The Perfect Match (10 page)

But surely she had all the comfort and love she needed here with Guy.
Guy,
the man whom only this morning she'd been making plans to spend the rest of her life with.
Guy,
the man who suddenly in the space of a brief conversation had become almost a stranger to her.

She was being silly, she warned herself. There was bound to be a simple explanation for Guy's omission in telling her about Jenny Crighton. All she had to do was to ask him for it.

Guy was just leaving the local delicatessen with the purchases he had made for his supper with Chrissie when he saw Jon and Jenny crossing the square.

'Mmm...you've been in Lawfords,' Jenny commented enviously when she saw what he was carrying. 'Lucky you, their food is wonderful but a little bit pricey when you've got two hungry teenage boys to feed. No need for me to ask whom
you 're
planning to share your feast with,' she added teasingly.

'No need at all,' Guy agreed dryly.

'Chrissie seems a lovely girl, Guy,' Jenny remarked warmly. 'But I can understand why she feels a little bit wary about going public with the fact that Charlie was her uncle. Of course, the family virtually dis-owned him years ago, we all know that. Oh, and by the way, you'll never guess what. The police apparently suspect that there may be a woman involved with the gang who've been doing the break-ins locally.'

Jenny saw the way Guy was frowning and shook her head.

'It sounds odd, I know, but it seems it's often easier for a woman to get inside a target house and check to see what's there that's worth stealing. She then passes this information on to the rest of the gang.

'Heavens, is that the time!' she exclaimed as the church clock chimed the hour. 'We'd better go. Enjoy your dinner party.'

Guy was still frowning as he watched Jon and Jenny walk away. Chrissie was Charlie Platt's
niece?

Then
why
hadn't she told him so?
Why
had she deliberately concealed the relationship from him and given him to believe that she was simply
acting
for the family, rather than being a closely related member of it?

He could remember quite vividly how, when he was a child, Charlie used to lie to him and pretend that he wanted to be his friend, that his malicious and cruel bullying of him had simply been a mistake. Guy could remember, too, how Charlie had taunted him when he had fallen for his lies and believed him. The wariness and cynicism, the hardness he had begun to develop as a means of protecting himself from the likes of Charlie Platt had stood him in good stead as an antiques dealer. It was a business where it paid to be cautious and a little bit suspicious at times, to thoroughly check the ownership of goods offered to him for sale rather than to automatically assume that the would-be seller had the right to dispose of them, but it had simply never occurred to him to be suspicious or wary where
Chrissie
was concerned.

He had taken her completely on trust, believed her every word utterly, and he had never even thought of questioning or doubting her. His response to her had been so immediate, so intense, so emotional, that it had left no room for logic or rational thinking.

But she had obviously not felt the same, had she?

Otherwise it would never have occurred to her to withhold from him the fact that she was Charlie's niece.

To withhold from him. He grimaced to himself, his face suddenly bleak and cold.

Even now, he was
still
trying to make excuses for her. She hadn't simply
withheld
the truth from him; she had deliberately deceived him. There had been plenty of opportunity for her to tell him the truth, to explain to him just what her real relationship with Charlie was.

But her deceit seemed so out of character for her.

One of the things that had struck him most forcibly about her had been her naturalness, her openness, her warmth, but quite plainly they were only illu-sory ... manufactured.

As he crossed the square and headed for his own home, he tried to reason with himself that he was overreacting, that he was judging her, condemning her, without allowing her a fair hearing. There could, after all, be some perfectly logical explanation of
why
she hadn't told him the truth.

Such as? the more cynical side of his nature demanded harshly.

A simple case of forgetfulness. Oh, by the way, I forgot. Charlie Platt was actually my uncle.

He shook his head, mentally deriding himself and in the fashion of his teenage nieces and nephews adding a sardonic
Not.

By the time he had returned to his house, the shock of Jenny's unintentional revelation was beginning to subside enough for him to pause and respond politely to Ruth's comments about the attractive display of flowers in his small front garden.

Ruth lived a few doors away from him and he knew her both via her charity work and through her relationship with Jenny.

She was an elegantly attractive woman who still bloomed with the joy of rediscovering and marrying the man she had originally fallen in love with as a young girl. And if these days her life and her world was a rather more cosmopolitan one than that of a small Cheshire country town, with six months of the year spent in America with her new husband and their daughter and family and six months back home in Haslewich, she was still very much the extraordinarily warm and perceptive person she had always been.

'I can't take any credit for them,' Guy admitted in response to her comment about his garden. 'Unlike you, I'm afraid my fingers are not particularly green and I have to rely on Bernard to ensure my garden doesn't let the close down.'

Bernard Philips was yet another member of the extended Cooke clan, a second cousin of Guy's, who together with his two sons and his daughter had built up a local garden centre business—a business that Guy, in true entrepreneurial fashion, had yet another small investment in.

It was not for nothing that certain members of his family teasingly nicknamed him 'The Banker'.

He had a reputation amongst his family and friends, he knew, as a shrewd and astute businessman, and it had only been the previous Christmas that his sisters had been teasing him about the fact that he was too logical, too keen to weigh up the pros and cons to ever allow himself to fall deeply in love. And until he had met Chrissie, he had been inclined to share that belief.

Chrissie... Perhaps it would have been better if he had never met her, he decided savagely after he'd said goodbye to Ruth and let himself into his house.

Which was she really? The open, warm soul mate he had believed he had found, or someone very different?

Was
she
at fault for deceiving him or was
he
simply a fool for having deceived himself, for having credited her with virtues and attributes she simply didn't possess?

Had
he
imposed on her his own idealised version of her, lifting what was really merely an earthy lust into the realm of something more spiritual and divine?

Half an hour later, having abandoned his half-hearted preparations for their supper, he acknowledged that the only way he was going to discover the truth was by asking Chrissie outright why she had not told him about her relationship with Charlie Platt.

DESPITE the thorough cleaning she had given it, her late uncle's house still had that faintly musty smell she associated with neglect and decay, Chrissie acknowledged, wrinkling her nose slightly.

The old sheet she had thrown over the desk to protect it had slipped off, and as she went to replace it, she paused, studying the desk affectionately. She could well understand why her mother wanted to buy it from the estate.

It possessed a warmth and sturdiness that encouraged one to reach out and stroke the wood and Chrissie smiled a little to herself as she did so.

She was no expert but she doubted that the desk would prove to be very expensive. It would be her mother's birthday in two months' time and she was tempted to buy it herself and give it to her mother as a birthday present.

She was still smiling at the thought of her mother's pleasure when Guy knocked on the front door.

Quickly she went to let him in and was taken aback when she saw that he was frowning and that instead of moving to take her in his arms as she had been expecting, he actually seemed to move away from her as though he wanted to put some distance between them.

Natalie's contemptuous earlier comments ran through her brain and she hesitated uncertainly. Outside, the temperature had dropped and Chrissie felt a chill in the air inside the cottage. Shivering slightly, she turned to get her coat. The door to the small front sitting room was still open, and as she retrieved her coat from the hall chair where she had left it, she saw Guy freeze as he looked into the room.

'What is it...what's wrong?' she asked him anxiously.

'What's that desk doing here?' Guy demanded harshly.

Chrissie frowned as she heard the sharp accusatory note in his voice, her heart sinking.

'I'm waiting to get it valued. It belonged to...' She stopped and bit her lip. Guy was looking at her in a most peculiar way.

'Do go on,' he told her mock-gently. 'Or shall /

say it for you? It belonged to Charlie Platt, better known locally as, at best, a con man and, at worst, a thief. A man who by no stretch of the imagination could ever legally or rightfully be the owner of
that
particular piece of furniture.'

'A con man!'

Chrissie went pale as she heard the pent-up fury in Guy's voice. She had known all along that he hadn't liked her uncle, had guessed it, sensed it, from all that he had not said about him rather than from what she'd heard, but the venom and bitterness she could now hear—see—in him seemed so totally out of character, so much the complete opposite from the tender, ador-ing lover who had left her only hours before that she could only stare at him in shocked bewilderment.

'But then,
you
probably know all this already, don't you, Chrissie? Which is why you've taken such good care to conceal this desk from me...just as you've also concealed from me the fact that Charlie Platt was your uncle.'

'No!' Chrissie protested.

'No? No what?' Guy demanded savagely. 'No, he wasn't your uncle?'

Chrissie bit her lip. She was in too much of a state of shock to speak or defend herself.

She had known, of course, that sooner or later she was going to have to tell Guy who she was. And if she was honest, she had perhaps put off telling him longer than she ought, but she had never dreamt he would react like this,
accuse
her like this. Look at her as though...as though he found her utterly and completely beneath his contempt, a creature so, so far beneath him that he could hardly even bear to look at her.

'I...I
was
going to tell you...I
wanted
to tell you,'

she protested huskily, 'but—'

'Of course you did,' Guy interrupted with silky-smooth dislike.

'There hasn't been time... everything happened so quickly,' Chrissie told him doggedly, still trying to make him understand, to stop him before he ruined, destroyed, everything between them.

'Yes...too quickly for you to have time to get rid of this, I assume you mean,' Guy accused her grittily, giving a brief nod in the direction of the desk. 'I always knew Charlie wasn't too fussy about how he earned his drinking money, but I never realised he'd turned to fencing stolen property—'

'Stolen!'
Chrissie exploded indignantly. 'That desk wasn't stolen. It belonged to my great-grandmother, my—'

'That
desk,' Guy cut across her curtly, his mouth compressing as he carefully spaced out every word,

'was
stolen
less than a fortnight ago from Queensmead. I'd know it anywhere, even without having seen the description the police have circulated.

I appraised it for Ben Crighton—not that it has much commercial value. It's a copy of the French original,'

he told her coldly, 'and as a copy isn't worth a tenth of the original.'

'You're lying,' Chrissie declared, her own shock and anguish giving way to an anger intense enough to match his own.

Just what was he trying to accuse her of doing?

Just
what
was he trying to imply? She had her mother's word that the desk had belonged to
her
grandmother and she would take her mother's word against anyone's—
anyone's
—any day of the week.

I'm lying...?' For a moment, the rage she could see in Guy's taut face and clenched fists was such that Chrissie automatically took a step back from him, her face going scarlet with mortification as he told her icily, 'I don't hit women. Not even a woman like you.'

A woman like her!

'How much more stolen stuff did he have stashed here, I wonder, and where is it now? I'm sure that's a question the police would be very interested in hearing the answer to.'

The police! Chrissie's heart gave a frightened bound but she wasn't going to let him panic or ter-rorise her. Why
should
she? She had done nothing wrong and neither, in this instance, had her late uncle.

The desk belonged to their family and Guy had simply mistaken it for the one stolen from Queensmead. He had to have done.

As they confronted one another across the narrow width of the small hallway, Chrissie found it hard to believe that just a matter of hours ago they had been lying in one another's arms promising eternal fidelity and love, discussing the future they hoped to share together.

She wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.

Possibly both. How
could
she have been such a fool?

It was obvious to her now that Guy was dangerously volatile and untrustworthy where his relationships were concerned. How many other women had he treated...deceived...the way he had done her? Had he come here this evening looking for an excuse to quarrel with her, blame
her
for the fact that he had fallen out of love with her?

Love! He didn't begin to know the meaning of the word. But she did. Oh yes, she did, because, despite the pain he was now causing her, she knew perfectly well that if he was to turn to her, take her in his arms, beg her forgiveness, say it was all a mistake and it was just the shock of discovering she was Charlie's niece that had made him behave so cruelly, react so badly, she would want to accept his apology.