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CHAPTER TWO
THEFLORIST, NOT PERCY, was waiting for Suzy when she crossed the road to walk into the picturesque little church. It was unusually cold for a spring evening and she shivered, wishing she had thought to put on a coat. The florist was in a hurry and had already positioned her arrangements by the time that Suzy arrived, leaving the bride to do nothing more than make her own few personal touches.
‘It looks wonderful,’ she told the older woman as she left, contriving a generous smile because it wasn’t the woman’s fault that Suzy was a less than happy bride-to-be. She hurried about tying small floral beribboned tokens to the ends of the pews. Her bridegroom had paid for everything and had spared no expense, although Suzy had not made a single extravagant choice for an event that she had feared taking place. Way back at the beginning, after his blackmailing start, though, Percy had been polite and reasonably pleasant but in recent months, as they got closer to the wedding, he had become terse and more difficult to deal with.
Sadly, however, her father’s debt would not be written off until she became Percy’s legally wedded wife. Could she honestly trust the older man to continue to respect the terms they had agreed, though? Right now, she was getting a little nervous about being alone with Percy behind closed doors, forced to tolerate his moods and hope for the best. Perhaps if she had been more sexually experienced she might have been less nervous of the older man, she reasoned uncertainly. Then she might have been more confident that she could accurately read his behaviour. But Suzy was a virgin, less from choice than from lack of opportunity, living in a small place where she met few single men.
Hearing a noise in the church porch, she grabbed her bag and went to switch off the lights, assuming it was Percy and wondering what on earth he wanted to see her about so late in the day. As she walked out into the dim porch, she was grabbed by both shoulders and flung back against the hard stone wall like a doll and a stifled shriek of fear erupted from her. She thought she was being attacked and then she saw Percy squaring up to her with a pugnacious face of fury.
‘What the heck?’ she began in disbelief.
Percy clamped a silencing hand to her mouth. ‘Standing there at the bar flirting with another man...making a fool of me, were you?’ he growled at her.
‘No, we weren’t flirting... I swear,’ she declared shakily, sincerely afraid of the way he was behaving and eager to placate him so that he would free her. ‘The silly man was still trying to persuade me to model for him—’
‘You’re lying, just like Barb did!’ he thundered down at her, unimpressed.
‘Who’s Barb?’ Suzy whispered, her spine and her head still stinging from that first rough meeting with the wall.
‘My first wife and I’m not having another one like her, running after all the men, making a mockery of me round the neighbourhood!’ he spat down at her, his eyes locked on her with what looked very like hatred to her frightened gaze.
‘Please let me go, Percy,’ Suzy whispered because, while Percy might not be a very tall man, he was built like an ox, square and stocky and strong. ‘This has got out of hand.’
‘Shut up...you don’t tell me what to do...ever!’ he launched down at her, slapping her across the face in a glancing blow that caused her head to strike the wall behind her again and extracted a gasp of pain from her pale lips. ‘Not so cheeky now, are you? I’ve been too soft with you.’
‘Let me go,’ Suzy urged between clenched teeth. ‘This is assault, Percy, and I won’t stand for it!’
And he laughed as though she had said the funniest thing he had ever heard.
‘What are you planning to do about it? Report me to the police when I can throw you and your dad out of this village any time I like? I own you just as I own all the businesses round here and don’t you forget it!’ Percy lifted his hands off her with an exaggerated flourish. ‘I’ve gone easy on you this time. Don’t let me see you flirting like that again!’
Suzy was so dizzy, she staggered as she slid back down the wall onto her own feet again. He was a frighteningly strong man because he had held her suspended all that time, but then she was a small and slender woman. As Percy slammed noisily into the car he had left parked across the street, she lifted her bag from where it had fallen and headed back home, praying her father would already be in bed. She massaged her aching head as she crept upstairs to her room. All of her ached from being thrown against the wall and her face was still stinging from that blow.
In the mirror she saw that she had had a nosebleed. She was in shock, trembling and staring at her drained and distraught face. She cleaned herself up in the bathroom, noting that her face was swollen while wondering how much make-up it would take to hide what might well be a bruise by morning. In her bra and pants she inspected her body and recognised the purple bruising already becoming visible on her arms and shoulders. She hugged herself and shuddered.
Percy had been married before and nobody local was aware of that fact. He was violent and territorial and had seen flirtation where none existed. But she still had to marry him, didn’t she? She had to have that debt cleared for her dad and, once that was achieved, if Percy laid his hands on her again she would go to the police. On that decision she went to bed.
In the morning she went by rote through her bridal preparations. Her gown was all lace, ribbons and glittering crystals because Percy had instructed her to buy ‘something fancy’ and the ultra-feminine frills were the sort of thing that Percy deemed fancy. Fortunately, the long sleeves hid her bruises and cosmetics took care of her bruised cheekbone. But as she finally looked at herself in the mirror it was as if she were only then emerging from a waking nightmare: suddenly she knew she couldn’t go through with the wedding—not for her dad, not for any reason could she face marrying a man who clearly believed that it was his right to beat her up.
‘Hey, love, I’m just off down to the off-licence for later... OK? I’ll only be half an hour,’ her father told her from outside the door. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’
She yanked open the door and gave him a hug. ‘I love you,’ she told him, but she didn’t have the courage to tell him that she was about to leave Percy at the altar. She would write a note but there could be no explanation because her father would kill Percy if he knew what he had done to his daughter and she didn’t want to cause a fight in which her much smaller father might get hurt.
She was going to run. She had no car, not even a bike and very little money, her brain reminded her. Where was she planning to go? What she was hoping to do? But just at that moment the practicalities honestly didn’t matter to her. All that mattered to her was that she had finally made a decision and that there would be less dangerous fallout all round if she simply vanished. In haste she wrote a note to her father, telling him that she was sorry, but she simply couldn’t go through with the wedding and that she’d phone him as soon as she was able. No note necessary for Percy. When she failed to show he would know that he had shown his true colours too clearly to her the night before. She kicked off her bridal heels and reached for her biker boots.
As she was bending over, tightening the multicoloured laces, her attention fell on the window and the view across to the church. She saw Percy climbing out of his car in a dark suit and then turning to stare across at the pub. Why was he arriving so early for the ceremony? Did he already suspect that she might not turn up?
Sheer dread grabbed Suzy as she wondered if he would try to see her, check on her. Her stomach heaved with nausea, her brow banged with stress. The bag she had been planning to pack, the clothing she had been meaning to change into...it all totally fled her mind and panic took over instead, washing away every other consideration, including common sense. Grabbing her bag, she pulled out her purse and extracted what cash she had within it. Thrusting the banknotes she had down the front of her dress into her bra, she simply ran down the stairs and out into the beer garden, which was surrounded by the dense woods that ringed the village. She had run wild in those woods as a child and, even in the cold air with actual snowflakes starting to fall, they had never looked more enticing to her than they did at that moment.
Hoisting her full skirts high round her legs, Suzy ran for the cover of the trees. Behind her she heard the echo of the doorbell seemingly thundering through the flat and she felt sick, grateful that she had run rather than taking the risk of hanging back to face Percy again. She didn’t owe him that courtesy. If he had felt violent the night before he would feel even more violent when she told him she wasn’t coming to the church. And no man was ever going to hit her again!
‘Something’s set off one of the motion sensors on the fence,’ Ruy’s security phoned to inform him. ‘It’s probably an animal but it would be safest if you stayed indoors, sir, and let us handle this.’
Reflecting on the state-of-the-art security he had originally set up to ensure his privacy rather than his personal security, Ruy almost rolled his eyes. He had not wanted security of any kind with him, but so successful had he become in his role at Valiente Capital that his insurers now wanted him protected everywhere he went. He had been forced to build the necessary accommodation for bodyguards even though in his opinion the chances of a kidnapping deep in the wilds of Norfolk, where he was entirely unknown, were extremely low.
‘It’s fine. I’ll handle it myself,’ he imparted before dealing with the polite attempt to argue that inevitably followed.
He slung on a thick coat and scarf because the temperature had dropped radically once it began snowing. Snow and it was almost May, he reflected in wonderment; what a barbarous climate that could go from spring one day back to winter the next! He had bought hundreds of acres of woodland with the house and had surrounded it with an impenetrable security fence. Reflecting on the peaceful beauty of his surroundings with satisfaction, he jumped into his four-wheel drive and drove down the track into the woods, parking a few minutes later to get out and stride through the trees to head for the west sector of the fence, which lay nearest the village.
