The Deception Trap Read online

  The Deception Trap

  by Ann Charlton

  Teressa had plotted revenge against Ashe Warwick for years. She had no compunction about deceiving him now.

  It helped that the now slim, glamorous Teressa bore little resemblance to the awkward, overweight Tess of six years ago who'd had a crush on Ashe. Ashe, who had heartlessly walked out on her family when they lost their money.

  So Teressa was shocked to learn that the ruthless picture of him fixed in her mind was entirely wrong! Even worse, she was falling in love with him all over again.

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names.

  They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Original hardcover edition published 1986

  Australian copyright 1986

  New Zealand copyright 1986

  Philippine copyright 1986

  First Australian paperback edition February 1987

  Š Ann Charlton 1986

  ISBN 0 263 75510 X

  Printed in Australia by

  The Book Printer,

  North Blackburn, Victoria 3130

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE he was. Ashe Warwick.

  Teressa stood in the doorway of his office, the vacuum cleaner and caddy in her hands. For six years on and off she had wondered just how she would feel if she saw him again. At first, when she was sixteen, she had been melodramatic about it. No knife was sharp enough, no fate too horrible for him then. But then the world had been going mad, her father bowing under the pressures that would take away both his health and his fortune. The disappearance of that last had seen the disappearance also of numerous ‘friends’ — Ashe Warwick included. Yes, he was lucky she hadn’t got this close to him when she was sixteen.

  Later, when she had seen his novel launched and successful, her wish for vengeance had been less physical. At eighteen she wished that someone recognising themselves in his book, might sue him for some astronomical sum. Still later, when she read in the financial pages that he had taken over Warlord Finance on his father’s death. Teressa had hoped he might find himself a very small fish in a big pool.

  ‘I hope he sinks without a trace.’ she’d said to her sister who had more reason to hate him than she herself. But Cecily’s pretty head had been full of Mike Manetti by then and she showed little interest in her mercenary ex-fiance. At twenty Teressa relished the idea that Ashe might come to grief in the city. It would be only justice if he were devoured by the same pin-striped piranha that had hastened her father’s downfall.

  And now Cecily was married to Mike and honeymooning in Italy―and Teressa was back here after five years on the west coast of the continent. Back in Sydney and actually face to face with Ashe. Well, not quite face to face. He was working behind his ebony and glass desk and so far he hadn’t looked up to see her waiting. A sheaf of computer sheets was raised in front of him and all she could make out was the top of his head. He could be her brother-in-law now if things had gone differently―if Damien Radcliffe hadn’t been ruined, Ashe would have married Cecily and they might never have known that he was a fortunehunter.

  He and Cecily would probably have had a family. Teressa shuddered at the idea of being an aunt to Ashe’s children. As it was, Cecily had lost her attraction as a potential ex-heiress. Ashe had run out before the money had. And less than a year later, her father’s bitterness and disillusionment had ended in a quiet hospital room. A great many hypocrites had attended his funeral―this man amongst them.

  There was a silver sheen to the waving beige hair she remembered. Grey hairs? Good. He deserved a whole head of them. The print-outs moved a fraction and she saw that he wore glasses. Teressa raised her hand to knock. She was glad, very glad, she’d come along as Mrs Richards’ helper tonight. It was worth an evening of hard work cleaning Warlord’s offices Just to see Ashe Warwick going grey and losing his eyesight. He probably had a paunch and dyspepsia as well. The piranha mightn’t have got him but at least they’d begun to nibble. Before she could knock he rustled the computer sheets and waved her in with a preoccupied gesture.

  ‘Come in, come in, Mrs Richards,’ he said without looking up. Teressa waited a moment, angered by the brusque delivery and his failure to even spare a glance for his cleaner. Dear old Mrs Richards, who talked about him as if he were some sort of paragon, didn’t even rate a look. But it wasn’t just that that kept her there in the doorway. It was the sound of his voice. It hadn’t changed at all. ‘Tess,’ she could remember him saying in just that same deep, attractive voice when Cecily had brought him home for the first time. There were no overtones of impatience in it then, just an adult amusement at a lumpy fifteen-year-old with braces on her teeth.

  He rose from his desk, the sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘You can make a start, Mrs ―’ He stopped, realising she was not his usual cleaner. ‘Ah―you’re new with Universal Cleaners, I take it?’

  Teressa’s hand clenched around the handle of the vacuum. As he moved around his desk to riffle through a stack of files she saw that the piranha hadn’t after all begun on him. There was no paunch. His figure was wide-shouldered and athletic, flat-stomached.

  The grey in his fair hair had turned it a striking silver-beige. His glasses made him look neither studious nor middle-aged, and even the lines on his face that hadn’t been there at twenty-seven seemed to have turned out to his advantage. Her own dramatic change and a bit of wishful thinking had convinced her that he would have lost his looks. He hadn’t.

  ‘Well?’ He looked up from his search when she didn’t answer. Teressa stared as he removed his glasses and looked her over. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I―’ She stuck on her reply. Those eyes―an odd topaz colour and a way of looking right through her.

  How often he’d looked just this way at her during those dinners at Cliffe House when he had laughed and joked with her trusting family. She was to have been a bridesmaid at the wedding. Ten to one the groom wouldn’t even have seen her.

  ‘Good lord, girl,’ he exclaimed, mistaking her preoccupation for timidity. ‘I’m not about to pounce on you! Are you a new permanent with Universal or not?’

  ‘Um―more casual,’ she said at last.

  ‘Hmmm. Mrs Richards usually does my office. Don’t disturb anything on the desk when you dust.’ He extracted a folder from the stack on his desk and went out.

  Teressa slapped a lamb’s-wool duster over his bookshelves. Perhaps she should have turned up dressed to kill. That patronising air of his might not apply to the new Teressa Radcliffe whom Ashe .had never seen. In her most faded Jeans and an oversized shirt, her dark hair parted on the side and pigtailed to camouflage its distinguishing feature, she looked about eighteen and insignificant. But she was twenty-two and those few words with Ashe had revived all her vengeful feelings. The duster flicked over the desk, skirted around the stack of files. Teressa stopped, her attention caught by the name on the top folder. He had quickly become a big fish if he was handling ac
counts of that size, she thought, sliding it aside.

  Primae, the second file was labelled, sub-headed ‘Moore’. She put down the duster and leafed through the pages, darting a look at the door every few seconds. If the astronomical sums cropping up in the typed and handwritten sheets were anything to go by this was another big client. Ashe Warwick was a big fish, it seemed.

  There was no justice―none at all. He didn’t desereve this success, and Damien Radcliffe had certainly not deserved failure whatever his critics had said. For nearly two decades her father had been one of the country’s most exciting corporate gamblers. His bold speculation had built him an empire. It had brought him losses too, like any gambler, and the financial mags, while praising him as a steel-nerved speculator, pointed out that Radcliffe was unimpressive as a takeover operator. He picked the wrong targets, they said, paid too high sometimes, they said―and did not manage the companies successfully after takeover.

  A recipe for disaster, they said. In the end they were proved right. Damien, overextended and under takeover pressures himself, gambled once too often. He sustained a run of losses the magnitude of which stunned everyone. The press which had epitomised him as a flamboyant, financial swashbuckler were misspelling his name within months. His Radcliffe Corporation fell under the umbrella of a rival and Damien found himself gambling to keep his personal fortune. When his health suffered, he even failed to do that successfully. Friends ran for cover as if Damien might infect them with financial insecurity. Even relatives―and there were few of them to start with―sympathised from a distance.

  Their jealousy of Damien. hidden behind smiles while he was wealthy and influential, made a last brief showing in a mass shaking of heads and murmured, ‘I always somehow knew this would happen … ‘

  Teressa remembered the gradual exclusion from the tight ranks of the well-to-do, remembered her best friend suddenly making excuses about staying the weekend as she’d often done before. She remembered the day Ashe Warwick extricated himself from marriage into the failing Radcliffe empire. And how Damien had looked afterwards. No justice, she thought angrily.

  Her father had died leaving his daughters a trust fund that survived the debacle-and Ashe Warwick sat at a Gwathney Siegal desk, wore expensive pin-striped suits and wheeled and dealed in six and seven figures.

  Footsteps clipped along a corridor. She flipped the folder shut with fumbling fingers … had it been the second or third file in the stack? Second. As she thrust it under the top one, a sheet fluttered from Primae’s cover. In dismay she snatched at it, and her elbow nudged the neat stack which slid in a slow-motion avalanche to her feet. On her knees, Teressa bundled everything up, shoving loose papers inside the most likely parent folders. Her cheeks were red with mortification when she heard him stop at the door.

  Fat chance she would have of striking a blow at Warwick when she couldn’t even manage a peek at his papers without messing things up!

  ‘What on—’ he exclaimed, and strode in to stand looking down at her. “I asked you not to touch anything on the desk —’ He sounded like a headmaster berating a thick-headed pupil. Teressa snatched up a paper and thrust it into a file.

  ‘For God’s sake—’ He bent down, took her by the shoulders and removed her. ‘Leave it to me. I would like to be able to read them again.’ Frowning at her, he shook his head. ‘Where did Mrs Richards find you?’

  It was an exasperated statement rather than a question, and Teressa’s temper began to simmer. She bit her lip and looked down at her feet, and the hands on her shoulders eased.

  ‘Okay—’ he conceded with a sigh. ‘I suppose it was an accident―don’t look so shattered. What’s your name?’

  Shattered? She wasn’t shattered. If he only knew how close he was to bodily harm!

  ‘Teressa.’

  ‘Hmmm. My name’s Warwick. You can make a start on the floor, Teressa. I’ll be leaving shortly.’ With that he hitched up his pin-striped trousers and crouched to gather up his files. ‘And get Mrs Richards to find you a uniform if you’re going to be a regular.’

  He leaned one hand on the floor and looked up at her, his eyes dropping eloquently down her shapeless shirt and faded jeans. Teressa didn’t move, furious all over again.

  Looking up a second time to find her still there he said, ‘I'm trying to be patient, Teressa. Don’t stand there watching me clear up your mess. Make a start on the carpet, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘ … you’re a good girl, Teressa,’ Mrs Richards said as they packed away her vacuum cleaner and floor polishers into the white van. ‘Universal Cleaners’ was emblazoned on one side, a grand title for one small energetic widow and her equipment. ‘Not many young girls would help out an old lady like this.’

  Teressa smiled guiltily. Her motives weren’t as altruistic as her neighbour imagined. From the moment Mrs Richards had revealed that she cleaned the Warlord premises, Teressa had been hoping for an opportunity to join her―Just to see Ashe Warwick again. And the old lady’s ‘bad leg’ had offered her that chance. She would have done it anyway, Teressa thought. Thelma Richards had made her warmly welcome from the moment she had moved into the flat next door to her six weeks ago and Teressa’s liking had quickly grown to affection. Nevertheless, her conscience twinged a bit.

  ‘It’s no trouble, Mrs Richards. I’ve only had two days’ work as a temp, this week, and I was getting bored.’

  ‘Well, I appreciate it. Cleaning three floors can be tiring.’

  ‘You do it five nights a week.’

  ‘I’m used to it, my dear. A tough old bird, my Tom used to call me. We had five major accounts in the old days…’ she sighed. The old days had ceased on Tom’s death. The Richards and their team of hired workers had been disbanded. Only Mrs Richards and this one shabby little van were left.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing this alone,’ Teressa said as the van began its erratic journey from Milsons Point.

  The lights of Sydney and the Harbour Bridge blinked behind and to their left. ‘What about your son Mark —?’

  Mrs Richards was horrified. Mark had his wife and family to think of. Mark had always suffered asthma and wasn’t strong. This set her off on another track, and the childhood weaknesses of her four children were legendary. ‘ … and my Dan, he was such a one for bronchitis.’ She brooded a little as she always did when she mentioned Dan, her youngest. He had gone to work up on the Gove Peninsula over a year ago and the only word his mother had received from him since then was a postcard from the West Indies.

  Her family seemed a thankless lot, Teressa thought, though of course she never said as much to her neighbour, who talked about them in fond, unselfish pleasure at their achievements. The fact that none of them made much effort to ensure her comfort bothered her not one whit, just as Tom’s failure to leave her financially independent in no way diminished her devotion to his memory. Teressa knew a few people who could learn the lesson of loyalty from Mrs Richards.

  ‘ … it’s only when my bad leg plays up that I have trouble,’ she finished. ‘I have to admit I feel my age then. But I always do the sixth first, in case I run out of steam. Then if I’ve missed any little bits, at least it isn’t on Mr Warwick’s floor.’

  ‘I saw your Mr Warwick.’

  The steering wheel twitched. ‘Oh dear―I thought he wasn’t there tonight. Tch, tch! If I’d known I would have done his office myself…’

  Teressa glanced at her in surprise. Even her extreme respect for Warwick didn’t account for her distress.

  ‘He wanted to know if I was new at Universal and I said yes, on a casual basis, just to save a lot of explaining. I hope that was all right.’

  The van lurched. A motorist in the neighbouring lane took fright and veered away.

  ‘Yes, yes, I suppose that’s … he didn’t ask you about Tom?’

  Teressa turned to look at Mrs Richards. ‘Tom? But you told me he died nearly two years ago. Why would he ask me about him?’

  The explanation she offered
left Teressa speechless.

  The simple fact was that she had not told anyone at Warlord that her Tom had died. She had given up all the cleaning contracts they had serviced together but kept Warlord’s, managing it single-handed except in emergencies. It was, she said, the only work she knew and the money supplemented her pension and kept her independent.

  ‘If I’d told them I was a widow they never would have let me keep the contract, would they?’ she said with perfect logic. ‘I signed the new one as Universal Cleaners … ‘

  ‘But didn’t anyone notice that you were doing it alone?’

  ‘God love you, dear, of course not. People don’t really notice cleaning staff. They say hello and have a chat, but nobody notices if you’re not there, if you know what I mean. Tom wasn’t one to talk a lot, bless him, and I usually did Mr. Warwick’s floor myself, so he doesn’t think it strange that Tom’s not around.’

  ‘But does he ever ask about him?’