The Ultimate Betrayal

‘Why do you put up with him when he’s such a selfish bastard?’ Zac bit out suddenly.

‘Aren’t all men?’ she countered tartly.

‘Not like Daniel,’ he muttered. ‘I still find it hard to believe that he’s married to someone like you.’ He glanced at her. ‘The Lydia Marsdens of this world suit him much better, you know.’

It was a ruthless thrust and hit home painfully, draining her lungs and blanching her face, because she couldn’t even argue the point with him. Lydia Marsden was probably more suited to Daniel—not that she’d ever seen the woman to judge—not that she ever wanted to see her.

Lydia Marsden was the faceless ghost who visited her in the night. That wretched haunting was more than enough to deal with.

‘And Mandy Sales,’ he added tauntingly. ‘That was quite a revealing confrontation you all had on the dance-

floor that night, wasn’t it?’

‘You overheard?’ Rachel gasped.

‘Half the room overheard it, darling,’ he drawled. ‘And stood in stunned amazement as it all began to sink in. Daniel Masterson—’ his smile was drily mocking ‘—whiz-kid of the new-age tycoons, had a little wife and three children tucked away nobody seemed to know about—I bet that news, when it got out, hit Lydia right where it hurts the most. She was after marrying him, you know. Daniel was the ideal choice for an up-andcoming corporate lawyer like her.’

So Lydia was a lawyer, not Daniel’s secretary, as she had assumed. The news jolted her. Compete with that if you can, she mocked herself bitterly. It was one thing believing you were fighting an ordinary secretary for your husband’s attention—but some female hot-shot lawyer?

As if thinking along similar lines, Zac murmured curiously, ‘If you’ve been married for seven years, then that means you caught him before Daniel made his meteoric elevation into the killing-fields of finance. So what does that make you, Rachel?’ he asked. ‘A hanger-on from his reckless youth?’

Insults were insults and, in Rachel’s mind, some were probably deserved. But that last remark had aimed to cut—and cut it had, if only because it pierced directly at the truth she was beginning to believe for herself.

‘I think you’d better shut up and stop this car so I can get out before you say something I’ll take real exception to,’ she snapped.

To her consternation he did exactly that, pulling the car into the kerb and stopping with a jerk before turning to glare angrily at her. ‘Well, I’ve already taken exception,’ he muttered, ‘to the way you’ve been playing me along all these weeks. My God!’ he grated before she could say anything. ‘I never stood a chance with you, did I?’

‘No,’ she answered honestly.

‘Then why the hell didn’t you stop me before we got in this deep?’

‘This deep—what deep?’ She turned to challenge him with a deriding look. ‘We haven’t done anything but share a fumbled kiss on a rainy night!’

‘We were sharing more than that, Rachel, and you know it,’ he scathed her derision. ‘But it was all just a game with you, wasn’t it? You saw I fancied you and thought you would play me along for a while. What was it?’ he demanded bitterly. ‘Did your ego need a bit of a lift? Has it begun to get to you at last that he gets a bigger kick out of bedding his legal adviser than he does his wife?’

She hit him then, her hand striking at his cheek while her own face went white with pain. Then she made a grab for the door-handle, her other hand fumbling to unfasten her seatbelt so that she could get away. But Zac grabbed her arm, his fingers biting. ‘Oh, no,’ he muttered. ‘You don’t get away with that so easily.’

With a tug he pulled her against him, and his mouth came down on top of hers. It was an intrusion—a vile rape of her unresponsive mouth. And by the time he let her go again she was choking on the taste of him.

Then thankfully she was out of the car, slamming the door shut in his hard angry face.

He didn’t hang around. He fired the car engine into life, then was driving off on a screech of tyres, leaving her standing there in the biting cold wind, watching his red tail-lights disappear from view.

She dragged a hand across her mouth, grimacing when she felt the telling sting which said he had managed to cut her inner lip. Damn him! she thought, wishing herself back in that old fairy-tale world she used to exist in, where nothing nasty happened. Damn Mandy for waking her up out of it! she added bitterly as she began the walk home. Damn Daniel for his infidelity and damn Lydia for giving in to his expert seduction! But most of alldamn herself!

She wasn’t too far away from home, she noted thankfully, but her feet were killing her by the time she hobbled through the front door, and she kicked the offending high heels off as soon as she’d closed the door behind her. It was warm inside, after the biting cold night air.

One o’clock, she noticed testily as she climbed the stairs. She felt utterly done in; depression sat on the top of her head with a vengeance and the ugly scene with Zac echoed over and over in her mind. She didn’t bother trying to look for Daniel. He could be in hell for all she cared. And anyway, she was in no mood for yet another row tonight. He obviously agreed that they’d done enough of that on the phone because he hadn’t bothered meeting her with the proverbial whip at the front door as she came in.

But she was wrong if she thought he was going to ignore her completely. She had only managed to strip off her dress and pull on her dressing-gown when he entered the bedroom, her discarded shoes dangling from his fingers.

‘You forgot these.’ He dropped them by the closed bedroom door.

‘I didn’t forget them,’ she snapped. ‘I just left them where they came off.’ She was sitting on the edge of the bed, massaging her aching toes, her head lowered so that the soft cloud of her hair hid her face from view.

‘He didn’t bring you all the way home,’ he remarked with suspicious levity.

Been spying through cracks in the curtains again? she wondered bitterly. ‘Maybe he didn’t bring me at all,’ was all she said.