The Mirror Bride

The woman looked surprised. ‘Well, I tear them off any that haven’t sold and send them back to the publisher so I don’t have to pay for them.’

‘Oh. I see.’ Olivia looked at the magazines again. ‘I didn’t realise.’ She smiled at the woman, said, ‘Goodbye,’ and left the shop.

The next morning she swept out the flat before embarking on the chore of washing their clothes; with any luck they’d dry enough to air in the hot water cupboard. A month previously the ancient agitator washing machine that lurked in the bathroom had clattered itself to a standstill, and although the landlord’s agent had promised to replace it, a new one hadn’t eventuated yet.

Determined to look on the bright side, Olivia admired the muscles she was developing in her arms as she hung the clothes out beneath a sky that promised at least a morning’s fine weather. After that she boiled up the bones the butcher always gave her on the pretext that they were for the dog—both of them well aware that there was no dog—and added vegetables she had bought yesterday from the bruised bin. Tonight they’d have the meat from the bones for their dinner, and tomorrow they’d drink the soup.

This afternoon, she decided, I’ll go and see the supermarket about a job again. With any luck they’ll respond to a bit of tactful nagging.

She had asked a fortnight ago, and been told that there was no opening. They’d taken her name and address and said they’d contact her, but it wouldn’t hurt to show her enthusiasm. Even though she knew there was no position for her. Possibly never would be.

Soon she’d be twenty-five, and it seemed as though her life had been an endless grind of work and worry and fear. Such dreams she’d had once, such hopes—all shattered.

‘That,’ she said aloud, ‘is enough of that! Self-pity is not going to get you anywhere.’ And then she began to cough, deep, barking paroxysms that shook her frame and hurt her throat and chest.

Unfortunately, telling herself that depression was the usual accompaniment to illness didn’t seem to help much; she still felt oddly lackadaisical.

‘I’ll make Simon a new pair of trousers,’ she said, using a false cheerfulness to force herself to do it. A month ago she’d bought a skirt at the op-shop which would cut up well.

Setting her lips into a firm line, she took out her old sewing machine—one which she’d earned in her wandering days. Another house-truck family owned it then, but the woman hated sewing. In return for making clothes for all the family, Olivia had been given the machine.

Normally she enjoyed the challenge of creating something new from something old, but after laying the material out on the table she put the scissors down and stared at it.

The last thing she wanted to do was sew.

Perhaps, she thought with a quick glance at the clock, she was hungry. However, the sandwich she made was so unappetising that she put it down after a couple of mouthfuls and sat at the table with her head on her arms, trying to block out the grey mist of hopelessness.

Someone knocked on the door.

A religious caller, she thought with foggy lethargy. Go away.

The knock was repeated—this time a peremptory tattoo that brought her to her feet.

Listlessly she opened the door, and to her utter astonishment there stood Drake Arundell—tall, broad-shouldered, his lean, heavily muscled body elegantly clad in a superbly tailored suit—almost blocking the narrow balcony that served as the access along the back of the flats.

On a sharp, indrawn breath she snatched the door back to shield her body, her eyes dilating endlessly as she looked up into a harshly contoured, expressionless face. Colour leached from her skin and a faint cold sweat slicked over her temples.

Quick as she was, he was quicker, and of course he was infinitely stronger. Without visibly exerting pressure he pushed the door open and walked into the room. Olivia fell back before him.

Foreboding washed through her, a hallow nausea caused by shock and dread. When her heart started up again she found it difficult to breathe.

Moving with the feline grace she remembered so well, he followed her across the room, his eyes revealing nothing but sardonic amusement. Even if she hadn’t seen the forceful features she would have recognised Drake Arundell by his gait alone. After all, she had known him all her life—although it wasn’t until she was fourteen and he was twenty-two that she’d noticed him with the inner eyes of her burgeoning womanhood.

He’d walked down the main street of a little town a lifetime away, and everyone in Springs Flat had watched him—some appreciatively, and some, the parents of young, impressionable daughters, with acute foreboding.

It was the sort of walk that had persuaded the elders of uncounted tribes the world over and down the centuries to look around for a war, or for big game to be hunted, or for an exploratory trip—anything to get that lean-hipped, lithely graceful saunterer out of the district and away from their wives and daughters.

Already famous, earning big money on the Formula One circuit, he was a certainty, her stepfather had said admiringly, to win the World Drivers’ Championship soon.

Brian Harley used to enjoy teasing Drake’s father, who worked in his accountancy firm, because Stan Arundell had resisted his son’s ambitions. A conventional, hardworking man, he’d wanted Drake to take law at university, and he had used Mrs Arundell’s long battle with illness to restrain his son. It had been Brian who had persuaded him to give Drake his blessing. Immediately Drake had left school, and within a remarkably few months had been racing his snarling monsters.

The situation was laden with ironic overtones; however, there was no irony in the expression of the man who was stalking her across her own room. All she could read in his face was a predatory, cold threat.

Compelled by some absurd conviction that the only way she’d retain control of the situation would be to stop retreating, Olivia came to a sudden, stubborn halt in the middle of the room, hands clenched stiffly at her sides.

He stopped too, just within her area of personal space.

Olivia’s eyes travelled reluctantly to his face. At twenty-two he had been amazingly magnetic in a potent, bad-boy way that had set the fourteen-year-old Olivia’s heart thumping erratically whenever her eyes had met those wicked grey-green ones. By the time she was seventeen the raffish appeal had altered to a tougher, more formidable fascination. Now time and experience had curbed and transmuted his raw intensity into a self-sufficient, hard-edged maturity.

He had always been disturbing; now he was dangerous.

Endeavouring to swallow her nervousness, she said crisply, ‘Hello, Drake.’

His unwavering eyes were instantly hooded by thick black lashes. The meagre light from the central bulb splintered into red-black sparks on his hair, refracting through the light mist of rain there; devil’s colouring, her mother used to say.

No, she wouldn’t think of her mother now.

‘Hello, Olivia.’ His deep voice was abraded by an attractively rough, sensual undemote that brought a world of memories flooding back—most of them tarnished by subsequent events.

Expediency dictated a polite response. ‘How are you?’

Distrusting his smile, resenting the leisurely survey that ranged the five feet six inches from her old slippers to the top of her honey-blonde head, Olivia had to suppress a swift angry reaction as he said suavely, ‘Curious, as you intended me to be. Your letter was practically guaranteed to bring me at a gallop.’

‘But it didn’t. I wrote over a fortnight ago.’

He smiled—not a nice smile. ‘I’ve been overseas. I came as soon as I could.’

She held out her hand, willing it not to tremble. After a taut moment his engulfed it. The brief, warm grip sent electricity up her arm and through every nerve cell in her body.

‘Thank you,’ she said simply, discovering that it was impossible to retrieve any composure while pinned by the steady, inimical gaze of those perceptive eyes, emotionless as quartz.

He looked around, his brows climbing as he took in the room. Stolidly Olivia suffered that unsettling scrutiny. She knew exactly what he was thinking: What on earth was Olivia Nicholls doing in a place like this?

Well, she’d done her best and she wasn’t ashamed of the flat. Nevertheless she braced herself for the comment she could see coming.

‘Sewing, Olivia?’

‘I’m very good at it,’ she said. ‘Until a couple of weeks ago I was a professional seamstress.’

‘What happened?’

‘The factory is moving to Fiji. It’s a lot cheaper to hire labour there.’ Losing her job had been the final straw; that was when she’d admitted she had no hope of saving the money she needed so desperately. Until then she’d thought she might make it. She tried not to let her bitterness and fear show in her voice, but his perceptive glance revealed that she hadn’t succeeded.

He continued his leisurely perusal of the room, and when she was so angry that she knew her cheeks were fiery, said evenly, ‘You still look just like a cheerleader.’

‘A—what?’

His mouth pulled up at the corners, but there was no amusement in his eyes. With a speculative irony that further ruffled her already shaky composure, he said, ‘A cheerleader. You must have seen them on television. In America they cheer the local teams on. Long-stemmed and open and vivacious, they look healthy and nice and sexy and athletic all at once. When you were seventeen I used to think you were cheerleader material.’

No cheerleader had a pale, thin face and hair that hung lankly around her neck because she couldn’t afford to get it cut.

‘It must be my Anglo-Saxon genes,’ she said, not hiding her resentment well enough. She hesitated, then went on without quite meeting his eyes, ‘Are you married?’

‘No,’ he said without expression, adding with suspicious gentleness, ‘But married or not, Olivia, I won’t easily be blackmailed.’

She shook her head indignantly. ‘That’s not what I—’

Something quick and ugly behind the screen of his lashes made her inhale sharply and lose the track of her reply. Although it took all of her courage she stood her ground, holding his gaze with a lifted chin and straight back, calling on a recklessness she hadn’t even known she possessed.

‘I’m not actually looking for a wife at the moment, if that’s what you had in mind.’ His tone was insulting, as was the look that accompanied it.

Of course she didn’t want to answer a slur like that, and of course the tide of colour that gave fleeting life to her pallor probably convinced him that that was exactly why she had written to him.

Since his sixteenth year Drake Arundell had been chased unmercifully—and not just by women his own age or impressionable adolescents. Now, with his potent, hard-edged appeal only slightly smoothed by superb clothes and an aura of power and sophistication, he probably had to shake women out of his sheets every night.

She was casting about for some suitable answer when he continued blandly, ‘What happened, Olivia?’

A meaningless smile pulled her lips tight. ‘My mother died.’

He displayed no emotion. All that could be said for him was that he was no hypocrite.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said distantly, the words a mere conventional expression of regret. ‘Why is Elizabeth Harley’s daughter, and Simon Brentshaw’s granddaughter, reduced to living like this?’

‘One of my grandfather’s pet hobbyhorses was his belief that it was extremely bad for young people to grow up knowing they had a cushion of money behind them. He thought it corrupted them. He told me right from the start that there wouldn’t be anything for me. I don’t know whether he left anything to my mother, but if he did none of it was handed on to me when she died,’ she said unemotionally.

He frowned. ‘I see. Well, it’s none of my business. Why did you write me that rather enigmatic letter?’

‘Simon was just over a year old when my mother died,’ she returned, leashing her anger and disillusion because she had to keep a cool head.

‘And who,’ he asked softly, ‘is Simon?’

She tamped down incipient hysteria. ‘Simon is your son.’

Astonishment glittered in the cold eyes before being banished so completely that she wondered whether she had seen aright. Oh, he was a brilliant actor! If she didn’t know better, she thought bitterly, she’d believe he hadn’t known of the child he’d fathered the year she was seventeen.

‘Ah,’ he said quietly. ‘No wonder you wanted me married! Not that it would have made any difference.’ His cold gaze wandered her body as he said scathingly, ‘I might have kissed you when you were seventeen, Olivia, and even done a little groping, but I never took you to bed. And nowadays, fortunately for me, I can prove that he’s no child of mine. If you persist with this farrago of lies I’ll have your bastard DNA-tested, and then I’ll prosecute you for attempted extortion.’

‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ she demanded, suddenly imbued with a strength she’d lacked during the past few months. ‘I wouldn’t have slept with you—’

‘You damned near did everything but sit up and beg for it! In the end I had to tell you that I wasn’t interested.’

She said in a quick, unsteady voice, ‘Simon is not my child! You know he’s my half-brother—and you’re his father!’

CHAPTER TWO

A TENSE silence enfolded them both. Stealing a glance at his face, Olivia could read nothing there except a chilly contempt.

‘And how do you know that?’ he asked in a lethal, silky tone.

‘Because my mother said so,’ she retorted, masking the rapid gut-punch of fear with scorn of her own. ‘She also told me that you knew about him, so it’s no use trying to pretend you had no idea of his existence.’

Olivia had been in love with Drake that long-ago summer when Simon was conceived, and even after his cruel rejection of an offer she hadn’t known she’d made she’d carried the memory of his kiss in some hidden, guarded place in her heart. Foolish and naive of her, but then at seventeen surely one was allowed to be foolish and naive about one’s first love?

It had taken the revelation of Simon’s parentage to destroy both. While she had been shyly, secretly falling in love with Drake, while he had been flirting with her, he had been sleeping with her mother.

Perhaps she could have forgiven him that, for Elizabeth had been radiantly beautiful, possessing a charm and sweetness that had drawn people to her all her life. But after that summer affair Drake had left them all to go to hell in their respective ways. His rejection of his son, his desertion of her mother, had set the seal on Olivia’s disillusion.

Even now he was refusing to admit that he had a child. Although his features were clamped into immobility, his eyes frozen beneath half-closed lids, she could feel his rejection like a palpable force in the room.

‘Start at the beginning,’ he said in a voice that made her jump, ‘and tell me exactly what she said.’

She hesitated, because that meant reopening scars she had hoped were healed. However, one glance told her that there was no disobeying the implacable command in his gaze. In a controlled, flat voice she said, ‘Simon was born about seven months after you left Springs Flat.’

‘I see. What makes you think he wasn’t your stepfather’s child? And don’t tell me he couldn’t have children. He had a daughter by his first wife. Ramona Harley left him and took her daughter back to America long before you came on the scene, but I remember her.’

Olivia looked down at her hands. ‘My mother said that she hadn’t slept with him for over a year,’ she said tonelessly.

‘She could have lied.’

Her head moved in sharp denial. ‘No. That’s what they were quarrelling about—he knew Simon wasn’t his.’

For all the interest he showed she might have been reciting her times tables. ‘How did your mother die?’

She turned her head away from those intimidating eyes. ‘She—she fell one night and hit her head on the corner of the table.’

‘So how did that lead to her daughter ending up in a place like this with her half-brother? Your stepfather is still alive, I believe.’

‘Yes.’ Shocked by the whispering feebleness of her reply, she stiffened her spine. Damn him, he had no right to interrogate her as though she were on the witness stand! ‘He—was unkind to Simon, so after my mother was—died—I took Simon away.’

His brows drew together. Astute eyes scanned her face in a merciless, unhurried survey. ‘And he let you go? Just like that? A seventeen—no, you’d have been eighteen—’

‘Does it matter?’ She glowered down at her hands, so tightly clasped that the knuckles were white. Her body language, she thought mordantly, couldn’t have been more explicit. Carefully she loosened her grip. He noticed, of course, those narrowed eyes following the betraying little movement.

Swiftly, defiantly, she said, ‘I was nineteen, actually. But however old I was, Simon is your son! As you’ll discover when you have him DNA-tested.’ She tried to hide the disdain in her tone, but feared she’d made a bad fist of it.

Although his eyes rested on her face with insulting indifference, she was sure that she could hear the smooth meshing of gears as his brain sorted out the information he needed. When he spoke she almost jumped again.

‘Tell me why you left your stepfather. And this time no rubbish about him not liking the child. I want the truth.’

Every muscle in her body tensed, but because she had rehearsed the answer the words came easily. ‘He resented Simon. I was afraid he’d hurt him.’

She held her breath, letting it out in a small huff of surprise when he demanded no further explanations. ‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘Why have you waited until now to contact me?’

‘You made it very obvious you didn’t want anything to do with either my mother or your son. Anyway, I didn’t know where you were. After your accident you dropped out of sight completely.’

‘So how did you find out where I was?’

She set her teeth. ‘I saw your photo in the paper.’

‘And you thought, Aha, here’s a pigeon ripe for the plucking—’

‘No! Simon has glue ear, damn you. Do you know what that means? He’s going deaf, and he can’t hear the teacher—can’t understand what she’s telling him, or the sounds she’s trying to teach him in reading. He needs grommets put into his eardrums to drain the ears and every day he waits he drops a little further behind at school.

‘They didn’t pick it up until he’d been at school for a year, so he’s already lost a lot of ground. His behaviour is getting worse too. He used to love school, but now he hates it because the other kids say he’s stupid and call him a dummy. He gets into fights and is disruptive, simply because he can’t hear and can’t keep up. The waiting list to have grommets put in is over a year, and I can’t afford to get it done privately.’

She knew she should tone her aggression down, sound moderate and demure and appealing, but when she thought of Simon’s bewildered suffering during the past year it was all she could do not to swear and shout and throw a tantrum.

‘Your devotion to the child is exemplary.’ He was watching her, his hard mouth compressed into a straight line, grey-green eyes opaque and unmoved. When he continued it was with unnerving precision. ‘But you’ve chosen the wrong man, Olivia. I’m not so conveniently weak I’d let you foist your child on me.’

‘He is not my child.’ Taking in a deep breath, she unclenched her tight jaw and said pleadingly, ‘Drake, please. You can’t turn away from your own son!’

‘You’re right,’ he agreed calmly. ‘I wouldn’t turn away from my own son. It was a nice try, Olivia, but you went about it the wrong way. If you’d written the usual begging letter I might have helped for old times’ sake.’ His eyes wandered openly down her body, returned with cool, speculative contempt to her pale face. ‘I don’t blackmail easily.’

Desperation drove her to say fiercely, ‘If you won’t help him I’ll go to the newspapers and tell them—’

His hands snaked out, catching her wrists in a grip so strong that she winced and cried out. Long fingers relaxing slightly, he said with a soft sibilance that was infinitely more frightening than a loud bluster could ever have been, ‘Stop right now.’

The tumultuous words died on her tongue. She dragged in a shaky breath, suddenly aware that she didn’t really know this man, that they were alone and she was weakened by illness.

Gripped by a sickening fear that she might have done something so irrevocable that all their lives would be marked by it, Olivia’s senses were on full alert; the skin across the back of her neck prickled and tightened, made preternaturally sensitive by her acute awareness of Drake Arundell’s fingers around her wrists. Shocked, she realised that she could smell him—a faint, infinitely troubling scent that set her nerve ends tingling.

Fight or flee, she thought, trying to calm the violent beating of her heart. She couldn’t flee, and intuition warned her that she risked more than she understood if she fought; no wonder tension iced her stomach and clouded her brain.

And then she heard Simon’s voice. ‘Liv!’ he shouted, clattering up the outside staircase. ‘Hey, Liv, guess what? There’s a cool Jag outside! I wonder...’

No! I’m not ready for this! Olivia thought feverishly, wrenching her hands free. Bending so that her face couldn’t be seen, she pretended to pick up a piece of thread from the floor, only straightening when Simon came tearing into the room, honey-gold hair tossing in the wind of his progress, golden-brown eyes sparkling with unaccustomed vitality.

‘...whose it is!’ he finished, skidding to a halt as he took in the tableau in front of him.

‘What are you doing home?’ she asked too sharply. ‘School hasn’t finished yet.’

‘Yes, it has so.’ He flushed, jutting his bottom lip.

Not now! she thought. He had gone through the ‘terrible twos’ with no sign of tantrums, but since his hearing had deteriorated they came frequently.

He thought better of it this time, though. ‘We had a concert and then they sent us home,’ he said, directing sideways looks at the man who was watching him impassively.

Later she’d make sure Simon hadn’t bunked school, but at that moment all she could say was, ‘This is Mr Arundell, Simon.’

‘Hello,’ Simon said, suddenly wary as a half-grown wolf cub. ‘I’m Simon Harley.’ He advanced into the room and looked uncertainly at Olivia.

Drake said, ‘How do you do, Simon?’ and held out his hand.

Cautiously Simon shook it. ‘How do you do?’ he replied, staring up in awe. ‘Is that your car down there?’

Olivia looked from the smooth childish features to the guarded face of the man who had just repudiated his son, and wondered whether she could see some resemblance.

No, none. Like her, Simon bore Elizabeth’s stamp.

And yet... An elusive tingle of memory teased her mind before escaping into oblivion.

‘It is,’ Drake Arundell said, all grey leached from eyes that were now pure green.

Olivia said quietly, ‘Darling, go and wash your hands—they’re filthy.’

‘What?’

She repeated the command in the clear, slightly nasal tone that seemed to get through best to him.

‘OK.’

He gave a respectful smile to Drake Arundell, who waited until the door into the bathroom had closed firmly behind him before saying in a low, level voice, ‘You can’t even claim he looks like me. He’s—’

In an equally muted voice Olivia interrupted, ‘We can’t talk now.’

His head came up as though she had struck him on the jaw. Inwardly quailing at the icy lack of emotion in his eyes, Olivia refused to back down; she stared him directly in the face, silently forbidding him to upset the child who was noisily splashing water over his hands in the bathroom.

‘We aren’t going to talk at all,’ he said curtly. ‘I fight dirty, Olivia. If you annoy me any more I’ll find a painful way to clip your claws.’ He swung around and strode out, long legs moving fast, the set of his broad shoulders and the way he held his head expressing anger and contempt.