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The Arrangement
Suzanne Forster
Her story could blow apart the secrets they’d both agreed to keep.Alison Fairmont Villard wakes in a hospital bed with a face she doesn’t recognise and a husband she doesn’t know. Andrew Villard, a self-made millionaire, has a bright future but a shadowy past. When he tells Alison the details of their life together, she has no choice but to believe him – and to accept the shocking proposal he offers.It isn’t just the partial amnesia that Alison suffers. She has her own terrifying secrets that can’t be entrusted to anyone, even Andrew. Even the police suspect he was behind Alison’s near-fatal accident aboard his yacht and were ready to charge him with murder before her body was found, battered on the razor-sharp coral reefs. When the veil of amnesia lifts, it’s too late. Alison is caught in a web of her own making.And now an FBI agent with a personal vendetta is about to blow the lid off her deadly marriage of convenience.
Praise for New YorkTimesbestselling author
SUZANNE FORSTER
“No one combines steamy suspense and breathless
thrills like Suzanne Forster!”
—bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips
“[Forster is] a stylist who translates sexual
tension into sizzle.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
SUZANNE FORSTER
The Arrangement
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to my mother, who breathed her last on 2nd February 2006, and who, despite tremendous physical challenges, managed to come through it all with her dignity, her compassion for others and her lively sense of humour intact.
Every life should end so gracefully.
Rest in peace.
Edith Mary Stephenson-Bolster
1916–2006
Prologue
Andrew Villard couldn’t remember when he’d last closed his eyes. Waves pounded his sixty-five-foot sloop like fists, hammering his senses as mercilessly as they hammered the hull. This wasn’t just a storm at sea. It was an assault on his world. He was searching for a body, his wife’s—and God help them both, he had to find her alive.
Andrew had a life most men would have killed for—enough wealth to wield influence, enough power to attract privilege. In a world split between winners and losers, he had won big. But as of seventy-two hours ago, his streak was over. He was a murder suspect. Prime.
Lightning ripped a hole in the black-and-blue sky. Wind lashed Andrew’s hair. He hugged the mast, bracing as another wave crashed over the bow. He’d hired a small crew so he could be free to search. He had an experienced skipper at the helm, as well as a crewman who had already reefed the main sail and trimmed the storm jib to help stabilize the boat.
His wife, Alison, had disappeared at sea three days ago. The sun had gone down, and they’d been heading back to port when a squall had blown up. Andrew had gone belowdecks to hunt for life preservers that weren’t in the cockpit locker where they should have been, and while he was down there, something slammed into the yacht almost hard enough to capsize it. By the time he got back on deck, a storm was raging, and Alison was gone.
Searching for her had been virtually impossible. He’d been alone on a big yacht in the dark with a fierce storm blowing. High winds had driven him back into port, where he’d radioed the Coast Guard, but their search of the coastline had yielded nothing. They’d found no trace of her, even though they’d continued searching until last night, when gale-force winds had made them call it off.
Andrew had been out in the storm every day since she vanished, but that hadn’t stopped the Coast Guard from questioning whether it was an accident. They’d gone over his boat, seen the damage and called in the county sheriff’s office. It was no secret that sailing was Andrew Villard’s passion. In his twenties, he’d been part of the team that raced Lasers for the summer Olympics. Andrew knew the waters, was a seasoned navigator. He was too good to lose someone at sea.
A team from the sheriff’s office had searched his sloop, Bladerunner, and they were treating him like a suspect. They’d found the damaged lifeline and the scuffed deck. It was only a matter of time until they’d find the insurance policy. And there was the tragic way his ex-fiancée had died. The media had made sure everyone knew about that. It was hailed as more proof of the Villard Curse.
If he didn’t find Alison, he would be charged with her murder. Tomorrow or the next day. Soon. He would be arrested.
The bow rose and crashed down. A wall of water knocked Andrew to the deck and nearly ripped him away from the mast. When he dragged himself back up, he couldn’t see any sign of his crew. Dread sent him crawling toward the cockpit, where he spotted the pilot crouching and clinging to the wheel. The other man had taken shelter in the doorway of the pilot house.
“Come about!” Andrew shouted, gesturing to the man at the wheel. “We’re heading back in.”
He saw relief on both men’s faces and knew he’d done the right thing. This was his desperate mission, not theirs. He had no right to endanger their lives.
Another wave lifted them into the air. They were sailing like the Flying Dutchman when the crewman began to gesture wildly. “There!” he bellowed, pointing southeast. “The rock reefs. Look at the reefs!”
Andrew couldn’t see what the man was talking about. The reefs were obscured by mist, and before he could get back to the mast, the Bladerunner had sunk into another deep trough. Water poured over them in sheets, but as they rose again on a crest, Andrew could see that the seas to the southeast were less wild. The storm seemed to have moved past them, heading out to the Pacific.
He spotted a white speck in the black claws of the reefs. As they headed toward it, Andrew forgot all about the danger. The waves were still heavy as they neared, but he was mesmerized by what looked more and more like a human body. The yacht’s engines roared to life, helping turn the boat into the wind. Andrew didn’t have to instruct the pilot. He knew exactly what to do.
As they came within range of the rocks, Andrew realized that it was a body, a woman, either unconscious or dead. She wasn’t impaled on a reef as he’d feared. She was floating on the surface, nearly naked. It looked as if the clothes had been ripped from her body, probably by the force of the storm. But somehow she’d gotten caught on a large piece of driftwood.
She was battered, too. His gorge rose as he saw that there was little left of her face but bloody pulp. He could discern what might be her mouth, her nose, but other than that, she was virtually unrecognizable. The driftwood may have kept her afloat, but it hadn’t kept her from being dashed against the rocks.
Andrew and the crewman rushed to lower a lifeboat. Moments later they climbed down the ladder and pushed off. But even when they were close enough to pick her up, Andrew wasn’t able to identify her. Her injuries were a grisly sight, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He thought he’d seen her move her hand. Was she alive?
As he freed her limp and bleeding body, he saw that she’d been snagged on the driftwood by a delicate gold wristlet—Alison’s birthday gift. Andrew didn’t know whether it was relief or horror that made him shudder. His wife had been found.
Andrew was ready to rip the No Smoking sign off the hospital wall. Every time he turned around that plaque was in his face, reminding him how badly he wanted to smoke. He’d quit his pack-a-day habit over a year ago, having no idea how desperately addicted he was. Desire had finally begun to wane in the last couple months. Now it was back with a vengeance—and this sign was a constant reminder, lest it slip his mind.
At the moment he was the only addict pacing the floor of Providence Saint Joseph’s VIP lounge. A concert promoter by profession, Andrew knew all about such lounges. Celebrities required green room treatment wherever they went, and that included hospitals. This one had a concierge during the day, free coffee, gourmet snacks and flat screen TVs. It also had sleeping quarters, but Andrew was too wired for that. He could only guess what had earned him VIP status. Maybe the ten thousand dollars he’d donated to the hospital benevolent fund.
He checked his watch. It was 6:00 a.m., and he was waiting for an update on Alison’s progress. She’d been in surgery twelve hours, and Andrew had heard nothing since three that morning, when they’d told him she should be able to resume a normal life, but it would take several more hours to reconstruct her face. He’d also been warned that this would be the first of several surgeries.
Thank God he’d insisted she be Medevaced to Saint Joseph’s. He’d called from the yacht on the way back into port, and there’d been an ambulance there to meet them. The paramedics had taken her directly to the trauma center at San Diego General, but after it had been determined that she had no serious internal injuries, Andrew had arranged for her to be transferred to Saint Joseph’s, where the reconstructive surgeons were the best in the world.
The trauma center’s surgeons could easily have repaired the broken bones in her body, but he knew it would take virtuosos to put her exquisite face back together.
Alison’s face. Andrew could see it so clearly in his mind, fine-featured and fair, the Rapunzel of her generation, which happened to be X. She would rather have lost a limb than her looks. As beautiful as she was, she was also deeply insecure and sought constant reassurance, which may have explained her crazy dreams of superstardom, and her belief that Andrew could use his connections to make those dreams come true. It wasn’t the only reason their marriage had fallen apart, but it was one of them.
A flash of blue in Andrew’s periphery caught his attention. A young female plastic surgeon, still garbed in scrubs, came through the waiting room door and approached him. Andrew recognized her as one of the operating room team.
He couldn’t read her expression. Obvious exhaustion masked whatever emotion she might be feeling. And doctors weren’t supposed to telegraph those things, anyway. Alison could be dead, and this doctor’s face would show nothing more than professional compassion. Right now, he didn’t even see that.
“How is she?” he asked.
She wiped her brow, and he saw the bloodstains on her sleeve.
“It’s delicate work,” she said, “but it’s going well.”
Andrew felt light-headed, probably from relief. “She’s going to be all right?”
“As you know, the worst damage was to your wife’s face,” she told him. “We’ve reset her jaw and reconstructed her nose. She’ll need more surgery in the future, possibly several operations, but there’s a good chance we’ll be able to restore not just the structure, but the character of her face.”
“You’re working from the pictures I gave you?” Alison had been nearly unrecognizable, even after they cleaned her up, so Andrew had described her at length and given them the wallet-size pictures he carried, most of them close-ups of her face. His hobby was boat design, precision work that made him very aware of details.
“Yes, from the pictures.” She smiled, seeming pleased despite her obvious fatigue. Her expression said that this was a victory for medicine, and for her personally. “We’ve even managed to remove what was left of the birthmark on her throat,” she said proudly.
“The birthmark?” Another wave of light-headedness caught Andrew, rocking him back on his heels. The room got very bright, and he didn’t realize he was staring at the doctor until he heard her calling his name.
“Mr. Villard? Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine.” He forced himself to smile at her as if everything was fine, but he was still unsteady. He kneaded his forehead, warding off the threat of a blinding headache. “It’s been awhile since I slept.”
“We won’t be much longer.”
“I’ll get some coffee,” he said, aware that he sounded out of breath. It had been several days since he’d slept, and he was exhausted. If he was acting strangely, that was the reason. And it was the only reason he was going to give, especially to this doctor.
1
New York, Six Months Later
Alison Fairmont Villard opened her eyes reluctantly. She was in her own bedroom, but the first moments of consciousness still brought bewilderment. Andrew had insisted she recuperate at his home on Oyster Bay in Long Island, but it wasn’t being on the east coast that confused her. Each day since the accident had started with a realization that felt almost physical, as if she had to grasp her mind and wrench it to this new time and place, to a world she actually knew very little about. And yet more about than she wanted to.
Her amnesia wasn’t as total as the doctors had thought. She remembered nothing about being battered against the reefs and nearly drowning, nothing about the plunge into the raging ocean, but she could remember just enough of what had happened before that to be terrified by it.
Those flashes of memory acted like a spotlight that could blind you to everything except its beam. What she recalled now were the harrowing moments. Everything else was hidden in the surrounding ring of darkness.
Maybe it was the pills. She took them to sleep and to keep the dreams at bay. Whether night or day, when she swallowed a tiny blue pill, she was transported to a cool, safe place, a shaded tropical lagoon, her mind free of clutter and turmoil. She slept in innocence, like Eve before the apple.
Her fingers clasped the small battered loop of copper attached to her charm bracelet. It was an ugly stepsister compared to the other delicate gold charms, but she was relieved to find it still there. She’d reached for it so often it had become a reflex. An embarrassing tic. But the brush with death had made her superstitious, and the old copper penny ring had literally saved her life when it snagged on a piece of driftwood. Its protective powers had been tested.
She rolled to her side and sat up, not bothering to cover her nakedness. There was no one to see her, anyway. She and Andrew didn’t share this beautiful suite where she slept her life away, and as far as she knew they never had. Before the “accident,” which was how they now referred to it, they’d lived in his Manhattan apartment. Here, in his much larger estate on Oyster Bay, their rooms were in different wings. Different rooms. Different lives.
She had almost no interaction with her husband these days, except occasionally to discuss a social or business event that he wanted her to attend with him, and there had been very few of those. In the first weeks after the accident, he’d spent hours with her, filling in the blanks of her life with him, as well as her life before him. He’d shared as much as he knew of her past, but it was what he’d told her about their relationship that made her realize they’d been on the brink of a divorce before the accident—and Andrew didn’t seem to have any desire to reconcile now.
He didn’t even seem to like her, which made her feel strangely empty and resentful, even though she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d felt about him before. He’d refused to go into the intimate details of their relationship, which had left her both curious and suspicious, but mostly, lost. How was she supposed to pick up pieces she didn’t have?
They were together now only because of the agreement they’d made—and that was strictly business. Once she’d recovered enough to lead her own life, such as it was, he’d left her to it. That was how he wanted it. What she wanted didn’t seem to enter into anything, though to be fair, he had asked her about that once.
What do you want to do with your second chance?
Her answer had surprised him. She told him she didn’t remember asking for one.
She rose and stretched, using her arms and feeling the ripple come from the base of her spine. Her listlessness was replaced by a vague sense of guilt as she considered the state of her bedroom and what she could see of her sitting room through the connecting arch. Clothing had been dropped here and there; books and magazines lay about.
Had she always been this sloppy? Maybe she was rebelling against his need for order and organization. He’d called home once when he was away on a trip, and had her search for some papers in his study, which was next to his bedroom. She’d been amazed at the precision of his life.
She didn’t feel precise. She felt messy.
“What you are is a zombie,” she murmured, startled at the husky tone of her own voice. Part of that was from the surgery and the rest was the way she’d always sounded, apparently. “Do something,” she said. “Anything other than sleep.”
She started for the bathroom, thinking she might shower and dress, perhaps go to the kitchen and find something to eat. It was late morning, and she probably should have been hungry, but she rarely had much of an appetite, especially for the organic food that Andrew preferred.
He had someone come in twice a week to clean and do the grocery shopping, but other than that they had no staff. He’d let everyone go shortly after he brought her home from the hospital. He’d had concerns about prying eyes and the tabloid press, but they would have been interested in her only because of him.
He’d made a name for himself in the music business, not just for the high-profile events he organized, but for the talent he’d discovered. And it didn’t hurt that he was the personification of tall, dark and dashing. Years ago he’d been engaged to one of his own finds, a pop princess named Regine, when she’d drowned, apparently rather mysteriously, in their swimming pool.
Another accident. The women in Andrew’s life were prone to them.
The media had tagged it the Villard Curse, but Andrew wouldn’t discuss it, except for a few paltry details that Alison could have read in a newspaper. His mother had been a rising star with the New York Opera when she’d suffered a freak accident during a rehearsal. She and Andrew, who was a teenager at the time, had been living with her mentor, the opera’s artistic director, and Andrew had stayed on with the director after she died, rather than disrupt Andrew’s schooling. His parents had divorced when he was a baby, and his mother had desperately wanted him to have culture in his life. No one had objected, least of all Andrew’s father, who’d moved to the wilds of Wyoming and had a family of his own.
When Alison had pressed for details about Regine, Andrew had startled her by lashing out. Apparently the loss was still too painful, but it had been five years. He’d told her not to ask about Regine again, but he’d alluded to a love triangle, of which she, Alison, had been one of the points. Alison had no recollection of that at all. It was her mother, Julia, who’d come between her relationship with Andrew when Alison was eighteen. As far as Alison knew, Andrew’s association with Regine had been strictly business up to that point, although it did turn romantic after Alison and Andrew parted. Things quickly became serious between he and Regine, but she was dead before they could marry.
A year after that Andrew had secretly married Alison…and now this.
Her spine rippled again, a shiver this time. She lived with a vague sense of dread that never left her, except when she forced it away. Were there men who found it easier to dispose of women than to leave them? They would have to be patholotical in the extreme, and she didn’t want to think about her husband in that way. She was still rattled and disoriented. Right now there was nothing to anchor her, no touchstones, but that would change.
The large sage-green-and-white bathroom soothed her as she stepped barefoot onto its cool limestone tile. The mostly glass-and-steel house had several levels, domed skylights and was built on low, rolling sand dunes. It was one of the few modern structures in Oyster Bay Cove, and Andrew had kept the decor inside as light and natural as the shores and the sea outside.
As she entered the shower stall, the charm bracelet jingled on her wrist. She never removed it these days, even to bathe. Doing so made her feel too vulnerable. A chunk of her life was gone and the details of her past were confused and fuzzy, but she had a sense of herself as an adventurous person before the accident. Some might even say reckless. Now she was in constant search of ways to protect herself. She kept a marble paperweight on the nightstand next to her bed and a kitchen carving knife in the nightstand drawer, just in case.
She turned one of the knobs on a sleek stainless steel panel, and warm water began to mist from above. Possibly her favorite part of the bathroom was the rain forest showerhead. Standing under it, she really did feel as if she’d been caught in a tropical cloudburst.
When she came out of the shower moments later, wrapped in a bath sheet, she sensed that something was different. But as she walked through the room, still dripping, she didn’t notice anything out of place.
As she entered the sitting room, she saw that an envelope and a handwritten note had been left on her writing desk. The embossed envelope was made of pale blue linen as soft and slippery as silk. It was addressed to her, but it had been opened and the contents read. She knew because of the note from Andrew lying next to the envelope. He’d written just two sentences and signed his name with the usual slashing capital A.
Alison, there’s no way out this time. We have to go. Andrew.
Alison pulled the matching blue stationery from the envelope and read the entire page in one gulp, as if it were a single sentence. Nerves, she thought. The kind that made you eat too fast and caused the food to ball up in your stomach.
My darling daughter,
Your silence is breaking my heart. You will be twenty-eight soon, and though no invitation is needed because this is and always will be your home, I’m extending one so that you can understand how desperate I am to see you again.
Please come to Sea Clouds and celebrate the occasion of your birthday with your brother and me. Of course, Andrew is invited, too.
I long to see you.
All my love,
Your mother
Alison’s breath had gone dry in her throat. Invitation? It was a summons from her mother to appear. She’d known this was coming, but that didn’t make it any less a disaster. Andrew had been holding her mother off since the accident. He’d said he was doing it to protect Alison, to give her time to heal and prepare, but Julia Fairmont had extended an olive branch. She wanted to see her one and only daughter, and no one could protect Alison now.
She had visions of putting the pricey stationery through a shredder and grinding it into a pile of slivers. But she didn’t have the nerve, even for a symbolic act of defiance. It felt as if she’d lost control of even the smallest details of her life. She was a chess piece being moved around by master players, one of whom was her husband.
The letter was just one example. It was addressed to her, but Andrew had opened it, read it and told her how they were going to respond, even though the decision had to do with her life, her family—and should have been her choice. He believed it was time to repair her relationship with her mother, and even though it was part of the arrangement Alison had made with him, she hated the thought of going back to Mirage Bay under these circumstances.
She had only agreed because of personal reasons that were deeply important to her. Those reasons were also why she stayed in this house and put up with Andrew’s interference. Unfortunately, she’d had to take him into her confidence, because she would need his help when they got to Mirage Bay. But this wasn’t the right time for her to go.
Her mother’s invitation almost certainly had something to do with the fifty-million-dollar trust that would have come to Alison on her twenty-eighth birthday, if she hadn’t decided to walk away from the family wealth and marry Andrew. Julia Fairmont had been apoplectic. She’d cut off all contact with her daughter for four years, and according to Andrew, it was mutual. Alison had made no attempt to repair the rift.
