The Ultimate Betrayal

Obviously Mandy had not recognised the new Rachel in the woman Daniel was holding in his arms.

‘For seven long years, no less,’ she went on regardless. ‘To a pretty, if insipid, little thing, who will be sitting at home at this very moment, taking care of their three sweet children while her darling husband plays lover to any woman who will have him.’

‘Oh, not just anyone, Amanda,’ Daniel countered coldly. ‘I always found it very easy to turn you down, after all.’

Mandy wanted Daniel? Lifting her face, Rachel stared into his harshly cynical eyes and felt something else rend apart inside her as yet another veil was ripped from her blind, trusting eyes. Daniel watched it happen with a grim clenching of his jaw.

Daniel and Mandy did not get on; she had always accepted that as one of those things, without bothering to question why they were so hostile towards each other. Well, now she knew, and she felt sick with the knowledge.

‘Man must always beware of a woman scorned, Daniel,’ Mandy cautioned sagely. ‘It is one of our mostdestructive little weapons, after all.’

‘And you used it so well, didn’t you?’ Daniel drawled. ‘Aiming directly at the weakest point.’

‘How is Rachel, by the way?’ she drawled. ‘Has the poor thing any idea how quickly you’ve found a replacement for the ousted Lydia?’

Enough. Rachel had heard enough. Twisting within the constricting grasp of Daniel’s arms, she turned to look at her once-best friend, watching with a complete lack of expression as all the colour left Mandy’s face; without saying a word, Mandy spun gracefully on her heel and walked away.

The mood was shot, the evening a disaster. Neither spoke as they left the club and walked the short distance to where Daniel had parked the car.

Then, ‘How long?’ she asked, once he’d slid the car into the steady stream of traffic leaving London.

‘Years,’ he shrugged, not even trying to misunderstand her.

‘Did you ever take her up on it?’

As she watched him she saw his fingers take a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, his mouth tightening because the question offended his dignity, but he had to accept her right to ask it. ‘No,’ he answered flatly. ‘Never even considered it.’

‘Why not?’

‘She leaves me cold,’ he replied dismissively.

And it was a dismissal, one Rachel had to believe simply by the sheer lack of feeling with which he said it.

‘Then why didn’t you tell me what she was trying to do?’

‘And ruin your faith in someone you cared a great deal for?’ He sent her a sombre glance. ‘I never hid the fact that I thoroughly disliked her, Rachel,’ he reminded her grimly.

‘But you never went out of your way to discourage the friendship either,’ she pointed out. ‘One word—one word, Daniel,’ she emphasised tightly, ‘that she was only using me to get to you, and tonight’s little scene could have been avoided.’

‘Knowing how deeply the truth would hurt you?’ His expression was harsh in the dim light inside the car. ‘I would have had to be some kind of heel to do that to you, Rachel.’

‘True,’ she conceded, and left that single word hanging in the air between them, knowing he had read the other meaning it offered—and knowing he had no defence against it.

She entered the house first, making directly for the stairs without bothering to go in and speak to Jenny. ‘I have a headache,’ she mumbled, which was not exactly a lie. There were a lot of different bits aching inside her, her head only one of them. ‘Please apologise to your mother for me.’

She was not asleep when Daniel eventually came to bed after taking his mother home. But she pretended to be, while intensely aware of every move he made around the quiet room as he prepared for bed. He came into it naked as he always did, lying on his back with his head supported on his arms, staring at the darkened ceiling while she lay very still beside him, wishing with all her aching heart that fate would just wave a hand across them and dismiss the last few weeks as if they had not happened.

But of course fate was not that kind or that forgiving, and they lay there like that for ages, the tension so thick in the darkened room that Rachel began to feel suffocated by it. Then Daniel let out a sigh and reached for her. She went unresistingly into his arms, needing what he was going to offer with probably as much desperation as he did. And their loving took on a silent frenzy which was almost as unbearable as the tense silence had been.

Lydia came to visit her again that night, stiffening her passion-racked body just at the point where she’d begun to believe she was going to gain release form her pent-up desires at last. Daniel felt the change in her, and went very still while he watched her fight the devils which were haunting her.

And she did fight, eyes closed over wretched tears, kiss-softened mouth quivering, her fingers biting into his muscle-locked shoulders.

Another obstacle climbed, she thought, with no sense of triumph when, for once, she managed to thrust Lydia away. And, on a shaky sigh, she pulled Daniel’s mouth down to hers.

‘Rachel,’ he whispered as he entered her. Just, ‘Rachel,’ over and over again in a raw shaken way which said he had understood the battle she had just fought and won, and knew too that she had done it for his sake. For him.

Yet though they climbed together, and although their bodies throbbed to a mutual drum-beat of growing fulfilment, when it came to it Daniel leaped alone, leaving her feeling lost and empty. A failure in so many ways she did not dare count them.