A Mediterranean Marriage

‘Harris Travel ripped off the local builders and suppliers. The builders were given a fake name and address for the firm and a fake phone number.’

Pale as she stood there under the relentless sun, a trickle of nervous perspiration running down between her breasts, Lily parted her soft lips, but it was a second or two before her voice picked up sufficient strength to emerge. ‘Harris Travel ripped off people? I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Rauf expelled his breath in an impatient hiss. ‘There are no villas. Nothing was ever built beyond that entrance and you have to know that.’

Lily gulped. Only then did she recall him saying that he had a copy of the land purchase agreement. Surely that was indisputable proof that she was standing on the site that Brett had bought? But this was not the land that Brett had photographed and there were no buildings within view.

‘Are you sure the villas aren’t just down the road?’ she mumbled, peering round herself with frowning incomprehension. ‘I want to see that purchase agreement.’

Rauf extended it and Lily grabbed at it. The document trembled along with her hand. It was written in Turkish but when she scanned down the sheet she recognised Brett’s signature and an official seal. Her brain was now functioning in very slow motion. Shock was setting in hard and she could not accept the enormity of what Rauf was telling her. ‘I still think these villas have got to be around here somewhere…if we look. I mean, maybe we’re on the wrong road or something,’ she suggested shakily. ‘You were always telling me how vast this country is…you can’t know every road around here!’

She was shaking like a leaf in a high wind. But Rauf was determined not to fall victim to what innate cynicism warned was most likely to be a performance aimed at convincing him that she was a misunderstood innocent. At the same time, however, he could not help but be impressed by the rendering of stupefied shock and disbelief that Lily was giving him.

‘There are no villas,’ he said again.

‘There’s got to be!’ Lily launched at him in feverish protest.

‘The land was bought, the builders engaged,’ Rauf advanced in a grim undertone. ‘But after a small first-stage payment was received, they neither heard from your sister’s ex-husband again, nor were they able to establish contact with him.’

Lily tottered backwards and sank down on a low rock in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree. Her legs felt all wobbly and hollow.

‘Before the builders discovered that they had been had, they put in the driveway and the foundations. Since the mine shut down, there isn’t much employment round here and the builders were promised bonuses for fast results. Gilman had a big car and they thought he was rich, so they went ahead and bought more supplies on credit with a relative, trusting that the next, much larger payment was in the pipeline. Two families were plunged into poverty and debt by this.’

Lily’s tummy gave a sick lurch, shame enveloping her. What had happened? What had Brett done? Could he have used the cash earmarked for the villas just to keep the agency in business? She hated Brett, could not initially comprehend her own reluctance to accept the obvious until she acknowledged that the security of her entire family rested in that same balance.

Evidently, Brett had lied over and over again about the villas. He had shown Hilary and their father photographs of another site and had later given them more pictures of that same site and the two big villas that had been erected there. Neither her sister nor her father could have had any suspicion that there was anything suspect about the enterprise because that building project had been Brett’s baby from the outset. By then, her father had retired and Hilary had only gone back to work in Harris Travel after Brett had stepped down from managing it just a few months ago…until then, Brett had had an entirely free hand.

So what had happened to all the money that should have gone into building the villas? Brett could only have taken all those thousands of pounds for himself. There were no villas, just a piece of scrubby land with no outlook in the back end of nowhere. Yet Brett had contrived to argue during his divorce settlement with her sister that he was entitled to half of the marital home because Harris Travel would be retaining the sizeable asset of two luxury villas abroad. In addition, Brett had managed to satisfy an admittedly unsuspicious pair of solicitors that those two villas did exist. Her poor sister had ended up being grateful that her estranged husband had not also claimed a right to a share of the family firm after all his years working there!

Lily stared into space with shattered eyes. There were no villas. That meant that Rauf’s investment had gone missing altogether. What chance now was there that that supposed mix-up over those bank account names was genuine? She shuddered and, lifting nerveless hands, she pressed them to her clammy face. Brett had been embezzling from the business and, by the looks of it, he had sucked Harris Travel dry. Her family was going to be left penniless and in debt.

Rauf studied Lily, who was seated like a traumatised pixie on her rock, transfixed by shock. She kept on looking at the overgrown foundations as if she were still hoping that two villas would spring into literal being right there before her very eyes.

‘I can’t credit this…’ she muttered, shaking her head. ‘How could Brett do this to his own family? I mean, they’ve already lost so much since the divorce.’

Smouldering dark golden eyes pinned to her ashen face as she uttered that first-ever disparaging comment on Brett Gilman, Rauf growled, ‘You had no idea?’

Blinking, Lily lifted her golden head and looked at him for the first time in several minutes, blue eyes stricken pools as she endeavoured to come to terms with the sheer scale of Brett’s lies. ‘How can you ask me that? One of the main reasons I’m here in Turkey was to sell those villas! I can hardly get my mind round the concept that they were never built in the first place…’

‘That’s understandable.’ So, on the count of the nonexistent villas at least, he had misjudged her, Rauf conceded grudgingly, his wide, taut shoulders squaring below the fine, expensive cloth of his jacket. It seemed that Brett Gilman, regardless of his former liaison with Lily, had acted alone and without her knowledge. That would be a shock for her too though: the wounding discovery that her one-time secret lover had lied to her as well, while he’d plunged the family business into fraudulent dealings. But

then over the past year, Lily had already suffered a certain amount of punishment, he reminded himself grimly. Brett choosing to divorce her sister for a woman other than herself must have been quite a slap in the face too. But a very well-deserved slap, Rauf reflected without hesitation.

The thick fullness of tears in her throat, Lily compressed her tremulous lips. ‘But you knew, didn’t you? You knew there were no villas when we met up yesterday.’

‘I only learned of this scandalous affair forty-eight hours ago when my investment consultant finally brought it to my attention. As I too have a stake in Harris Travel, I have already instructed that the two Turkish families who sustained losses through this venture are to be fully compensated.’

Lily stared at him through swimming eyes. He was so detached from her, so controlled. A helpless sob bubbled in her throat. ‘That’s good,’ she said in a wobbly voice. ‘But I doubt very much that you’re about to compensate my family for their losses!’

Striding forward, Rauf bent down to curve his lean hands round her shaking shoulders and raise her upright. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘I feel so awful…like it’s somehow my fault!’ Lily sobbed, her distress taking her over for a couple of seconds before she contrived to get a grip on herself again. ‘But I’ve never had anything much to do with the business and I still can’t understand how Brett could literally steal from his own kids. Goodness knows, I hate him, but Hilary and Dad always had a very high opinion of his business acumen!’

Rauf smiled a not very nice smile above her down-bent golden head and closed a supportive arm round her slender back. Her tears would not soften him. Having cracked her façade, he had her on the run and he would keep up the pressure until he knew everything there was to know. He supposed a lot of women would embrace a selective memory when it came to an indefensible affair that should never have happened, but he felt that she owed him, at least, the truth. ‘You didn’t always hate your brother-in-law—’

‘Not when he and Hilary first married—’

‘And not when you brought me home to invest in the family firm at Brett’s instigation either,’ Rauf slotted in with harsh clarity.