Deal With the Devil--3 Book Box Set

‘I know it isn’t you,’ he said, with an almost dismissive shrug. ‘It’s obvious that it couldn’t possibly be you. How could it be?’

He believed her?

‘You…you know that it isn’t me?’ Lucy repeated cautiously, afraid to trust in her own hearing.

‘Yes, of course I know it isn’t you,’ Marcus replied, with familiar sharp impatience.

‘But how? How can you know?’ Lucy asked him shakily.

‘Apart from anything else, you have a small but very identifying mole, high up on the outside of your left thigh,’ Marcus told her calmly. ‘And whoever posed for the body shots for this—this abomination doesn’t.’

‘Oh!’

How very weird that the most important thing in her whole life should hang on the existence of one tiny brown mole; that something not much larger than a pinhead could make the difference between happiness for the rest of her life or misery until she died—between trust and doubt, between truth and lies, between being married to Marcus and being rejected by him.

‘It’s obvious that someone has superimposed your face on the body of someone else.’

‘But someone else without my mole,’ Lucy said, as lightly as she could.

Marcus was frowning at her now.

‘The mole is simply a confirmation of what I already know, Lucy,’ he told her coolly. ‘My own judgement is all I need to know that you could never be the woman depicted in those photographs.’

To Marcus’s own disbelief he realised that he wanted to reach for her and hold her; that he wanted to tell her he would kill, breath by breath, painfully and slowly, whoever was responsible for what had happened; that he wanted to tell her that he knew not just with his intellect but also with his heart, with the deepest part of himself, that she would never ever indulge in the kind of scenario the photographs depicted. He wanted to tell her that he knew that she was a sensualist, a woman who loved the intimacy of one-to-one lovemaking, a woman who celebrated her womanhood in the act of sharing pleasure with just one man.

But how could he be feeling like this? He did not feelthings. He thought through his decisions logically and calmly. He did not ‘sense’ them. He did not allow his emotions to sway his judgement. And, most of all, he did not allow himself to feel his heart turning over inside his chest in a roll of raw agony because Lucy’s pain was his pain. Because if he did, then that meant—

Angrily he slammed the door against the knowledge he did not want to accept.

‘But why would anyone want to do such a thing?’ Lucy was asking, giving him something logical to focus on and deal with. ‘Never mind send those…those things to you?’

‘It’s probably just someone’s idea of a joke,’ Marcus told her, intent on refusing to analyse what was happening to him inside his head. No, not his head but his heart—that part of him that he had told himself, when he had finally accepted that his father had deserted them, would in future only be allowed to operate physically, never emotionally.

‘A joke?’

‘Yes, it happens all the time.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Young idiots like your cousin Johnny, for instance, who have nothing better to do and—’

‘But, Marcus, something like this isn’t a joke,’ Lucy protested.

‘Look, let’s just forget about it, shall we?’ Marcus told her briskly. ‘After all, we’ve both recognised it for what it is—at best a stupid, senseless and very tasteless joke, and at worst a malicious attempt to damage our relationship.’

‘But who would do a thing like that?’ Lucy asked, worry crinkling her forehead.

‘Who knows? The best thing we can do now is to ignore it and to forget it,’ Marcus repeated. But he knew he wasn’t being entirely open with her.

He was grimly aware that only this morning he had heard that the woman Nick Blayne had left Lucy for had ended their relationship and thrown him out, and that he was now virtually penniless.

There was no note with the package, but Marcus suspected that the video and the accompanying photographs were the beginnings of a clumsy attempt to blackmail him into paying for the ‘master’ copies. It was the kind of thing that had Nick Blayne’s grubby mark all over it, but Marcus didn’t want to upset Lucy by telling her so.

Or because he was concerned that if she knew that Blayne was free again she might be tempted to go back to him?

‘Marcus?’

Tears of reaction were rolling down Lucy’s face. Her thoughts were a jumbled mass of fear and confusion, plus intense relief that Marcus had reacted in the way that he had. A wave of gratitude and love for him surged through her, filling her eyes with fresh tears

‘It’s all right, Lucy. It’s all right,’ Marcus told her gruffly.

‘I’m not crying because I’m upset,’ Lucy managed to tell him. ‘I’m just crying because I’m so happy that you didn’t think it was me.’

Marcus wasn’t aware of moving, only of holding her in his arms whilst her whole body shuddered with reaction.

‘Oh—but, Marcus, if you hadn’t known about my mole…’

‘Lucy, look at me.’

‘My mascara’s run and my nose is red,’ she objected, sniffing.

‘True,’ Marcus agreed wryly, but his expression was warmer than she could even remember seeing it. ‘But I can still recognise you, Lucy. And even if you had not had your mole I would still have known that the body in those photographs and in those situations could never have belonged to you.’

‘How could you know that?’

‘Because I know you,’ Marcus answered her, simply and truthfully.

And it was true. He did know, at the most primitive and deepest level of his being, that Lucy could never and would never be the girl in those photographs.

And now he was beginning to know now something else as well; its message was being thumped out to him via the heavy thud of his own heartbeat.

But he still wasn’t ready to give in. His desire to marry Lucy came from logic and not love. Came now?

Or had originally come?

Lucy give him a small, tremulous half-smile, which wobbled slightly despite her best efforts to prevent it from doing so. ‘So you still want to marry me, then?’

Marcus arched one eyebrow and told her dryly, ‘Of course. It would take a far braver man than I to disappoint a mother who has planned a wedding breakfast for five hundred people.’

‘I did tell her that we only wanted a quiet wedding,’ Lucy assured him.

‘Five hundred, five thousand, or five—frankly, my dear, I don’t give a tuppenny ha’penny damn how many guests there are. All I care about is that you’re there, Lucy.’

‘Because you’re nearly thirty-five and you want an heir?’ She held her breath, hoping against hope that by some miracle he would deny her comment and declare that he loved her.

‘Of course,’ he agreed immediately.

Her foolish hope leaked away, leaving her starved of its comfort and filled with pain.

‘I’m going to take you back to your parents’ place now,’ he told her.

‘Marcus!’ Lucy protested.

‘I mean it, Lucy. You can’t stay here, tonight of all nights. We both know that.’

And he knew that if he touched her he might just not be able to let her go, Marcus was forced to acknowledge.

CHAPTER NINE

LUCY had refused point blank to wear a white wedding dress, and had been on the point of giving up finding anything suitable in the short time she’d had available when she had seen a Vera Wang dress in Harrods, in ecru silk. Wonder of wonders, it had fitted her.

The long sheath-like gown had a tight-fitting corset-style bodice, a detachable skirt, and a fishtail demi-train. In order to satisfy family tradition a copy had been made of its matching close-fitting bolero-style jacket from a piece of antique family lace.

She hadn’t wanted to wear a veil either, but in the end had agreed to wear a small pillbox-style hat with a very small ‘almost’ veil.

The promise of heavy-duty wedding-style cream lilies with appropriate greenery, a positive phalanx of pages and bridesmaids of assorted junior ranks from both their families, and the pomp and circumstance of the Oratory and Handel’s music had been enough to soothe her mother’s maternal angst about her not looking like a ‘real’ bride.