Susan Napier – The Mistress Deception (страница 2)

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.