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But her brief flirtation with dishonesty cost her dearly, because the policeman turned away from the open car door and addressed someone behind him with sardonic humour. ‘Hear that, Adam? She says you know each other well. Says that her name is Helen Sheldon. Care to give us a formal ID for the report?’
‘Sure.’ A backlit figure moved around and ducked down to look into the car, and Honor gasped as she saw his face.
‘No. That’s definitely not Helen Sheldon. I’ve never seen this woman before in my life.’
The man that she had thought was Zachary Blake followed up his icy denial with a venomous smile that twisted his mouth from snarl to sneer.
‘Calling you dumb was an understatement. Didn’t it enter your tiny mind that it might seem a trifle suspicious to claim to know me at the same time that you were busy trying to pretend that you thought I was my own brother? Or maybe you’re being very, very clever. Maybe you’re looking ahead to a defence of mental incompetence. Don’t bank on it. Even if this turns out to be the bumbling amateur farce it looks to be I’m going to make sure that the case against you is nailed down tight. As far as I’m concerned people like you are the lowest scum on earth!’
And with that Adam Blake slammed the door and stalked off, leaving Honor in the ruins of her shattered dreams.
That Neanderthal thug, that—that rough, crude, bullying pig was her delightful, passionate, poetic, ideal man? Impossible!
If anyone was laying claim to a false identity, it was Adam Blake!
CHAPTER THREE
ASSISTING the police with their enquiries while trying to retain at least a modicum of personal privacy was hard work, Honor decided wearily that evening as she made herself a solitary dinner.
Three hours! It had taken three hours in that police station to satisfy grim officialdom that she wasn’t a homicidal maniac with a lethal grudge against the Blake family!
Of course, it hadn’t helped that she had not been carrying a skerrick of personal identification, but, as she had pointed out to the slit-eyed Gibbon, handbags were notoriously difficult to juggle on the handlebars of a bicycle! And then there had been the complication of trying to explain her actions without compromising Helen. The police were quite capable of arranging for her sister to be detained at the airport if they thought Honor’s story required her corroboration. Helen would be livid if that happened.
Unfortunately, after she had down-played the whole thing by treating it as a joke, claiming that she had known all along that Adam had been writing to the wrong sister but had decided it was time to ’fess up, the DI had insisted on driving her home and viewing the physical evidence for himself.
Then, instead of just glancing at one of the letters, he had read the entire batch, an invasion of privacy that Honor had endured only because she suspected that he would be happy to produce a search warrant and go through the whole house if she said no.
‘You don’t mind if I borrow this one for a little while, do you?’ he had murmured at last, not bothering to wait for her answer as he had tucked the piece of evidence complacently into his jacket pocket. Naturally it was one of Adam’s steamier efforts and Honor had cringed on his behalf. If he became a police-station joke he would never forgive her. Not that he was likely to now, anyway.
Honor sighed as she ate the desiccated omelette she had overcooked in her distraction. At least there was one consolation. She had achieved what she had set out to do that morning. By now Adam Blake must be fully aware of who she was...and who she wasn’t.
Instead of softening the blow, she had managed to deliver him a real pile-driver!
Another consolation was awaiting her in the refrigerator: a beautifully rich chocolate cake made for her by one of the group of little old ladies among whom she circulated copies of the talking books that she recorded for the Blind Institute.
She cut herself a bigger than usual slice and retreated to her lounge to enjoy the last rays of the sun stretching into the small, north-facing room, sprawling on the carpet by the French doors and turning the stereo up as loud as was comfortable, the poignant, meditative mood of Elgar’s cello concerto perfectly suiting her frame of mind.
Halfway through the concerto her chronically bad-tempered cat, Monty, stalked into the room and availed himself of the last crumbs of cake on the plate before mercilessly clawing a comfortable position in the centre of her supine body, his wheezing, rumbling purr providing a monotonous counterpoint to Sir Edward’s masterly composition.
So loud, in fact, was the music and Monty’s vibrating bass that Honor didn’t hear the bell or the knocking on her distant front door and it was only when the French doors behind her head rattled violently that she realised she had a visitor.
She jerked upright, shrieking as Monty dug his claws through her faded shirt into her skin and hung on grimly as she scrambled to her feet. She staggered to undo the tricky door-catch, at the same time trying to brush off the hugely outraged fluffy burr adhering to her sagging clothes.
The tussle ended when the door flew open under intense pressure from without and Monty, scrabbling for purchase against Honor’s chest, sprang at the interloper’s head and rebounded off it into the relative safety of the darkness beyond.
‘What the hell—?’
Honor didn’t need to open her pained eyes to recognise her cursing visitor. He had greeted her before with that same expression, uttered in that very same, furious tone of voice.
Adam Blake. In black trousers and a black fisherman’s sweater and with a dark scowl on his tanned face he looked larger than ever, and menacingly attractive. The high, hard cheekbones and strong jaw gave him a sculpted male beauty that she had barely registered during their last hasty confrontation. He and Helen would make a striking pair, Honor realised drearily. They were two of a kind, blessed with golden good looks and a physical magnetism that was impossible to ignore.
‘I—I’m sorry.’ To her horror she realised there was a small trickle of blood oozing down his temple and she instantly forgot the stinging on her own chest. ‘It—it was only my cat...’
‘If that’s your cat I’d hate to see your dog!’ Adam swiped at the trickle with the back of a big hand and Honor winced in sympathy.
‘I don’t have a dog—’
‘With a pit-bull like that for a cat I don’t suppose you need one.’
Honor’s heart began to settle back into a more normal rhythm. ‘You startled him, that’s all. He was scared and you were standing between him and freedom.’ She automatically searched in her jeans pocket for a crumpled handkerchief which she apologetically held out to him. ‘Here, you’re still bleeding—’
He ignored the pacifying gesture, producing a handkerchief of his own, a crisp white square, beautifully ironed, with which he dabbed his temple. ‘If you’d turn that bloody noise down you might hear your doorbell!’
Honor bristled as she did so. ‘That noise happens to be Elgar,’ she said tartly, when she had quietened the stereo. ‘I thought you liked classical music.’
His eyes narrowed at the familiarity implicit in the comment. They weren’t so much brown as blond, Honor thought inconsequently, a shade or so deeper than the dark honey hair.
‘Where are they?’
‘They? There’s no one here but me,’ Honor blurted, and then wondered whether she had made a mistake in admitting she was alone to a furiously angry man. ‘Mr Blake—’
‘Mr Blake?’ His blond eyebrows raked sardonically upwards. ‘Why so formal all of a sudden? What happened to “you big oaf” and “Neanderthal”...darling?’
The snarled endearment was definitely a threat. Freshly conscious of his solidity and size, Honor swallowed, bravely standing her ground as she nervously tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear. ‘I—I suppose you’ve spoken to that detective—’
‘We had a fascinating conversation. Now where are they?’
‘W-who?’
‘Not who, what! And don’t bother running that doe-eyed-innocence routine past me; I don’t buy it. If you don’t start co-operating I’ll have you slapped behind bars so fast your head will spin!’
No need—it was spinning wildly already. Doe-eyed? No one had ever called her that before. If it hadn’t been yelled with such insulting emphasis she might have mistaken it for a compliment.
‘The police are perfectly satisfied that I had nothing to do with...to do with whatever trouble you’re in!’ Honor said stiffly, resisting the urge to shout back. She wished she knew what she was defending herself against. Exactly what she had been suspected of had never been precisely defined. All she knew was that it involved a serious threat, and that there would be dire consequences for herself if she so much as breathed a word of the case to anyone until cleared to do so by the police.
‘It’s not I that’s in the most trouble right now,’ he grated. ‘If you don’t produce those letters in the next five minutes I’ll tear this place apart myself.’
‘The letters?’ Honor almost wilted in relief. ‘What do you want them for?’
‘What do you think?’
He took a step towards her and Honor put a defensive hand against the front of her shirt and was disconcerted to feel bare skin. She looked down. To her horror Monty’s hind legs had done a very good job of dragging most of her buttons out of their worn buttonholes. Her faded shirt had parted over her breasts, revealing a similarly shabby bra, one she had hung on to long past its prime because it was so comfortable.
She gasped, and hastily began rebuttoning, freezing as Adam suddenly reached forward and pulled one side of her shirt out of her hand. While she stood, stiff with shock, he lifted his other hand and ran blunt square fingers over the tender flesh swelling above the frayed lace. A sharp sting made her wince as his thumb dragged in the wake of his fingers.
‘It seems your pet is fairly indiscriminate in his victims—you’re bleeding as much as I am. You ought to get something on those scratches straight away; the skin on your breasts is a lot more delicate and susceptible to damage than the skin on exposed parts of the body.’
His lack of embarrassment only made Honor’s more acute as his hand slowly withdrew, leaving behind a tingling awareness of his touch.
Bewildered by such consideration in the midst of his raging fury, and guilty that she had suspected him, even for a moment, of carnal motives, Honor’s eyes flicked to the vivid, red-beaded line down the side of his face.
‘I-I have some antiseptic ointment in the bathroom if you want some...’ she offered, clutching the front of her shirt and nervously backing away.
Something feral gleamed deep in the golden eyes. ‘Good idea. Why don’t you go and get it and we can tend to each other’s wounds?’
Have him touch her breasts again with that strange, gentle insistence? Honor could feel her face heat up as she turned and fled for the bathroom. After all the trouble she had gone to to dress up nicely for him earlier, he had to walk in on her when she was clad in scruffy jeans and a shirt she had picked up in a jumble sale!
Only two of the four scratches she had sustained were seeping blood but Honor cleaned and applied the cream to all of them. She didn’t want to give Adam the excuse of demanding an inspection, and the ruthless satisfaction on his face when she had begun to blush had told her that he had instantly perceived her physical awareness of his masculinity as a weakness that could be exploited to his advantage.
Remember the letters, she told herself severely as she tucked her shirt firmly back into her jeans. Adam Blake is not really the snarling, aggressive, insulting bully he appears to be. He is a warm, charming, sensitive man who just happens to be justifiably confused at the moment. Grabbing the tube of ointment, she kept repeating the incantation as she went back to face him.
The warm, charming and sensitive man was sitting behind her desk rifling through the drawers. His concern had been merely a ploy to get her out of the room, she realised with an acute sense of betrayal.
‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’
He ignored her, bending in the chair to pull out another drawer, and tip out its contents on the floor. Realising that she had no hope of physically stopping him, Honor tried to use sweet reason.
‘Mr—Adam, if you want those letters back I’ll be happy to give them to you. I know you’re angry but truly, I had no idea that you thought you were writing to my sister—how could I? You wrote to this address and I’m the only H. Sheldon who lives here. I didn’t even know that you and Helen had met—I thought you just must have seen me at the ball and...and...’
His head lifted, his eyes chilly with contemptuous disbelief. ‘Found you so instantly and devastatingly attractive that I couldn’t forget you?’ Honor blushed painfully as her foolish fantasies were stripped to their unlikely origins. ‘Yes, I can see how often that must happen to you.’ His sarcasm was as glacial as his stare.
‘Perhaps that’s how you get your kicks—by enticing strange men to write to you under false pretences. Do you advertise in the personal columns, too, and send your gullible prospects a photograph of your beautiful sister to stimulate their interest? Are you so jealous of her that in some sick and twisted way you try to be her—?’
‘I’m perfectly happy being myself! You seem to be forgetting that you’re the one who made the approach to me,’ Honor flung at him, mortified by his interpretation of her character. ‘All I did was innocently answer a card that I received—’
‘You have an interesting interpretation of innocence,’ Adam rapped out. ‘The police tell a different version...the one about how you thought it was great fun to lead me on until you decided I was becoming too persistent, an embarrassing annoyance, and thought it was time to front up and deliver the punch line in person.’
Oh, damn! She knew that somehow her lies would return to haunt her.
‘I only said that because I was trying to keep Helen out of it. I didn’t want the police involving her in any awkward publicity—’ she protested.
‘But she is involved, isn’t she, right up to her beautiful neck?’ he cut in savagely. Honor could practically see his wounded male pride throbbing. ‘I suppose she was in on the joke, too?’
‘There wasn’t any joke.’ Honor stared him straight in the eye, willing him to believe her. ‘I didn’t realise what had been going on myself until I was reading one of your letters this morning and...well, of course I showed them to Helen straight away and she told me about what you did for her at the ball, and then I knew...’
‘You showed her?’ Adam’s voice rose sharply in conjunction with his powerful body as he came sweeping to his feet. ‘Helen’s here?’
The flare of anticipation that glowed momentarily in his eyes said it all. The beauteous Helen would be forgiven her transgressions whereas her plain, unprepossessing sister would not. Honor felt a little kick of malicious temper. If he could be insensitive so could she.
‘Not now, no. She was staying with me for a few days, but she flew to Sydney this afternoon. When I told her about the mix-up she wasn’t really interested. She doesn’t answer fan letters, you see, so she probably would never have written to you even if you had sent your letters to the right address in New York.’
Instead of flinching Adam fixed her with a drilling look. ‘Something else you lied to the detective inspector about? You told him your sister was in New York—’
‘I didn’t lie, I said she lives in New York, not that she was there right at this moment—’
‘A lie by implication is no less a lie,’ said Adam grimly. ‘You seem to make a habit of taking advantage of other people’s mistakes, don’t you, Honor? Quite the little opportunist, in fact. I wonder what else you’re hiding...?’
With that he sat back down and continued his search, his careless violation of her tidy drawers a deliberate goad to which Honor instinctively responded. She marched around the desk and pulled open the bottom drawer. She took out the stack of letters that the detective had put back in meticulous order and dumped them in front of him.
‘There! Satisfied?’
He was shuffling impatiently through them. ‘Not nearly. I don’t care about these. Where are the others?’
‘What others?’
‘You know very well. The ones I didn’t send.’
Honor stared at his gritty profile, wondering whether the blow from Monty’s claws could have caused a mild concussion in so hard a head. Now she looked more closely she could see the fine tension lines radiating out around his mouth and eyes, signs of powerful emotions kept in rigid check. He looked like a man at the very edge of his control. What anger he had released so far was merely the tip of the iceberg.
‘They’re all there,’ she said warily, feeling like a passenger on the Titanic. ‘Except for the one that the detective took with him, of course...’
‘And you can thank God that he handed it back to me instead of filing it as evidence,’ he growled, and suddenly she thought she understood. He wanted reassurance that she hadn’t showed the most revealing letters to anyone else.
‘Look—’ She reached for the envelopes and yelped as her hand was slapped down on to the desk under a savage paw. ‘I was only going to show you,’ she said reproachfully. ‘If you’re talking about the last few letters they’re right here, at the back. See?’ She showed him with her free hand.
‘Matching envelopes,’ he said cryptically as he checked the contents. ‘Hide them in plain sight. Clever.’
The press of his encompassing palm loosened over hers but just as she slid her flattened fingers gratefully free he curled his hand around her wrist and jerked her closer. Sitting down he was still almost as tall as she was standing. His voice was silky with cold menace. ‘Now, be a good girl and show where you’ve hidden the others. If you give them to me we’ll call it quits—after you’ve answered one or two pressing questions...’
She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about; there are no others.’ She strained away from him while trying not to let the extent of her panic show. Maybe Adam Blake had a split personality; maybe his letters had been dictated by a separate persona that he wasn’t consciously aware existed.
‘If that’s the way you want to play it.’ The smile he gave her sent a chill up her spine. It was almost as if he relished her resistance.
‘I’m not playing.’ But he was...playing her straining body like a fish on a line, reeling her slowly in between his splayed knees with a gradually increasing pressure of her captured wrist.
‘However many letters you might have posted, those are all that arrived here,’ she told him, her normally rich, warm voice reedy with rising hysteria. How did you reason with a madman? ‘Why don’t you let me go and we can have a drink and talk about this sensibly?’ Maybe alcohol was a bad idea. It might feed his paranoia. ‘Or a cup of tea. That scratch is probably throbbing by now. Why don’t you let me clean it for you and—? Oh!’ With a slight flick of his wrist he brought her down on her knees, his thighs levering shut on either side of her torso. She gasped at the ruthless compression of her ribs, her hands pushing helplessly against the thick muscles bunching under the dark trousers.
He watched her twist and struggle in silence for a moment or two and then he leaned forward and cupped her pale face in his big hands with a tenderness that terrified her far more than his anger.
‘Forget the tea and sympathy—I want something much more valuable. Would you like me to hurt you, Honor?’ His thumbs stroked behind her ears, his fingers threading up under her hair, cradling her skull, making her aware of its mortal fragility.
‘Is that the only way I can make you tell the truth? The things about yourself you told me in your letters—I don’t suppose all of them were lies. I remember you telling me once that you have a low pain threshold...’ The slightly calloused edge of the outside of his palm lifted her jaw, stretching her soft throat uncomfortably taut. ‘Shall we test the veracity of that statement first...?’
‘Adam, please—’
His thumbs shifted to press across her trembling mouth. ‘Don’t beg yet, I haven’t started.’ His fingers massaged her scalp gently and suddenly black dots were dancing in front of Honor’s eyes that had nothing to do with pain. After a shattering day this emotional overload was just too much.
‘You’re being totally unreasonable,’ she whispered.
‘And you don’t think I have a right to be? I don’t give in to blackmail. Not ever. I don’t know how you got hold of those damned letters but if you thought you could use them against me you made a bad mistake—’
‘But you know how I got them...you sent them to me!’ The black dots had become red and Honor could hear the blood pounding in her ears. If he leaned any closer he would be kissing her. Or, more likely, biting...
‘Did you think you’d get money for them? From me? Or are you more ambitious? Did you think you could use them to advance your journalistic career by flogging them off to the highest bidder? Maybe it was just malice. You wanted to make me pay for the sin of having wanted your sister instead of you. There are plenty of motives to choose from, aren’t there?’
His breath was hot against her face. ‘I—I’m not that kind of reporter,’ she said weakly.
‘You admitted you work for a newspaper.’
