Mistress On Loan

‘Only to jail?’ he came back at her mockingly. ‘I was certain hell would be the preferred destination.’

‘Hell’s too good for you.’ She pushed back a strand of hair that had escaped its confinement and got to her feet, swaying slightly as she fought off the last remnants of dizziness.

‘Be careful.’ He went to take her arm, and she recoiled.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Don’t ever dare to touch me.’

‘A threat, an accusation, and now a challenge.’ He was actually smiling. ‘What a pity I have neither the time nor the inclination to take you up on it. At present,’ he added silkily. ‘I gather you’re terminating our reunion. May I ask where you’re going?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find Piers and talk to him. Show you up for the liar and cheat that you are.’

‘I wouldn’t have so much to say about cheating.’ There was a note of grimness in his voice. ‘Not when you owe money all over the area. And don’t even think of going to Brazil, Adie, always supposing you could find the fare. I’m sure your creditors wouldn’t like it, quite apart from Piers’s wife.’

He opened the door and held it for her. ‘I’ll see you around.’

To answer, Not if I see you first, would have been simply childish rudeness. Instead Adrien did not even glance at him as she walked out of the office.

She heard Mr Davidson saying, ‘Miss Lander—Miss Lander, I need to talk to you,’ but she ignored him too, breaking into a run as she headed for the door of the bank.

She could only think of Piers, and the necessity to contact him. To disprove the monstrous things that Chay Haddon had been saying. Nothing else mattered, or could be allowed to matter.

The next hour was a nightmare. She tried faxing Piers in Portugal, but found his outlet had been closed down and that the same thing applied to his e-mail address. The telephone line she’d always used seemed to be disconnected.

Panic was closing her throat and making her fingers clumsy as she pressed the buttons on her receiver, trying every number he’d ever given her.

Eventually someone answered—a man speaking Portuguese. She asked haltingly for Piers, and heard him say something in a muffled voice, as if he’d covered the phone with his hand, which was followed by a burst of laughter, as if other people in the room were responding to his remark. To a joke that her query had triggered.

Adrien found she had bitten her lip so hard she could taste blood.

When he spoke to her directly, he made her understand in fractured English that Piers had gone to Brazil and would not be coming back. Nor could he tell her where she could contact him.

Amid another shout of laughter, he added, ‘Good luck.’

She put the receiver back on its stand and stared into space, aware that her heart was thudding erratically against her ribcage.

However unacceptable she might find it, it seemed that Chay Haddon had been speaking the truth after all. That Piers had indeed sold him the Grange, and vanished.

She could feel pain ready to explode inside her, but she dammed it back. She could not deal with her personal anguish and betrayal now, because there were other overriding considerations.

Thanks to Piers, she was now in debt for thousands of pounds, over and above her mortgage and bank loan. All over the area there were people who would soon be demanding their money, and she had no means of paying them.

She looked around her at the pleasant sitting room, with its familiar furniture and ornaments. They’d always been part of her life, but soon all of them could be lost for ever, along with the cottage, and the business.

She was without illusions about what she could be facing. Bankruptcy was staring her in the face, and it would touch everyone around her too. Zelda and Smudge could end up homeless. And there were the women in the workroom as well, who thought they were in secure employment and had taken on extra obligations as a result.

And all because she’d fallen in love.

A sob rose in her throat.

She’d trusted Piers and he’d defaulted, crudely and cruelly. Her name was on the empty account and the chequebook, and she was responsible. She had no contract or written guarantees. Nothing that could support her in law, even if Piers could be found.

He’d arranged it that way, quite deliberately, and because she loved him she’d agreed. And her naivety could cost her everything.

And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been warned. Zelda had been openly unhappy about taking on such a big project that would absorb all Adrien’s time and energy.

‘People aren’t going to wait while you sort out the Grange,’ she’d argued. ‘They’ll go elsewhere. Tell people we’re never available. And word soon gets round. We shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket like this.’

But she’d wanted to be totally involved in the Grange’s restoration, she thought achingly, because it was going to be her home, and she didn’t want anyone else imposing their ideas. Intruding on the idyll she was creating.

Moving like an automaton, she went through to the kitchen, filled the kettle and set it on the stove to boil. She needed some strong black coffee to clear her head while she made a list. She needed to know the entire extent of her obligations and also what work A to Z had in the pipeline.

She would also have to go back and face Mr Davidson, as well as her own bank manager. Try and arrange an overdraft facility or a further loan. And then work her way out of trouble.

She swallowed, aware that she had a hard furrow to plough.

But she had to start somewhere. See if she could pull some of the irons out of the fire before Zelda and the others got to hear the rumours that would already be flying…

They depend on me, and I can’t let them down, she thought, catching her breath convulsively. I can’t…

She fetched a notepad and a pencil and began to write.

In spite of her brave front, backed up by business suit and briefcase, all her worst fears had been confirmed by mid-afternoon.

Her own bank manager, while sympathetic, had told her that her borrowing limit was already fully extended, and he couldn’t agree another loan. And Mr Davidson had sighed heavily, looking down his nose, and had asked how she proposed to pay off her present unauthorised overdraft.

Even more dauntingly, both of them had recommended her to consult an insolvency expert ‘without delay’.

She had also been reminded that, as the Grange now belonged to Haddon Developments, she was in effect squatting, and should remove her personal effects immediately and hand over her keys to Mr Haddon’s lawyers, Frencham and Co, in the High Street.

So there was no reprieve, Adrien thought as she climbed wearily back into her Jeep. And the execution would take place as scheduled. She was shaking inwardly, and her facial muscles ached from the effort of hanging on to her self-control.

In a few short hours she had been transformed from a girl happily in charge of her own life, with a successful business and a future with the man she loved, into some kind of grotesque puppet, capable of movement only when someone else jerked the strings.

And the worst part of it all—the realisation that flayed her skin and made her stomach quiver with nausea—was that Chay Haddon was the one holding the strings.

And each time she’d encountered him he’d brought trauma with him, she thought shivering.

What in the world could have brought him back? That was what she couldn’t understand. Because his own memories of the Grange could hardly be happy ones. The housekeeper’s son, she thought, who’d been sent off to boarding school for marooning her in a tree, then banished from the house for ever for stealing her garnet pendant.

Was he seeking some kind of posthumous revenge on Angus Stretton, who’d been responsible for exiling him from the house and had also, in the aftermath, sacked his mother, who’d given such quiet and faithful service for so many years.

If so, there was a real sickness there, she thought, wrapping her arms protectively around her body.

But it was a comprehensive and sweeping retribution that he was exacting. Piers had lost his inheritance, and she—she was facing financial ruin.

As he was already well aware, she realised, recalling his jibe about her creditors. He knew exactly what he was doing. The thief had returned as a robber baron, and this time he’d stolen her whole life.

She wanted to run and hide. Seek some dark corner where no one would ever find her. But she couldn’t do that. She had to be strong—to stand her ground and fight back with whatever weapons she could get.