Act of Betrayal by Sara Craven Read Free Book Online Page A

it,' he said. 'Why else would they have come to
    us?' He made it sound unanswerable, but Laura had an uneasy
    feeling that it was not. She said quietly, 'Uncle Martin—I only
    wish I knew,' and left the room, closing the door quietly behind
    her. From the windowseat in her room, she watched the cars begin
    to arrive for the party. She had no choice. She'd rung Alan's
    cottage twice in the intervening period, but had received no
    answer. So—she would wait up here until she saw his car, and
    persuade him to slip away quietly, without getting involved.
    She'd done a lot of hard thinking while she was waiting, but none
    of the conclusions she'd reached were very happy ones. Uncle
    Martin was a worried man, and had been for sometime, and like
    other worried men he was prone to clutch at straws. But that
    didn't mean that Jason had walked back into their lives with a
    lifeline. He, she thought soberly, had no reason to love
    Caswells, or wish to do them any favours. She had tried many
    times to blot out of her mind the agonising bitterness of that
    last scene between them. No-one should pay too much credence to
    things said or done in savage anger, she told herself. But that
    didn't alter the fact that one of the last things Jason had said
    to her was that he would make Martin Caswell pay for his role in
    the breach between them. She tried to reassure herself that it
    had simply been said in the heat of the moment. Tried to tell
    herself that however cynically immoral his behaviour, Jason was
    not a vengeful man. Or was he? What did she know of him, after
    all? What had she ever known? she asked herself despairingly. In
    the early days of their relationship, she'd probed, trying to
    establish details about his childhood, upbringing, education,
    family—all the things which had contributed to make the man
    she'd fallen in love with. But he'd always blocked her questions
    abruptly, telling her the past didn't matter—that it was only
    the present and the future which counted. In fact, she'd assumed
    he had no family—that his reluctance to discuss his former life
    stemmed from the fact that he'd been brought up in a children's
    home, or similar institution. The discovery that his parents were
    both living had only been the first of the shocks which had torn
    their married life apart., And now, he was back and in a position
    of power. A position where he could hurt Caswell as easily as he
    could extend a helping hand. It would be fatally easy for him to
    encourage her uncle's company to rush Fibrona into production,
    then back out at the last moment. Easy and potential financial
    devastation for Caswells. If he wanted revenge for the
    humiliation that the discovery of his double fife, and the
    subsequent divorce must have caused him, then the weapons for
    that revenge were at his fingertips. He was a man who kept his
    secrets well, she thought bitterly. This time, his motives and
    intentions would all be locked in his mind, safe from any form of
    investigation. All she had to go on was a gut reaction that
    nothing was as simple as it seemed. And Uncle Martin was a hard-
    headed man. Did he really suspect nothing? Whatever miracle
    qualities the chemists might claim for Fibrona, she couldn't
    believe they were sufficient to have brought Jason Wingard back
    into their lives. And she was no longer naive enough to think it
    could just be coincidence either. People were arriving all the
    time. Celia had been busy. She seemed to have invited half the
    neighbourhood as well as the members of the Caswell board, and
    the Tristan executives. She could hear the faint hum of voices
    from downstairs each time the drawing room door opened, and
    Celia's laugh floating above them all, as sparkling as
    springwater. Laura had watched her go downstairs. Celia had
    looked dazzling, all the stops pulled out, in a dress of midnight
    blue taffeta, with a huge stiffened collar framing and
    accentuating her blonde hair. She tried