‘He offered you that?’ Sophie dropped into her chair. It was an obscene amount of money, but what she’d been doing with Daniel while he’d been plotting to rid himself of her brother and this marriage was more obscene.
She’d slept with him, practically offered herself to him.
And, all the while he’d been pretending to go along with the plans she’d been making, he was busy planning to ensure the wedding never happened.
‘That was just the opening gambit,’ her brother continued. ‘I told him to get lost and he’s upped the offer to a cool million now.’
Something squeezed tight in her chest. This couldn’t be happening. Why would Daniel want her here, organising a wedding he was busy trying to ensure would never happen? She’d actually believed he was coming round to the idea.
Yet hadn’t Daniel practically boasted how he’d got rid of Monica’s previous boyfriends?
Despite everything, despite all she knew and suspected, she still had to ask the question. ‘You’re sure it’s Daniel?’
‘Oh, yeah. It’s him. And this thug who calls himself security—Jo Dimitriou—I know him, but I didn’t know he was working for Caruana now. I’ve got this really bad feeling about him. Watch out for him. He’s dangerous.’
And Daniel wasn’t? Jo gave her the creeps, she was the first to agree, but who was the more dangerous—the man who offered you money at someone else’s behest, or the man who made you believe in one thing when he was busy destroying everything you were trying to build up while you were looking the other way? ‘I should have warned you, Jake. He’s done this before—offered money, I mean—to get rid of Monica’s boyfriends.’
‘Bastard! Monica told me she was beginning to think if there was something wrong with her, not being able to hold onto a man.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Stay here for now. I figure Monica’s better off out of it. I haven’t told her yet. She thinks the sun shines out of her darling brother.’
‘I understand.’
‘Listen, Sophie, I’ve told this Jo guy no. There’s clearly no way Caruana’s going to listen to me, but if he hears it from you he might actually believe it. Can you tell him? Tell him to save his efforts? It doesn’t matter what he offers me, the answer’s still no. Tell him I’m marrying his sister, whether he likes it or not.’
Sophie put the phone down, her mind numb, her body in shock, and a great, gaping hole where her heart should have been. She’d thought she’d been wrong about him. She’d thought it had been the shock of the wedding announcement that had turned him into a raging monster that first day, and that he was coming round—had come round—to accepting that the wedding would go ahead. Bit by bit, he’d seemed to soften.
Or was that her? Falling into his bed and wanting to believe he was different, so that her first impressions had been wrong. Seduced by sex until she’d believed the monster was the lie, that the man was better than that.
When clearly he’d been a monster all along.
She looked around the office: at the pictures she’d stuck up on the walls; at the various lists that seemed to cover every horizontal surface; at the samples of stationery and swatches of fabrics she had for colour matching.
Daniel had no intention of this wedding going ahead. So what was she even doing here?
From down the hallway came the sound of voices and she had to fight the sudden urge to retch.
Daniel was home.
It had been the day from hell. A bank in one of his shopping centres had been host to a hold up, there’d been another blow-up with the Townsville negotiations, which meant he’d have to head back up there first thing tomorrow, and Jo had been giving him grief about upping Fletcher’s offer again in the wake of this latest rejection. And the worst thing about that was the random thought he’d had that maybe Fletcher’s reluctance to accept an offer meant Fletcher really did love his sister. He’d shoved the idea away as quickly as it had arisen, but the sick feeling had lingered all afternoon.
If he hadn’t had Sophie to come home to, there would have been nothing to make the day worth living.
Millie handed him a beer and he chugged half of it down before drawing breath. ‘Thanks, I needed that,’ he said, looking around, surprised Sophie wasn’t hanging around the kitchen where he usually found her this time of day. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.
‘Still working in that office of hers, I imagine. Probably didn’t hear you come in. Why don’t you go and pry her away from that computer? She’s been in there all day.’