not to leave town, but that had been the gist of his final threat as he had left the house. And when she had arrived home she had been horrified to realise that she was still wearing his expensive platinum watch—another crime for him to lay at her door! And this time he would be right, for she had deliberately done nothing about returning it. By now Sir Frank would have arranged for her cheque to be repaid into the company accounts, but she was afraid to hope that that would be the end of it, not if Joshua felt it incumbent on his honour to exact personal retribution.
Desperate to avoid having to deal with reality, she impressed on Lisa and Saleena she wasn’t in to phone calls—from anyone—and whenever they went out she switched off the answer-machine and took the phone off the hook. She did, however, make one stilted call to Cindy, to tell her that the money had been repaid, and that whatever repercussions there might be from now on would stop with Regan. She had hung up on Cindy’s hysterical thanks in the certain knowledge that she had finally closed the book on her failed marriage.
The following afternoon, on the fourth day of her emotional exile, her brittle shell was cracked by the last person she would have expected to bother to seek her out—Carolyn Harriman, floating on air after her final wedding gown fitting.
‘Hi—you don’t mind I got your address from Granny, do you?’ she chirped to Regan, who did mind. She had refused to wonder if Carolyn had yet plucked up the courage to break the news of her phantom pregnancy, guiltily aware that she had fled without even saying goodbye—unwilling to risk any additional emotional trauma.
‘I couldn’t get through on the phone, but I figured you wouldn’t have another job yet and thought you could probably do with some cheering up,’ breezed Carolyn. ‘Look—I bought Danish pastries to go with our afternoon coffee! Granny told me why you left—about the rotten thing your husband did to you. God, men can be utter pigs, can’t they?’
Regan could detect no hint of falsity in her friendly attitude, and was forced to conclude that Chris must not have blabbed about what he had seen on board the Sara Wade.
It struck her that she had never seen the young woman looking more relaxed as she leant on the stove while Regan put the jug on to boil.
‘You’re still going ahead with it, then?’ she said warily, when she learned where Carolyn had been.
Only Carolyn could simper without looking silly. ‘Well, yes—sort of…Haven’t you got a percolator?’
‘No, we haven’t. What do you mean, sort of?’ Regan forced herself to ask.
‘Uh…with a different groom.’
Regan’s teaspoonful of instant coffee spilled all over the bench.
‘Chris?’
‘Of course Chris.’ Carolyn sounded ludicrously offended that she should ask. At Regan’s expression she offered up a sheepish smile and waggled the new ruby and diamond ring on her finger, ‘Luckily he kept this when I threw it back in his face. We got re-engaged a couple of days ago.’
‘And J-Joshua raised no objections?’ Regan stuttered.
‘Why should he?’ said Carolyn smugly. ‘It’s what he expected all along. Why do you think he bribed the printer to muck up the invitations? He told me when he proposed that he doubted we’d have to actually marry each other. He said he knew that when it came to the crunch Chris loved me too much to let me marry anyone else!’
‘How omniscient of him,’ said Regan, shards of anger thrusting jaggedly up through a smothering blanket of pain. And he had had the nerve to rage at her for being conniving! She hadn’t been the only one with a secret agenda!
‘Well, he was right, wasn’t he?’ Carolyn defended. ‘And if he had been wrong, then he was prepared to genuinely go through with it, for the baby’s sake—and for that I’ll always be grateful to him! It was really strange, though, because he’s been in a really filthy mood about everything else in last few days, but he hardly reacted at all when I fronted up about not being pregnant. He acted like it wasn’t even important. He just shrugged and suggested I tell Chris as soon as possible, so I did, and instead of rowing about it we talked and talked for hours, and admitted that we had both behaved immaturely and I cried and…’ she almost managed a blush ‘…we ended up in bed.
‘Oh, Regan, you should have heard what he said! He said that he’d been miserable without me and mad with jealousy when I turned to Jay, that’s why he’d been so nasty! He said that he’d been forced to face up to the fact he hadn’t been fair to me or to Jay. He said he’d have kidnapped me at the altar rather than let Jay have me!’
The idea of Joshua being humiliated in front of two hundred guests had a certain vicious appeal, thought Regan, even if it would have been partly at his own instigation!
She stuffed herself with fattening pastries as she masochistically encouraged Carolyn to happily twitter on, gleaning the fact that Joshua and Ryan were still staying at Palm Cove and that Hazel had conscripted a biddable niece of Alice’s to be her letter-writer. Carolyn herself had made the trip down to her Auckland couturier in the WadeCo helicopter, and she gave Regan a nervous rash when she let slip that she had shared it with Joshua, who was expecting to stay overnight in the city and resume permanent residence in a matter of days.
As she departed, basking in her own happiness, Carolyn gave Regan a hand-addressed silver-gilt wedding invitation.
‘Chris says you have to come,’ she told her gaily. ‘He told me to deliver it to you personally and tell you that he’ll have something to say if you try to refuse!’
Regan gave her a sharp look, but Carolyn seemed to be unaware of any ulterior meaning to her words. The Wade brothers seemed to have a pretty similar line in ambiguous threats, thought Regan savagely as she closed the door and immediately picked up the telephone receiver and slammed it back on the hook. No more avoiding life!
It immediately began to ring, and she snatched it up with a belligerent snarl.
A startled silence. ‘Hello…uh…is that Regan?’
She sucked in a wild breath. ‘Yes, who is this?’
‘Derek…You know—Derek Clarke.’
‘Oh.’ Her heart flip-flopped in her chest. ‘Do you want Cleo? She’s not here—’
‘No, actually, I wanted to talk to you. A really weird thing just happened to me…’
Regan felt like snapping that a lot of weird things probably happened to sleaze-bags like himself.
‘Oh, what was that?’ she asked with immense restraint.
‘Well…it’s this guy I sometimes arrange dates for—he just sent me an e-mail to say he wants me to set him up with someone called Eve tonight…’
The furious roaring in Regan’s ears made it difficult to hear him as he went on, ‘So of course I immediately zapped him with the fact that I don’t know any women called Eve and—this is the weird part—he comes back on my instant message system with your name. I told him that he had to be mistaken, because I knew you weren’t much of a swinger, but he wasn’t interested in anyone else. He was real insistent that it had to be you and only you. He said all he wanted me to do was give you the message that Adam
