The Secret Wife

‘Aren’t you even curious about that newspaper article?’ Maurice prompted between grinding teeth of strain. ‘Or didn’t Constantine tell you that I took the blame for that? It’s true, it was my fault. I shot my mouth off to my sister—’

‘Lorna?’ Dredged from her introspection, Rosie’s head spun round.

‘She used to see this bloke, Mitch, in the pub. He was a reporter on the local paper. Apparently, she’d been trying to get off with him for ages,’ Maurice explained grimly. ‘So she spouted the story to try and impress him with the idea that she had interesting connections, invited him back to her flat for coffee and let him borrow that photo she took of you.’

Only then did Rosie recall that the day she and Maurice had moved into the cottage it had been his sister wielding the camera. Lorna had given her a souvenir copy of that photograph.

‘And that was the last she saw of him. Mitch swopped the scoop for a job on a London tabloid. It’s a lucky thing that I only told Lorna you were marrying Constantine and nothing else. She thinks you met him down in London,’ Maurice proffered heavily. ‘If she’d known about Anton or the will, that slimy reporter would’ve got the whole damned lot out of her!’

Rosie sighed. ‘You lied to protect her.’

‘Constantine is a very confrontational bloke. In fact, he comes out of nowhere like a rocket attack,’ Maurice groaned, staring fixedly into the driving mirror.

Rosie stiffened, dismayed to discover words in defence of Constantine brimming to her lips and hurriedly swallowing them back. ‘I’m probably just infatuated with him. I’ll get over it,’ she swore, striving to save face on the subject of a relationship that had no future whatsoever.

‘I hope so. Only a maniac with no respect for human life would sit on my bumper on a road as dangerous as this!’ Sweat was breaking out on Maurice’s brow.

‘You mean...?’ Rosie’s head whipped round at the exact same moment as a low-slung scarlet sports car flashed past them at speed on the brow of the bend and screeched to a tyre-squealing halt.

Panicked by the manoeuvre, Maurice hit the brakes of the four-wheel drive in an emergency stop. Constantine sprang fluidly out of the sports car and strode back towards them.

‘He raced cars for a while when he was a teenager,’ Rosie explained shakily. ‘Thespina persuaded him to give it up.’ He took up women instead, she completed inwardly.

‘He’s walking inches from the edge of a thousand-foot drop without looking where he’s going!’ Maurice gritted, his appalled gaze glued to the sight.

‘Can’t you drive on past or something?’

‘Are you as crazy as he is?’ Maurice demanded in a defensive burst of incredulity. ‘I’d need a death wish to try and outrun a Ferrari on this road!’

Constantine stilled three feet from the car and removed his sunglasses, sliding them into the pocket of his exquisitely tailored jacket. Ice-cold black eyes dug into Rosie and she shivered, intimidated more by that chilling, silent menace than she would have been by rage.

Maurice skimmed a rueful glance between the two of them and slowly shook his head. ‘Get out of the car, Rosie,’ he murmured flatly. ‘I’m only a hero on level ground... and, aside of that, Constantine is your husband.’

Shock made Rosie’s generous mouth fall inelegantly wide.

‘Unless, of course, you were about to tell me that he knocks you about...’ Maurice dealt her a doubtful but enquiring glance.

A terrible desire to lie assailed Rosie and then she clashed with the raw outrage in Constantine’s fulminating stare and shrank with shame. ‘But you can’t just—’

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not taking sides.’ With an air of decided finality, Maurice hit the release button on her seat belt.

‘How wise,’ Constantine purred like the predator he was as he strolled round the bonnet.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ Maurice sighed.

Disdaining the use of the door, Constantine lifted Rosie out of the passenger seat with two powerful hands. ‘I can walk,’ she snapped, her burning face a picture of temper and mortification. ‘Put me down, for heaven’s sake!’

In intimidating silence and paying no heed whatsoever to her fevered protests, Constantine strode back down the road and settled her into the Ferrari.

‘How dare you treat me like that?’ Rosie gasped as he swung in beside her.

‘What did you expect ... applause for making a fool of yourself?’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Conscience might have brought Maurice over here to check up on you but he wasn’t prepared to force the issue with me. Clearly you were telling the truth when you said that you weren’t lovers ... but the absence of the sexual element wasn’t for want of trying on your part, was it?’ Constantine slashed her a look of biting derision. ‘It is obvious to me that you settled for friendship only because he wasn’t interested in anything else.’

‘That’s nonsense ...’ Rosie began heatedly.