Walking The Edge: A Romantic Suspense/Espionage Thriller (Corpus Brides Trilogy Book 1) (3 page)

He took a few steps to come to a standstill a yard away. “Millie, what are you talking about?”

The patience in his tone grated on her already-frayed nerves, and she gulped, trying hard to moisten her mouth and throat so she could at least make herself be heard.

When she remained silent, trying to regroup her thoughts into a coherent whole, he moved forward, until only a few inches separated them. He felt warm, the heat from his body permeating through his thin, hand-tailored Savile Row cotton shirt. She wasn’t dealing with the cold blood of the serpent, but with the man inside him. The same man who had been talking to another woman just minutes before.

“Let me take you back up,” he said.

“No.” She shrugged his hand off when he touched her arm. “Who was that?”

Closing her eyes, she fought a losing battle against her spinning surroundings. The awareness that her husband cheated on her added further momentum to the vortex taking hold. She swayed, but held tight to the moulding and managed to keep herself upright.

“What are you talking about?”

Again, the hint of patience in his words. Did he really not understand what she’d asked? His patronizing attitude annoyed her beyond the pale, and still under the sway of the medication, she lashed out at him when he again tried to catch hold of her arm. The flat of her hand hit his face, hard, and time suddenly stood still.

He lowered his gaze, and when he lifted his face again to her, the glint of cold had returned in his irises, leading to the bottomless void of the beast inside him.

“You need to rest.”

Frost dripped from the words, and she flinched. However, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking she’d yield under his icy treatment.

“Don’t take me for an idiot,” she said. “You were talking to a woman on the phone.”

He sighed, clenching his fists. “Millie, that’s enough.”

“Answer me!”

Silence stretched, and then he cursed softly. “I wasn’t talking to anyone back there. Hell, I wasn’t even on the phone.”

“But—”

“You heard me? Are you sure you heard right?”

She blinked. Had she? She’d been certain he talked to a woman...

I saw you
, she wanted to toss at him.
I saw you mouthing the words.
Yet, again, the insight rattled her. How did she know how to lip-read? She dug her teeth into her lower lip, forced herself to keep her mouth shut and stop the flow of questions she craved for him to answer.

Peter reached out and clutched her shoulders. His grip felt neither soft nor gentle. With a push, he made her sit on the velvet-upholstered ottoman inside the alcove, then he squatted in front of her.

“The doctor said this could happen once you came home.” He paused. “Millie, I wasn’t talking to anyone. I wasn’t even in the front room, but on my way to the study from the kitchen when I saw you standing here.”

He sounded so honest and sincere...

Maybe she
had
not heard properly. Maybe this was nothing more than a horrible delusion. Nothing made sense anymore, not when those psychotropes played with her mind and imagination. Hadn’t she just dreamed of a different Peter, of the man who had loved and cared for her? The memory of that vision materialized at the forefront of her mind, painting itself over the image of his face before her. Dejection and a feeling of utter loss invaded her, making her sag into her seat.

She reached out and touched his hair, raked her gaze across his handsome face. Still the same from what she recalled, yet, so different, too. He looked older than in her dream, hardened.

“Longer hair suited you better,” she said softly.

His swift intake of breath startled her, and she dropped her hand, staring at his face. A grim expression touched his features, making his lips look pinched, but then the cold mask settled back as quickly as it had left.

“You should go back to bed.” He stood, his hand again on her upper arm, and made her stand with a none-too-gentle tug.

He pulled her to the staircase, and she stumbled in his wake. Hand wrapped around her wrist in a steely grip, he dragged her along. He was hurting her, but she wouldn’t tell him that. The complaint wouldn’t breach his cold façade.

He released her on the threshold of her bedroom and turned to leave. The violence in his moves hit like a splash of cold water on her senses, and the certainty slid home that she couldn’t trust him. Something told her he lied as naturally as he breathed. And he had a mistress...

“She made you her bitch, didn’t she?”

The question hurtled from her mouth before she could think it out. Too late, though—she’d have to see it through. Also high time he came clean with her.

He didn’t turn. “You’re out of your mind.”

“Am I? No wonder, since you ply me with so many drugs!” She’d add oil to the fire, but she had a feeling restraint wasn’t something that featured high on her list of priorities when she got riled up.

He whirled around, and she saw him move as if someone had pushed a slow-motion button. Somehow, she should be afraid, but she wasn’t. He didn’t faze her, not his erect stance, or the fury evident on his face. What a change from the usual detachment. Had she hit a sensitive nerve?

“No one made me her bitch,
Millie
. It’s been a long time since we’ve been husband and wife in the carnal sense, you and me.”

Her gut told her some truth lurked in his statement.
Hallelujah
. She needed more, though. Why the sham of their marriage, then?

“Why?”

He gave a bitter snort and laughed. “You don’t want to know.”

She did. “What happened?”

“I don’t want to go there.” He turned to leave.

But she couldn’t let him go, not after he’d started to open up, if only a little. She ran to him, as fast as her still-sluggish body could, and caught up with him in the doorway of his bedroom, clasping his wrist to force him to stop.

“What happened?” she again questioned him.

“If you want a new start for us, you wouldn’t ask that.”

He didn’t shrug off her hand, so she stood her ground. “Tell me.”

When she insisted, he did throw her hand off, and she jerked from the sudden movement. Her insides shook when he hit his clenched fists against the wall. The reverberation along the panel rocked the glass vase on the nearby demi-console propped against the silk-lined wall, and it tumbled to shatter on the parquet.

“You want the truth? I’ll give it to you.”

A sliver of unease slid into her heart, and for once, she questioned her judgment. Would it be a good thing, to know? Wasn’t ignorance better?

“The bloody truth, Amelia, is that you were on the Côte d’Azur while I stayed back here. I thought you went to the film festival in Cannes, but you’d scampered miles away from there.”

He paused, as if for emphasis, and her unease snowballed into dread.

“You’d found a comfy spot on a yacht off the coast of Nice. A yacht that exploded because of a bomb, leaving you for dead, while the intended target escaped.” He let a few seconds elapse in silence. “Will you ask why you were on board that yacht in the first place?”

She wanted to shake her head “no,” but she couldn’t. She needed to hear this, however unsettling it would prove to be.

“You were there because someone invited you to have a good time on board their friend’s yacht.” He took a step forward, backing her against the wall. “That someone, Millie, was your lover.”

This couldn’t be true. She wasn’t someone who cheated. She couldn’t be. “Fuck you, Peter.”

The sting of his palm striking her cheek forced the breath out of her lungs as she reeled from the violence. How dare he hit her? Reflexively, she struck back and connected with his face, the back of her hand a hard blow to his mouth, her diamond ring splitting his lip.

He brought one hand up and used his thumb to wipe the blood trickling down the side of his chin. Without another word, he turned on his heels and went into his bedroom.

But she wasn’t done with him, not yet. Not by a long shot. “Why did you stay with me, then, if I’d taken another man to my bed? Why the whole make-believe setup now?”

She followed him, but one step inside the bedroom and her instincts rose to the highest alert. Something very bad was about to happen. She froze with the insight as sounds of a cabinet door closing in the bathroom reached her ears. She should turn tail and run, back to her room where she’d slide the bolt and turn the key so Peter couldn’t get to her.

But she wasn’t fast enough. She still found herself where she stood when he re-entered the bedroom, something in his hand. She didn’t know what, but it would spell her doom.

Run.

She turned and rushed to the corridor. His footsteps accelerated behind her. Two feet from the door to her deliverance, his arm wrapped tight around her neck and he pulled her roughly to him, his hand clutching her upper arm in a vise-like grip. He was so much bigger than her...

Her first instinct told her to fight, yet, the more she squirmed, the tighter his stranglehold got.

Take a few steps forward, gather momentum, and hit the wall, feet flat. In the same move, twist your torso to the side and hit hard with the elbow.

She had no time to ponder where the certainty of that thought came from or how the sound of the deep, male voice addressing her crystallized in her mind. She tried to do as the voice inside her head told her to, but she wasn’t fast enough. The sharp prick of a needle in her neck made her cry out. She howled with misery and defeat when the stinging release of the drug Peter injected into her burnt through her muscles.

Her body went progressively limp, but she heard the words he whispered in her ear.

“Because you were always meant to be mine,” he said in a low growl thrumming with possession and spite.

Then the darkness claimed her, and she sagged as its clawing fingers ripped at her consciousness.

*

Her body slouched into an inert mass against his torso. Peter grinned. “That’s it, you little bitch. Nothing more than you deserve.”

He let her go, and as she slumped to the floor, the realization of what he’d done slithered like cold ice into his blood. He took a step away and pressed his back against the wall. The syringe lay cold and empty in his hand, and he flung it to the other end of the corridor.

Goodness, why had he compromised the plan? The cunning vixen could rattle his cage like no other, though. She knew exactly what button to push at just the right moment.

A tiny shot of victory burst inside him as he recalled the shock on her features when he’d told her she’d been the first one to stray. He had seriously unsettled her with that little bit of information. With some luck, their conversation would work its desired effect on her, sapping at her backbone. He hadn’t expected her to be so tenacious.

But what to do from here on? The dynamics had changed, and none of them had anticipated the situation could get so complicated. He reached down, lifted her small body from the floor, and took her into her bedroom, where he dumped her on the bed. Not sparing her another glance, he left her room, closing the door behind him, then scurried down the hall to find the empty syringe and dispose of it.

He had to get out of there. He hadn’t planned on any of this, and he simply couldn’t breathe anymore. This matter would too quickly catch up with him, and he most dreaded to face the possibility that he had taken on too much with Amelia.

He also had to work damage control.
Bloody hell.

As he headed down the steps to the ground floor, the complexity of the situation hit him full in the gut. He’d crossed a line that would change the whole set-up. Maybe he could recoup the losses, make it all look like he had been pre-emptive in his strike.

He whipped his mobile out of his pocket, grabbed his trench coat out of the wardrobe near the front door, and slid it on before he exited the house. A few safe steps away, he dialled her number.

“We have a problem,” he said as soon as she picked up. “I had to change the direction of the plan.”

“But why? Everything was going fine—”

“Everything was
not
going fine. She mentioned me having long hair.”

Her pause at the other end screamed loud and clear that he’d retrieved the upper hand.

“I see what you mean,” she said.

“We need to meet. The safe house. Now.”

Chapter Two

The bright light of morning bathed the room, the sun’s rays filtering through the sheer drapes hanging at the sliding glass doors leading onto the terrace.

She stretched out on the bed, her cheek rubbing against a satin pillowcase. The gentle swish of long hair cascading over the pillow tickled her ears when she moved. Her gaze, when she blinked her eyes open, landed on the tanned skin of a man who sat upright next to her, his back against the headboard.

Propping herself on an elbow, she muttered a sleepy greeting as a smile spread across her lips. He’d stayed for the whole night. Again.

The sheet covered him up to his lap, leaving the glorious breadth of his hairless chest bare to her appreciative look. Warm, golden rays of sunlight danced over his body, licking at him with flickering shimmers.
Hmm, the light of the seaside. Nothing could compare to it—the brilliant sparkle that shone everywhere on the Côte d’Azur. Seagulls screeched outside as they spanned the cloudless sky. Oh, yes, summer proved very nice indeed in this part of the Mediterranean.

Sighing, she stretched, taking advantage of the proximity of the man’s body to trail her fingers over his warm skin. All firm and lean muscle under her touch... Fire started its slow, consuming burn up her body. Lord, she wanted him.

Still, he remained silent, keeping his face averted towards the wide glass expanse of the doors. His sandy blond hair still looked mussed from sleep, the muscles in his tense neck corded. The tautness of his clamped jaw alerted her to his contemplative mood.

Sitting up straighter, she reached out and touched his cheek, making him turn his face in her direction. A soft gasp escaped her when she encountered his eyes. Deep-set and narrow, they shone with a sparkling turquoise hue, making her think of mysterious tropical waters. But worry and some other sobering emotion filled their depths. Not good.

“What?” she gently asked, afraid to speak lest he should disappear without answering.

He sighed. “We can’t keep going on.”

His soft words pierced her heart. “No. Don’t say that.”

“You know we never expected it to come this far between us. Mi—”

She placed a finger on his lips, shushing him. “No. Don’t say my name. Don’t taint our moment.”

He tried to move away, to avert his gaze, but she clasped his face in her palms and kissed him. Breaking the kiss, she pressed her forehead against his and closed her eyes.

“When I’m with you,” she said, “I’m not
her
. Do you understand that?”

“
Putain,
”
he cursed softly in French.

He wasn’t calling her a whore, but simply saying a word that came naturally to him, the way it hung on the lips of every person from Marseille.

“
Tu vas m’tuer.
” He sighed again.

You’ll be the death of me.
Despite herself, she smiled. She held power over this man, and damn if she didn’t relish the feeling. He belonged to her. All hers.

And right then, she preferred not to think of the other meaning that could be ascribed to his words—she could literally spell his death, too. If the man she lived with came to know about her lover— No, she wouldn’t think of this. Not now. Not when his mouth had claimed hers and he pushed her back onto the mattress.

Right now belonged to them, and them alone.

*

London. Hampstead Heath

Friday, December 14. 8:36 a.m.

When she awoke, the dream still lingered, vivid in her mind. The face of the other man in it remained so present in her memory, she could draw his features even after she opened her eyes and blinked a few times.

Who is he, and why do I recall him now?

He’d spoken French, and his words held a deep accent, a pronounced inflection that turned the crisp language into an almost sensual drawl.

Peter had mentioned the Côte d’Azur the night before. Could it be where she’d been involved with her mystery man?

Thoughts of Peter made her dart a hand to her neck, and she rubbed the pad of her fingers against the tiny puncture mark where he had plunged the needle into her skin.

The damn bastard. He had dared! No matter that he’d also not hesitated to hit her when things didn’t go his way, and that he had a mistress—that he’d felt compelled to drug her into the darkest abyss of oblivion just to be rid of her temporarily spelt the doom of their relationship. Whatever it might have been in the first place. The arse he had become came nowhere close to the man she had remembered.

Could it be her mind’s way of telling her things were over between them, and had been for a long time? He’d crossed to an irreversible position the night before, a limit the woman in her reckoned should never be breached.

She was done with Peter, but was he done with her?

Frustrated beyond tolerance, she jumped out of bed and went straight for the heavy marble pot holding delicate white orchids on a low side table in her bedroom. In her fury, she picked it up and hurled the small container at the antique standing mirror at the other end of the room.

“Fuck you, Peter!” The sound lost itself in the shatter of the glass carrying all the violence she burned to let out.

Fisting her hands, her short nails digging into her palms, she gritted her teeth and contained the scream dying to escape her lips.

Such aggressive and destructive thoughts and behaviour. What could be wrong with her? Had she always behaved like this?

The walls around her closed in, rendering the big, airy room to the size of an ever-reducing sardine tin.

She had to get out of there. Stat!

Before she could think out a plan of action, her legs had carried her into the corridor, where she hurtled down the stairs and headed towards Nathaniel’s cubicle. He’d take her out, get her away from the dwindling air supply in this mausoleum.

The sound of the television’s drone caught her attention the minute she stepped close to the little room.

Nathaniel sat in front of the screen, apparently unperturbed by what had been going on upstairs. Unless he’d received orders not to bother her no matter what he heard. Either way, her attention shifted when a word from the commentator caught her ear.

Marseille
.

Again, that city; then someone started talking in French before being voiced over in English.

But in those split seconds before the dubbing, she’d made out a voice reminding her of the one she’d heard in her dream. The hint of the accent she had identified. A slight drawl, like regional patois, with the letter ‘n’ pronounced phonetically as “ng.”

Could her mystery man be from Marseille?

On suddenly light feet, she dashed back into her bedroom, closed the door, and locked the panel before sitting down on a settee with her mobile phone. Once the Internet browser logged on, she searched for information on Marseille.

The usual tourist pages came up, and with swipes across the touch screen, she skimmed and navigated through the results. Finally reaching the section where the city got mentioned in recent news, her search landed on a video clip of a news segment involving the Marseille police. There had been a bust involving a gang of European casino robbers, their headquarters in the old city having been disbanded. A branch of the local police, under the command of a
commissaire
by the name of Gerard Besson, had led the investigation, in a concerted effort with Interpol.

An interview of the man accompanied the article. Something prompted her to swipe her finger over its link...and she nearly dropped the phone when the video started playing.

For there, staring back as he delivered his report, stood the lover from her most recent dream.

She covered her mouth, smothering the gasp before it escaped. She had found him. Lord, she had
found
him.

Desperate to learn more about him now that she knew his identity, she redirected her search onto him. A
commissaire
; must be a high-ranking officer in command. Fishing for more information on the Net, she discovered he’d only recently been promoted to the post.

So this could mean he hadn’t made it to that level when the two of them had been together, about a year earlier, before she’d had her accident. The article didn’t mention if he was married, and in the close-up images in the clip, she hadn’t been able to spot a ring on his left hand. Neither did she recall one in her dream, but would a man wear his wedding ring while making love to his mistress? Certainly not.

Gerard Besson. She frowned. His name definitely sounded French, but it didn’t call forth any recognition in her mind. His face looked all too familiar, though, and he couldn’t be a body double of the lover in her dream. Too much resemblance and too many coincidences. She’d been on the Côte d’Azur with a French lover, and the description fitted him to a T.

She stood, still reeling with the realization that she had found the identity of a man from her past, and moved away from the settee to the window. The bare, spindly branches of the maple tree in the yard shed dark outlines against the clear glass. In the gusts of the London winter, they danced like macabre shadows in the grey bleakness.

Just like the wisps of remembrance she clung to in her pitch-black memory.

A whisper from the dream came back to tickle her consciousness, a whiff of words in a foreign tongue she’d understood perfectly.

She knew French? Since when? And how?

So many questions, and not one hint of an answer. She turned away from the window and paced across the room.

What could she do?

Nothing, and this made her go stir crazy at the frustration growing and building with every minute she spent cooped up in Peter’s pretentious house.

“Damn you, Peter. Damn every moment I’m forced to spend with you,” she shrieked.

However long she remained in the goddamned soulless dwelling, she would be at his mercy. Yet, she also couldn’t get out, couldn’t escape. Not when the hulk of a man downstairs tailed her every move.

She had to get out, and she wanted—needed—to hurt Peter. The harder, the better, and in her current plight, she knew of no better way than throwing his supposedly hard-earned money down the drain.

Yes—she would go out and blow all the money she had at her disposal in one single trip.
Let’s see what it does to the arse.

She took a quick shower and changed into a silk camisole and grey linen trousers paired with a black, woollen Burberry trench coat. She then went down to the study and the safe located behind a painting. After emptying the contents, she glanced at the three thousand pounds in thick-bound packets. “Definitely not enough to rile you up, you bastard.”

She could max out the credit cards, but there, Peter could afford to revoke the purchases and she’d end up making no dent in his stash or his ego. No, she had to flambé hard cash, which meant maxing out withdrawals on her debit cards, easily giving her another twenty grand.

Great.
She smiled.

She stepped out of the study with her head held high and paused by Nathaniel’s little room. “We’re going out.”

She didn’t linger to hear his reply. He could debate all he wanted; she would go out. The huge hulk wouldn’t dare drug her, too, would he?

With resolute steps, she stalked to the garage, intent on making her husband’s life a living hell, at least for today.

Oh, yes—she’d make him regret he’d crossed the line with her.

***

London. Knightsbridge

Friday, December 14. 11:10 a.m.

She smiled at the cashier, laughing inside at the beaming look on the young woman’s face. Who wouldn’t be happy in the girl’s shoes? If the sales people got commissions, this young one had just earned herself a few hundred pounds in the last twenty minutes.

“Thank you.” She took the bags and, turning around, pushed them right at Nathaniel. His arms already overflowed with shopping gear, and he grunted when she piled on the heavy load of parcels.

Take that, you thick idiot.
Jubilation flowed through her as she went out of the designer apparel shop and headed to another luxury concept store at Harvey Nichols. Five thousand pounds
flambé
-ed in an hour. Perfect. Another eighteen thousand waited in her purse; what better venue to achieve her aim than Harvey Nicks and its classy, minimalist layout housing outrageously priced shops? Like the one in front of her on the ground level of the building. It sold what, to her, looked like horrible, shapeless, contemporary house decor stuff. Totally inappropriate for the Hampstead Heath mausoleum.

She waltzed through the aisles, picking exorbitant-priced, stylized décor items resembling nothing, really, and dropping them into her basket while the big man, who looked like a laden Christmas tree overflowing with bags spouting foamy tissue paper, trailed her every step with a lot of hardship and grunts. He couldn’t leave her alone for even one minute—Peter’s orders—so he had to follow her through every nook and around every corner.