‘Let’s face it, sweetheart, you only had eyes for one man. The rest of us were invisible, including his fiancée. As an interested onlooker, I admired the way you went after him with such single-minded determination. Your inventiveness knew no bounds. What a performance. You wanted him and you made sure you got him, no matter what. Then, in the blink of an eye, you were gone. Nobody could figure out what had happened. As a matter of interest, what did make you leave in such a hurry?’
Her eyes widened as the realisation of precisely what he had seen came home to her. Her acting tour de force that summer had had a purpose beyond the obvious, but seen from the outside there was only one perspective anyone would have seen. Suddenly his attitude towards her became abundantly clear. He thought she was a… There wasn’t a nice way of describing what he thought her. Of all the nerve! Not to mention hypocrisy. There were shades here of the pot calling the kettle black. OK, so he didn’t know her side of things, and to give him his due it was easy to jump to the obvious and nasty conclusion. But he hadn’t had to cling to it all this time! Clearly he didn’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
A cauldron of intense rage began to simmer inside her. She should put him straight right now, but the memory of all the things he had said to her, all the insinuations, kept her lips tight shut. She was damned if she would. She would tell him only when she was good and ready.
The truth was she had gone to Antibes that summer with the express purpose of saving her cousin Emma from an ill-advised relationship. Word had reached the family that the man Emma had become engaged to whilst staying with a friend in the South of France was a fortune-hunter. The Shaw family, and its various branches, were extremely wealthy, and Rachel and Emma had sizeable trust funds in their names, though both had chosen to work for their living. With their business still at the fledgling stage, Rachel had decided to stay at home, so it had been the first holiday they hadn’t spent together in years.
Which was how Emma had come to fall foul of Anton, because Rachel hadn’t been there to advise her. Of course, when her parents had tried to intervene, Emma hadn’t believed them, hence the family had turned to Rachel, who had gone in fighting as usual. She had flown over with the express purpose of making Emma see reason. An unenviable task, yet she had gone because she loved her cousin dearly and hadn’t wanted to see her hurt.
Naturally, knowing Rachel’s negative attitude towards love having lived through her parents’ rollercoaster marriage and messy divorce, Emma hadn’t believed her either. No amount of talking—and they had talked long into the night—had put a chink in Emma’s rose-coloured glasses. In the end Rachel had been forced to take strong measures. If Emma was so certain that Anton was for real, then she, Rachel, wouldn’t possibly be able to steal him away. Emma, just as stubborn as Rachel, had dared her to do her worst. So she had, and that was what Nathan Wade had seen.
Playing a man-eater had been relatively easy, for Rachel had always had a natural aptitude for acting. Basing her character on a girl she had known in college, Rachel had thrown herself into the part of a wild and wilful seductress who used her beauty and her fortune to get whatever man she wanted. She had pursued Emma’s fiancé, and, being without scruple, he had dropped Emma like a stone.
To cut a long story short, after several days of watching her fiancé dance attendance on her cousin there had been a showdown between Emma and Anton. It had been an unpleasant scene, especially when Rachel had revealed exactly who she was. Anton had vanished after saying some very nasty things, and once Emma had had a cleansing bout of tears the two cousins had packed up and flown home. The rest, as they say, was history. What neither of them had known, so wrapped up had they been in their personal drama, was that Nathan Wade had witnessed the juicier moments and taken his cue from that.
Emma and Rachel still ran a growing catering business, and shared a flat in London. That brief interlude in France was long forgotten—except by Nathan. Had he been a different man, Rachel wouldn’t have hesitated to clear the matter up forthwith, but she was too incensed.
Instead of doing the sensible thing and making a case for herself, she merely shrugged in her most offhand way. ‘How does urgent family business sound?’ she quipped lightly, and knew from the narrowing of his eyes it hadn’t gone down well. Not that she cared in that instant. His opinion could hardly get any worse when it was at rock bottom already.
‘Anton and his fiancée departed about the same time, too,’ Nathan went on. ‘I suppose they also had “urgent family business”?’
Rachel couldn’t speak for Anton, but Emma certainly hadn’t been able to get back to her family quickly enough. ‘I imagine so. They didn’t say,’ she agreed blithely.
‘Anyway, having seen you in action, you can imagine my consternation when I took over the running of the bank and found you were Linus’s granddaughter.’
Rachel sank down onto the arm of the chair. She had no difficulty imagining that at all. Having caught her act and believed the worst, she understood why he had disliked her on sight. But why had he remained silent all this time?
‘Why didn’t you say something before?’
‘I admit my first instinct was to confront you, but then I became intrigued. You looked so different from what I remembered. You acted differently, too. I began to wonder what you were up to. I waited to see what sort of game you were playing,’ Nathan explained smoothly.
Her brows lifted in an arc of surprise. ‘I wasn’t playing a game,’ she pointed out, and he half smiled.
‘On the contrary; you play it all the time. You have that look of innocence down pat. No wonder Linus thinks the sun rises and sets in you. Does he know anything at all about the men in your life?’
Her eyes narrowed at that. ‘He knows I date,’ she conceded cautiously.
Nathan laughed. ‘That’s a quaint way of putting it, but it keeps him happy, and that’s the way you want it. The game you play, sweetheart, is to keep him believing you’re still made out of sugar and spice and all things nice, when in reality your private life wouldn’t bear scrutiny.’
She frowned darkly, thinking she understood him all too clearly, but seeking clarity before she hit the roof. ‘My…private life?’ she probed in a tight voice.
‘You know, the things you get up to after hours. I don’t care what man you’ve set your sights on now, or how you go about getting him. It’s none of my business. What I do need, however, is for you to use that talent on Luther Ames. Use it to keep him occupied whilst I search for the letters.’
She was stunned by what he was suggesting. Now she understood his continued disdain. He had never seen her differently. All this time he had believed there were two Rachels. The one he saw during the day, who did her job and caused her family no harm, and the one who came out at night to prey vampirically on unsuspecting males. Dear God. It was almost too incredible for words.
Unable to sit still in the face of this, Rachel sprung to her feet, striding over to the window, battling to keep her temper in check. All this time, whilst she had been mooning like a lovesick idiot, he had believed her to be spending her nights having a good time with countless men whose names she doubtless couldn’t remember! Ooh! Never mind that she had, in fact, been a model of rectitude. In his mind she was branded a man-eater, and so she remained to this very day. The injustice of his blindness made her see red, but she fought with her own personal devil. She had promised her family she would do her best to curb her instinct to respond blindly in anger, but never had she needed to use more self-restraint. Turning back to face him, she folded her arms to hide the way her hands were balled into angry fists.
‘That’s quite an
