Fragments, p.1
His Other Woman, page 1
HIS OTHER WOMAN
VALERIE KEOGH
For David Purkiss
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Thank you!
More from Valerie Keogh
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Valerie Keogh
The Murder List
About Boldwood Books
1
LYDIA
It was still dark when I opened my eyes so I wasn’t sure how long I’d been unconscious. My cheek was pressed into the thick pile of the carpet, and my head felt like it had been cracked open. I tried to sit up but the pain was excruciating, making me cry out and give up the attempt. Without moving, I could see where Rich lay on the floor a few feet away. He was looking in my direction, his arm extended, his hand close enough that I was able to reach for it. I wrapped my fingers around his and squeezed gently.
‘Rich? You okay?’
He didn’t answer. Nor did his fingers return the pressure on my hand. Worst of all – what made my eyes fill and a lump appear in my throat so that I swallowed convulsively – he didn’t blink.
I was a crime fiction fan. TV or books, it didn’t matter, I devoured them all. I particularly liked true-crime documentaries with their detailed explanation of the misdeed and the hunt for the perpetrator. Like a sponge, I’d absorbed knowledge along the way. So even in my shock, with my face still pressed to the floor and pain radiating from the back of my skull to blur my vision, I knew why he wasn’t blinking. I recognised the nauseating stink that curled into my nostrils for what it was.
Rich was dead.
There was something else. It was hovering at the back of my mind, something important I was supposed to do… something… but whatever it was, it kept bouncing out of my grasp.
Gritting my teeth, I raised myself enough to look around the spacious hotel room. I’d spent hours on the website assessing the various options before choosing it. It was the wrong time to wish I’d made a different choice, that I’d chosen a compact room instead, one where a shout might be heard in the room next door or in the corridor outside. One where the phone wasn’t taunting me from the console on the far side of the room.
A tentative effort to get to my feet, even to sit, failed. The pain made my head swim, my vision blurring even further. Raising a hand, I felt a warm, wet mass tangling my hair. It explained the pain, the confusion, and my inability to remember what it was I was supposed to do, because I was suddenly certain there had been something… but whatever it was, it was lost in my injuries.
I was hurt, but I was alive. A grim determination to ensure I stayed that way made me inch forward towards the phone.
Every movement sent my head swimming. I pushed Rich’s arm out of the way and shuffled a few inches forward. As I came level with him, I stopped, ignored the pain and rose on my forearms to gaze into his face. Perhaps I’d been wrong. Perhaps it was the air-conditioning that had made his body stiff and cold. ‘Rich?’ I rested a hand against his cheek. ‘Rich?’ I slapped him, gently at first, then harder, the sound of flesh on flesh loud in the quiet. Tears blurred my vision even more.
I collapsed onto his shoulder and pressed my face into the curve of his neck. It would have been nice to think of happier times when I’d done the same, of days lying on the beach or in the fields after a picnic, but my imagination had never been that good. I’d always been the prosaic type, the doer and organiser, the facts person, not the dreamer.
Rich was dead. I was hurt – how badly, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps I could simply stay there resting on him until housekeeping came in to service the room mid-morning. They’d get me help then. My eyes closed and I felt myself drift away. Head injuries could be fatal. It didn’t need a vivid imagination to picture housekeeping turning up to find our dead bodies. But I’d gone through too much to give up now. Had worked way too hard to lose everything at this stage. The thought galvanised me.
The quickest way across to the phone was blocked by Rich. In death, as in life, he was a big man. Six-foot two of solid muscle, impossible to move. I rose onto my elbows, ignoring the instant dart of pain, and looked down at his face. A strong face. Handsome in a rugged, masculine way. There was always a twinkle in his eye, as if he was secretly laughing at you. I’d found it incredibly sexy. Until somewhere in the last few years, and I’m not sure when, that twinkle seemed to have died. Instead, when he looked at me, there had been something else lurking in his eyes, a certain hardness, almost a resignation that this was it: he was stuck with me. And somewhere in those same years, I seemed to have given up and become just the kind of woman I’d never wanted to be: pathetic, drab, and boring.
It was a bad time and way too late to have regrets, but I had them all the same. If only we’d sat down and talked when we’d first started to fall apart, perhaps we wouldn’t have done. I rested my hand against Rich’s face. Perhaps if he’d told me everything when we’d first met, things would be different. But he hadn’t, so they weren’t. He was dead; I might be dying.
The phone was tantalisingly close, but so far away. If I could have stood, I’d have stepped over Rich’s body, but even propping myself on an elbow was taking its toll. When black dots shimmered across my vision, I knew I was going to faint. I lowered myself to the carpet but it took several seconds for the sensation to fade. I couldn’t stand to step over my dead husband, and even if his body didn’t look like an insurmountable mountain, I couldn’t have brought myself to crawl over him.
Instead, I began to make my way around him. Inch by agonising inch. The carpet was against me, its thick pile slowing my progress as I pulled myself forward on my elbows, shutting my eyes against the pain. Blood trickled from the wound in my head, through my hair and down my forehead. I wiped it from my eyes and licked it from my lips and tried not to be too concerned when it kept coming.
They’d have to replace the carpet. The random thought brought me to a halt and I lowered myself to the floor once again, my forehead sinking into the soft pile. What did it say about me that I was lying inches away from my dead husband with an injury that might prove fatal, and my first thought was for the state of the carpet?
How terribly banal I was.
My eyes were heavy. According to all those crime series and documentaries I’d watched, it was a bad sign when someone became sleepy after a head injury. A bad sign… but I couldn’t help it… Maybe, after all, it was better this way… Maybe, this was a better end than the one I’d planned… Maybe…
When the next blow came, it was almost a relief.
2
EIGHT WEEKS EARLIER
‘I swear, I didn’t know—’
‘Well, now you do. Every detail of what I went through because of you. So you know how much you owe me, don’t you?’
‘I—’
‘Don’t!’ Anger made the word vibrate. ‘Don’t you dare insult me by making excuses. This is the only thing I’m ever going to ask of you. Do it, then you’ll never hear from me again.’
‘Right.’ A loud sigh followed. ‘It’s not going to be easy—’
‘No, but you’ll do it, yes?’
‘Yes, I will.’ Another sigh, longer, filled with guilt and regret. ‘I owe you.’
3
FIONA
Fiona Carlton swirled her gin and tonic, making the ice cubes tinkle and the slice of lemon fight to stay afloat. ‘Never wanted to be that girl,’ she said, staring into the glass.
‘Sounds like a line from a song,’ her friend Jocelyn said.
‘It is. Well, the title of a song, to be accurate. A Carly Pearse one. It could have been written about me.’ So much so that Fiona had played the song on repeat when she’d discovered the man she was seeing – a man she was already falling in love with – was married. It didn’t matter that she’d always known. Perhaps not from their first encounter, but certainly from that first evening.
Never wanted to be that girl.
Perhaps if she’d met Rich in the usual way. In one of the wine bars she frequented, or through one of the many dating apps she’d tried when her friends told her she had to join the twenty-first century. They’d insisted it was the only way, the modern way, and totally acceptable. But she hadn’t met him that way. She’d met him by accident. Literally. She’d been rushing to a meeting with a client, later than she’d hoped, and was desperately trying to read her notes as she speed-walked along the street.
Her head down as she rounded the corner, she’d crashed straight into a man coming the opposite direction. With a cry of alarm, her carefully collated notes had flown one direction and she went the other. A nearby wall had saved her from falling to the pavement. She’d hit it with a grunt, immediately bending to scrabble around her feet for the pages that had come unstuck and were in danger of being swept away. Unfortunately, she’d leant down at the same time as the man she’d walked into, and they’d knocked heads.
‘Ouch, fuck.’ She straightened and put a hand to her forehead.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, bending again to collect her paperwork and hand it to her. ‘It was getting a bit Laurel and Hardy there, wasn’t it?’
She’d have said Fawlty Towers herself, but maybe it was an age thing. She took the folder he’d handed her, shuffled the pages back inside the cover and hoped she’d have time to get them in order before her appointment.
‘I think you have it all,’ he said, bringing her eyes to him.
She was good at assessing people quickly. A smart coat over a sharp suit, crisp, white shirt, elegant tie – silk, she guessed – dark hair, greying at the temples. Distinguished was the word she’d have used if she’d been asked to describe him. She’d have said handsome too, and as she noticed the twinkle in the grey eyes, she added sexy.
‘Yes,’ she said.
He smiled then. Not just a polite upward tilt of his lips, but a full, teeth-baring, face-splitting smile. ‘Yes, you’ll have a drink with me?’
Colour crept over her cheeks. She considered herself immune to every chat-up line she’d ever heard – and she’d heard many – but there was something about this man. She didn’t believe in love at first sight, but lust, that was a different matter and she was old enough, wise enough, to acknowledge exactly what it was that had flared between them. Unadulterated lust.
‘That’s not possible—’
He held the smile, tilting his head a little. ‘Because you can’t, or because you don’t want to?’
Because you’re way too sure of yourself. Because you might just as well have dangerous tattooed across your forehead. Because I’m old enough to know better.
‘I have an appointment.’ She tilted her wrist to check the gold watch that circled it. ‘In five minutes, to be exact.’
‘And after?’
He was persistent. With no dimming of his smile, or in the pronounced twinkle in his eyes. She glanced at his left hand. He was wearing gloves so she couldn’t check to see if he was wearing a ring.
‘A coffee, or a glass of wine? I’ll leave the choice to you.’ His smile faded, the light in his eyes dimming a little as he waited for her reply. ‘To make up for almost knocking you over.’
Almost knocking her over. Weakening her defences. Making her say, ‘Yes, okay, a glass of wine would be nice,’ when she really, really should have laughed, shaken her head and moved on.
His smile returned. Full-on. He pointed to the street ahead. ‘Do you know Dexters?’
It was a wine bar she knew well. Lots of polished wood, small, comfortable booths, flattering lighting. It was a perfect assignation spot and she instantly had a change of heart.
‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.’ There was no maybe about it. It was a very bad idea. This kind of man, so confident in his skin, so damn sexy, brimming with charisma, he was the type of man she should run from. She was definitely old enough to know better, but also, stupidly, old enough to think she could handle this. Later, she’d wonder if that had been her first mistake.
He reached out, tapped her arm gently with a hand. ‘It’s just a glass of wine. Don’t overthink it.’
He was right. Of course he was. It was just a glass of wine. A welcome drink after what had been one of those days when anything that could possibly have gone wrong had done. She made one last attempt to put him off, one more attempt to save herself. ‘I won’t be free for at least an hour.’
‘An hour?’ He flicked the cuff of his shirt back and frowned at his watch. ‘Actually, that works perfectly.’ The smile returned. ‘Dexters in an hour. I’ll be waiting.’
He was gone before Fiona could change her mind. Because she was about to. She shook her head, glanced quickly at the contents of the folder she’d dropped, reshuffled some pages, then resumed her journey. She’d get through this meeting, then catch a taxi home. Have a bath, get cosy, have a glass of wine and watch something mindless on TV.
That was what she’d do.
It was what she should have done.
Instead, she’d gone to Dexters. When she went inside, he was there, sitting on a stool, his eyes fixed on the door, a smile spreading when he saw her. He got to his feet and walked towards her, closing in to kiss her on both cheeks, as naturally as if they’d known each other for a long time. She caught the scent of him, clean, earthy, masculine, and felt a jolt of desire. She had enough self-awareness to recognise the sensation for what it was. Nothing wrong with it. She was thirty-eight, in the full of her health. Desire was a natural reaction to a handsome, sexy man.
It was what you did with the sensation that mattered.
And she wasn’t planning on doing anything.
She thought back to that first encounter and swirled the ice cubes around in her glass again as she felt Jocelyn’s eyes on her. There’d be sympathy in them. Perhaps even pity. They’d been friends for a long time, had shared tears over disastrous relationships: men who had broken Fiona’s heart, women who’d broken Jocelyn’s.
Fiona stopped playing with her drink and swallowed half in a couple of mouthfuls. ‘It was just supposed to be a glass of wine. His apology for almost knocking me over.’
One drink had led to another, and another, he laughing that they should have bought a bottle, she wondering where her willpower had parked itself. Dexters did food, but nothing either of them fancied, so he suggested they go to a restaurant he knew. ‘It’s not far; we could walk,’ he’d said.
‘It’s Friday night; we won’t get a table.’
‘Of course we will,’ he’d said, with a certainty she quickly came to understand was the way he approached everything. As if the world wouldn’t dare to let him down.
A part of her wanted him to be proved wrong, for them to be turned away when they walked through the door of a very upmarket restaurant. But not only were they offered a table, but the maître d’ had greeted him by name and with a deferential manner that only came from knowledge – and from money.
