Buch lesen: «Lifelong Affair»

CHAPTER ONE

‘I KNOW you’ve been having an affair with my husband! I’ve known about it for weeks now. And if you want him you can have him. I don’t even like him any more!’

Morgan watched in horror as the bitterly angry woman let loose that tirade, her mouth twisting in derisive humour as the words became ones of bravado, laughing openly as the woman took off her wedding ring and threw it at her.

‘Okay, cut—that’s a take. Morgan, you’re becoming so convincing as the superbitch that I’m beginning to wonder about you,’ Jerry, the director, drawled dryly.

Morgan’s laughter had faded at the word ‘cut’. She had played this scene half a dozen times today already, and each time she became more disgusted with the way her character in this weekly soap-opera was developing.

Originally she had been signed for a three-month contract only, but the character of Mary-Beth Barker had become so popular with the public that she had signed a contract for another season. The character of Mary-Beth was so against her own nature that she wasn’t sure she wanted to negotiate another one. She had certainly had plenty of other offers the last six months!

‘Don’t wonder, Jerry,’ she advised wearily. ‘It will be for nothing.’ She came off the set, her hair long and gleaming, the colour of copper, a dark shadow over her sparkling green eyes, her lashes long and silky, her nose small and pert, her mouth wide and inviting, coloured with a brighter lip-gloss than she usually wore, the blusher on her creamy cheeks darker too, for the cameras. Her green dress was thin and silky, very provocatively styled, part of Mary-Beth’s wardrobe; her own taste tended to run to the casual and comfortable rather than fashionable. ‘I’m nothing like Mary-Beth.’ She stood next to him, a frown marring her smooth brow. ‘In fact, I don’t like where she’s going at all. So far I’ve—she’s—blackmailed her stepfather for his attraction to her, told her mother about it anyway, almost wrecked her sister’s marriage, and now she’s had an affair with a married man simply because his wife once slighted her at a party. What sort of woman is she!’ she grimaced, running a hand through her perfectly smooth and shining hair, instantly ruffling it into disorder.

‘Beautiful,’ Jerry leered lasciviously.

‘And evil,’ she said disgustedly.

‘You bet,’ he nodded with a grin.

‘You wouldn’t sound so happy about it if she’d decided to get her claws into you!’ Morgan raised copper-brown brows at him.

The director shrugged. ‘The excitement might be worth it. When you’ve been married to the same woman for fifteen years that’s a quality that seems to be missing.’

Morgan smiled, her own naturally bright and friendly smile, the character of Mary-Beth discarded as soon as the scene ended. ‘I’ll mention that to Alyson when I see her next,’ she teased, knowing Jerry had been happily married from the moment he and Alyson had been pronounced husband and wife.

‘She’d kill me,’ he grimaced. ‘And you’re supposed to like Mary-Beth if no one else does. After all, she pays your rent.’

She knew that, but it didn’t make the public reaction to her personally any easier to accept. Soap-operas were entertaining, and there were half a dozen of them made at this Los Angeles studio alone, but until she actually appeared in Power Trap herself she hadn’t realised that the viewing public really believed the characters existed. A lot of men admired the character of Mary-Beth, liked the danger she emitted, but normally women reacted in a hostile manner, treating her like an adversary, watching their husbands closely whenever she was about. Even some of her so-called friends had become a little wary of her, sure that she couldn’t have developed the character of Mary-Beth the way she had if there weren’t some of the man-eating bitch really inside the straight-speaking Morgan McKay.

Over the months she had hardened herself against the insulting comments she received whenever she went out, although it didn’t stop it hurting any less. When the new series came out in the fall her reputation—or rather, Mary-Beth’s—would be damaged irrevocably.

She went back to her dressing-room, switching on the television for relaxation as she changed into her own denims and orange silk blouse, tall and slender, dulling the make-up down to be less dramatic, brushing her hair free of lacquer and feeling it swing easily past her shoulders in its normal copper straightness.

‘You were great today!’ Sam Walters came into the room after a brief knock, and kissed her lingeringly on the mouth.

Morgan returned his kiss, glad to see him. Sam played her brother-in-law in Power Trap, and the two of them had been seeing each other out of work for the last four months. Tall and blond, with the body of an ex-footballer, Sam had to be every woman’s ideal, his easygoing nature and strong sense of humour merely a bonus.

‘Thanks,’ she smiled up at him, her arms about his neck as he held her close. ‘How about going to your beach-house tonight?’

‘Sounds good,’ he nodded. ‘Barbecue dinner?’

‘Lovely,’ she agreed, turning to pick up her purse.

‘—and it’s now known that Glenna McKay and her husband Mark Hammond were on the aircraft that crashed late last night on its way from London to Los Angeles. There are thought to be no survivors from the crash, now believed to have been caused by engine failure.’ The television newsreader then went on to another topic of news.

But for Morgan the world seemed to have stopped. Glenna and Mark …! It couldn’t be, there must have been some mistake. And yet Glenna had insisted she wanted the baby born in the States, and she was in her seventh month now. God, the baby too … No—–!

‘Steady, honey!’ she didn’t realise she had spoken out loud until Sam answered her, sitting her down in one of the plush armchairs in the room.

‘Sam, did you hear—Did she say—–’

‘Yes,’ he confirmed heavily, frowning his concern of her paper-white face. ‘I heard it too, Morgan.’

‘My God—Glenna!’ she choked, too shocked to cry yet, too numbed by the horror of hearing on the television of her own sister’s possible death. Possible …! Who was she kidding, there were hardly ever survivors from those sort of disasters. Her parents! They would have to be told—–

‘We’ll call them in a minute,’ Sam soothed as she once again spoke out loud without being aware of it, kneeling beside her to comfort her in her distress.

Glenna. Her elder by two years, her fiery hair matching her equally fiery nature—she couldn’t possibly be dead! Air crashes happened on television, to other people, other families, they didn’t happen to young fun-loving couples like Glenna and Mark, certainly not to unborn babies!

She couldn’t believe this was happening, that her sister could actually have been on the plane that had crashed late last night. She had heard the first reports of it early this morning, had felt saddened for the families of the people on the plane, never dreaming that she would be one of them!

Glenna had been a successful actress herself until two years ago she had married Mark Hammond, an English businessman she had met and fallen in love with in Florida. The marriage had been far from idyllic—had been? Heavens, already she was talking in the past tense, as if she accepted that Glenna and Mark were dead.

She and Glenna had been born and brought up in the States, had always lived here apart from a few holidays abroad, and having to give up her career as a successful actress to go and live in England with her husband had not been something Glenna accepted without a fight. And she had continued to fight, had hated living with her in-laws at the Hammond house in southern England. The Hammonds were almost part of the aristocracy, something Glenna’s mother-in-law had taken great pains to point out to Glenna any opportunity she could. Morgan could just imagine how her sister had reacted to that! In fact, she knew how Glenna had reacted to it; she had spent hours talking to her sister long-distance—calls her sister had made, claiming the Hammonds could more than afford the telephone bill. She knew from those calls that Glenna had been far from happy, had longed for her career and the physical, if not emotional freedom, she had always had in the States. The Hammonds had put restrictions on her behaviour and her social life, restrictions Mark had seemed happy to accept for his wife.

The one stipulation Glenna had made when she had had her pregnancy confirmed five months ago had been that the baby be born at her home and not Mark’s. In the face of strong family opposition, mainly Rita Hammond’s, Mark had finally agreed, and the two of them had flown to their deaths.

‘I have to call my parents,’ said Morgan in short jerky gasps. ‘If they should hear the news in the same way …!’

‘They probably already have,’ Sam soothed.

Oh God, this was a nightmare! Her mother had probably collapsed, her father would be bottling his emotions inside him as usual. He wasn’t a man who found it easy to show his love, although she and Glenna had never doubted his love for his family. But this was something no one had expected in their wildest nightmares!

‘I have to get home—–’

‘I’ll drive you,’ Sam instantly offered as she stood up agitatedly.

‘My parents’ home,’ she pointed out. ‘They’re going to need me.’

‘I’ll still drive you,’ he insisted.

‘You still have a scene to shoot this evening,’ she reminded him calmly, thinking logically despite the panicked racing of her brain. ‘Jerry was only complaining yesterday that we’re behind schedule.’

Sam shrugged. ‘So we finish shooting mid-September instead of the end of August,’ he dismissed. ‘The network can’t complain, not with the ratings we’re getting. I hear we’re very popular with the English audience. Hell, what am I going on like this for?’ he muttered. ‘What do you care about the reaction of the English audience at a time like this! I’ll just go and tell Jerry we’re leaving.’ He gently touched her cheek before going to talk to their director.

Morgan stood in numbed silence waiting for him to return. Sam was wrong about her not caring about what the English audience thought of the show. A couple of months ago Glenna had telephoned her in a great state of agitation, crying and muttering what a bitch her mother-in-law was. Apparently Rita Hammond had taken great delight in the fact that Glenna’s sister should be appearing in something so lowly as a soap-opera, had taken every opportunity she could to be derogative about Power Trap and Morgan’s part in it. Normally Glenna would have been unmoved by such taunts, but her pregnancy had made her more susceptible to showing emotion, and she had been very distraught.

Jerry himself came into the room just then, his weatherbeaten face creased into lines of sadness. ‘Hell, Morgan, Sam just told me.’ He grasped her forearms, frowning down at her. ‘That’s a hell of a thing to hear on the television,’ he growled.

‘Yes.’ She was still too numb to respond to the sincerity of his regret.

‘I was fond of Glenna,’ he continued softly. ‘She and I worked together a couple of years ago, before she married her stuffed shirt,’ he grimaced. ‘We’re all going to miss her.’

Morgan swallowed hard, as nausea started to rise within her, the numbness leaving her at Jerry’s way of talking about her sister as if she no longer existed. ‘Excuse me,’ she muttered, pushing past him to run into the wash-room, waves of nausea racking her body as the full horror of her beautiful and fiery sister dying in such a horrendous way struck her. Glenna had always been too busy in her life to think of death, and Morgan certainly doubted she ever expected it to happen in such a violent way. None of them had.

‘All right?’ Jerry was helping her wash her face in cold water when Sam came back into the room.

‘Better,’ she nodded, swallowing the nausea down. She had to pull herself together, had to be strong for her parents’ sake, her strong attorney father, her homemaking mother. They were going to be devastated. ‘I’ll have to pick up some things from my apartment,’ she told Sam as he drove her.

‘Sure,’ he agreed easily, not intruding on her private thoughts as she lapsed into silence.

Strangely her apartment still looked the same as when she had left it early this morning, the same casual untidiness that she liked, the galley kitchen, scatter cushions placed on her corner unit in the lounge, a cup still standing on the dining-room table from where she had had breakfast, plants arranged about the whole apartment, one of her weaknesses, her other one being the Walt Disney posters in her bedroom. She knew that the general public, after her portrayal of Mary-Beth, would never believe her liking for all things Disney, but it had remained with her from a trip to Disneyland when she was a child. A trip both she and Glenna had loved. Oh God, Glenna …!

All this was a terrible dream, one that she couldn’t believe until someone could tell her it was true, someone who really knew. After all, the news item could have been wrong; maybe Glenna and Mark hadn’t been on that flight, maybe they should have been but something had prevented them making it, maybe—–

The telephone at her bedside began ringing, and she snatched up the receiver, feeling her heart plummet at the sound of her mother’s voice, a strangely strong voice, her mother seeming filled with a determination that wasn’t a normal facet of her nature, their father the strong one.

‘You’ve heard, Morgan?’ she asked briskly.

‘Yes,’ her voice caught huskily. ‘It was on the television just now.’

Her mother sighed. ‘I wonder if they realise how cruel they can be,’ she said waspishly, a small black-haired woman of fifty, filled with a restless energy that put younger women to shame. ‘Alex Hammond called us a short time ago, so at least we didn’t hear that way.’

Alex Hammond. A picture of a tall dark-haired man with a remote manner, autocratic features; piercing grey eyes, aquiline nose, thinned lips, determined jaw, and a lithe athletic body came to mind. Mark’s brother, the elder by eight years at thirty-eight, he ran the family business like a well-oiled cog, had little time for the rest of the human race, having no wife and apparently no steady woman in his life either. Morgan had met him only once, at the wedding two years ago, and she hadn’t liked him, not his arrogance or his haughtiness.

‘I would have telephoned you at the studio,’ her mother continued, her voice showing some sign of strain now. ‘But I’ve been busy with—Your father collapsed, Morgan,’ her voice broke, still a little trembly as she continued. ‘He answered the telephone to Mr Hammond, and he seemed all right at the time. Then he just—he’s had a heart attack!’

This was worse than a nightmare, the whole world was going crazy! ‘I—Is he—–’

‘He’s in hospital, but his condition has stabilised,’ her mother hastily assured her. ‘The doctors are sure he’s going to be all right.’

‘I’m coming home—–’

‘No! Morgan, I told Alex Hammond we would be coming to you—that was before your father collapsed, of course. He said he would get in touch again when he knew anything more than that Glenna and Mark were on the plane.’ The line went silent for several minutes, as her mother fought for control. ‘He was expecting to know more later today.’

Alex Hammond would be the type of man who demanded, not asked for, that information. And he had such a presence of authority that he would get the answers too!

‘I’d rather come home. Mr Hammond will realise I’m there when he gets no answer here.’

‘I’m not at home, Morgan,’ her mother told her softly. ‘I’m going to stay at the hospital with your father tonight.’

‘Are you sure there’s no danger?’ Morgan asked sharply, wondering if her mother was telling her everything.

‘The doctors assure me there isn’t,’ she was hastily assured. ‘But I’d rather be with him tonight. Please stay in Los Angeles and wait for Mr Hammond to contact you. I’d hate for us to miss his call.’

Her mother was right, she knew she was, and yet she felt she should go to her father. But if Alex Hammond should telephone while she was in transit …! ‘I’ll wait, Mom,’ she said softly. ‘And I’ll call you at the hospital as soon as I know anything.’ There was only one hospital in the small California town her parents lived in. ‘Give Dad my love.’

‘I will, dear. And don’t worry, things could still be all right with Glenna and Mark.’

She couldn’t move after putting down the receiver. Her mother was being optimistic, and they both knew it. Glenna was going to be dead, Mark too, and their poor little baby that hadn’t even begun to live. And no matter how light her mother made of the heart attack she knew her father was gravely ill.

‘I thought I heard the telephone—–’

With a strangled cry she turned and flung herself into Sam’s waiting arms, a dam seeming to burst as she sobbed it all out to him, finding comfort in his lean strength as he led her back to the lounge, holding her close against his chest as she sat close beside him on the corner unit.

‘She was so beautiful, Sam,’ she choked, her tears having wet his shirt front. ‘I can’t believe she’s dead—and in that way. No wonder Dad took it so hard,’ she shuddered.

‘I know, honey. I know,’ he soothed, smoothing back her hair with a gentle hand, surprisingly so considering their size and strength. Tall and slender as she was, Sam made her feel cherished and cared for, his manners were always without fault, never too forward, but always friendly.

‘You never met Glenna, did you?’ she mumbled into his shirt.

‘I’ve seen her in the movies. She was beautiful,’ he acknowledged. ‘Very like you.’

Again they were talking in the past tense, and it was with a sense of deep pain that she realised she would probably never see her sister again. Of a similar age, the two of them had always been very close, had shared friends and clothes during their teenage years, continuing to keep those same friends as the years passed. Everyone was going to be heartbroken when they learnt the fiery-haired Glenna was no longer with them.

‘Everyone loved her, Sam,’ she continued huskily. ‘She was so much fun, so—so full of life!’ Her voice broke over the last.

Everyone had loved Glenna—except the Hammonds. Glenna and Mark had a private wing in the Hammond house, the widowed Rita Hammond and her bachelor son occupying the other wing, while the married daughter Janet lived several miles away with her husband and two daughters. Rita Hammond and her daughter Janet had shown their disapproval of Mark marrying an American actress from the first; the formidable Alex Hammond had been indifferent. Mark was a charming rogue, very dark and handsome, but he was no match for the rest of his family, resisting all Glenna’s efforts to persuade him to move to America, claiming that he had to stay in England to work in the family firm, and also claiming it was unnecessary to have a house of their own when the family house was so big.

Living with her in-laws wouldn’t suit Morgan, and she knew that it hadn’t suited Glenna, although in the beginning she had been too much in love to object to anything Mark decided. Her one stubborn bid for freedom, that of having her baby born in the States, seemed to have caused their deaths.

Morgan pulled herself together with effort; she was not one to allow emotional trauma to take her to the hysterical stage. ‘You should be getting back, Sam,’ she told him in a firm voice. ‘I shall be all right now, and you do have that scene to finish.’

‘Jerry told me to stay with you.’

‘But I don’t need “being with"!’ She sounded brittle, highly strung, knowing she needed to be alone for a while to come to terms with her loss. She deeply appreciated Sam’s gentle care, but no amount of talking was going to help her through the next few hours as she waited for Alex Hammond’s call. ‘Really, Sam,’ she insisted as he made to protest. ‘I need time to—accept.’

‘Time alone,’ he nodded understandingly, having lost his young wife in an automobile accident four years ago when they had only been married a year. He stood up, tall and assuring. ‘If you need me, any time day or night, just call, hmm?’ He framed her face tenderly with his large capable hands.

She appreciated his lack of argument, knowing she didn’t have the strength to fight him if he insisted on staying. ‘Thank you,’ she blinked back the tears. ‘Until I get this call from Alex Hammond my hands are tied. I can’t go to England where the crash happened, and I can’t go to Dad either.’

Sam bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. ‘I’m sure he won’t be long.’

But the evening passed, and then the night-time hours, and still Alex Hammond hadn’t called her. Morgan paced the room most of the night, the time dragging slowly, until finally in desperation she telephoned the Hammonds’ house herself. She wasn’t proud, and if they wouldn’t come to her then she would go to them.

It took some time to convince Symonds, the Hammond butler, that she really was Glenna’s sister and not a reporter trying to get a story. It seemed the Hammond telephone hadn’t stopped ringing since the news broke.

‘Mrs Hammond has been sedated and is in her bedroom,’ she was informed in a haughty voice, and for a moment it took her back that the Mrs Hammond he was talking about was Rita and not Glenna. ‘Mrs Fairchild,’ he spoke of Mark’s married sister, ‘is at home with her own family.’

‘And Mr Hammond?’ she asked breathlessly, not giving a damn where Rita and Janet were, not having taken to either of them at the wedding. Mother and daughter were too much alike, both narrow-minded and condescending, believing all actresses to be promiscuous sirens.

‘Mr Hammond isn’t at home,’ she was told.

‘Not there?’ she frowned.

‘No, miss,’ the man sounded affronted that she should dare to question his statement, ‘he left the house several hours ago.’

‘To go where?’ she demanded impatiently.

‘I wouldn’t know, Miss McKay.’ Symonds sounded surprised by such a question. ‘Mr Hammond doesn’t inform me of his movements.’

‘Then in the circumstances he damn well should!’ Morgan slammed the receiver down, too angry to question more.

Damn the man! Where could Alex Hammond have disappeared to, and apparently without telling anyone where he was going? No doubt Rita Hammond knew of her son’s whereabouts, but it seemed she was taking the joint deaths as badly as Morgan’s father had. From what she had been able to tell, Mark was the favourite son, a late edition to the family who had been cossetted by all around him. Rita Hammond would have felt his death severely.

But all this didn’t change the fact that Alex Hammond had promised to call, that she had held off calling the hospital about her father in case she missed that call, and now he had disappeared. She had been relying on his authority to find out what was happening, having called the airline herself only to be told things were too confused and panicked at the moment for any information to be given out by them. It was their way of saying they didn’t know what was happening either!

But that didn’t help her now, and after calling the hospital to check that both her mother and father were sleeping comfortably she rang the airport to book a flight out to England, only to be told the first available seat was late morning. She took it, knowing she was doing no good sitting here.

Dawn saw her seated at the breakfast bar in her galley-kitchen, drinking the remains of her third pot of coffee, the heavy look in her eyes evidence that she hadn’t slept at all, her almost fixed gaze on the wall telephone telling its own story. Alex Hammond still hadn’t called.

Her mother telephoned a short time later to assure her that her father was doing well, that he seemed a lot better. She seemed as perplexed as Morgan over Alex Hammond’s silence.

Her suitcase was packed, her creased denims changed in favour of a tailored dress, her hair flowing freely about her shoulders, and she couldn’t stand to sit here in her apartment another minute longer waiting for a call that obviously wasn’t going to come, so she telephoned for a cab to take her to the airport.

When the doorbell rang a few minutes later she expected it to be the driver, but she opened the door to a barrage of questions and flashing intrusive lights.

‘How do you feel about your sister’s death, Morgan?’

‘Will the funeral be here or in England?’ asked another reporter.

‘Will Glenna and her husband be buried together, Morgan?’ persisted another.

Morgan had blanched at the sea of faces outside her apartment door; microphones and cameras were pushed into her face, a couple of them for television.

She had remained undisturbed by reporters all night, as her address was known to few but her closest friends, although it now seemed someone had released the wolves at her heels.

‘Were you close to your sister, Morgan?’ a beautiful, chic female asked at her continued numbed silence, and this avid curiosity about her grief sickened her.

‘We hear your father collapsed when told of the crash—can you confirm this, Miss McKay?’ one determined reporter pounced.

Morgan swallowed hard, unable to comprehend this hounding over such a private grief. What sort of people were they, to ask her such questions!

‘Did you—–’

‘That will be enough!’ rasped an authoritative voice, startling the members of the media into stunned silence.

A man was pushing his way through the crowd to Morgan’s side, although he didn’t need to push for long, for people stepped aside as they recognised a force stronger than themselves.

Alex Hammond. It could be no other man. She might only have met him once, but the memory of him had stayed indelibly printed on her brain for some unknown reason. Possibly because she had never met anyone quite like him before.

Tall, taller even than Sam, he had a force of energy and determination that would make him stand out in any crowd; the dark hair was showing signs of greying at the temples now, the eyes were still the same icy grey she remembered, his nostrils flaring angrily now in his displeasure, his mouth thinned for the same reason. He wore a dark three-piece suit and snowy white shirt, and looked for all the world as if he hadn’t just spent an exhausting eleven hours on a plane.

He grasped her arm in a vice-like grip. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he muttered.

Morgan was only too pleased to comply, wondering why Alex Hammond had felt it necessary to fly over here rather than just telephone her. Unless he felt her father’s collapse was enough on his conscience for one day! She could have told him she was past collapsing, that the long hours she had spent beside the telephone had at least given her time to calm, to realise that Glenna really was dead.

‘Who the hell is he?’ The members of the media weren’t silenced for long. They might have recognised the authority of this man, but it was a recognition that had only made their curiosity all the deeper. ‘Where did he come from?’

‘With shoulders like that I don’t care where he came from,’ drawled the beautiful chic television reporter. ‘I’m just glad he’s here. Sir, are you a friend of Morgan McKay’s?’ There was more than a little personal interest in the blonde woman’s question, although a microphone was thrust aggressively into Alex Hammond’s face.

‘I thought she was seeing Sam Walters,’ murmured someone else.

Alex Hammond’s hand had tightened on Morgan’s arm at the intimacy of the woman reporter’s words, and he pushed the microphone away from him with a dark scowl. ‘I believe Miss McKay’s privacy has been invaded enough for one day,’ he snapped, his hand firm on her arm now as he turned her back into her apartment. ‘If you’ll excuse us—lady, gentlemen,’ he nodded dismissively.

‘Hey, the guy’s English—–’

‘Your powers of deduction are amazing,’ Alex Hammond taunted dryly, caring nothing for the ruddy hue that coloured the younger man’s cheeks, pushing Morgan the rest of the way into her apartment and closing the door in the face of the renewed questioning. ‘Like vultures!’ he muttered as he followed her through to the lounge, then his silvery-grey eyes narrowed as he saw her packed suitcase standing next to a chair. He looked up at her with a frown. ‘Are you going somewhere?’

‘I—I’d given up on your call.’ Her voice came out husky—and slightly defensive. She shouldn’t need to explain herself to this man, damn it! ‘I’m booked on a flight to England in a couple of hours’ time.’

He merely nodded acknowledgement of the fact, seeming impatient to end the conversation before it had started. ‘Is it true, has your father collapsed?’