Vendetta (7 page)

The locked door hid exactly what she had suspected: an office. A businessman with Nicholas Thorne’s autocratic reputation would never trust anyone enough to relinquish control of his business, even temporarily. She pulled the door softly to, and switched on the light.

There was a computer work-station and various unidentifiable pieces of electronic equipment, and a big desk strewn with papers.

Vivian ignored the wall of shelves lined with jars and tubes of dubious-looking specimens, her heart sinking at the sight of the heavy steel combination-safe on the floor.

She went over to the desk. Only the top drawer was locked and she rifled quickly through the others, finding mostly stationery and files of scientific papers and journals. Nothing that might tell her more about Nicholas the
man
. No stray photographs of his wife or son. No photos of any other kind either…

Adrenalin spurted through her veins and her sweaty hands shook as she unlocked the top drawer and sat down on the big swivel chair behind the desk to reach inside.

The first thing she touched was a small medicine bottle, and her fingers tightened around the amber glass as she
picked it up and read the typed label: chloral hydrate. Her soft mouth tightened and she pushed the half-full bottle into her trouser pocket, intending to dump the contents at the first opportunity.

Her heart gave a nervous convulsion when she saw what the drug had been sitting on—the settlement contract, signed, witnessed, dated—intact and still viable…

She lifted it out and weighed it in her hands. But no…even if she took it, where could she hide it? The fact that Nicholas hadn’t already destroyed it was surely a hopeful sign. As long as it lay here undisturbed, Marvel-Mitchell Realties still had a future.

She put the contract back, her breath fluttering as she slid it to one side and saw her forlorn dis-engagement ring crowning one very distinctive, disturbingly erotic photograph. She tried not to look at the haunting image, afraid to touch it lest she become further victim to her depraved fascination with Nicholas Thorne.

But where were the others Nicholas had taunted her with? The wedding was supposed to be the day after tomorrow. If only she could continue to stave off disaster until the ceremony was over! She didn’t want her wedding-present to Peter and Janna to be a bunch of pornographic photographs and a threat of financial ruin. She could just imagine the poor vicar’s face if he caught a glimpse of any of those pictures. She would never be able to hold up her head in church again!

However much she longed to believe that her brief presence here had taken the edge off Nicholas’s bitterness, had softened and changed him, she didn’t dare take the risk of relying on her increasingly biased judgement where he was concerned. Only when Janna and Peter
were safely and securely married would Vivian let herself take the gamble of trusting Nicholas, telling him the truth and hoping that he would justify her faith in his basic humanity.

She scrabbled frantically through the drawer, reaching deep into the back where she found something firmly wedged. She pulled it out.

A cellphone. She flicked a switch. A
working
cellphone.

Civilisation was only a single telephone call away.

The alternatives bolted through her brain in the space of a split second. She didn’t have to go through with it. She could call Peter—call the cops. She could cause a scandal. Make a great deal of misery for everyone concerned, but save herself.

And perhaps drive Nicholas out of her life forever…

She let the telephone clatter back into the drawer at the same instant that she became aware of another presence in the room.

She hadn’t heard him on the stairs and now she saw why. His feet were bare as he crossed the uneven wooden floor, not making a sound. He wore only a white towelling robe and his hair drifted in damp clumps across his brow.

He was breathing hard. And he was angry.

‘Careless of me.’ Nicholas leant over and slammed the drawer viciously shut, nearly catching her guilty fingers in the process.

‘And even more careless of you to be caught.’ He locked it and wrenched the keys out with a violent movement. Vivian slid out of the chair and nervously backed away.
‘What were you doing, Vivian?’ he demanded harshly, stalking her every move. ‘Snooping? Or were you frantic to get to a phone so you could warn Lover-boy?’

The back of her thighs hit the computer table and she pulled her scrambled wits together as he halted, his whole body bunched with furious aggression.

‘
No!
’ His appearance had rendered her split-second decision redundant, but she wanted him to know what it would have been. ‘No. I—I didn’t even know there was a phone in here. I was just looking for the photos—the other ones you said you had—’

‘I also said you were gullible,’ he sneered. ‘The only photos I had, you tore up—except for my personal favourite, of course…’ He wasn’t wearing his eye-patch and even his sightless eye seemed to blaze with sparks of angry golden life as he smiled savagely at her bitter chagrin.

‘I was thinking of having it blown up and framed before I send it to Marvel,’ he taunted. ‘It’ll have so much more impact that way. Perhaps I should even call him myself, give him a blow-by-blow account of how much pleasure I got from having his chaste bride-to-be
mounted
…’

She flinched at the crudely insulting
double entendre
. His volcanic rage seemed wildly out of proportion to the condescending amusement, even wry admiration, with which he had greeted her other failed attempts to thwart him.

‘OK, OK, so I took the keys because I wanted to steal from you and snoop among your secrets,’ she flared, fighting back with her own fortifying anger. ‘I thought I might find something I could use to help persuade you to
let me go. What’s so terrible about that?
You
snooped through
my
life—’

He stiffened, his expression hardening to granite.

‘And, tell me—if I suddenly agreed with everything you said? If I handed you your precious settlement contract and said all debts were cancelled—what then? Would you be able to walk away and forget that any of this ever happened? Would you still marry Marvel on Saturday?’

For a heartbeat Vivian ached to be selfish and trust to his sincerity. ‘Why don’t you let me go, and find out?’ she said warily.

She knew instantly that she had made a serious mistake. His jaw tensed and colour stung his cheekbones as if she had delivered him a sharp slap across the face. Oh, God, had the offer been genuine?

‘I wouldn’t tell anyone, if that’s what you mean,’ she said quickly, hoping to repair the damage. ‘Nobody back home has to know about any of this. It’s still not too late—’

‘The hell it isn’t!’ Turning away from her, he jerked his head towards the door and grated, ‘Get out!’

Was he ordering her out of the room, or his life? She moved hesitantly past him. ‘Nicholas, I—’

He sliced her a sideways glance of fury that stopped the words in her mouth. ‘Frank said you were changing for dinner. Don’t make a liar out of him.’

Then his voice gentled insidiously. ‘And, Vivian…?’ Her fingernails bit into her palms as he continued with dangerously caressing menace, ‘If I ever catch you here again, you won’t find me so lenient. Be very careful how much
further you provoke me tonight. I’m in the mood for violence…’

‘If I ever catch you here again…’ He wasn’t sending her away! Vivian was shocked by the turbulence of her relief as she shakily made her way up to the room where she kept her meagre selection of clothes.

Deciding it might be deemed further provocation not to obey his thinly veiled command, she quickly put on a fresh blouse, the cream one she had worn the day of her arrival, and changed her sneakers for her low-heeled shoes. The trousers, she decided with the dregs of defiance, could stay—she could do with their warmth around her woefully trembly knees.

The kitchen had been transformed in her absence. It was no longer a bright, practical workplace; it was a shadowy corner of a private universe, lit only by twin flickering candles set on a table laid for two. A casserole dish sat in the centre, flanked by a bottle of red wine and two glasses. Nicholas, she discovered with an upsurge of her heartbeat, was still wearing his white robe—a spectral white phantom floating at her out of the darkness.

‘What happened to the lights?’ she asked sharply. ‘Where’s Frank?’

There was a brief gleam of teeth from the phantom and a movement of his head so that she could see that the dark triangle of his eye-patch was back in place, his vulnerability well-masked. ‘I’m conserving generating power,’ he said, in a tranquil tone of reason that sent a frisson down her spine. His silky calm was like the eye of a hurricane—she could feel the energy swirling around it. ‘And Frank’s already eaten. He’s in his bedroom. Why? Did you want him for something?’

The innocent enquiry made her seethe. He knew damned well why she wanted a third person present! Frank was no use as a buffer tucked away in his little concrete bunker down the hall.

It was pure nerves that made her blurt out as she sat down, ‘I’m not sleeping with you tonight!’

He sat across from her, leaning his chin on his hand so that his face moved forward into the flickering pool of light, his eye gleaming, a tiny candle-flame dancing like a devil in the hot, black centre. ‘What’s so different about tonight?’

She was hypnotised by the devil. ‘It just is, that’s all.’

‘Do you mean that you’re more aware of me as a man than you were last night?’ he murmured.

She didn’t think that was possible! ‘An
angry
man,’ she qualified stiffly.

‘I’ve been angry with you before. Usually you just fling my temper back in my teeth.’

‘Usually you behave with more self-control.’

His smile was darkly knowing. ‘Maybe it’s not
my
lack of control that you’re worried about. Don’t you trust yourself in bed with me any more, little fire-cracker? Afraid I might have lit your fuse?’

Her soft mouth tightened and he laughed softly, reaching across the table towards her. Vivian stiffened, but he was only removing the lid from the casserole.

‘You dish up the food. I’ll pour the wine.’

‘Oh, but I don’t know if I like red wine—’

‘You’ll like this one. It’s a gold-medal winner from a vineyard I part-own in Gisborne,’ he said, brushing aside her diffidence as he filled her glass. He poured himself a
glass, drank half and refilled it, all in the time it took her to ladle some of the steaming casserole on to their plates.

She waited until she had eaten several mouthfuls of food before she took her first sip. In spite of her determination not to react, she was unable to prevent a murmur of surprised pleasure as the full-bodied flavour exploded against her palate, drenching her senses in its heady bouquet.

‘You see, you never know whether you’re going to like something until you try it. You need to be more adventurous, Vivian, experiment more…’

She didn’t like the strange tension in him…nor the dangerous ease with which he broached the bottle as they both pretended to eat. She noticed he had shaved since their confrontation in his office. It had been necessary for him to shave but not to
dress?
She felt a strange thrill of fear.

‘Weren’t you afraid?’ he said disconcertingly, his deep, hushed tone seeming to weave itself into the darkness. ‘The only locked room in Bluebeard’s castle… Weren’t you afraid of the horrors you might find in there when you stole the key?’

‘This isn’t a castle and you’re not Bluebeard,’ she said, resisting the powerful vision he was slyly conjuring out of her imagination. ‘You’ve only ever had one wife,’ she said deliberately. ‘And I’m certainly in a position to know that you didn’t murder her.’

He looked at her broodingly over the rim of his glass. ‘Ah, yes, my beloved wife. Frank tells me you’re curious about her…’ Vivian was suddenly certain that Nicholas was building up towards some kind of critical release of
the tension that raged in his face, seethed in his rest less eye.

‘I’m in the mood for violence…’

She rubbed her damp palms surreptitiously against her thighs and felt the forgotten bulge in her trouser pocket.

The idea sprang into her mind full-blown. Her fingers closed around the glass bottle warmed by her thigh.

‘I wouldn’t mind a drink of water, please.’

He got up, moving with his usual swiftness and precision, and Vivian knew that in spite of the wine he had consumed he was still dangerously alert. It was only his inhibitions that had been relaxed, and thus the bonds that chained his savage inner demons.

The moment he turned away to the sink, she pulled out the chloral hydrate, wrenched off the lid and tried to shake a few drops into his full wine glass, horrified when the clear liquid came out in a little gush.

She didn’t have time to get the bottle capped and back into her pocket, and had to thrust it down on her lap as she accepted her glass of water, feeling the remainder of the drug soak into the fabric over her hip as her heart threshed wildly in her chest.

‘You wanted to know about Barbara…’

She watched, her green eyes wide with fascinated horror, as he re-seated himself and took a long swallow of his wine before he spoke again. Oh, God, what madness had possessed her? What if she had given him too much and he died?

‘The biggest mistake of my arrogant young life…’

Mistake? Vivian was jolted out of her frantic abstraction.

His mouth twisted at her expression. ‘You thought it was the love-match of the century? Mis-match, more like.
It was my father’s idea. He’s an extremely dominating man and I’m his only son, his greatest pride—and his greatest disappointment. We clashed on just about everything. When I came back from university overseas, he was very ill and used some very clever emotional blackmail to pressure me into marriage with his god-daughter. Needless to say, he then miraculously recovered.’

‘Then…you fell in love with each other after the marriage?’ Vivian said, her thoughts falling into chaos.

‘Love was never part of the equation. Like my father, Barbara saw our marriage in terms of status and control. We lived separate lives from the start. She politely endured me in her bed because it was necessary in order to secure her permanent place in the Thorne dynasty—part of her bargain with my father, I gather—and I politely endured for reasons just as selfish, because I wanted nothing to disturb my build-up for the Olympic trials…’