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A frown wrinkled her lightly tanned brow. ‘Jordan? Jordan Pendragon—is that you?’
There was a small silence. ‘Roz?’
‘Jordan?’ She was fully awake now, wriggling out from under Luke’s heavy arm, meeting a gaze that sprang from sensuous approval to shrewd alertness as Luke registered the name on her lips. ‘Jordan, what’s going on?’
‘You’re five hours behind us...isn’t this rather early for you to be answering Luke’s phone?’ he countered curiously.
‘Maybe he’s keeping a better eye on me than you thought,’ she said bitingly. ‘Would you mind answering my question?’
Thousands of kilometres away Jordan sighed. ‘Now, Roz, you know how worried Olivia was about this letter business. All I did was ask a friend to discreetly watch over you—’
‘A friend?’ she repeated ominously, sharply slapping Luke’s hand away as he tried to remove the telephone from her ear. well, he and I knew each other quite well when I worked for the Corporation. He was the colleague I saw when you and I were at the airport. When I went over to say hello and found out that he was going to Tioman, well... I know what a straight-up guy he is—not street-smart but physically a tough cookie with a cautious brain that makes him cool-headed in a crisis—I’d trust his judgement of people any day of the week... so I told him about your stalking letters and how you refused to countenance protection and asked if he would mind keeping tabs on my favourite sister-in-law without making it too obvious what he was doing—’
‘Well, he certainly stuck to orders on that one,’ Rosalind grated, ignoring the blatant soft soap since she was Jordan’s one and only sister-in-law. Her eyes were chips of emerald ice as they froze on the culprit’s gri
m but unrepentant face. ‘And now you’ve decided your friend isn’t up to the job of minder after all?’
Tension crackled down the line. ‘No, it’s just not necessary any longer. I was going to ring you after I spoke to Luke.
‘Roz, they’ve found your letter writer; they’ve found Peter...’
CHAPTER NINE
ROSALIND went clammy, an ugly premonition crawling across her skin.
‘They?’
‘The police. He’s dead, Roz. He killed himself at his flat in Wellington a few weeks ago...but he was such an unsociable type that they only found the body yesterday. Peter Noble was his name. He took some sort of overdose on prescription medication, poor sod—they’re not sure whether it was deliberate or not, because there wasn’t any suicide note...’
Roz was vaguely aware of Jordan explaining the pitiful circumstances, and the fan paraphernalia, diaries and letters which led the police to approach the Marlows with their information.
Thank God they had nothing to connect Peter with Peggy through her, she thought, but she was sickened to realise that the police had dated his death at just days before that fateful meeting in the Wellington hotel. That might explain Peggy’s mentally disorganised behaviour that day. Had she known Peter was dead—was that what she had been trying so hard to warn Rosalind through the pain of her heart attack?
Perhaps she had somehow got into Peter’s flat and discovered his body, but had panicked at the prospect of reporting it, even anonymously. She might have been afraid to admit it to Rosalind, too—hence the elaborate, rambling lead-up. She would have been crazed with guilt and grief.
And ever since, all the time that Peggy had been lying unconscious in hospital, her son had been lying dead in his pathetic shrine to yet another woman from whom he had received nothing but rejection...
‘Oh, God!’ Rosalind curled over on herself on the bed, the morning sickness she’d thought she had beaten burning like acid in her throat.
‘Rosalind, what is it? What’s happened?’
Luke caught the telephone as it dropped from her suddenly nerveless grasp, his eyes on her white face as he lifted it, and after a short, staccato burst of speech conversed quietly with Jordan for several minutes. When he finally disconnected the call his face was as pale as Rosalind’s.
‘Roz—’ He touched her bowed back tentatively, as if he expected her to lash out at him, but she was too caught up in the vivid horror she had created in her mind to resist as he put his arms around her and lifted her curled-up body gently into his lap, his hand cupping the back of her skull, his fingers ruffling her cropped locks as he held her against his naked chest.
‘I was right to feel sorry for him, wasn’t I?’ she whispered, swamped by a fresh wave of guilt. ‘But I don’t feel sorry now; I just feel...relieved. Part of me is glad that he’s dead, because that solves my petty little problem!’ She hitched a half-sob into his strong shoulder, turning her face into the familiar musky scent of his skin. ‘Oh, God, Luke, what if it was deliberate? What if he did it because of me...?’
‘Shh, don’t torture yourself about it,’ Luke murmured, bending his head to brush his lips against her clammy forehead. ‘You can’t hold yourself responsible for the actions of a mentally disturbed stranger. Jordan said that he had a long history of psychiatric problems.’
‘But if I’d looked on his letters as a cry for help—’
‘Noble apparently had plenty of help over the years. He’d got very cunning at manipulating himself out of official programmes. You were his victim, Roz, not the other way around. He didn’t even see you as a person. He didn’t want you to know who he was because then he might have been forced to face the reality that he wasn’t part of your life and never would be.
‘He probably enjoyed the sense of power over you that his anonymity gave him and Jordan said that the police psychologist thought the things they found in his flat indicated a classic pattern of escalation. Sooner or later he would have felt the compulsion to act out his fantasies, and when he found that reality didn’t match up he would have resorted to violence to punish whoever had disappointed his craving. If he hadn’t been able to get access to you, he would probably have forced some other woman to act out your role...’
He dismissed each of Rosalind’s hectic ifs and buts with the same calm logic and then, when her initial shock had passed and she broke into a storm of weeping, he held her, rocked her, softly kissing away her tears until the passiveness of grief became the militancy of passion and she made love to him with a wild fervour that blotted out the pain and reaffirmed in the most elemental way her fierce commitment to life, love and the pursuit of happiness. He was gentle, accepting her desperate desire for sensual oblivion, tempering her wildness with his ready responses, allowing her to use him to exorcise her demons.
Afterwards, as she lay tucked in the security of his arms, the perspiration cooling on her skin, she said croakily, the words raw in the swollen tissues of her throat, ‘I should be furious with you.’
