it meant. He leaned forward and punched in Mary’s extension number on his telephone.

‘Mr Riordan’s office—’

‘Mary, when did this envelope arrive in the office?’ he demanded, his abrupt urgency overriding any potential embarrassment.

‘The day before yesterday—in the morning,’ Mary replied, after a small hesitation to think out the sequence of events. ‘I always slit open Mr Riordan’s personal mail for him as soon as it arrives, and put the stack on his desk…but of course I never look at the contents unless he expressly asks me to—’

‘So this has just been lying around—open—on Dad’s desk for the past two days?’ interrupted Matt, sweating bullets.

‘Well, yes…but with Mr Stiller not due back from Tokyo until later in the week, only the cleaners and I have had access to Mr Riordan’s office,’ Mary pointed out.

Matt’s tension eased a notch at the reminder of his cousin’s absence. Both only children, he and Neville Stiller had spent a lot of time in each other’s company while growing up, but as adults their relationship was far from cordial.

Neville, who had worked at KR Industries ever since he’d left high school, had been appointed Chief Executive five years ago, and was generally expected to take over as General Manager when his uncle retired. Matt, on the other hand, had been actively discouraged from following directly in his father’s footsteps. Instead he had been educated, guided and groomed for the job which now consumed most of his waking hours—chairman of the family’s holding company, which controlled multimillion-dollar investments in both the local and international share markets.

Matt had long accepted that there was no place for him in the flourishing business which had been the cornerstone of his father’s fortune, but Neville remained intensely protective of the power-base he had carved out for himself, quick to resent any advice or expression of interest in the firm as an attempt to undermine his position as Kevin Riordan’s successor.

If this pivotal deal had not demanded Neville’s continuing presence in Tokyo, Matt didn’t doubt that he would have rushed back to commandeer the General Manager’s office.

Firmly ensconced in the seat of power, Neville would have had few qualms about nosing through his stricken uncle’s private correspondence, and if he had come across the photos how he would have gloated over the knowledge that his cousin had been caught, quite literally, with his pants down!

Matt cringed at the thought. As it was, Neville had had little choice but to grudgingly accept Matt’s offer to hold the fort until he had concluded his complex negotiations with a Japanese industrial waste management company with whom KR Industries was planning a joint venture.

Suddenly Matt was hit by another, even more devastating worry.

‘Do you know if Dad had time to look at his private mail before he had his heart attack?’ he grated.

Mary’s sharply indrawn breath recognised the ugly implication. ‘I suppose he may have done,’ she admitted slowly. ‘We went through the business mail together first, as usual, and he dictated a few urgent letters, but…yes—it’s possible that he started going through his own mail while I was typing up the letters. But since that envelope was the largest, I would have put it at the bottom of his pile…’

They both knew that that was little consolation. The brash personality shaped by Kevin Riordan’s poverty-stricken childhood viewed size as an important indicator of status. ‘Restraint’ was not a word which figured large in his vocabulary. If he had decided to read his mail he was likely to have reasoned that the bigger the envelope the more interesting the contents.

In this case he would have been right!

Matt’s dark eyes narrowed to glittering black slits, a faint tic pulsing on the hard temple above his left eyebrow. His left hand clenched on the receiver, the spare flesh whitening over his knuckles and around the broad gold band on his ring finger.

‘Mary—bring me a plain foolscap envelope!’ he ordered, and slammed down the phone.

He dragged a blank writing tablet towards him and picked up his fountain pen to scrawl a slashing message in his trademark green ink across the page.

When Mary appeared with his request he transferred the photographs and the folded message into the new envelope and addressed it in aggressive block letters.

‘See that it goes out immediately,’ he said, pushing the sealed envelope across the desk.

‘By courier, or post?’

His smile was unpleasant.

‘Courier.’ He wanted the blackmailer’s mental suffering to start as soon as possible.

Mary looked at the address, her poker-face breaking up as she raised concerned grey eyes to his. ‘Don’t you think you should—’

‘Just do it!’

Her mouth snapped shut at his unprecedented rudeness. Her chin lifted and she turned on her heel, her rigid, bony back a silent reproach. Matt was irresistibly reminded that her staunch loyalty to his father had always also extended to himself.

‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ he apologised swiftly, his deep voice resonant with sincerity as he ran his fingers through his thick wavy hair, disciplined into a conservative cut that flattered the long bones of his face. ‘I didn’t mean to shout. I’m not angry at you. What with keeping my mother company at the hospital and trying to juggle things here, as well as my own job, I haven’t had much sleep over the past two nights and I’m afraid my temper’s suffered accordingly. But as you said before—this is something that I need to handle myself…’

As a boy he had always been quick to admit fault and offer amends, thought Mary, and as a man he was equally ruthless with his failings. In fact sometimes she felt he took too much responsibility upon himself…

‘I just hope you know what you’re doing,’ she murmured.

‘Oh, I know exactly what I’m doing,’ he told her with a savage smile. ‘I’m turning the tables on an extortionist.

‘I have a feeling that I may turn out to have a gift for blackmail!’

CHAPTER TWO

RACHEL BLAIR sat at the kitchen table sipping her morning coffee and glowering at the letter in her hand.

‘Hello, what are you doing up so early?’ Her elder sister came bustling through the door, dressed in her nurse’s uniform and carrying an armful of crumpled sheets and damp towels. ‘I thought you were going to leave it one more day before you went back to work.’ She vanished into the adjacent laundry and Rachel could hear her lifting and closing the lid of the temperamental washing machine and cranking the dial around.

‘I felt perfectly fine when I woke up so I changed my mind,’ Rachel called to her through the archway. The mild headache niggling at her consciousness she preferred to attribute to the letter in her hand rather than the lingering after-effects of her ailment.

‘Hmm.’ Robyn reappeared in the doorway and gave her a professional once-over. ‘Just make sure you don’t overdo it. Your immune system’s probably still not back to full strength.’

‘It was only a virus,’ Rachel pointed out. ‘I’ve finished my course of antibiotics and my cold is pretty much gone—see?’ She sniffed to show that the clogged airways of the past few days had cleared.

Robyn shook her blonde head in bafflement. ‘I don’t know how you managed to catch the flu in the middle of Auckland’s hottest summer on record. No one else we know has it…’

With an effort Rachel managed not to blush.

‘I guess I’m just ahead of my time,’ she said airily. ‘The doctor said I have the type they’ll be offering a vaccine for this winter.’

Fortunately Robyn was easily diverted from her speculation on the source of the infection.

‘Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll name it after you,’ she grinned.

Rachel could think of someone far more deserving of the honour of being commemorated as an irksome germ!

‘Type-Rachel flu? Do you think I could ask for royalties?’ She grinned back, and the resemblance between the sisters was suddenly pronounced, even though, superficially, they looked as different as chalk and cheese.

At forty, Robyn was still as slim and petite as she had been as a teenager, her ash-blonde hair and big blue eyes lending her a doll-like air of feminine fragility which was belied by her job as a hard-working practice nurse.

Ten years her junior, Rachel towered over her sister, and most other women of her acquaintance. Her wide shoulders and full bust would have made her top-heavy if it hadn’t been for the broadly rounded hips flaring below her neat waist, and her long, firmly muscled legs. Her triangular face, framed by a spiky, razor-cut cap of hair the colour of burnt toffee, thickly lashed hazel eyes and thin, determined mouth possessed strength of character rather than beauty…but unfortunately people often tended to judge her from the neck down!

She knew that her curvy, hour-glass shape rendered her almost a cartoon-figure of female pulchritude, the living embodiment of countless male fantasies.

It had been rough coping with the unwonted sexual attention when she was young, but she had determined very early on not to let her overtly sexy body image dictate the path of her life. She had fought hard to be her own person, and with maturity had perfected subtle strategies to control the perceptions and prejudices of those around her—dressing casually, in loose, multi-layered clothing, and cultivating a robust good humour which was the opposite of seductive. Fortunately her height and superior strength gave her a physical edge whenever her defensive strategies proved too subtle for over-active male libidos.

‘I doubt it—though you’d probably have hordes of guys clamouring to be personally infected,’ chuckled Robyn. Thanks to the considerable age gap between them, and the fact that she had been happily married to Simon Fox for over twenty years, she had never been jealous of her sister’s effect on men.

A rattling mechanical hiccup sounded behind her and she darted through to give the washing machine a well-practised kick of encouragement.

Rachel rolled her eyes and returned her brooding attention to her unwelcome letter.

She was getting fed up with this petty campaign of harassment. At first she had dismissed the escalating stream of annoyances as an unfortunate run of back luck, but too many coincidences had piled up, and now her suspicions condensed into certainty.

It was typical of her unknown harasser to hide behind a faceless bureaucracy. Whoever had it in for her was a coward—but very a clever one, initiating trouble but never following it through to a point where Rachel might have a chance to identify the source.

A low growl of frustration purred in the back of her throat.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Robyn, drifting back to the accompaniment of noisily hissing water pipes.

‘The council has received a tip that I’m running a business from this address,’ Rachel paraphrased in disgust. ‘They’re warning me that they’re going to investigate and I could be prosecuted for carrying on a non-complying activity.’

‘It must be some mistake,’ said Robyn, tucking a shoulder-length strand of hair back into the smooth French twist she wore at work.

‘You think so? And was it also a mistake when the phone company was told the same thing and tried to charge me a higher line rental? And when the tax department decided to audit me because someone phoned their hotline and told them I had an undeclared second income? Or when I didn’t get any mail for two weeks and suddenly discovered that the post office had been advised to redirect my mail to a house which just happened to be the residence of a motorcycle gang?’

Robyn put a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh! That reminds me—Bethany said something arrived for you yesterday afternoon by courier. You were having a bath and she was just leaving for basketball practice so she just signed for it and took off with it in her bag. She forgot all about it until this morning.’

She crossed the small, sunny kitchen and fetched the bubble-wrapped plastic courier bag which had been tucked with some other papers behind the telephone on the bench, handing it to her sister.

She glanced at the watch pinned to her breast and let out a little huff. ‘I hope Bethany’s out of that bathroom—I’m sure when you offered to put us up for a few weeks you didn’t expect to have to put up with a teenager who showers twice a day for twenty minutes at a time! I do wish you’d let us pay something towards the water and power, as well as the groceries.’

Rachel paused in the act of ripping into the zip-locked seam of the bag. ‘Don’t be silly. Just be thankful that Bethany’s into cleanliness, not some ghastly grunge kick. It’s not as if I have to pay rent, or a mortgage. I’ve loved having you to stay.’ There was a hint of wistfulness in her hazel eyes. Since David had died two years ago there had been no one special in her life, no one who was critical to her happiness—or she to theirs. Usually she kept herself looking resolutely to the future, but these last few days of enforced rest had given her time to dwell on all the ‘might have beens.’

She shook off the cruelly unproductive thoughts. ‘I just wish that Simon wasn’t coming back so soon and whisking you both so far away,’ she said lightly.

‘We’re only moving to Bangkok—not the moon,’ Robyn chided her bracingly. Simon, who worked for a multinational chemical company, was being transferred to Thailand to help build a new manufacturing plant. While he had flown out there to meet his new boss, choose their company-paid accommodation and register Bethany to attend the local International School, his wife and daughter had been packing up and selling their Auckland home and arranging to ship their belongings.