her straight home. When she reached the flat it was to find it besieged with reporters and police, and none of them had been gentle with her. ‘Kieron Blake’s informant,’ was how one paper described her. Others were less kind. Susan had returned from the country with her parents. Sir Arthur had been deliberately cruel and remorseless, and at the end of the week her boss suggested that because of the notoriety, it might be as well if she found another job. She worked in a solicitors’ office, and as he explained in great embarrassment, clients might not feel they could trust a firm which employed a girl known to have betrayed a friend’s trust.
She had wanted to scream that it hadn’t been like that, but pride held her silent. Her only crime was that she had believed herself loved; stupidly, criminally, foolish of her perhaps, but she had not and never would have breathed a word of anything that might have deliberately been construed as breaking a trust.
The police had questioned her for hours, and when Sir Arthur died from a heart attack just before the case came to court she had received an avalanche of poison pen letters. That was when she had decided to change her name.
For three months she had endured absolute hell, and not once in all that time had she heard a word from Kieron—neither of compassion, nor regret, not even of acknowledgement of what he had done. She had not tried to contact him. Pride alone had sustained her through the horror of it all, but her trust, her faith, and her innocence were smashed beyond repair.
The office door swung open, banishing the past. She looked up quickly, her eyes freezingly disdainful. Kieron had always been tall, but now he was broader than she remembered, filling the small space, his eyes deeply and darkly contemptuous as they looked at the open telephone directory. One lean finger ran smoothly down the page, stopping unerringly against the number of the employment agency.
‘No luck?’ he drawled sardonically. ‘Too bad.’
Briony forced herself not to respond, her eyes carefully blank as she removed the directory and put a piece of paper in her typewriter.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Blake.’
‘Mr Blake?’ he sneered coldly. ‘Oh, come on, surely we needn’t be so formal—Beth!’
The last word was said softly, almost a taunt, and Briony swung round, her eyes blazing with anger and contempt.
‘Don’t call me that!’ she snapped.
‘Why not? It’s your name.’
‘Not any longer,’ Briony told him crisply. How dared he deliberately remind her of the past! ‘I left it behind me.’
‘How convenient.’ Kieron had his back to her, his dark head bent over some papers, ‘Tell me, Briony, did you bring anything of Beth with you, when you decided to trade personalities?’
‘Not a thing,’ Briony assured him shortly. Why was he plaguing her with these questions, resurrecting memories she would rather had remained forgotten?
‘That’s a pity. At least she was a warm, living, breathing woman.’
‘Who you destroyed!’
The words were out before she could stop them, and Kieron’s eyes narrowed sharply as he swung round and stared at her.
‘What makes you say that?’
Sheer disbelief held her rigidly silent. How could he stand there and ask her that? Hadn’t he deliberately and coldbloodedly used her, and then when he had got his story, simply dropped her? He knew how she had felt about him—she had never made the slightest attempt to hide it. He was an intelligent man; he must have known how she would react, how shocked and distressed she would be. She had learned from a photographer who had worked with him, and whom she had bumped into by accident three months after he had left, that his career was flourishing. He had been posted abroad somewhere, although where the photographer had not said.
‘So, nothing of the Beth I knew remains?’ Kieron persisted.
He was watching her intently and Briony felt like a helpless little fly being pursued by a particularly relentless spider. What did he want? An admission of how close he had come to completely destroying her, to gloat over?
‘Nothing,’ she told him emotionlessly.
His anger seemed to explode over her.
‘Don’t lie to me, Briony!’ he gritted furiously, ‘I saw your face when you walked into that office and saw me sitting there. You hate my guts, don’t you. Don’t you?’ he demanded when she refused to answer.
‘Haven’t I the right?’ Her hands were curled into two small fists. ‘After what you did.…’
For a long moment he said nothing, merely watching her in a way that made Briony shiver with apprehension. Why should he examine her with such contempt? He was the one at fault. He was the one who….
‘You’re quite right,’ he said softly, cutting across her bitter thoughts. ‘The Beth I knew has gone completely. You’re quite a woman, aren’t you, Briony? A woman of iron and steel, according to the office grapevine. The Beth I knew would never have held on to a grudge so tightly, nor become so bitter. But then the Beth I thought I knew never.…’ He broke off and without warning leaned over her, watching her eyes spit defiance. It was only when he kept on coming, and Briony eventually shrank back, that she thought she saw some emotion flicker deep in the narrowed eyes, but it was gone almost instantly, his expression withdrawn as he said curtly, ‘You’re perfectly safe. You’ve made your point, but I don’t intend working with a secretary who looks at me as though I’ve crawled out from under a particularly slimy stone. So if I were you I’d have another look at this.’ He dropped the directory he had removed from the shelf behind her on to her desk with a derisive smile, and started to walk towards the door.
‘One thing at least hasn’t changed,’ he said unkindly, pausing to watch the wary expression creep into her eyes. ‘At least not if all the gossip one hears is correct. It seems you still enjoy turning men on and then freezing them off. With one notable exception.’
Briony gasped at the unfairness of the accusation, and the cynical, twisted smile which had accompanied his last words, and was just about to demand an explanation when Kieron added acidly:
‘You’ve made how you feel about me quite plain, Briony. You hate and loathe me, right?’
When she didn’t comment, he breathed out sharply, anger etched deep in his face.
‘God, you must want to keep this job very badly!’
‘Very badly,’ Briony agreed coolly, hoping that her voice wouldn’t betray anything that she was feeling. How on earth she was going to work for Kieron and keep her sanity she did not know, but work for him she must.
‘So that you can be with Matt?’
Before Briony could get over the shock of the accusation, Kieron was saying with bitter contempt, ‘Is that what your taste runs to these days? He’s not a man, he’s a babe in arms!’
Briony went white, but Kieron had already turned away. She fumbled for a piece of paper and put it in her typewriter, her fingers rattling over the keys in an even staccato rhythm, but the typewritten words were blurred by a mist of tears she was powerless to control.
IT was after seven when Briony stepped wearily off the bus at the end of her road. There had been a last-minute panic necessitating recall of an article and she had worked late to help Doug get the crisis sorted out. The adrenalin flow which had helped her through the day had abated, leaving her feeling drained and exhausted. Her feet dragged as she walked up the tree-lined avenue. It had been a perfect spring day, and now as long golden shadows fell across the pavement the last liquid notes of birdsong filtered sweetly through the air.
She had a long way to commute, but she had particularly wanted a house