Phantom Lover

‘I never said anything because I just wanted to forget the whole embarrassing incident,’ said Helen sharply, forestalling Honor’s obvious question. ‘My dress was an Ungaro, you know. The shoulder-strap was practically torn away and though I got a dressmaker to repair it it was never quite the same. I was nearly in tears, I was so furious. I hardly spoke to your Adam, if that’s who it was, except to give him directions to this place. I only went to that damned ball because of you, you know, and what did you do but go off and leave me to the mercy of some drunken moron!’

‘I didn’t abandon you—it was more like the other way around. I couldn’t get close with all your admirers clustering around,’ said Honor, stung by the unfairness of the accusation. ‘Besides, you told me to keep my distance from you, remember, because I wasn’t feeling very well and you had that Australian swimsuit shoot in a few days and didn’t want to get my germs. In fact my infectiousness was the supposed reason for your suddenly rushing off to Sydney the next morning.’

‘Yes, well, I wasn’t going to hang around and wait for some sleazy tabloid to pick up on the story and ring me for a comment. Can you imagine the headline—TOP MODEL IN TOPLESS ROMP?’ She shuddered. ‘My publicist would have fits. Not to mention Mother.’ Honor was unsurprised to note that her concern for their ambitious mother, who had been the driving force behind Helen’s career and was still her manager, took second place to her fear of adverse publicity. Helen was always acutely conscious of her image, to the point of paranoia.

‘He got a shot of you topless?’ Her throaty voice squeaked with horror. She knew that her sister always turned down nude work—‘preserving her mystique’, she called it. Even swimsuit offers were accepted only when their prestige was exceptional.

‘Well, it wasn’t quite that bad,’ Helen conceded grudgingly. ‘But I was being considered for that new aerobics clothing line at the time and they wanted someone with a squeaky-clean image. I couldn’t afford to risk even a mild scandal. Why all the interest now? Don’t tell me this Adam is looking for me after all this time?’

No, but only because he already thought he had found her!

And because Honor always tried to live up to her name she had shown Helen her precious letters...all except the last few passionate epistles which she couldn’t quite bring herself to share. It would be too much like a betrayal.

Her sister’s reaction was quite predictable. She had given one or two a cursory read-through and collapsed in hilarity.

‘He thinks you’re me? What a hoot! He’s in for a shock, isn’t he?’ she giggled with an adolescent glee that Honor darkly thought ill befitted a woman who was almost thirty. ‘Especially since his last sight of you was when you were snoring like a jet-engine!’

‘Snoring?’ Honor’s puzzlement was shadowed by the gloomy presentiment of further humiliation.

‘Drooling, too, as I recall,’ Helen added with sisterly cruelty. ‘I couldn’t go back into the hall with my dress practically in shreds so we cut through the gardens to get to his car and there were you, parked on a bench like a homeless tramp. Since you’d said you were going to stay until the last gasp no matter how rotten you were feeling, I told what’s-his-name to carry you to your car so that you wouldn’t get double pneumonia or something if you didn’t wake up for a while. I thought if I told him you were my sister he’d make a fuss and insist on you coming with me so I did us both a favour and told him you were a distant relative with an extremely jealous husband. I even left you the stolen roses that drunk tried to foist on me in order to keep my hands busy while he tried to have his sweaty way...’

‘Thanks a million,’ grumbled Honor, cringing at the unflattering picture she must have presented. She should never have taken those pain-killers on top of several glasses of champagne.

‘What—what was he like? What did he say?’

In her mind she had pictured the man who wrote to her as being quiet and reassuringly ordinary-looking, with kind eyes and a ready smile. Socially unsophisticated. The kind of man who would be more interested in a woman’s mind than her appearance. The kind who preferred warmth and humour to the cold perfection of glamour.

Helen was maddeningly vague. ‘I can’t remember. He was thin and dark...I think. He made the usual protective male noises but I didn’t really listen. He must have been pretty strong, the way he carried you, but he drove some awful station wagon or something. Not my type at all!’ It was typical of Helen to judge the man by his car. At Honor’s sound of annoyance she said impatiently, ‘Well, what do you expect me to say? He wasn’t Superman. There was nothing memorable about him—not that I wanted to remember anything about the whole wretched business anyway. I’m swamped in gorgeous men every day of my working life, darling, why should I remember some unimportant stranger I met ages ago?’

Honor looked at the valentine—slightly dog-eared from months of affectionate handling—that had started it all, and sternly made herself face facts.

‘He couldn’t possibly have meant to write to me—not after having met you,’ she sighed, far too aware of her sister’s devastating tunnel-vision effect on men to have any illusions about how she rated in comparison.

‘What does it matter who he meant to write to? It was you he ended up corresponding with,’ Helen pointed out kindly, spoiling it by adding, ‘If you ask me, he’s got to be pretty arrogant in the first place if he thinks a woman like me would be interested in some country hick...’

‘He doesn’t live in the country, he lives in Auckland,’ Honor automatically defended.

‘Small-town hick, then,’ said Helen, ignoring the fact that Auckland was New Zealand’s largest city. She was very proud of the fact that she had outgrown her home country, whereas Honor had very proudly grown back into it after several years’ enforced stay in the canyons of New York city.

‘Anyway, it was a gross piece of assumption on his part that I’d be interested. I don’t know what you’re worrying about. If he dumps you what have you lost? Only another penfriend, for goodness’ sake. You used to have stacks of them when you were twelve—I should have thought you’d have grown out of that sort of teenage stuff by now. Doesn’t say much for your social life, does it? I told you burying yourself in this place would stunt your growth. I suppose, as usual, you let your imagination run away with you and built it into some grand romance in your mind.’

By now Helen was into full, condescending stride. She had never understood Honor’s fascination with the written word, had pitied her for wasting her time reading about life instead of following her big sister’s example and going out and actually living it.

‘They’re just letters, Honor, it’s not as if he ever actually bothered to make the effort of meeting me—you—face to face,’ she continued bracingly. ‘And stop looking so guilty. The whole thing was his mistake in the first place for assuming that there was only one Miss Sheldon. Imagine thinking I’d enjoy writing letters to someone I don’t even know!’ She shuddered delicately. ‘If I tried to answer every fan letter I get I’d never have time to do anything else. You know what I’m like—I don’t even answer yours...’

Honor gave up trying to explain. Helen would never understand in a million years what those letters had meant to her. How much joy they had brought her, how deeply committed she had felt as she had progressively revealed more and more of her thoughts and feelings to a man she’d never met.

And what about those most recent letters she had sent? Honor went cold with horror at the thought of what she had ardently revealed. Talk about drooling! Oh, God, what a mess...!

She knew she couldn’t just hang around waiting for the axe to fall. She couldn’t stand the agony. And the thought of putting it all into writing was abhorrent. She couldn’t present him such a shock in a letter, in cold black and white, with no opportunity for her to test his mood first for the best way to explain. Whatever the embarrassment to herself, she owed it to them both to talk to him in person. But how? If she wrote asking for a meeting without telling him why, he would still get an awful shock on seeing her. It would be far better if she could talk to him first on the phone—soften him up for the disappointment...

There lay the rub. Adam didn’t usually bother to head his letters with any address and the recent letters hadn’t even been dated. All she had to go on was the North Shore box number he had originally given her.

While Helen was upstairs packing the vast number of clothes she had brought for her few days’ visit, Honor leafed through the telephone book with sweaty palms although she already knew what she would find: curiosity had tempted her to peep once before. There was no A. Blake in either the personal or business listings with an address on the North Shore.

This time, desperation led her to run through all the very numerous Auckland Blakes and at the very bottom of the alphabetical listings something jumped out at her.

Z. Blake, Arrow House, Blake Rd, Evansdale.

Honor blinked. Coincidence? A vague memory stirred and her thick brows drew together in an effort to bring it into focus. Hadn’t she read in the local paper a few years ago about a local hero, Zachary Blake, who had made a fortune diversifying his family’s citrus fruit orchard into production of avocados, kiwi fruit, nashi and other exotic and expensive fruits aimed at the overseas restaurant market? He had been one of the first ‘Kiwi fruit millionaires’ in the boom days before farmers all over the country started jumping on the exotic fruit bandwagon and he had used his wealth to diversify even further, into food processing and other related industries.

Might Adam be a relation of the Zachary Blakes? He had never mentioned having relatives who lived in her vicinity, but then she had never mentioned having a sister. Their letters had been for and about each other, a deliciously selfish and possessive indulgence that no one else was permitted to share.

But if Adam was a relative, even only a distant once, that might explain his presence at the Valentine Ball, since people in the area had been encouraged to sell tickets among their wider circle of families and friends. Perhaps the Evansdale Blakes could tell her how to get in touch with Adam. It was worth a try.

Never one to procrastinate, Honor made a furtive phone call to the number in the book, nervously aware that if Helen walked in and realised what she was doing she would probably earn herself another patronising sisterly lecture.

The discovery that Adam was not only known to the Evansdale Blakes but was actually in current residence with them shocked her into stammering confusion, especially when it became evident that unless she stated a very explicit purpose for her call she was not going to be put through to him. The sheer unexpectedness of it all caused her to hang up in a panic and only afterwards did she think it strange that the man had never bothered to ask her for her name and yet had seemed fixated on demanding to know what she wanted from Adam. The thought of having to ring back and humiliate herself by relating the ghastly mix-up to an unknown and obviously unsympathetic third party made up her mind. The direct approach was the only option left.

As soon as Helen wafted out the door in a cloud of L’Air du Temps, trilling farewells, Honor grimly wheeled her bicycle out of the shed. There was no point in trying to get any work done until she had done everything she could to talk to Adam.

In ordinary circumstances she would have enjoyed the bike ride, being quite used to the eccentricities of the dilapidated machine that she had bought from the previous owner of the house, along with all the other junk in the rusting corrugated-iron shed at the bottom of her garden. The Waitakere Ranges were a popular training ground for triathletes looking to build up their cycling stamina on the hilly terrain and although Honor was nowhere near their league, either in fitness or in the snazziness of their gear and complex machines, she shared their appreciation of a brisk workout along the quiet, winding, bush-lined country roads. This morning, however, an unexpected spring shower and the hollow nervousness in her empty stomach served to make her wish she had at least waited until after lunch to do her duty.

Consequently, by the time she arrived at the Blake house she had a very severe case of cold feet even before she saw its palatial splendour. Looking down at her mud-spotted shoes and stockings, she cursed herself for changing out of her jeans into a skirt and blouse but she had wanted to make a reasonable impression. Now her rain-damp skirt clung clammily to her legs, although thankfully her light jacket had protected her white blouse, which would probably have turned transparent. At least she had been bright enough to wear a scarf and she took it off now, running cold fingers through the tangled waves of her hair.

After wheeling her embarrassingly shabby bike a little way back down the road and parking it safely out of sight in the undergrowth, she advanced cautiously down the driveway, keeping close to the trees that lined one side, where the footing on the larger stones was easier for her smooth-soled flat shoes than the fine gravel at the centre. As she approached the wide front door Honor caught a glimpse of her reflection in one of the curtained windows and halted. Goodness, she looked like a tart with her skirt rucked up between her legs. Perhaps modesty would be better served by taking her stockings off. Her skirt would be less likely to stick to smooth, bare legs.

She made a smart about-turn on to a narrow paved pathway along the side of the house, looking around for some cover. There was a little thicket of low-growing shrubs next to a fishpond and she ducked in among them and crouched to peel off the damp stockings quickly. Unfortunately her bare feet sank into the loamy ground and she had to wipe them with her scarf before she could slide back into her shoes.

By the time she rose from the bushes Honor was flushed and thoroughly annoyed with herself for her uncharacteristic obsession with her appearance. What did it matter what she looked like? She wasn’t Helen and that was all that would matter to Adam.

Unfortunately, just as she popped up a man suddenly appeared from the rear corner of the house, running directly towards her with such an implicit threat in the lean of his powerful body that Honor reacted to sheer instinct and began to run back towards the drive, unzipping her jacket to push the grubby stockings deep into the inside pocket as she did so. A garbled shout sent her deeper into panicked embarrassment and there were suddenly people running all over the place as she slammed into a brick wall with such force that she went sprawling backwards, her fingers trapped inside her pocket by the stretchy octopus her stockings had suddenly become.

‘Look out, she’s got a weapon!’ she heard, before the brick wall reached down and hauled her up by the scruff of her jacket, one beefy hand punching down into her pocket, almost tearing it off as he wrestled her for her stockings and dragged them free.

Ears ringing, Honor was conscious of all the chaos around her coming to a dead stop as the limp trophy was dangled from her captor’s hand.

‘What the hell—?’

Honor looked up into the furious brown eyes of the menacingly big blond man who held her. He had shoulders like a rugby player and a broken nose to match and his grip on her jacket was so tight he was practically strangling her with the collar. Perversely, his rough treatment vanquished her embarrassed fright and ignited her temper.

‘Let me go, you big, stupid oaf!’ she hissed, writhing in his grasp and jarring her fists as she pounded them against his iron chest.

‘No way,’ he snarled, shaking her until her teeth rattled. ‘What the hell were you going to do with these?’ He dangled the stockings tauntingly in front of her pink nose and from the flash of yellow heat in the brown eyes she wondered whether he intended to strangle her with them. He certainly looked as if he’d like to, witnesses or no.

‘Wear them on my head!’ she snarled back with furious sarcasm. ‘Or, better still, use them as a slingshot to crack that Neanderthal skull of yours!’

Dimly she heard the commotion re-start around her as several other men tried unsuccessfully to drag her out of the masher’s bone-cracking grasp.

Amid the turmoil she heard the startling words which had the effect of freezing her share of the struggle.

‘Police? You’re police?’ She cranked her head around, noticing that what had seemed like a crowd was only five men, all as big and brawny as the man who held her, and one woman who looked as if she could match them muscle for muscle.

She glared up at the man who still held her. ‘What is this, a training exercise in police brutality? You know I could make a complaint about this!’

‘You’re the one who ran,’ the blond giant ground out, unimpressed by her outrage.

‘I didn’t realise running was a criminal offence, Mr Plod,’ she snapped back. ‘If you’ve made a run in my stockings maybe I can have you arrested.’

A tiny snicker of inappropriate laughter from one of the men was quelled with a single look from the senior-ranking officer who now stepped forward to take charge.

‘I’d like you to accompany me to the station, miss, to answer some questions—’

‘I’ve got a few the little bitch can answer right now,’ the man holding her cut in crudely. ‘Who’s in it with you?’ he demanded savagely. ‘Where’s your accomplice? You must have one—you’re too dumb to have hatched this on your own. Is he your lover?’ He gave her body a contemptuous survey that took her in from head to battered toe. ‘If he is, don’t expect him to give a damn what happens to you now; I doubt if he thinks that a brown dumpling is worth doing hard time for—you’ll be the one to take the fall—’

‘Mr Blake—!’ The senior officer again attempted to intervene. This time it was Honor who stopped him.

‘Blake?’ Shock was piling on shock from all directions. Her heart sank as she looked into the blazing brown eyes. ‘Mr—? You—you’re not a policeman? You’re Zachary Blake?’

Colour raked along his tanned cheeks as if she had struck him a stinging blow. ‘You know damned well who I am, you lying bitch—’

‘That’s enough, Mr Blake! You can let her go now. We have the situation under control.’ The order came sharply, and this time the blond avenger reluctantly released her, stepping back and slowly flexing his big fists at his side as if imagining them squeezing around her neck.

Honor swallowed painfully. So much for the subtle approach!

‘I—don’t know what this is about. I’m just here to see your...to see Adam Blake...’ she offered tentatively, realising that she didn’t know what relationship he had to this man.

Instead of soothing him, her timid foray into explanation prompted a searing explosion of curses that followed her all the way to one of the unmarked police cars at the back of the house into which she was rapidly hustled.

‘You don’t understand,’ she cried, as they pressed her into the back seat. ‘Please, let me speak to Adam, he’ll know who I am!’

‘And how well do you know him?’ queried the senior officer in a strange voice as the policewoman slid alongside Honor from the opposite door.

Honor felt a tiny glimmer of hope that she could salvage herself from this comedy of errors. ‘Very well,’ she said firmly. ‘Just ask him about our letters. Tell him that my name is Sheldon!’

‘Our letters?’ He pounced on what he evidently saw as a discrepancy. ‘Is Sheldon your surname? And what is your first name, Ms Sheldon?’

She hesitated, disturbed by the sudden silky smoothness with which he spoke. ‘Helen.’

Guilty colour flooded her face, but she reasoned that, once Adam had vouched for the name, then she could set about putting her identity right.

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.