A Rich Man's Revenge

скачать книгу бесплатно


Rico laughed. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Charles? That girl has you by the short and curlies.”

“Must you be so crude?” Renée said with a withering glance Rico’s way. “Take no notice of him, Charles. He’s just jealous because he can’t find anyone to love, or who truly loves him in return.”

Rico laughed again, yet it had a hard, hollow ring to it. “I wish I were jealous. Oh, yes. That would be much better.”

“Better than what?” Charles asked, not quite following Rico’s train of thought.

Rico looked remorseful for opening his mouth. “Nothing. I’m rambling. I’ve had too much to drink. I think I’ll stick to coffee for the rest of the night.”

“An excellent idea, Enrico,” Ali said. “Alcohol is the root of all evil.”

“I thought that was money,” Rico retorted.

“No. It’s sex,” Renée surprised them all by saying. “Sex is the root of all evil. We would all be much better off without it.”

“But then there wouldn’t be any children,” Charles pointed out.

“Exactly,” she returned.

“Trust you not to like children,” came Rico’s cutting comment.

Renée stiffened. “I didn’t say that. But the world is overpopulated as it is. And so many children are suffering. I would rather there be no more children than to see such suffering.”

“Sorry, but I can’t oblige you there, Renée,” Charles piped up. “Dominique and I are planning to have children. And soon.”

Rico’s eyes jerked his way. “I thought you’d put that off for a while,” he said with a frown. “Hell, Charles, you’ve only been married a month!”

“I’m forty-one next birthday, Rico. I haven’t got time to waste. Besides, Dominique’s keen to have a baby.”

“Is she, now?” he said, and Charles heard the cynical note which always flavoured Rico’s voice when he spoke about Dominique.

Rico didn’t like Dominique. Charles could no longer ignore that fact. Why Rico didn’t like her was just as obvious. He thought Dominique was a gold-digger, like his own ex.

Charles could have been insulted by his friend’s opinion—didn’t he think any woman could love him for himself?—but he understood Rico was still going through a bitter phase after his own wretched marital experience. In time, he’d realise Dominique wasn’t anything like Jasmine. When that happened he might even decide to give marriage another go himself.

“I think we should cease to discuss personal issues and get back to the game,” Ali suggested wisely. “That is why we meet here each Friday night. To play poker and to escape life’s little stresses and strains for a while. Let us leave such matters at the door in future.”

Rico and Renée both gave Ali a look which implied a man of his massive power and privilege wasn’t subjected to too many of life’s little stresses and strains.

Till Charles had met Dominique, he might have agreed with them. Money and success had certainly smoothed his path in life. But he knew now that it didn’t bring real happiness. Love did.

Without love, having all the money in the world could become very empty indeed. Charles suspected Ali was no more happy in his private life than was Rico, or the merry widow. You only had to look into that woman’s eyes to know she wasn’t happy. Not where it mattered. Not in her heart.

Earlier, she’d made it sound as if she didn’t want children. But was that the truth? Or was it a rationalisation of where her life was heading, fast past that age where it was easy for a woman to conceive, especially without a partner?

Charles was only guessing, of course. Renée was like Ali, never revealing much about her private life. Presumably she did have a love life, but what kind and with whom Charles had no idea. All he knew was that she always showed up at the races alone. And she never cancelled on a Friday night. Unusual for a woman.

There again, Renée was an unusual woman. An enigma. A rather intimidating enigma. Charles pitied any man who ever fell in love with her. No man wanted to be intimidated by his woman. They wanted a woman who could make a man feel good about himself, the way Dominique did.

Aah…Dominique. She was very much on his mind tonight. Ali could command they leave their personal lives at the door but Charles couldn’t do that just yet. His love for his lovely wife was all too new, and all too consuming.

He patted the jewelry box in his jacket pocket before he sat back down again, his stomach tightening in pleasurable anticipation of that moment when she opened the lid and saw the necklace. He couldn’t wait to put it on her, to see how it looked.

The next two hours dragged, his play deteriorating further. Ali shook his head at his many mistakes. Renée smiled wryly and Rico scowled.

“What am I going to do with you, Charles?” Rico said when the night’s poker was over and the two men rode the lift together down to the ground floor. Renée had already gone ahead, always the first to leave after play was halted, usually around midnight. Tonight it had been twelve-thirty, due to their late start.

Charles laughed. “I’ll do better next week,” he said, thinking that by then he might have the worst of his lust out of his system.

Not that he said that to Rico. Rico would pounce on the word lust, and claim he’d been right all along; it was just the promise of sex which had bewitched and entrapped him.

But Charles knew that wasn’t the case. It was only natural that he and Dominique were still going through that phase when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Unlike most newlyweds these days, they hadn’t been living together before their wedding. Hell, they hadn’t even kissed!

“Did you mean it when you said you and Dominique weren’t waiting to have children?”

Rico’s question surprised Charles. “Why would I lie about something like that?”

“But you haven’t actually gotten her pregnant yet.”

“No. She’s on the Pill for now. But she’s coming off it next month.”

“I honestly don’t think that’s a good idea, Charles. You should wait at least a year before you take such a big step. Get to know your wife a bit better first. You hardly know the girl, after all.”

Charles’s forbearance over Rico’s negative attitude towards Dominique began to wane. “I know all I need to know,” he replied tautly. “Look, Rico, I realise you don’t like Dominique. You probably think she’s a fortune hunter, but—”

“You’re wrong,” Rico interrupted, his expression grim. “I don’t think she’s a fortune hunter, my friend. I know she’s a fortune hunter.”

CHAPTER THREE

CHARLES whirled, his fists balling by his sides. “Now, look here, Rico, I’m warning you. Stop this once and for all. Just because Jasmine took you for a ride, doesn’t mean that Dominique’s doing the same to me. My wife loves me. Renée’s right. You’re jealous.”

The lift doors opened on the ground floor and Charles gave Rico one last uncompromising glare. “I suggest you apologise before we leave this lift or you can consider our friendship over,” he pronounced angrily.

Rico looked more concerned than apologetic. “I’m sorry. More sorry, Charles, than you can ever imagine. But I can’t let you be taken for a fool. And I can’t let you go ahead and blindly have a baby with that woman. I have proof of what I’m saying. Hard and fast proof.”

Charles’s head jerked back in shock before more anger rushed in. “Proof? What kind of proof?” he challenged heatedly.

“Irrefutable proof.”

“Such as?”

“The kind supplied by a very reputable private investigator. Facts and figures. Taped conversations with her ex-flatmates in Melbourne, people she’s worked with, men she’s slept with. You’re welcome to hear them for yourself whenever you like. And to see the written report. Your wife is a fortune hunter, Charles. Make no bones about that. She openly admitted to her flatmates during her years in Melbourne that her aim in life was to marry money. You became her target after things with her previous marital candidate fell through and she made the move to Sydney.”

Charles tried to swallow the huge lump which had filled his throat but it was stuck there.

“He was her last boss,” Rico swept on mercilessly. “Jonathon Hall, a reasonably successful celebrity sports manager. Though not as rich as his lifestyle indicates, which is why he ended up marrying money himself. Apparently, Dominique was livid when he dumped her. She told one of her girlfriends that the next time she wouldn’t go for a guy with Hall’s looks and charm. She’d try for someone older who didn’t think he was God’s gift to women, someone who’d be oh, so grateful to have a girl like her even look at him twice.”

Charles wanted to cry out, to scream that none of this was true. Dominique loved him.

But Rico was ruthless in his exposé of his beautiful bride’s true nature. “Dominique isn’t even her real name. It’s something plain like Joan or Jane. I can’t remember which. She changed it to Dominique when she first came to Melbourne from Tasmania when she was nineteen. Which reminds me. Her parents weren’t both killed in a car accident, either, like she told you. Her mother died of cancer when Dominique was eighteen, but her father is still very much alive. Lives in a small town on the West Coast, works as a manager in one of the local mines. She’s a liar and a fake, Charles, in every way.”

The blood began to drain from Charles’s face. He vaguely saw horror in Rico’s eyes and realised he must look as shattered as he felt.

“Gee, Charles. Don’t go collapsing on me. Hey, man, I didn’t realise how much you loved her till this moment. I thought it was just infatuation. Man, you look terrible. What you need is a stiff drink. Come on, let’s go get you one.”

Charles let Rico propel him into a nearby bar, prop him up on one of the stools there and order him a brandy. He downed the drink in two quick gulps and let Rico order him another.

The brandy soon did its work and blood began slowly seeping back into his brain, his inner despair momentarily overlaid by a confused curiosity. He swivelled on the stool to face Rico once more.

“When did you find out all this?” he asked shakily. “Not before the wedding, surely.”

“No. I hired the PI whilst you were on your honeymoon. The full report only came in yesterday.”

“But why, Rico? Why would it even occur to you to do such a thing?”

“One of the flatmates Dominique confided in is a cousin of mine. Claudia. She’d gone to Melbourne a couple of years ago for a change of scene after her marriage broke up. Recently, she came back to live in Sydney and was staying with one of my sisters. I was at a family get-together a few days after your wedding and was showing everyone some of the casual snapshots I’d taken when Claudia recognised Dominique. She said Dominique had this fixation about becoming really rich. Apparently, she told Claudia she could never earn enough herself in a lifetime of working for a salary, so the only solution was to marry money. Everything she did had that single aim. To catch herself a rich husband.”

Charles expressed his despair with a colourful four-letter word.

“Absolutely. I agree with you. But at least now you can see why, after what Claudia told me, I thought it was my duty as your best man to find out everything I could.”

“Which you obviously couldn’t wait to pass on to me,” Charles said bitterly. “But for what purpose, I wonder. Do you think you’ve done me a favour, Rico, disenchanting me like this? You could have left me in blissful ignorance. That would have been kinder.”

“I was going to for a while, believe me. But not after what you said tonight about starting a family straight away. I just couldn’t stay silent and let you do that, Charles.”

“I don’t see why not,” Charles muttered bleakly.

“Fortune hunters fall into two categories,” Rico elaborated. “Firstly, there are the Jasmines of this world who marry you for the high life, and never have any intention of spoiling their figures having babies. Their plan is to have a ball for a while at your expense, till you start asking for a kid, like I stupidly did. Then they divorce you and take you for every penny they can in alimony. The second kind—into which your Dominique obviously falls—have a baby as soon as possible to cement their position, guaranteeing them of an even bigger settlement when they also eventually file for divorce. The child is a pawn, not the precious gift it should be. Just another little money-spinner.”

Charles wanted to weep at the death of all the joyful anticipation he’d been experiencing over having a baby with Dominique.

“That’s why I had to speak up, Charles,” Rico said with a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “Not just for you, but for that baby. No child deserves to be brought into this world as a bargaining chip.”

Charles slowly nodded his agreement, although there was a part of him which still wished Rico had stayed silent. Now he’d probably never have a child.

“Get rid of her, Charles. Dump her. Divorce her. She’ll be lucky to get a cent after the family law court sees all the evidence I’ve amassed against her.”

Rico was right in his advice. But Charles knew he wouldn’t do that just yet. Or was the word couldn’t?

His hand went to his pocket to pat the box which lay there and his heart suddenly stopped breaking apart, cemented back to survival mode by an emotion far stronger than his earlier despair. Love turned to hate was an amazingly powerful motivator.

No, he wouldn’t be getting rid of his beautiful new wife just yet. She had to pay for what this necklace had cost him, what she had cost him. His male pride demanded it. His hate insisted upon it.

Charles seethed inside when he thought of what a fool she’d made of him. A silly, blind, arrogant fool. Right from the start, she’d played him like a fiddle. Fleeing last year’s Christmas party had obviously been a ploy, as had appearing reluctant to date him at first, but her spurning his advances after she finally agreed to date him had been her coup de grâce!

He cringed when he thought of how triumphant he’d felt when she’d said yes to his proposal of marriage. But the triumph had been all hers, not his!

How she must have chuckled behind his back when he’d decided not to sleep with her till their wedding night. Her trembling as she’d come to him that night had probably been suppressed laughter. And as for the response she’d showed to his lovemaking…

Well, he’d be having the last laugh. Let’s see how good her faking ability was during the next month.

Because he was going to give himself—and her—one month. One month of vengeance.

His mouth pulled back into the travesty of a smile just thinking about some of things he planned for them. She’d probably even pretend to enjoy herself, like the mercenary manipulator she was.

“You’re not going to divorce her, are you?” Rico said with a degree of stunned surprise in his voice.

Charles abandoned the rest of his second brandy—being drunk was not on tonight’s agenda—then turned to his friend.

“No,” he said, his voice menacingly calm. “Not just yet. But don’t worry. There won’t be any baby.” Dominique wasn’t the only one who could lie, and deceive.

Rico frowned at him. “I don’t know now whether to feel sorry for you, or Dominique.”

“I wouldn’t waste your sympathy on her, if I were you.”

“You won’t do anything stupid, will you, Charles?”

“Stupid?”

“Like strangling her when you’re making love?”

Charles laughed a cold laugh. “Do you honestly think I’d go to jail because of that little tramp? Rest assured my revenge, such as it is, won’t ever take that path, or be allowed to get out of hand.” As he slid off the bar stool he clamped a hand over his friend’s shoulder, partly to support his own leaden legs and partly in a reassuring gesture. “Don’t worry about me, Rico. I’ll survive. What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? I’m—er—going to the races.”

Charles frowned. “But none of our horses are running, are they? They’re all out on spells till the spring.” Charles and Rico usually only went to the races when they had a runner.