The Bride's Secret. HELEN BROOKS
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haven’t thought about it.’
‘Use your imagination.’ And then as she still stared at him with great, accusing eyes, he snapped, ‘And don’t look at me like that, damn you. You either make it or you don’t in this wodd—there are only two choices—and to make it you take all the help you can get. I’ve...done favours for people, bent the rules a little, oiled wheels,’ he finished softly, his eyes narrowed and hard.
‘But you’re an accountant,’ she murmured naively. ‘How—?’
‘Hudson is going to get offered a case in the next little while, and if he takes it it could prove...uncomfortable for people who have been very good to me. If the dirt starts to fly it’ll come my way too, and a little bit of dirt contaminates everything it comes into contact with—your mother, you—and if you’re with Hudson...’
‘What... what case?’ she asked through numb lips.
‘Things have been hotting up for some time, but eighteen months ago certain people decided I’d better leave the States and lie low—subpoenas have a nasty habit of rearing their heads when you least expect them,’ he continued almost matter-of-factly.
‘Does my mother know?’ She couldn’t believe the conversation was really taking place, not here, in her aunt’s pretty little sitting room. ‘Does she know why you left the States?’
‘Of course not. I never discuss my business with anyone,’ he drawled softly, his voice at odds with the intensity of the chillingly cold eyes. ‘It is...personal.’
‘Then why are you telling me?’ she asked bewilderedly.
‘Think, girl, think!’ The words were harsh before he collected himself and continued in the same soft tone as before, ‘It is clear from what you’ve told your mother that you have some influence with Hudson de Sance, and that is a bonus we could never have arranged if we had tried for years. If de Sance doesn’t take the case it will come to nothing, end of story.’ He smiled meaningfully.
‘You’re asking me to persuade him not to take it?’ she asked numbly. ‘Is that what this is all about? You expect me to do that?’
‘Exactly.’ Now the soft voice was persuasive. ‘It will be best for everyone concerned—you see that, surely? Me, your mother, you—even Hudson. It will not do his sterling reputation any good when it comes to light he’s having an affair with the daughter of one of the men he’s prosecuting. And it would come to light...’
‘I am not your daughter,’ she shot back bitterly.
‘The media won’t see it like that,’ he countered darkly.
‘And it’s not an affair, not like you mean. He...he wants me to marry him,’ she said desperately. ‘He loves me.’
‘Does he? Does he indeed...?’ Michael nodded reflectively. ‘Better and better.’
‘I hate you.’ She glared at him, her eyes blazing. ‘You married my mother purely as a cover, didn’t you? And you’ll dump her as soon as it suits you. You don’t love her, you’re incapable of love. I bet you couldn’t believe your luck when I began to date Hudson—’
‘A gift from the lap of the gods,’ he confirmed sardonically. ‘And definitely not to be ignored. Now, if you’re clever, Marianne, you’ll use this for your own advantage. I can make you a very wealthy woman in your own right, and as Hudson’s wife...’
‘Even if I agreed to this, it wouldn’t be just this one time, would it?’ she said bitterly. ‘You’d put Hudson in a terrible position, use emotional blackmail about me and my mother, threaten to blacken his name through me if he didn’t agree to what you and your friends want. He would never be free of you.’
‘It would be just this once; you have my word,’ he said smoothly, but she saw the look in his eyes and knew she was right.
‘Your word?’ she repeated scathingly. ‘You’re despicable, filthy. I can’t bear that my mother has allowed you to touch her.’
‘Careful, Marianne, be very careful,’ he warned silkily. ‘I can break her and I can break you, and my friends have extensive influence. Just be sensible and all this can be worked out very nicely.’
But she didn’t behave according to Michael’s definition of sensible. She escaped to her room and sat there for hours, her mind desperately seeking a release from the horror, only to come to the conclusion that there wasn’t one. She couldn’t put Hudson through the torment that her revelation would involve—whichever course of action he took. Either he compromised everything he had built his life, character and reputation around—and Michael would make sure he kept on compromising, too—or he would have to fight her stepfather and his criminal friends, and in the process, through his relationship with her, mud would stick to him, too. It was a no-win situation whichever way she looked at it.
Unless she left Hudson now. Disappeared out of his life. Disappeared out of everyone’s life. Her heart pounded furiously, but it was the only way.
She wrote three letters. One to her mother, explaining everything. One to Michael, informing him she was going where no one would find her and that she was telling Hudson nothing except that their relationship was over. And one—the most difficult—to Hudson. And then she packed, left the house before dawn, and once in England made for London, her mind and emotions shattered.
She couldn’t remember much now about the first few months, although she had survived somehow—living in a tiny bedsit and working as a waitress, her mind on automatic most of the time. Later she’d realised she had had some sort of mini-breakdown, but at the time she had just got through each day as it came, the blackness in her soul absolute.
The thing that had shocked her out of the stupor was seeing an old friend from her home village purely by chance, and learning in the middle of a crowded café that her mother and Michael were dead, killed in a car crash the day after they had returned to Scotland. It had been like a blow straight between the eyes.
She had grieved desperately for her mother, hated Michael with a vengeance that had shocked her, longed for Hudson with renewed intensity. But gradually, over the following weeks, she had come to the realisation that she was thinking and feeling and living again—even if the main element to it all was suffering. Agonising suffering.
‘Would you like me to hold your hand while you face the music?’
‘What?’ The dark, silky voice had intruded into the nightmare world with all the softness of cold steel, but as she came out of her reverie she saw her hotel looming up in the distance and a new sort of panic rose. ‘Oh, no, I don’t; of course I don’t,’ she snapped testily—hating him, loving him, feeling as though she couldn’t take much more without howling like a baby.
‘He might wonder why you didn’t phone him to tell him where you were,’ Hudson suggested quietly. ‘I wondered that myself. Why didn’t you?’ The grey eyes flashed her way for one vital second.
Because it simply hadn’t occurred to her, she thought helplessly. She hadn’t thought of Keith once, not once, through the evening; all her thoughts and emotions had been tied up with the tall, ruthless man at her side. ‘It wasn’t necessary,’ she said stiffly. ‘I don’t answer to Keith or anyone else.’
‘Hmm. independent, eh?’ he drawled easily. ‘Funny, I don’t remember you as quite so militant when you were with me.’
She wasn’t militant, she was melted jelly inside, Marianne thought with painful self-awareness; but the time had long since passed when she could have explained her actions to him. Perhaps if she had known about Michael’s death when it had happened—had gone to Hudson then and told him everything—things might have been different now. But then again Michael’s untimely death hadn’t negated any of her reasons for leaving Hudson. The contact with her would still have been there; the people Michael had been involved with could still have tried to discredit Hudson through her. Whichever way she had looked there had still been no solution.