Phantom Lover

Phantom Lover

Susan Napier

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

‘WELL, am I under arrest?’

Honor stared across the battered wooden table at the irritatingly fresh-faced female police constable. Old age must really be creeping up on her if policemen and women had started to look like schoolchildren. Suddenly she felt every one of her creaking twenty-five years!

‘Not yet. Right now you’re simply helping us with our enquiries,’ the constable said, with a complacency Honor found equally irritating.

‘So this is entirely voluntary, right? If I want to I can walk out of here without answering any of your questions,’ she said, to emphasise that she wasn’t prepared to be pushed around any longer.

Her wits were starting to return at last and she bitterly regretted having allowed herself to be bundled into the police car in the first place. But she had been so confused, so utterly mortified that she hadn’t cared how she retreated from the scene of her embarrassment, as long as it was at high speed! The police had been extremely efficient in that respect at least, but now they were being stupidly stubborn about letting her go.

‘You could do that,’ said the older, non-uniformed man leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the tiny interview-room. ‘But that would mean that we would have to make a decision as to whether to let you go or charge you. And I can tell you that on the evidence so far I would have to come down on the side of an immediate arrest. In that case you’d be held in custody until tomorrow’s court sitting. Your lawyer could then apply for bail but we would naturally oppose and you could well find yourself a guest of the government until your trial. Given the backlog in the Auckland Courts, that could be months...’

Honor blanched. With the currently uneven state of her finances the idea of involving lawyers was far more of a disincentive than summary incarceration. At least one didn’t have to pay to be in prison!

She had forgotten the plain-clothes man’s name but he had introduced himself as a detective inspector from Auckland Central and she supposed that she should be grateful that he had hauled her off to a nearby police station rather than taken her straight back to the city. If only Harry, the local constable, had been involved she might have been able to laugh it all off, but this was evidently a city-based operation that had spilled out into the rural fringes of Auckland, and explaining herself to strangers was a great deal more difficult.

She sighed, and glumly eyed the senior officer. At least he looked on the wrong side of thirty, with enough experience of human life to have a bit of sympathy for people caught up in awkward situations of none of their own making...well, almost none.

He was watching her now, with shrewd eyes that were neither overtly accusing nor condemning, merely shrewdly assessive. Not at all like the glassy-eyed suspicion that was being directed at her by the ambitious WPC.

‘Now, Miss Sheldon, why don’t you tell us why you were skulking about Mr Blake’s house?’

Trust that young whippersnapper to choose the most offensive way to put her question. Or should that be whippersnapperette? Good grief, now she was even thinking like an old woman!

‘I wasn’t skulking,’ Honor told her firmly. ‘I have never skulked in my entire life.’

‘Then what were you doing lurking on his property?’

‘I was not lurking—’

‘I think we’ve established that Miss Sheldon was on the property, Gibbons,’ the DI interrupted, and for a moment Honor could have sworn she saw a glimmer of humour in the cold grey eyes.

Gibbons. What a good name for her, Honor thought with malicious satisfaction, squinting to deliberately obscure the other woman’s attractive features. Yes, with her shaggy, reddish-brown hair and long arms she might just pass for a female gibbon in the murk of the jungle. Or was that orangutan? Or baboon? All three summoned suitably derogatory images that boosted Honor’s bruised confidence. Being somewhat short and generously rounded, stricken with freckles and thick wavy hair of nondescript brown that refused to obey any cut or style, no matter how professional, Honor had long ago given up worrying needlessly about her appearance, but under that supercilious uniformed stare she was beginning to feel like a total degenerate. In fact, she could feel definite latent criminal tendencies beginning to surface. A desire to indulge in a little police baiting...

‘Miss Sheldon?’

‘What?’ As usual in moments of crisis, Honor’s thoughts had wandered disastrously from the point.

‘Now we need to establish exactly why you were visiting the Blake residence in such a...shall we say, unconventional fashion?’ This time the grey eyes were definitely affable—suspiciously so.

‘I don’t see what’s unconventional about a bicycle,’ Honor countered defensively, suddenly wondering if she was victim of a good-cop, bad-cop interrogation technique that was supposed to lull her into a false sense of security.

‘You hid it in some bushes,’ the young baboon pointed out as if it countenanced a crime in itself.

Honor frowned. She wasn’t going to tell this snotty kid that she had been ashamed of her battered bike of dubious vintage and even more dubious brake-power.

When she had set out from home she had been expecting her destination to be the usual friendly homestead common to most New Zealand rural properties, albeit an up-market one commensurate with the size and diversity of Blake Investments. Instead she had been presented with a view of an intimidatingly pretentious mansion at the bottom of a steeply sloping, thickly gravelled driveway that sent cold chills up her spine. She had had nightmare visions of herself not being able to stop, ploughing straight on through the majestic front door, muddy tyres mowing down the butler and scattering screaming maids in all directions. Oh, yes, that would make a grand first—and last—impression on the man she had come to see!

‘I didn’t want it to get stolen,’ she temporised on a half-truth, unable to resist adding, ‘Of course, I didn’t know at the time that there were hordes of police already lurking and skulking around the property.’

The constable reddened, while the DI coughed, his hand briefly covering his mouth. Having abandoned his laid-back lean on the wall, he sat down on the other spare chair and put his big hands flat on the table.

‘Let’s cut all the clever word-play and get down to brass tacks, shall we? All we want to know, Miss Sheldon, is why you were visiting Mr Blake on this particular day, claiming an acquaintance that he himself emphatically denies. And why you previously tried to threaten him over the telephone. It was you, wasn’t it, trying to contact him on the telephone at eight thirty-five a.m. this morning? You have a clear and beautifully distinctive voice that is very easily identifiable.’

Honor bristled, ignoring the compliment. Was that what this fuss was all about—her abortive phone call? ‘I didn’t try to threaten him. Is that what they said? I wasn’t even allowed to speak to him!’

‘I know. You spoke to me.’ His cool admission scotched that particular theory. If he had been already there to pick up the phone then it wasn’t her call that had prompted police action.

‘Has somebody been kidnapped?’ she asked, all sorts of awful possibilities suddenly occurring to her.

Her question was quietly ignored. ‘You refused to tell me what your call was about, except that you had written Adam Blake some letters and that you wanted to talk to him about them.’

‘It was personal,’ she said stubbornly, feeling herself begin to blush as she remembered the rather garbled conversation she had engaged in before quickly hanging up, obviously thwarting the trace on the call that the stonewalling she had received had been designed to permit.

She had hoped to be able to avoid the risk of humiliation in person but, her phone call having failed so miserably, she had been left with no honourable choice but to cycle the fifteen kilometres from her home at Kowhai Hill to the address of the Blake homestead. If her car hadn’t been held hostage for the past week by the local mechanic who was waiting for a vital spare part she might have driven and thereby perhaps avoiding any necessity to skulk.

‘So you’ve already said. But I think that your very presence here establishes the fact that whatever it is is no longer a purely personal matter,’ it was pointed out with inescapable logic.

‘I don’t see why I should be treated like a criminal just because I went visiting uninvited,’ Honor said sullenly. They would probably laugh themselves sick when she told them. Either that or charge her with wasting valuable police time.

‘Extortion is a crime,’ the constable intoned sternly.

‘Extortion!’ Honor’s beautifully distinctive voice creaked like an old rusty gate, her green eyes widening in horror.

‘Extortion,’ confirmed the DI heavily. ‘Or blackmail, if you want to put it in its more common emotive term.’

Blackmail?

Oh, hell!

Suddenly what had been merely an embarrassing misunderstanding took on hideously serious complications.

Honor’s truculent resistance crumbled. She squeezed her eyes tight shut to combat the sinking realisation that she really wasn’t going to escape without giving a very thorough account of her actions to the police.

And all because of that damned Shakespearean sonnet she had mooned over this morning!

CHAPTER TWO

DARLING,

Is it thy will thy image should keep open

My heavy eyelids to the weary night?

Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,

While shadows, like to thee, do mock my sight?

The idea that her ordinary self could engender such wild longings in a man that he couldn’t sleep at night was so bizarre that Honor’s green eyes glowed with amused delight.

She picked up the cup of tea that she had just brewed for herself when she had heard the postman’s whistle, and carried her precious letter over to the comfortable chair behind the untidy desk that served to designate part of the lounge of her small cottage as an office. She settled down in her familiar sprawl, a jean-clad leg slung over one padded chair arm, and scanned the rest of the Shakespearean sonnet, down to the last, jealous couplet:

For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,

From me far off, with others all-too-near.

She couldn’t help smiling. Others? There were certainly no ‘others’ in the sense that the sonnet suggested. The small community of Kowhai Hill, tucked in below the Waitakare Ranges just north-west of Auckland, wasn’t exactly bulging with eligible males, and those she did come into contact with generally knew her too well to suffer any sleeplessness on her account. For one thing she was distressingly plain. For another, her reputation was as spotless as her name.

‘Good old Honor’ was a mate, someone with whom a local lad could be seen having a drink at the pub without being accused of unfaithfulness by his girlfriend or wife, a woman whose social life consisted largely of group outings or happily ‘making up the numbers’ at dinner parties where she could be relied upon to fit in, regardless of the age or diversity of the company.

Except to Adam. To Adam she was someone quite different: a woman enticing in her mystery, challenging in her intellect, desirable in her elusiveness.

Honor’s smile had disappeared by the time she reached the bottom of the page, its place taken by a vivid blush. Adam’s prose might not have the unique beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry, but it was none the less powerful stuff, a passionate outburst of feeling that was lyrical in its erotic intensity.

Although she had never met him in person, in eight months of correspondence Honor had formed a mental picture of a warm, witty and literate man whose love of writing cloaked a personal shyness that made him quite content to pursue their acquaintance entirely through correspondence.

Their letters had been a lively exchange of ideas about books, places, philosophies and world events rather than mundane personal details. Although she had learned that he was thirty-five, owned his own development company and lived on Auckland’s North Shore, that was about the extent of her knowledge of his physical existence outside his letters.

But with the last six letters, her cosy conclusions about him had been exploded. Not only had they arrived weekly instead of at the usual monthly intervals, they were so joltingly different in emotional tenor that Honor would have thought they were penned by someone else if she hadn’t recognised Adam’s distinctive handwriting.

At first Honor had not known how to reply. What did you say to a man who suddenly told you that you were the only thing that gave his life hope and meaning and that your letters were his lifeline? When he begged you to believe that he had fallen wildly in love for the first time in his life? That although he had never had you, except in his illicit imagination, he missed you savagely in his heart, his arms, his bed...?

She had been amused. And enchanted. Apprehensive and intrigued. And...yes, in spite of herself, seduced...

So, after the second letter, she had gathered her own courage and replied according to the dictates of her wayward heart rather than her sceptical head. Amazingly the words had flowed out of her pen as if they had been in there all along, awaiting the perfect moment to escape the repression of her earnest common sense. No one ever fell in love through the post, for goodness’ sake! She didn’t even know what he looked like!

‘All my love, Adam’.

She sighed as she reached the end of the second, sizzling page. Unlike his other letters, which often ran to nine or ten pages, these passionate outpourings were invariably as short as they were hot and sweet.

She began to fold the delicate, onion-skin sheets along the sharp crease-lines only to discover that there was a third sheet, stuck to the second by some of the ink which had run along the edges.

Carefully she peeled it free and froze as a name leapt out at her from the few hastily scrawled lines.

I know we’re not supposed to meet but if I don’t get to see your beautiful face soon, my darling, courageous Helen...touch the soft spun gold of your hair...make love to your lush mouth and delicate body the way I’ve dreamed of these last months I’ll go mad! Please come to me... Don’t put me through the agony of having to wait any longer. I need you...

Helen?

Helen!

Honor bolted upright in her chair.

Beautiful face?

Spun gold hair!

She swivelled her head to stare at her reflection in the blank grey computer screen which sat on her desk. By no stretch of the imagination could the unruly brown curls that tumbled around her shoulders be described as spun gold. Or the oval face sprinkled with freckles and rendered stern by the thick straight brows be considered beautiful. Her nose, rather pink from the spring cold that she was just shaking off, was the only thing about her that was glowing. And no one in his or her right mind would call her sturdy figure ‘delicate’...

Her confusion turned to dawning horror.

Frantically she tugged open the stubborn bottom drawer of her desk and sorted through the sheaf of letters, carefully filed by date. Most of the envelopes were typed, addressed to Miss H. Sheldon at Rural Delivery, Kowhai Hill.

Her hands shaking, Honor opened some at random, scanning the opening lines.

The later, passionate letters were headed ‘Darling’, the rest were teasing salutes to ‘M’Lady’, a reference to the whimsical valentine card addressed to ‘My Lady of the Moonlight’ that had arrived by special delivery the day after the St Valentine’s Ball in nearby Evansdale, which Honor had helped organise for a children’s charity. She had been one of the hostesses and had introduced and been introduced to so many new people that night that all their names and faces had intermingled in her hazy recollection. She couldn’t remember an Adam at all but there was no doubt from the handwritten rhyme inside his card, referring to roses and moonlight and ladies in distress, that he had known exactly who she was.

After all she had been pretty distressed that night, desperately fighting off the summer flu that she had later succumbed to, wandering the small memorial gardens in the moonlight while the dancing went on inside the adjacent community hall, trying to rid herself of a murderous headache that had refused to respond to the pills she had swallowed.

She had finally dozed off on a cramped park bench, waking an hour or so later to find herself tucked under a light rug in the back seat of her car, a sheaf of deep red roses lying on the seat beside her—obviously illegally picked in the gardens. Since there had been any number of hefty farming friends at the ball who could have performed the kindly deed she hadn’t thought twice about it until she had received the stranger’s valentine the next day. Then she had been curious, and yielded to the temptation of the implicit and very untraditional invitation of a post-office box number on the flap of the envelope.

She pulled out more letters until she had gone through them all and then began stuffing them haphazardly back into their envelopes, trying to control her rising panic at the awful realisation:

Not once in all their correspondence had he actually addressed her as ‘Honor’! And her own trademark signature—a large, dramatic H with the other letters of her name an illiterate scrawl that she had fondly imagined was dashingly sophisticated—that too could have easily been misread.

‘Honor?’

Her head snapped up. A yawning figure appeared in the doorway, her delicate, willowy figure clothed in the merest excuse for a nightgown, her long blonde hair spilling in disarray across her slender shoulders.

Honor’s heart sank into her practical shoes at the sight of her guest. She could hear fate laughing like a drain in her ear.

‘You’re up early, Helen. It’s only eleven o’clock.’

Her sarcasm went completely over her beautiful sister’s head. ‘Is it? I’d better get a move on, then. My flight leaves at three and Trina is taking me to lunch at the Regent before she zips me out to the airport.’

Her sister got lunches with her New Zealand agent at the best hotel in town and a lift to the airport in a limo, Honor ate cheese sandwiches in her kitchen and drove an ageing Volkswagen. And God forbid that she offer to farewell her sister at the airport. Helen hated to feel ‘emotionally pressured’, dismissing Honor’s ready sensitivity as ‘mawkishness’. That about summed up the differences in their lifestyles—and their personalities, Honor thought ruefully.

Honor had spent her teenage years watching with a mixture of awe and pity as her older sister clawed her way up through the fiercely competitive ranks of struggling models to achieve world-class status. She sincerely admired Helen for enduring the stresses and brutal rigours of maintaining herself at a constant peak of physical perfection from the age of sixteen, when she had won her first beauty competition, to her current graceful approach to thirty. But envy had no part in that admiration. Having seen the knife-edge of uncertainty on which Helen’s ego was constantly balanced, Honor had pitied her with the complacency of someone who knew how much of an illusion effortless beauty was, how false the glamour of her world really was.

She looked down at the letter clenched in her hand. No, she hadn’t envied her sister at all.

Until now.

‘Helen...’ Her voice trailed off. Did she really want to know? She gritted her teeth. She had no choice. He was talking about meeting her, for goodness’ sake!

‘What?’ Helen yawned again, stretching the tall, lithe body, sculpted taut by diligent daily aerobics and rigid dieting. Helen might eat at the best hotels, but she only ever tasted their salads!

‘Remember last time you stayed with me—you know when we had the Valentine’s Day Ball?’ Honor had been so busy helping to organise what was touted as being the rural social event of the year that she had forgotten to arrange a partner for herself and by then all her male ‘mates’ were spoken for. When Helen had arrived for an unexpected few days’ visit it had seemed a great idea for her sister to use the extra ticket. Who better to help create the necessary glitter for the event than a top international model?

‘Mmm.’ Helen sounded faintly wary, probably worried that Honor was going to request another charity appearance.

‘Do you remember meeting anyone called Adam?’ Honor held her breath, although she knew it was a forlorn hope. As soon as she had seen that wretched ‘Helen’ she had known...

‘Adam?’ Her sister’s vivid green eyes narrowed in thought, accentuating their perfect almond shape.

‘Adam Blake.’

‘Adam...Adam. No, I don’t think so.’ Helen shrugged cheerfully. ‘You know what I’m like with names, darling.’

Honor did know. Unless people had the potential to be useful to her career Helen tended to operate on the principle out of sight, out of mind.

‘Are you sure? Do moonlight and roses and ladies in distress ring any bells?’ she persisted doggedly.

To her shock her sophisticated sister pinkened. Honor had never seen her blush before and now she knew why. That creamy pale, unmade-up skin flushed unevenly, in blotchy patches.

‘Helen?’ Her voice was sharper than she had intended. ‘You do know who I’m talking about, don’t you?’

‘Not really. God, I’m dying for a coffee.’

‘What does “not really” mean?’ Honor scrambled up to follow her sister out into the tiny kitchen, watching with a jaundiced eye as Helen began puttering about on the bench-top. The only time her sister came even close to looking ungraceful was when she pretended to be domestic.

‘It means that maybe I do and maybe I don’t. I never asked who he was, although come to think of it he might have said that his name was Adam...’

‘Who said?’

‘Just someone who helped me out that night. I got into an awkward situation and he happened along at the right time, that’s all.’

That’s all? Honor wasn’t fooled by her sister’s casualness.

It took another half-hour and two cups of bitter black coffee to extract the story from her sister, and it was every bit as painful as Honor had known it would be.

Some time just after midnight, Helen had got into an undignified tussle with an overheated and over-inebriated admirer whom her customary haughtiness had failed to freeze off. When she had ducked out of the hall to escape his attentions he had followed, leaping amorously upon her in the rose-garden, tearing the bodice of her dress just in time for some amateur celebrity-hunter with a camera to get a couple of supremely compromising shots.

Helen’s unnamed gallant had not only appeared out of the darkness to haul the man off and send him smartly on his drunken way, but had driven her back to the cottage in her ruined dress and left her with the promise that he would make sure the photographs never saw the public light of day.