‘HAVE you just come here to gloat, Falcon?’ her father’s voice rasped disgustedly. ‘Do you find some nefarious pleasure in watching your victims in their last death throes?’

She had been sleeping unobserved behind the curtains of the seated bay window in her father’s study when the two men had entered the room a short time ago, had gone there to hide from Nanny and the lessons she had intended giving her. Having been sent home from boarding-school, because she had fallen victim to the outbreak of mumps that had stricken almost half the pupils of the school, it was completely unfair, she had thought, that she had to do lessons at home now that she felt a little better but was still contagious. There had to be some advantage to being sick, she had decided! And so she had hidden in the one place she knew Nanny would never think to look for her—her father’s study—and then she had fallen asleep in the hot sun that shone through the huge window on this clear May day.

But she hadn’t slept for long, her father’s voice, raised in anger—something she had rarely known from the charmingly mild-mannered man during her nine years of life—easily intruding into her slumbers.

‘You chose this way, Howard.’ The man who answered her father’s impassioned accusation spoke so softly that she could barely hear him, and yet still she could feel the power in his words.

‘What other choice did you leave me?’ her father scorned with obvious contempt for the other man. ‘You’ve taken it all, haven’t you, Falcon? My business, my home, my—— My God, you couldn’t even leave me my pride, couldn’t do that, could you? My God, men like you make me sick!’

Whatever initial guilty thoughts she might have had of revealing her presence behind the curtain had faded almost as quickly as they came into her head; her father wouldn’t like the idea of her eavesdropping—accidentally or otherwise—on what was obviously a very private conversation, but from the little she had already heard she knew he would be even less pleased now if she were to step out and reveal that she had heard anything at all. She might only be nine years old, but she knew this conversation was very serious indeed.

Chalford, her home, the only one she had ever known, gone? To this man, this stranger, a man she couldn’t even see properly?

She had tried to look at him around the edge of the long wine-coloured velvet drapes, but she was too frightened of being discovered to put her head out too far. All she had was an impression of size and power—oh, what power!—that seemed to emanate from his very stillness.

He seemed to turn in her direction at that moment, as if sensing he was being observed, and she quickly ducked back behind the cover of the curtain, her breath caught in her throat as she waited in terrified expectation for a hand to reach out and drag her from her hiding place to face the full force, not just of Nanny’s displeasure at the way she had hidden from her so that she shouldn’t do those awful lessons, but her father’s wrath at her behaviour too. And his disappointment in her would be much harder to bear than Nanny’s scolding…

But as the seconds ticked by on the grandfather clock that stood against one wall of her father’s study, and no hand reached out for her, she slowly began to breathe again.

Once again the reply to her father’s accusation was made quietly. ‘No one twisted your arm, Howard,’ the man dismissed calmly. ‘You did it all yourself.’

‘Oh, yes, of course I did,’ her father scoffed scathingly. ‘How easy it is for men like you to set traps for gullible men like me——’

‘Greedy men like you,’ he was corrected harshly, ‘who blame everyone but themselves, the only real culprit, for their mistakes!’

She was filled with fury against this man. How dared he talk to her beloved father like that? She wanted to go out there and kick his shins for him, demand that he apologise to her father, who had to be the cleverest, most wonderful man in the world.

But before outrage could overcome good sense her father answered the man. ‘The only mistake I ever made was in believing I could trust you!’ he said self-disgustedly. ‘Oh, get out, will you, Falcon?’ He suddenly sounded very weary. ‘Chalford isn’t yours yet, not until the dust has settled and the lawyers say it is, and until that happens you aren’t welcome in my home. Now get out, Falcon,’ he repeated harshly. ‘And take Janette with you.’

Janette? Why on earth would her stepmother want to leave with this hateful man, a man her father obviously hated? None of this made any sense to her.

‘I don’t want your wife, Howard,’ the other man told him hardly. ‘I never did.’

‘Served her purpose, has she?’ her father said with knowing contempt. ‘Well, I don’t want her any more either!’

‘That’s between the two of you,’ the other man dismissed without emotion. ‘I’m only interested in——’

‘I know why you’re here, Falcon,’ her father cut in heatedly. ‘And I’ve told you, you have everything else—the house you’ll have to wait for. And much joy may it give you every time you think of how it came into your possession!’ There was the sound of the door behind wrenched open. ‘I’ve asked you to leave twice; if I have to do so again I’ll call in the police and have you forcibly removed—I wonder how that would look in newsprint?’

There was silence for several long-drawn-out seconds after this direct challenge, and she suddenly realised she was holding her breath again, this time without even knowing she had been doing it. She didn’t understand half the conversation she had unwittingly

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Elusive Obsession Carole Mortimer

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

Elusive Obsession

Carole Mortimer